Marianne Winder
Her early life was bound up in the social milieu of the Jewish intelligentsia of Central Europe before its destruction during World War I. Franz Kafka was part of the literary circle the "Prague Circle" in pre-War Prague that included her father, and this no doubt influenced Marianne Winder's interest in German literature.
When the political situation deteriorated in the 1930s the Winder family was forced to leave Prague to seek refuge in England.
[1][2] After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Winder fled on 29 June 1939, when he crossed the Polish border illegally with his family, his journey taking him across Poland and Scandinavia to England, where he arrived with his wife and daughter Marianne on 13 July 1939.
Six weeks after their arrival in England the Winders were evacuated to Reigate, where they lived in a refugee hostel and where Marianne was registered as a student aged 18.
She defended a thesis on German astrological books from 1452 to 1600 and graduated in 1963 with a degree in Librarianship from University College London.
She collaborated with Dr. Walter Pagel, a pathologist and medical historian, and co-authored with him several articles including 'Gnostiches bei Paracelsus und Konrad von Megenberg' in Fachliteratur des Mittlelalters, (1968); 'Hervey and the "Modern" Concept of Disease', in The Bulletin of the History of Medicine, (1968); 'The Eightness of Adam and Related "Gnostic" Ideas in the Paracelsian Corpus' in Ambix, (1969).
On Pagel's death in 1983 she took charge of the publication of his complete work in two volumes, the first published in 1985 under the title Religion and Neoplatonism in Renaissance Medicine,[6] the second in 1986 entitled From Paracelsus to Van Helmont.
[1] At the same time she began a collaboration with Rechung Rinpoché Jampal Kunzang which led to the publication in 1973 of Tibetan Medicine: Illustrated in Original Texts,[11] for which she also wrote the Introduction and which, through its foreign editions in Chinese and French and its revisions, became a classic on Tibetan medicine[1][2] and the first work in English on the subject.
