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In 1894, the Germanisches National Museum in Nuremberg acquired an instrument resembling a leg harness. Stiff legs could be bent or stretched with it by means of lateral threads. Judging by the etched decoration, it comes from the collection of Elector August of Saxony (1526-1586). A comparison with contemporary leg harness reveals that the piece was originally made as an orthopaedic instrument. It completed the collection of surgical instruments in Dresden. Presumably, the plate harness was a technological condition for such orthoses and prostheses in many characteristics.

Recent scholarship on the social history of health and medicine in colonial India has moved beyond enclavist or hegemonic aspects of imperial medicine and has rather focused on the role of Indian intermediaries and the fractured nature of colonial hegemony. Drawing inspiration from this scholarship, the article highlights the significance of the Indian subordinates in the lock hospital system in the nineteenth century Madras Presidency. This study focuses on a class of Indian subordinates called the "gomastah", who were employed to detect clandestine prostitution in Madras to control the spread of venereal disease. It also underlines the role of other native and non-native subordinates such as Dhais, Chowdranies and Matrons, the ways in which they became indispensable for the smoother operation of the Contagious Diseases Act and the lock hospitals on a day-to-day basis. By emphasising how Indian subordinates were able to bring in caste biases within colonial governmentality, adding another layer to the colonial prejudices and xenophobia against the native population, it underlines the fact that there was not a one-way appropriation or facilitation of the coloniser's knowledge or biases by the colonised intermediaries. Rather, it argues for an interaction between them, and highlights the complexities of caste hierarchies and prejudice within the everyday colonial governmentality. Moreover, the article focuses on the consequent chaos and inherent power struggle between different factions of colonial staff.

This paper examines the institutional and social dimensions of cooperation in the Alliance of Science Organisations, the central corporatist stakeholder in German science policy, in the 1970s and 1980s, which were a crucial period for this committee. In doing so, this essay mainly focuses on the way science organizations interact with each other, as well as with national politics. The Federal Ministry of Research invited the Alliance to regular meetings and thereby fostered its involvement into political decision-making processes. Consequently, the question of who belonged to the Alliance came into the focus of different players. Although the members of the Alliance themselves decided on the composition of their committee, they were not able to completely insulate themselves from external demands. Including new members into the Alliance had a destabilizing effect on the carefully balanced distribution of power within this committee, as will be shown through the case study on the admission of the Association of the Major Research Centers (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Großforschungseinrichtungen, AGF) in 1976. In order to restabilize the situation, the members of the Alliance tried to exclude the AGF from certain issues. At the same time, the AGF itself was keen on being regarded as an equal partner and thus strove for its inclusion. This complex interplay of cooperative and competitive actions finally resulted in the institutionalization of the Alliance.

At the Wiesbaden Internist Congress of 1949, Alexander Mitscherlich and Viktor von Weizsäcker called for an expansion of the scientific concept of causality to include the search for the meaning of illness in one's personal history. This called into question a traditional psychiatric paradigm which presumed somatic causes of mental illness. Additionally, common psychiatric evidence practices were put to the test. In the first part of this article, three psychiatric positions that were presented at the 1949 congress are reconstructed. In the second part, the development of one of the psychiatrists involved, Jürg Zutt, is examined by focusing on the question of the possible effects of the Wiesbaden debate on his scientific reorientation as well as its consequences for his view of psychiatric evidence.

The Wiesbaden congress of internal medicine in 1949 played host to a heated debate on issues of method, epistemology, and evidence in psychosomatic medicine. Paul Martini, specialist in internal medicine and protagonist of methodically conducted clinical trials, criticized the methodology of knowledge production in psychosomatic medicine and disputed the validity of its claims. Starting from this controversy, the contribution reconstructs the formation and implementation of an experimental system on the origins of hypertension in which Thure von Uexküll, specialist in internal medicine as well as in psychosomatics, aimed to integrate somatic variables as well as the subjectivity, the biography, and the social relations of the patient. In this experimental system, the interpretations of patients had a privileged status. For Uexküll, empirical evidence, traceability, and reproducibility were seen as basic criteria for relevant and valid knowledge-requirements formulated by Martini in 1949.

The 1949 congress of internal medicine saw a heated and widely perceived controversy on epistemological issues of psychosomatic medicine. This article begins by outlining the place and significance of the congress in post-war history and tracing the course of the debate. The positions of the proponents of psychosomatic medicine, Viktor von Weizsäcker and Alexander Mitscherlich, are reconstructed, as well as those of the internist Paul Martini, who offered fundamental criticisms on the basis of his methodology of clinical research. In a second step, the respective different understandings of causality, evidence, and subjectivity are elaborated and contextualized. A special focus is on Martini's explicit use of these terms as well as his further research initiatives. Finally, I argue that "1949" can be analyzed as the culmination of an ongoing controversy about scientific evidence in clinical medicine that spanned several decades with its participants and levels of reference.

This paper examines the shifts in Alexander Mitscherlich's epistemological position in the 1940s, 50s and 60s via his plea for psychosomatic medicine. These shifts illustrate the post-war controversy among psychiatrists, physicians, and psychotherapists about what constitutes valid and practically relevant knowledge. The subjectivity of patients is key to Mitscherlich's concept of disease. This informs his continuous criticism of the use of statistical methods to validate individual diagnoses and hypotheses. This paper shows that Mitscherlich's criticism of a science-based medical methodology is highly adaptable, even though, in spite of many theoretical changes and adaptations, the main thrust of his approach remains consistent.