Health is both a positive end in itself and the foundation of the entire spectrum of other goods that flow from the ability of healthy individuals to engage in productive labour. And in nineteenth-century Germany the debate over the right to health was part of a much broader debate – one that was simultaneously medical and political – over the causes of ill-health, especially the relation between poverty, work, sickness and personal morality. From the 1848 revolution to the end of the Empire, the vigour with which a right to health was defended was directly related to the extent to which sickness was regarded as a specifically social problem. In the following pages I would like to use the intertwined histories of social medicine and the right to health to make two sets of arguments: one concerning the methodological problems involved in thinking about the relationship between medicine and politics; the other concerning the actual interplay of medicine and politics in the shaping of the German state from 1848 to the founding of the Weimar Republic.

The main point argued here is that, although medical sciences may have evolved according to their respective disciplinary logics, public attitudes towards these sciences and the willingness to translate medical knowledge into public health policy did not depend only – and perhaps not even primarily – on the assumed scientific validity of such knowledge.