Clara Winnicki
By 2018 the profession had become highly feminised: more than two thirds of Switzerland's qualified pharmacists were female; but there are indications that during the early decades of the twentieth century her gender placed Clara Winnicki at a professional disadvantage.
Leopold Winnicki, her father, was an engineer who had arrived from Poland as an immigrant, and then acquired Swiss citizenship through the legal process of naturalization.
By the time she passed her Matura (school final exams) in 1899 Clara Winnicki was one of just two girls left in her class at the Bern Literary Gymnasium ("Berner Literatur-Gymnasium'").
In the end, however, she was obliged to accept an internship contract with a pharmacist closer to home, in a "small Bernese provincial town", on terms that she would describe later as "unfavourable".
[5][8] It turned out that in order to acquire and manage her own pharmacy business it would be helpful for Winnicki to pursue her student career further.
[9] She received her doctorate on 28 February 1907 in return for a "contribution on the developmental history of the flowers of some officially [approved medicinal] plants".
On 14 December 1917 she addressed a meeting at the "Casino Bern" concert hall on the theme "Die Frau im Apothekerberuf" ("The Woman in the Pharmacy Profession").
She told of difficulties she had encountered in her professional career, but also shared her assessment that in her pharmacy there was no persisting "women question", and absolute pay equality had been achieved.
She spoke of her pride that professional colleague now took her seriously, and a Swiss Pharmacists' Convention had passed a resolution to encourage young women to study pharmacy.
Any time you accept a new job, forcefully reject any terms that do not place you on an equal footing with male colleagues.
There were, to be sure, hardened feminist battlers, but they would not have progressed to their roles of "sweet graceful sylphides" in the pharmacy profession if they had always just stuck to their knitting.
In a contribution to the specialist weekly journal "Schweizerische Wochenschrift für Chemie und Pharmazie", Winnicki elegantly concluded with a flourish in Latin: "Vivant, floreant, crescant, commilitones feminigeneris!".
[5][d] It was said that she had demonstrated neither appropriate administrative competence nor entrepreneurial flair, and spent too much time floating around "in the intellectual spheres of the old classics".
It was true that Clara Winnicki was an enthusiastic reader of the classical texts, and she defended her enthusiasm for the ancient wisdom with her characteristic vigour: "... the study of the ancient languages is a thing of great beauty which brings much to the general education of the pharmacist .... the pharmacist [can thereby be preserved from] monochrome mental ossification and evaluate all the real human questions with an open mind.
August Herbrand who needed an administrator for his pharmacy at Adelboden, a farming village with aspirations to become a successful health resort, in the mountains south of Bern.
Shortly before the end of the nineteenth century he had undertaken a period of study at Basel and then moved to Lausanne where he obtained his doctorate.
He returned to Switzerland in 1912, accepting a senior management position at a factory producing "pharmaceutical preparations", owned by a Dr. Wanderanstellen.
In the divorce case that followed, Mathilde would testify that Herbrand had taken over the assets she had brought to their union and managed to work his way through the lot on account of his dissolute lifestyle and morphine addiction.
The divorce was granted in March 1924: poor Mathilde Schlicht ended her days wrecked in an institution for the insane.
Members of the local medical community teamed up together to oppose Winnicki's plans for a drug laboratory linked to the pharmacy.
He drew attention to the various withdrawal cures he had attended - apparently to no good effect - and swore that in his pharmacy he had always adheredf to the legal regulations.
She also let her husband know that she was not prepared to accept as a "nurse" the "Nebenbuhlerin" (loosely, "whore on the side") whom he had brought back with him from one of his famous "rehabilitation cures".
She interpreted the loss of trust on the part of the local community as persecution, a cruel blow of fate which she was powerless to control.
It was also noted that Clara Winnicki, despite having been born the daughter of a Swiss father, was nevertheless the child of an "eingekaufter Schweizer" - an immigrant who had acquired his citizenship not as a birth right but through payment.
As a part of the evaluation process for the application(s) the cantonal authorities in Bern commissioned a report from the local police office in Adelboden.
She briefly recovered her confidence and railed against the "petty bourgeois view [that following marriage a woman] should return to the sainted bosom of the family [and] in accordance with the conventions of her class [become a carer] with love and sacrifice, [and] forget the profession she had learned".
But Clara Winnicki, formerly proud to be Switzerland's first qualified female pharmacist and a committed self-confident campaigner for women's entry into the professions, was broken.
[5] In March 1933, less than two months after the Hitler government had taken power in Germany, the city authorities moved to remove the couple's Swiss residency entitlements, based on their status as aliens and the relevant poverty laws.
[5] Clara Herbrand-Winnicki, by now seriously mentally sick, was extracted from the "Burghölzli", and on 30 August 1933 passed across to the German authorities at a Friedrichshafen frontier crossing.
Although she was evidently forgotten by the time of her death, during a decade in which opinions were focused on the rising threats from fascism, Clara Winicki's pioneering achievements have subsequently attracted greater appreciation.
