Anna Petronella van Heerden

Anna Petronella van Heerden(1887–1975), was the first Afrikaner woman to qualify as a medical doctor. Her thesis, for which she obtained a doctorate in 1923, was the first medical thesis written in Afrikaans. She practiced as a gynecologist, retiring in 1942. She also served in the South African medical corps during World War II.

Van Heerden was born on 26 April 1887 in Bethlehem, Orange Free State. Her parents were Francois Willem van Heerden and Josephine Ryneva Beck Horak. She was the middle child with an older brother Alexander Charles and a younger brother Frankie.

She was educated at the Huguenot Seminary in Wellington and Victoria College in Stellenbosch. She studied at the University of Amsterdam from 1908 to 1915 where she completed her medical degree. Van Heerden served as an intern at the Volkshuishospitaal in Bloemfontein in 1916 and had her own practice in Harrismith from 1917.

Quotes

• My analysis is underpinned by relevant life writing and feminist criticism, such as the notion of female.

Quotes about Anna Petronella van Heerden

• It investigates questions of nationalism, gender and sexuality in the autobiographical texts of Petronella van Heerden and Elsa Joubert.
• As political scientist De Klerk (1975:xiv) claims, ‘[t]he key to the Afrikaners is Calvinism’ and the strict doctrines enforced by the state and church can be said to have inhibited Van Heerden’s self-defining quest in her writing since she might have been ostracised (or imprisoned), in my opinion, if she imparted her more radical political opinions or openly discussed her sexuality as ‘mannish [lesbian]'.
• Through focusing on childhood experiences in Kerssnuitsels, marketed as a youth memoir, Van Heerden succeeds to convey her gradual awakening to the discriminating binaries imposed on women of her cultural and historical context in late 19th century and early 20th century South Africa.
• She gave up practicing medicine and came to Harrismith to farm cattle and was legendary among the boere here.