Medizin, Gesellschaft, und Geschichte : Jahrbuch des Instituts fur Geschichte der Medizin der Robert Bosch Stiftung最新文献

The collections of patient correspondence by Samuel Hahnemann in the Institute for the History of Medicine at the Robert Bosch Foundation in Stuttgart and the Deutsche Homöopathie-Union in Karlsruhe contain some letters written by the dispensing chemist, Theodor Lappe (1802-1882). These documents provide details of business affairs rather than illness topics. Hahnemann used the help of this pharmacist, who lived and worked in Neudietendorf/Thuringia, in trying to develop the homoeopathic medicine causticum. This gave rise to the idea of developing a homoeopathic pharmacopoeia which unfortunately failed because of the lack of self-confidence of this highly talented chemist.

History of medicine played an important part in the ideology and policy of the Third Reich. The Nazi Party and the "Schutzstaffel" (SS) tried to instrumentalize historical knowledge to justify their ideology and medical ethics. The academic discipline of the history of medicine saw a revival during the Nazi period and, especially, during the Second World War. Important medical historians were eager to contribute to a symbiosis between the State and their field. The close relationship between the history of medicine and the Nazi regime was particularly apparent at Paul Diepgen's Department for the History of Medicine and Natural Sciences at the University of Berlin. Diepgen, apart from his own collaboration with the Nazi regime, was the teacher of Bernward J. Gottlieb who became the leading medical historian of the SS and Director of the new "SS-Institute for the History of Medicine" in Berlin in 1941. Gottlieb's institute moved in 1943 to the "SS-Academy" in Graz to train future SS-physicians in the history of medicine. The history of medicine was of great relevance also for certain members of the Nazi elite. They included Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, who ensured that Gottlieb would become Diepgen's successor in 1945 for the chair of medical history at the University of Berlin. Hitler was asked to intervene in the appointment process given the political importance of the field and, in particular, the professorship being located in Berlin. The SS was able to exercise, by this time, a decisive influence on the field of the history of medicine. Only the collapse of the Third Reich prevented the traditional discipline from becoming a "science" to legitimize the Nazi System and the SS. The aim of this paper is to examine the role of the field of the history of medicine and of its key institutions and personalities during the Third Reich.

This paper examines the connection between the life, sense of mission and suffering in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. It shows that, as early as his Basel years, he wanted to become a philosopher who was willing to transmit without fear what he considered to be true to everybody, even if he would have to suffer and remain unappreciated. He was afflicted with increasing numbers of headaches and bouts of nausea from the mid-1870s and was further handicapped by constantly deteriorating vision. The ten years before his breakdown were spent as a traveller searching for a place where his suffering could be eased. The isolation imposed on him by the illness gave him the inner freedom to break the old certainties and to offer a new myth as an alternative. His failure as a writer was compensated by an intensified and, finally, gross sense of mission which ended in mental derangement in early January 1889.

An eighteen-month old boy called Ernst Langerhans died shortly after being injected with a prophylactic dose of anti-diphtheria serum in April 1896. The father, a well-known pathologist in Berlin, claimed, in the obituary notice, that his son had been poisoned by Behring's anti-diphtheria serum. This paper describes the tragic events of Spring 1896: the death of Ernst Langerhans, the official investigations that followed as well as the reactions in the daily newspapers and the medical journals. The death of Ernst Langerhans afforded the opponents of the new serotherapy an opportunity to call into question the whole immunological concept. Supporters of the serotherapy, in turn, defended it against these attacks. The spectacular nature of Ernst Langerhans's death combined with the fact that he came from a prominent family of physicians made the event a public scandal. The tuberculine affair which had happened only a few years earlier was another reason for the public concern. Finally, the "Langerhans case" was a scandal because of the way in which Robert Langerhans published the death notice also causing resentment within the scientific community. Indeed, the publication of the accusation was one of the reasons why the "Langerhans case" failed to provoke a crisis with respect to the new therapy, as the central argument was displaced onto wider ethical questions. Furthermore, the medical administration had learned from the tuberculine affair, and had subsequently implemented a large confidence-inspiring system of quality control. The "official" cause of death, following the investigations into the case, was proclaimed to be an accident; a tragic piece of bad luck.

Workers' autobiographies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries depict, at length, diseases both in terms of physical description and impact, and in terms of psychological effects. Drastic physical defects and their consequences are explicitly described. Many writers appear weak against the primary presumption of the strong, male body of the workers. Mourning and dejection over the authors' own weaknesses and the illnesses of others (relatives and colleagues) are prevalent. However, the masculinity of the first-person narrator, in principle, is not eclipsed or overshadowed by doubt because of disease and weakened physical condition. Diseases are metaphors for bad social conditions which lead to weakness, whilst the authors succeeded in coping with their weaknesses by compensating with other abilities and talents.