When grandfather studied Medicine in Geneva... Foreign students and teachers from 1876 onwards.

Founded in 1876, the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Geneva had an unusual student body in its first fifty years, composed mainly of leftist Russian citizens of Jewish and other ethnic origins, most of them women. Several of the professors were also of foreign origin. This paper explains why there were so many foreign students and gives some details of the life of a typical student and of four of the professors, Moritz Schiff, Sigismond Laskowski, Max Askanazy and Lina Stern.