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Hitzer argues that 'the history of "being diagnosed with cancer" should not be told as a straightforward story of liberation from the conventions of paternalistic dishonesty' (p. 154) and includes an illuminating discussion of Emperor Friedrich III whose death from laryngeal cancer in 1888 occasioned the first extensive coverage of cancer by the German media. While the book covers the history of cancer in both men and women, each chapter begins with a biographical or autobiographical portrait of a woman's experience with the disease. Bettina Hitzer, Heisenberg Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at the Technische Universität Dresden and I Privatdozentin i at the Freie Universität Berlin, has written what may fairly be called a definitive history of cancer in twentieth-century Germany. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on the psychoanalysis in Nazi Germany. It states that psychoanalysis in 1933 was roughly just a set of principles practiced and held by Jewish practitioners, but its history was not recognized in this manner until the early 1970s. It concludes that the history of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in the Third Reich represents both continuity and discontinuity. It notes that the continuities in the psychotherapy history are the more instructive and important.

A letter to the editor in response to a review of the book "The State of Health: Illness in Nazi Germany," published in the February 2013 edition of the journal is presented, along with a response to the letter by the reviewer.