The story of Anna Dengel, founder of the Society of Catholic Medical Missionaries, known worldwide as the Medical Mission Sisters, reads like a novel as this twentieth century pioneer time and again challenges the stereotypes restricting women in religion and society. She was determined to make professional medical care available to women and children in areas of the world where access to such services from men was forbidden; and she was equally determined that the institutional Roman Catholic Church would help facilitate such a mission. She not only lived to see that day. She helped to make it happen.
