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About Anna Dengel (Source: wikipedia):
Anna Dengel (*16. March 1892 in Steeg, Austria-Hungary as Anna Maria Dengel; † 17. April 1980 in Rome) was an Austrian doctor and religious sister. She was the founder of the Missionary Medical Sisters, a religious congregation with sisters from Allen continent (except Australia), with whom she established 48 hospitals worldwide. When she completed her studies in 1919, she was one of the first female doctors in Tyrol.
Life
Early life and education: Anna Maria Dengel was born as the daughter of Edmund Wilhelm Dengel and Maria Gertrud (Scheidle) Dengel. Anna had four brothers and sisters and four half-siblings. Her mother died when Anna was nine years old. She attended elementary school in Steeg and was accepted into the boarding school of the Order of the Visitation of Mary in Hall in Tirol. At the boarding school in Thurnfeld she received her high school diploma in 1914. After finishing school there, she was offered a job as a German teacher in Lyons, France. Dengel accepted the offer and taught there for two years before returning to Austria. She studied medicine in Austria, France and Ireland (Cork). In 1919 she passed the state medical examination and worked as a doctor in England for a year.
Career: When Anna Dengel was in her mid-20s, she heard that a Scottish doctor and Catholic missionary, Agnes McLaren, was looking for female doctors for a hospital in Rawalpindi, India (now Pakistan) that had been founded to provide medical care to the region's Muslim women who were excluded from treatment by male doctors. She immediately wrote to McLaren of her interest, and a lively correspondence began between the two. However, McLaren was already in her 70s at the time and died before she and Dengel could meet, but Dengel followed the course of preparation for her mission to India that she and McLaren had set. Dengel followed McLaren's advice to study medicine at University College in Cork, Ireland. After graduating, she went to England in 1919 for a nine-month internship. In 1920 she received her doctorate and began medical practice at St. Catherin's Hospital in Rawalpindi to continue the work that McLaren had begun. She worked primarily in the field of obstetrics, as women there were not allowed to accept medical help from men for religious reasons. For four years, Anna Dengel fought to make an impact on health care for women and children in northern India. She came to believe that many more professionally trained and spiritually committed women were needed to bring about real healing among people. She traveled to England and the USA several times to seek help.
Founding of the Missionary Medical Sisters: Dengel spent months traveling and meeting to publicize the medical needs in India. During this time, she held discussions with Reverend Michael A. Mathis CSC and other Catholic priests, bishops and cardinals about how best to meet these needs. She encountered the same obstacle that her mentor McLaren had encountered in her own pioneering work in health care for the women and children of Muslim India: the prohibition in canon law prohibiting members of religious institutes from practicing medicine.
After this experience, Dengel came to the conclusion that she needed to found a new religious community to take up this cause. She drafted a statute for the community that she had in mind. She wrote that members should “live for God... dedicate themselves to serving the sick out of love for God and... should be properly trained according to the knowledge and standards of the time in order to practice medicine to its fullest extent, to which the sisters should dedicate their lives.”
On 12. On June 30, 1925, permission was granted by the Roman Catholic Church to found the new community, and on June 30. September 1925, the "First Four" - Anna Maria Dengel from Austria, Johanna Lyons from Chicago, Mary Evelyn Flieger RN (Religieuses de Nazareth), originally from Great Britain, and Agnes Marie Ulbrich RN, from Luxembourg, Iowa - arrived in Washington, DC, United States came together to found their own medically oriented order, the Society of Catholic Medical Missionaries (SCMM).
The “First Four” could not take canonical vows because the Catholic Church had not yet approved the practice of medicine by religious sisters, but they still lived as sisters. The lifting of this restriction had been a goal of Dengel's mentor Agnes McLaren, who had petitioned the Vatican to persuade the church authorities to do so. After the missionary medical sisters grew, the Catholic Church finally approved the sisters' work in medicine and Allen its branches in 1936 and recognized the women as a religious order, now known as the Sisters of the Catholic Medical Missions. The members of the Missionary Medical Sisters then took their first public vows and Sister Anna Dengel was elected the first Superior General.
In 1927 she opened the Holy Family Hospital in Rawalpindi and in 1939 the new motherhouse in Fox Chase/Philadelphia was inaugurated.
Death and Burial: After her death in 1980, she was buried at her own request in the tomb of the Institute Congregatio Jesu on the Campo Santo Teutonico in the Vatican City in Rome, although she was not a member of it.
Awards and honors
1958 Honorary doctorate from the University of Nijmegen
1959 Honorary membership of the International Surgeons' Association
In 1967 she received the Great Gold Medal of Honor for services to the Republic of Austria.
In 1992, to celebrate its 100th anniversary, the Austrian Post A special postage stamp was issued on his birthday.
Streets in Innsbruck, Hall in Tirol and Reutte are named after her.