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Unresolved Questions of German Medicine and Medical History in the Past and Present

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Michael H. Kater
Michael H. Kater
Affiliation:
York University Toronto, Canada
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Extract

While in recent years a great deal has been written to clarify Germany's medical past, the picture is not yet complete in several important respects. In the realm of the sociology of medicine, for example, we still do not know enough about physicianpatient relationships from, say, the founding of the Second Empire to the present. On the assumption, based on the meager evidence available, that this relationship had an authoritarian structure from the physician on downward, did it have anything to do with the shape of German medicine in the Weimar Republic and, later, the Third Reich? Another relative unknown is the role of Jews in the development of medicine as a profession in Germany. Surely volumes could be written on the significant influence Jews have exerted on medicine in its post-Wilhelmian stages, as well as the irreversible victim status Jewish doctors were forced to assume after Hitler's ascension to power

Type
Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , December 1992 , pp. 407 - 423
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1992

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References

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49. William E. Seidelman, “In Mcmoriam: Medicine's Confrontation with Evil,” Hastings Center Report (November/December 1989): 5 (quotation); author's telephone conversation with Professor Seidelman, Oakville-Hamilton, 5 September 1992.

50. Fuchs, Bundesärztekammcr Cologne, to von Treskow, Auswärtiges Amt, Bonn, 5 October 1992 (private archive Seidelman).

51. Jürgen Peiffer, “Neuropathology in the Third Reich: Memorial to Those Victims of National-Socialist Atrocities in Germany Who Were Used by Medical Science,” Brain Pathology 1 (1991): 125–31;CrossRefGoogle ScholarErinnem und Bedenken (Tübingen, 1991).Google Scholar

52. Kraft, Universität Heidelberg, to Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst, Stuttgart, 21 August 1989; Sellin, Universität Heidelberg, to author, 30 January 1992 (both documents in author's private archive).

53. See Seidelman, McMaster University, Hamilton, to von Treskow, Auswärtiges Amt, Bonn, 14 July 1992 (private archive Seidelman).

54. Seidelman, McMaster University, Hamilton, to Witte, Auswärtiges Amt, Bonn, 25 September 1991 (first quotation); Witte to Seidelman 26 August 1991 (second quotation). An ongoing correspondence between Seidelman and Professor Reinhard Putz of the Anatomical Institute of Munich University has so far thrown no more light on the problem: Putz to Seidelman, 16 December 1991, 7 April and 6 October 1992; and Seidelman to Putz, 14July 1992 (all documents private archive Seidelman). On the suspicion, also see Erinnem und Bedenken, 43–44.

55. Anonymous report, Munich, March 1991; student as quoted in Seidelman, McMaster University, Hamilton, to Witte, Auswärtiges Amt, Bonn, 25 September 1991 (both documents private archive Seidelman).