Dr Alice
PORTFOLIO
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Dr. Alice discusses her postgraduate work with noted researcher Paul Ehrlich in bacteriology and pathology in Germany from 1895-1897:
“I went there to Frankfurt-on-the-Main. where he has just recently been installed. He had thought to go to Berlin, but being a Jew—there was anti-Semitism even then in Germany—he was told he must be baptized to get the job in Berlin, which he refused, and went to Frankfurt and opened a laboratory there and I worked there with German students who were very considerate but very curious about a woman wanting it. Their question would always be, ‘But who will darn the stockings if women are going to be bacteriologists?’ They gave me the impression that the whole sex in Germany was devoted to darning stockings. From there, I guess I came home.”
- transcript from interview by Jean Curran for the book Founders of the Harvard School of Public Health, which offers a history of the early years of the Harvard School of Public Health
