Bertha Pappenheim was born in Vienna on February 27, 1859, and died in Frankfurt on May 28, 1936. Pseudonymously known as Anna O, she was the patient whose case Joseph Breuer presented in Studies on Hysteria (Freud and Breuer, 1895d).

People who knew Pappenheim and admired her as a pioneer social worker were shocked when Ernest Jones, in the first volume of his biography of Freud, revealed Anna O's real identity.

Bertha's father, Siegmund Pappenheim, was a wealthy Viennese merchant, descended from an old Jewish family from Germany; her mother, Recha Gold-schmidt, gave birth to four children but only two, Bertha and Wilhelm, survived. Born in 1860, Wilhelm would become a famous attorney. Raised in a bourgeois household, Bertha learned English as a child and used it exclusively for a time during her illness; she also read French and Italian.

Reconstructions of Pappenheim's illness and the treatment she received,...