Dr Franziska Schlink

Dr. Franziska Schlink was a general practitioner to the Broken Hill community between the 1930s and 1950s. One of the first female doctors, she fought for her position as a woman in the medical profession and then fought for, and won, the right to go underground to treat injured and ill miners, one of the few women permitted to do so. 

Born in Wodonga, Victoria, in 1910, her parents Albert Joseph Schlink and Mabel Ann Hughes ran a general store that had been in the Schlink family since the early 1800s. They allowed Franziska to complete her medical degree, joining her brothers Carl and John who were qualified doctors. She started practicing at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and then moved to the Ballarat Base Hospital. In 1934 she took up a position at the Royal Perth Hospital where she was appointed junior resident Medical Officer. She arrived at the Broken Hill and District Hospital in 1936.  

Medicine was barely ready to welcome women into the profession, and neither was Broken Hill. Franziska was one of the town’s first female doctors and she was not well-received by her male colleagues, Broken Hill and District Hospital’s resident surgeons Samuel Barnett and Wilhelm Dorsch. They at first treated Franziska with disdain and, in a telephone call home to her parents in Wodonga, she described her new life as unbearable. But Dr. Schlink soon proved her worth and won respect. Although his initial treatment of Franziska was antagonistic, a friendship soon developed between she and Wilhelm Dorsch. 

In 1948, after twelve years in the local hospital, Franziska Schlink went into private practise with two other Broken Hill practitioners: Dr Brian Funder and Dr Edmond Thomas Walsh. She ran a busy and welcoming surgery, sometimes not charging poorer or elderly patients, and was popular and kind with women in childbirth, whom she supported whether they were married or unmarried. She became president of the Broken Hill branch of the Australian Medical Association and gave the community many years of service.  

She returned to Albury when she contracted lung cancer and died soon after at the age of 55. The community felt her loss. Dr. Franziska Schlink is remembered for playing a vital role as a pioneering woman in Broken Hill and in the medical profession.  

Audio transcript available.