Maria Daelen *1903-1993

Maria Daelen, a physician and government official, was born in Düsseldorf in 1903 and raised by her father after her parents divorced. She studied medicine in  Hamburg, Munich and Berlin. She graduated in Berlin in 1929 and subsequently received her doctorate in 1932. She received medical training in surgery at the Westend Hospital in Berlin and switched to internal medicine at Charité in 1933. An independent and professional woman who determined her own life and affairs, she was part of the “New Woman” movement of the 1920s and 1930s, which worked to emancipate women from imposed gender roles and sexual norms. By 1938, Daelen was running her own practice for internal diseases. During World War II she helped several artists evade military service and joined a resistance group of doc-tors from the police state hospital. In 1945 she fled to Austria to escape from the Gestapo. From 1947, as advisor for “tuberculosis care” in the Hessian Ministry of the Interior, she played an important role in the introduction of the BCG vaccination against tuberculosis. In 1950, she was appointed Government Medical Councillor in the Federal Ministry of Health and represented the Federal Republic of Germany as a delegate in the Council of Europe and in the WHO as one of few women on the international stage. Maria Daelen died in 1993, having remained independent and self-determined throughout her life.