Medicine and Modernity: Public Health and Medical Care in Nineteenth-And Twentieth-Century Germany (Publications of the German Historical Institute) - Hardcover

Von der hinteren Coverseite

This collection of essays addresses, in a comprehensive and critical fashion, fundamental issues in the history of medicine in modern Germany. The essays also investigate important continuities and discontinuities in German history, and between Germany and the West. The central focus of the collection is on the professionalization of modern medicine and the medicalization of modern society. The problem of Nazi Germany is a common and prominent theme of many of the essays, partially because of its influence upon the debate over the nature of modern German government and society in relation to Western social, political, and economic development. Other topics include: the social place of hospitals in the early nineteenth century, the various forms of social Darwinism, the politics of state-run health insurance, the influence of eugenics on medicine and psychiatry, social control and "shell shock" in World War I, the history of sterilization and euthanasia, Nazi experimentation on humans, the abortion debate, and the role of former Nazis in the West German medical leadership.