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Sophie Kabatschnik was born into a Jewish family in Grodno, Poland on 1 April 1875. In 1906, at the age of 31, she began her medical studies at the Faculty of Medicine of Zurich University where Professor Eugen Bleuler was teaching. Her thesis on the subject of ‘Mineral Elements of the Thyroid Glands’ was written, under the direction of Professor Eichhorst, in 1912. She must have got married while still carrying out her studies, for on the cover of her thesis she wrote her name as ‘Sophia Morgenstern—Warsaw’. She then left Switzerland for Russia in order to obtain her State Diploma in Medicine so as to be able to practise in Poland (Parcheminey, 1947). But she was back in Zurich again in 1915 where she worked on a voluntary basis at the Burghölzli Clinic, the director of which was Eugen Bleuler. She held the positions of fourth assistant doctor in 1915, third assistant doctor in 1916 and second assistant doctor in 1918; she was appointed first assistant doctor on 1 May 1920. The records of the clinic do not mention the date of her departure, but they do indicate that another first assistant doctor was appointed on 1 April 1923.2
In her first year at the Burghölzli, she met and befriended Eugen Minkowski, also an assistant doctor and whose career resembled her own. A Polish Jew, he had studied medicine and philosophy at Zurich University, gone back to Russia to sit his exams again and had moved to France in 1915. He and his wife were to become close friends of Sophie Morgenstern, although they did not share her views on psychoanalysis.
Eugen Bleuler’s son, Professor Manfred Bleuler, aged 85 in 1987, remembered Sophie Morgenstern as being ‘a vivacious woman, interested in all sorts of things, charming and intelligent’. In a letter sent to Mrs Berna, Chairperson of the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society in 1987, he wrote: ‘She was one of the doctors at the Burghölzli who was very highly regarded by my father; she took part in the discussions which were often about Si