Anna Maria Dengel

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Mother Anna Maria Dengel, S.C.M.M.
Dengel receives an honorary doctorate (Nijmegen, 1958)
Born16 March 1892
Steeg, Austria
Died17 April 1980
Rome, Italy
EducationUniversity College Cork, Ireland
Known forFounder of the Medical Mission Sisters
Parent(s)Edmund Wilhelm Dengel and Maria Gertrud (Scheidle) Dengel

Roman Catholic Church to provide full medical care to the poor and needy in the overseas missions.[1]

Biography

Early life and education

Anna Maria Dengel was born 16 March 1892, in

Steeg, Austria, to Edmund Wilhelm Dengel and Maria Gertrud (Scheidle) Dengel. Anna had four brothers and sisters, and four half-brothers and sisters. After her mother died when Anna was nine, she was enrolled in the boarding school of the Visitation monastery in Hall in Tirol. After completing her schooling there, she was offered a position to teach German in Lyons, France. Dengel accepted the offer and taught there for two years before returning home to Austria.[citation needed
]

Career

When Anna Dengel was in her mid-20s she heard that a

Muslim women of the region who were barred from care by male physicians. She was overjoyed and immediately wrote to McLaren of her interest, and a lively correspondence between them began. McLaren was already in her mid-70s at this time, however, and died before she and Dengel could meet, but Dengel followed the course of preparation for her mission in India which she and McLaren had set. Dengel took McLaren's advice to attend medical school at University College in Cork, Ireland. In 1919, after graduating, she went to England for a nine-month internship. The following year she left for Rawalpindi to continue the work that McLaren had begun.[citation needed
]

For four very difficult years, Dr. Dengel struggled to make an impact on the health care of the women and children in northern India. She became convinced that many more professionally trained and spiritually dedicated women were needed in order to effect real healing among the people. So she set out for the United States to seek help.[citation needed]

Foundation of the Medical Mission Sisters

Dengel spent months of travel and meetings to make the needs of India known, including discussions with

Church law barring members of religious institutes from practicing medicine.[citation needed
]

After this experience, Dengel came to the conclusion that she needed to establish a new religious congregation dedicated to the cause. She drew up a Constitution for the congregation she had in mind and wrote that the members were "to live for God…to dedicate themselves to the service of the sick for the love of God and …to be properly trained according to the knowledge and standards of the time in order to practice medicine in its full scope, to which the Sisters were to dedicate their lives."[citation needed]

Permission was granted on 12 June 1925 to begin the new congregation, and on 30 September that year the "First Four"—Anna Dengel along with Johanna Lyons, M.D., of Chicago, Evelyn Flieger, R.N., originally from Great Britain, and Marie Ulbrich, R.N., of Luxemburg, Iowa—came together in Washington, D.C., to found the Society of Catholic Medical Missionaries.

The "First Four" were unable to profess

Superior General.[2]

Death and afterward

Mother Anna died in

Campo Santo in the Vatican on 21 April. Her body was buried in the Teutonic Cemetery (reserved to natives of Germanic nations serving the Catholic institutions of Rome[3]
), which is within the territory of Vatican City.

See also

References

  1. ^ Medical Mission Sisters main website Archived 5 December 2008 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ "Medical Mission Sisters of Southern India "History"". Archived from the original on 29 August 2011. Retrieved 26 November 2011.
  3. ^ Vatican City website Archived 2012-08-22 at the Wayback Machine

Further reading

External links
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anna_Maria_Dengel&oldid=1179965550"