Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945

by Paul Weindling

Overview

Based on a wealth of hitherto neglected archival sources, this study analyzes the origins, social composition and impact of eugenics in the context of the social and political tension of the rapidly industrializing Nazi empire. Until recently, historians of German racism have limited their analysis of the origins of the Holocaust to a handful of völkisch racial ideologies, overlooking the effects of racial ideas on biology, on the rapidly expanding medical profession and on public health services. Historians of medicine and social and political historians of modern Germany will be interested in this important book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521423977
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/22/1993
Series:	Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	660
Product dimensions:	5.94(w) x 8.94(h) x 1.38(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction: science and social cohesion; 1. Social Darwinism; 2. Between utopianism and racial hygiene; 3. From hygiene to family welfare; 4. Struggle for survival, the 1914-1918 war; 5. Revolution and racial reconstruction; 6. Weimar eugenics; 7. The sick bed of democracy, 1929-32; 8. Nazi racial hygiene; 9. Eugenics and German politics.

Editorial Reviews

"...the book deserves praise as a major presentation of a truly social history of medicine." ISIS

"...combines intellectual, social, and political history....Weindling's story is a broadly familiar one of scientists and professionals seeking social power through shifting alliances with state officials, mediated by a shared technocratic ideology and the widespread belief that biology was destiny....an outstanding contribution to scholarship in modern German history and a source of provocative theses on the politics of science and medicine."

"...Weindling's book is a major contribution to an important subject. It brings a mass of fascinating and illuminating detail to bear on the medical origins of Nazi exterminism." The Times Higher Education Supplement

"an impressively researched contribution to an important subject." Social History

"he has clearly helped to illuminate the shadows that historians of medicine have tended to avoid in their focus on the brighter side of their subject." Nature

"...a massive and important history text." Morton S. Rapp, Canadian Medical Association Journal

"Paul Weindling's superb historical analysis of health, race and politics in Germany provides nonspecialists and medical scholars alike with a thorough grounding in the origins and politics of bioethical questions. This is a tour de force of research drawn from individual papers, institutional and public archives, and primary literature." American Journal of Sociology

"...the book deserves praise as a major presentation of a truly social history of medicine." Isis

From the Publisher