POWER IN POWERLESSNESS: THE STRANGE JOURNEY AND CAREER OF REGINA SALOMEA PILSZTYNOWA
"My parents married me at a young age to doctor Jacob Halpir, who took me that very year from the Nowogrodek Voivodeship in Lithuania to Istanbul, where we moved among fine people, and because my husband was a very capable medical doctor, and by God's grace, we attained some money."1 So begins the richly detailed and so far virtually unknown memoir of Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa, a Polish female physician whose life spans eighteenth century Eastern and Southern Europe from the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans to Poland and Russia.2 The account of her travels and adventures offers us an intimate and exciting glimpse of a period and a society that is at once distant, and yet still resonates to our contemporary experiences. A stranger in a foreign land, a female Catholic Pole in a Muslim male dominated society, Salomea managed to successfully carve out for herself a viable niche, an early "room of her own." Contrary to every modem expectation, she became a highly sought after and well respected practitioner of the medical arts, especially ophthalmology and, as a result, became the official court physician to Turkish pashas and Hungarian princes, and indeed, even to the Sultan Mustafa III (1757 1773) himself. Called "Poland's first female doctor" by the very few historians who know of her, her story offers us a window on eighteenth century social, professional, and gender interaction between Christians, Jews, and Muslims. It is also a richly woven tapestry of everyday life, in which are recorded fascinating vignettes of love, travel, romance, popular superstitions, war, black magic, serial killers, and bandits and that's only in the very first chapter alone. Her memoir forms an invaluable repository of personal accounts, as well as historical, ethnographic, religious, and geographical