Styrian treasures

First female country doctor in Murau had to fight her way through

Erika Walland- Zwicknagel traveled all over the district of Murau with her medical equipment.

(Bild: Krone KREATIV/Murauer Handwerksmuseum/Thomas Caks)

Part four of the "Krone" series on Styrian regional museums: the Murau Crafts Museum contains the tools of the district's first female country doctor. Among other things, they tell of the long road to equality.

"She had to fight her way through," says Uli Vonbank-Schedler from the Murau Crafts Museum about Erika Walland-Zwicknagel. She was the first female doctor to work in the district from the 1940s: "The male colleagues in the district didn't like that at all. She was defamed and maligned. But she persevered because medicine was her vocation."

The job as a country doctor was anything but easy back then: "In the beginning, she traveled to her house calls on horseback, later by bike. Some valleys in the district had no electricity or running water until the early 1960s," Vonbank-Schedler recalls. Not the best conditions for dealing with everything from births to minor operations on site.

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This made the medical equipment she always had with her all the more important. "Her son, who worked as a doctor himself until a few years ago, gave them to the museum." He was also able to tell many stories about how he accompanied his mother to patients throughout the district. "The period after the Second World War was particularly challenging. There was hardly any medication."

The fact that Walland's equipment has now found a new home in the Murau Crafts Museum is a little surprising at first glance, but actually fitting: "At the beginning of the 20th century, professions such as that of surgeon were still an apprenticeship, i.e. a trade. In the district of Murau, for example, the first university-educated general practitioner only started work in 1910," says Vonbank-Schedler.

Together with Thomas Felfer, she has curated a special exhibition on the history of medicine in the Murau district at the Crafts Museum. Erika Walland's tools can currently be seen in the exhibition "Who are you, Styria?" at the Graz Folklore Museum.