In April 1922, Hermann Rorschach was admitted to the hospital in Herisau with severe abdominal pain. Misdiagnosis and peritonitis claimed his life days later. He was thirty-seven. Olga Stempelin was suddenly left alone with two young children, Elizabeth and Wadin, virtually no financial savings, and a grieving household.
The scientific outlook was equally bleak. Ernst Bircher, the Bern publisher who had reluctantly printed Psychodiagnostik in 1921, viewed the book as a financial disaster. The printing run had been limited, the reproduction of the plates had required expensive multi-tone lithography, and initial reviews from the psychoanalytic establishment were skeptical. Bircher showed zero interest in promoting the system or printing supplemental guides.
Had Stempelin sold off the rights or walked away to sustain her private practice, the Rorschach technique likely would have faded into an obscure historical footnote. She chose otherwise. Recognizing the empirical validity of Hermann's work, she spent years cataloging his case studies, protecting his personal correspondence, and refusing to let commercial opportunists distort the diagnostic methodology.
She formed an alliance with Dr. Walter Morgenthaler, an influential Swiss psychiatrist and close family friend. Together, they fended off predatory attempts by third parties to alter the ten official inkblot plates. Stempelin insisted that any diagnostic reproduction must match the precise shades, textures, and spatial dimensions of the 1921 originals. Her unyielding posture ensured that the standardization of the Rorschach test remained intact during its transition into American and European clinics.
