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

The juxtaposition of official regulations and letters of complaint from Vienna's Rothschild Hospital shows, beyond the rhetoric and euphemisms of hospital reports, how lively and diverse day-to-day life was in a Jewish hospital around the year 1900. The letters of complaint query the official hospital rules and show that ideal and reality did not always coincide. Often, religious questions were at the root of the critique--such as doubts as to whether kosher dietary laws were adhered to--or conflicts between the agents involved, be they individuals or groups, patients, nurses, physicians or administrative staff. As part of this process, power structures, social hierarchies, patient rights and gender issues were called into question and renegotiated.

This study examines the importance of religious denomination in the German community of deaf people in the 19th century and up until 1933, focusing on the dual minority status of deaf Jews. It shows that the educational system for the deaf and the deaf movement as such were, in structure and content, informed by the Christian, primarily the Protestant, faith. This meant that deaf Jewish people were in danger of facing a conflict between their identity as Jews and their identity as deaf people. In order to resolve this dilemma, Jewish philanthropists and deaf people created a range of complementary structures: schools where deaf Jewish children received tuition tailored to their needs, religious services in sign language and a Jewish deaf association for mutual support and companionship. But being members of two stigmatized and marginalized groups made the Jewish deaf vulnerable from several sides. The discursive association of deafness, Judaism and heredity played a particular part in this. This study comes to the conclusion that deaf Jews did not want to choose between their deaf and Jewish identities but they wanted to belong to both. As a result they suffered from the negative views that some deaf people had of Jews and some Jews of deaf people--as well as from the double discrimination by the mainstream society.

While, in the post-war years and into the 1950s, the building of old people's and care homes and the allocation of home places in those homes was seen as the main task of municipal care institutions for the elderly in Frankfurt am Main, in the decade that followed their main task shifted towards increasing the possibilities of providing care in people's own homes, delaying the move into old people's homes and breaking through the loneliness that elderly people were presumed to experience. Supported by the state, community housing was provided with flats for elderly people and with carers to look after their needs. The "warm rooms" of the post-war period changed into clubs, where members met and received guidance. In the late 1960s the clubs were extended into day-care centres, offering a range of consultation services, organized day trips and recreational holidays for the elderly. It was hoped that "meals-on-wheels" in combination with age-appropriate living conditions would delay the move into a home. But these plans were not adequately developed in the 1960s and often it was not clear who would pay the bills. The same was true of outpatient medical care which had traditionally been the task of community nurses, but was now increasingly carried out by local authority carers, who also provided household assistance. This kind of care could only ever be given for a limited period of time and, while it was able to delay the move into an old people's home, it could not replace it.

For a long time mental asylums were seen as hermetically sealed units for the long-term confinement of patients. The broad and excluding nature of these establishments was their most prominent feature. From the end of the last century socio-historical and patient-oriented research has questioned and revised these properties. The present essay is based on that research. Using the example of a pauper asylum in Glasgow between 1875 and 1921 the essay analyses the number of released patients, how they were released and how they lived after being released. The sources used were individual patient files of the asylum and the corresponding files of the pauper administration. Although the number of releases--especially of patients who had been cured--declined in the period of investigation, the rate of successful outcomes remained, at 20 to 30 per cent, clearly above that of comparable institutions of the 1910s. According to the files, the key factor in favour of a release was the ability for social re-inclusion. The files examined reveal three typical biographical patterns: reintegration, psychiatric care and social care. While the first group tended to disappear from the sight of physicians and carers, members of the other groups frequently reappeared in the records. Apparently, social services as well as the asylum were often used to help cope with temporary family crises. Once the situation improved, the patients in question left social care and were taken home by their families.

Coercive sterilizations committed during the "Third Reich" were seen as a means of creating a Volksgemeinschaft (people's community) based on racial purity and hereditary health. While the physicians and attorneys who executed those actions emphasized the victims' sacrifice for the Volksgemeinschaft and stressed the benefits to the persons concerned and their families, the victims tried to escape the sterilization program. The "view from below" offers the possibility to observe victims as active agents who expressed their self-will in various ways: through escape, verbal protest and by refusing to be branded "inferior". In their attempts to reject the stigma of "inferiority", the victims often clung to the prevailing genetic ideas. The present article wants to highlight the also existing cracks inside eugenic thinking and shows, moreover, that other body concepts and ideas of illness existed, as the importance of eugenic thinking and the primacy of the Volksgemeinschaft were also called into question at the time.

Up to 1920 Thuringia was separated into many territories some of which were known for their unorthodox pharmaceutical industries. Gotha was the only famous duchy because one of its princes had married the Queen of England in 1840. The country was backward and the state administration was incapable of solving health issues. It was due to the interest of some physicians that the fragile balance between homeopathy, naturopathy, physicians and pharmacists broke down after 1900. But the state bureaucracy was unable to convince the people of its new healthcare approaches that were just based on scientific medicine.

Relating to a research project in the trans-Himalayan region of Ladakh, Northwest-India, the paper examines indications that the shamanic vocation and practice grew significantly in this region. The author tries to link this increase to severe psychological pressures imposed by the heavy presence of the Indian Army, political and administrative ties to the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir (with a predominantly Muslim population), and the region's status as a popular tourist destination. The paper argues that shamanic rituals performed by so-called oracles that embody deities of the Buddhist pantheon in trance (lhamo, lhapa) not only provide important services of healing and divination, they contribute significantly to medical prevention in times of growing competition and the deterioration of value systems. Turning from a local (Ladakh, the Tibetan Plateau) to a global perspective, it is further argued that the preventive function of shamanism has often been overlooked in previous ethnographic research and might be neglected by increasing efforts (also fostered by indigenous ritualists themselves) to establish and legitimize traditional ritual practices as part of modern health care systems which might eventually lead to the medicalization of traditional ceremonies--in short: "shamans do a lot more than just heal people".

In German psychiatry, a distinct change occurred in the 1920s with regard to types of treatment. By introducing work therapy, early releases and psychiatric support outside the asylums the number of in-patients was to be reduced. As a consequence social approaches began to dominate psychiatric discourse. These approaches aimed at normalizing everyday life in the institutions and at implementing treatments that would allow patients to be reintegrated into society. Based on numerous documents on a patient who had spent the 1920s and early 1930s in a mental institution, the article adds a patient's view to the psychiatrists' perspective that has so far dominated the history of psychiatry of the Weimar Republic. The documents allow for an in-depth investigation of both the potential and the limitations of the approaches to psychiatric reform prevalent at the time. They illustrate, from a micro-perspective, the field of tension between psychiatric diagnosis, life in the asylum and integration into society that, in the case of this patient, became especially poignant with the patient's release at the time of the Third Reich sterilization laws.