Award ceremony: Prof. Anna Elsner receives the Marie Heim-Vögtlin Prize

The HSG literary scholar Anna Elsner will receive the Marie Heim-Vögtlin Prize and its endowment of CHF 25,000 on December 19, 2022. "It is a great honour to receive this Prize," says Elsner. The prize's namesake, Marie Heim-Vögtlin, has a special role to play in the history of Switzerland and women's history: as the first female doctor in Switzerland, she embodied a modern woman who reconciled family and career. "The question of how working parents can master this balancing act still preoccupies us. I myself studied at a women's college (St. Hilda's College, Oxford), which had a strong influence on me, and it is a great cause of mine to support researching parents," explains the literary scholar.

Palliative care and euthanasia in French literature

"The award also has a special meaning for me because my research deals with the system of medicine and euthanasia." The concept of palliative care was developed in the late 1960s and is actually intended to make the dying process as comfortable as possible. Nevertheless, it has also been criticized. In her research, Elsner has dealt with the reappraisal of dying in French literature since the 1970s, where she came across very personal insights into the institutionalization of dying.