Anna Dengel

Mother Anna Maria Dengel, S.C.M.M., (16 March 1892 – 17 April 1980) was an Austrian physician, Religious Sister and missionary. She was the founder of the Medical Mission Sisters, which was among the first congregations of Religious Sisters authorized by the Roman Catholic Church to provide full medical care to the poor and needy in the overseas missions.

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.

When Anna Dengel was in her mid-20s she heard that a Scottish physician and Catholic missionary, Agnes McLaren, was looking for women doctors for a hospital in Rawalpindi, India (now Pakistan), which had been established to provide medical care for the 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.

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