Medical Mission Sisters

The Medical Mission Sisters (MMS) are a religious congregation of women in the Roman Catholic Church founded in 1925 and dedicated to providing the poor of the world better access to health care. They were formerly officially known as the "Society of the Catholic Medical Missions".

The congregation grew out of the experiences of Dr. Anna Dengel, a native of Austria. Dr. Dengel had served for several years as a medical missionary to the poor of what was then Northern India and today is the nation of Pakistan. She had experienced firsthand the unnecessary sickness and death of countless Muslim women and children, whose customs kept them cut off from medical care administered by male physicians.

After months of traveling to give talks about the conditions in India, and speaking with many members of the clergy, Dr. Dengel became convinced that only a group of Religious Sisters who had been professionally trained as physicians could reach these women, who were cut off from adequate medical care by cultural and religious traditions. Such a project, however, was contrary to canon law of the time, which prohibited members of religious institutes from practicing medicine.

Nevertheless, she drew up a Constitution for the Community she had in mind and wrote that the members were “to live for God…to dedicate themselves to the service of the sick for the love of God and …to be properly trained according to the knowledge and standards of the time in order to practice medicine in its full scope, to which the Sisters were to dedicate their lives.”

Permission was granted on June 12, 1925, to begin the new Congregation and, on September 30, 1925, the “First Four”—Dr. Anna Dengel of Austria, Dr. Johanna Lyons of Chicago, Evelyn Flieger, R.N., originally from Britain, and Marie Ulbrich, R.N., of Luxemburg, Iowa—came together in Washington, D.C., to begin the Medical Mission Sisters.

The “First Four” were unable to profess religious vows officially because the Catholic Church had yet to approve Sisters working in the medical field, yet they lived as professed Sisters just the same. Finally, in 1935, after the Medical Mission Sisters had grown, the Catholic Church changed its regulations and approved Sisters’ working in medicine and all of its branches. The Medical Mission Sisters then made their public, canonical vows, and they began to establish communities around the world.

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