Hedda Andersson

Life

Hedda Andersson was the daughter of a male laborer named Andersson and the cunning woman Johanna Andersson. When her father died in 1866, she mowed with her mother and three siblings to her grandmother.

On her mother's side, she descended from a line of medicine women, known to have practiced traditional folk medicine since at least seven generations, dating back to the 17th-century. Her great grandmother Marna Nilsdotter, as well as her grandmother Elna Hansson, was active in this field. Her mother and grandmother worked together as medical practitioners in Malmö. Her grandmother was famous in all Scandinavia as the Lundakvinnan ("Woman of Lund"), and had educated herself to a barber surgeon to avoid being accused of quackery, as did her daughter, the mother of Hedda, for the same reason.

When the universities of Sweden were opened to women in 1870, her mother and grandmother decided that she should study medicine at a university and obtain a formal license, to avoid being persecuted and accused of quackery, which had been the case with many women in the history of their family, such as her grandmother and mother. Hedda Andersson was educated at the school of Maria Stenkula, and was admitted to Lund University in 1880.

She has been referred to as the first female student there, though actually this was Hildegard Björck only shortly before. She was the only female there until 1882, but she was reportedly treated with respect by her male fellow students. She took her bachelor's degree in 1887 and her medical license in 1892. She thereby became the second female physician to have graduated from a Swedish university after Karolina Widerström.

She was active as a doctor in Ronneby 1892–95, in Malmö in 1893–95 and in Stockholm 1895-1925, after which she settled in Lund. She also studied in Copenhagen in 1892 and 1895 and under Max Sänger in Leipzig in 1893.

Memorials

A Visiting scholar Professorship was created at the Lund University in 2009 in memory of Hedda Andersson.