Sophia Getzowa (Hebrew: סופיה גצובה; 10 January 1872 (O.S.)/23 January 1872 (N. S.) – 11(12) July 1946) was a Belarusian-born pathologist and scientist in Mandatory Palestine. She grew up in a Jewish shtetl in Belarus and during her medical studies at the University of Bern, she became engaged to Chaim Weizmann, who would become the first president of Israel. Together they worked in the Zionist movement. After a four-year romance, Weizmann broke off their engagement and Getzowa returned to her medical studies, graduating in 1904. She carried out widely cited research on the thyroid, identifying solid cell nests (SCN) in 1907. Because of her status as a Jew, a woman, and a foreigner, Getzowa's employment status was unstable. She worked through the 1920s in various locations in Switzerland and also briefly in Paris. In 1925, after a recommendation from Albert Einstein, she was hired to work as a pathologist in the yet to be created Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she would become the first female professor in 1927. She collaborated with a wide range of European scientists over the remainder of her career, before her retirement in 1940.
Early life
Sophia (also Sonia) Getzowa (Gecova) was born on 23 January 1872 in Belarus, which at the time was part of the Russian Empire. In 1874, her family resided in Svisloch, a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement, near Novogrudok, which was also occasionally noted as her home town. In her own account, Getzowa stated that her parents, Beila Gelfand-Romm of Vilnius and Beiness Getzow (or Beinus Getsov, 1845–1896) of Gomel, moved the family from the rural estate near Svisloch, where she was born, to Vilnius soon after her birth. When she was around four years old, they moved to Gomel, where three years later she began studying with a Jewish scholar and learned the Hebrew alphabet. Getzowa's mother died when she was eight and a cousin, Marie Scheindels-Kagan, who ran a school in Švenčionys took her in and taught her Russian orthography. She returned to Gomel in 1882 and entered the newly founded Progymnasium, where she studied for three years. For eight years, she then attended the Жіночу гімназію в Ромнах (Women's Gymnasium in Romny), before pursuing medical studies at the University of Bern, in Switzerland, beginning in 1895. Getzowa was active in the Zionist movement and in 1898 was a delegate to the Second Zionist Congress, held in Basel. That year, she became engaged to Chaim Weizmann, who took her to meet his family in Pinsk over the summer breaks in 1898 and 1899. Getzowa traveled to Pinsk on both occasions, with her sister Rebekka, who was also studying medicine in Bern. It is probable that the two lived together after their engagement, as was common at the time. Getzowa became an important member of the Zionist community, attending the 5th Zionist Congress as a delegate of the Democratic Fraction, a radical group formed by her friend Leo Motzkin and Weizmann in 1901. Weizmann, who had been simultaneously carrying on a relationship with his future wife, Vera Khatzman, broke off his four-year engagement with Getzowa in July 1901, but did not tell his family until March 1903. Because Weizmann was vague about his intention, promising to meet Getzowa three months later and encouraging her to continue to work with him in the Zionist movement, she interpreted his relationship with Vera as a flirtation. Having been westernized by his long exposure to European cultures in Germany and Switzerland, Weizmann had now decided on a partner who was less defined by Eastern Jews in the confines of the shtetle. His behavior was seen as dishonorable, and created fractures with Motzkin and others in the Democratic Fraction. His fellow students held mock-court proceedings and ruled that he should uphold his commitment and marry Getzowa, even if he later divorced her. She never recovered from the trauma of the break-up, suffering yet another blow when her sister died from abdominal cancer on 16 April 1902. Encouraged by her professors to continue her studies, she graduated with a medical degree in 1904. In researching her thesis, Über die Thyreoidea von Kretinen und Idioten (On the Thyroid Glands of Cretins and Idiots), she discovered foreign tissue elements, which would become the foundation of her career. Her observation was that cell rests and cysts of the postbranchial body in atrophic goiters of the thyroid were not formed from thyroid tissue and did not react with the thyroid.
Career
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