Search

ZusammenfassungAn der Wende zum 20. Jahrhundert rückte die Problematik des Humanexperimentes sowie die Notwendigkeit der Einwilligung hierzu in den Fokus der Mediziner und einer allgemeinen Öffentlichkeit. Es wird u. a. am Fall des Venerologen Albert Neisser die Entwicklung forschungsethischer Standards zwischen dem Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts und 1931 in Deutschland nachgezeichnet. Das aus der Forschungsethik stammende Konzept des Informed Consent ist heute auch in der klinischen Ethik von zentraler Bedeutung.

Although already established in West Germany since the 1970s, with the introduction of research ethics committees (rec s) into the Tokyo revision of the Declaration of Helsinki, they gained in importance. From 1985, a duty to consult rec s in human subject research was written into West German physicians’ codes of conduct. In East Germany (“Deutsche Demokratische Republik”, ddr), a central rec was set up in 1981 within the ddr Ministry of Health, and after German reunification, a duty to consult rec s was introduced in the federal Medical Products Act (Arzneimittelgesetz). Since 2001, European regulations were incorporated into national laws which applied in Germany as in other member states. Regarding the institution and legal history of rec s in Germany, this contribution seeks to answer three questions: (1) Were rec s developed in response to a specifically German experience of medical crimes and the abuse of human research subjects, or were they part of an internationalization of medical research ethics and international integration of German research? (2) Was the setting up of rec s in Germany a more top-down, centralized process or a more bottom-up, grassroots undertaking, and what does this tell us about the status that biomedical researchers gave to the ethics of human subject research in that period? And (3) who has traditionally held authority over human subject research in Germany and who holds it today?

ZusammenfassungDer Dermatovenerologe Samuel Jessner (1859–1929) erhielt im Jahr 1921 einen Lehrauftrag für „Sexuallehren“ an der Universität Königsberg (heute: russ Калининград, Kaliningrad). Im Reichsmedizinalkalender wurde er aber auch als Urologe geführt. Dieser Beitrag zeichnet seinen Lebensweg und sein Wirken nach und fragt, wie Jessner in der Peripherie der deutschen Sexualwissenschaft und ohne enge Anbindung an deren Netzwerke dieser akademische Erfolg gelingen konnte. Sein geringer Einfluss in der Forschung, seine fehlende Anbindung an eine „Schule“ der Sexualwissenschaft im deutschsprachigen Raum und seine jüdische Herkunft waren Faktoren, die sowohl die Wahrnehmung seiner Arbeit unter Zeitgenossen als auch das Vergessen seiner Tätigkeiten in der Geschichtsschreibung präformierten.

Zusammenfassung Historiker*innen haben immer wieder auf personelle und institutionelle Kontinuitäten zwischen der Eugenik in Deutschland vor 1945 und der sich entwickelnden Humangenetik im Nachkriegsdeutschland hingewiesen. Wie aber wurde diese äußere Wahrnehmung unter deutschen Humangenetiker*innen diskutiert und spielte sie für das Selbstbild der Disziplin eine Rolle? Auf der Basis von gedruckten Quellen und biographischen Interviews wurden das Geschichtsbewusstsein und die Übernahme historischer Verantwortung unter deutschen Humangenetiker*innen untersucht, die in der Zeit zwischen den 1970er und den 2010er Jahren im Feld tätig waren. Ein historisches Bewusstsein spielte in der Erinnerung der Zeitzeug*innen schon vor den 1980er Jahren eine Rolle für ihr Fach und seit der Gründung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Humangenetik im Jahr 1987 wird in der Gesellschaft die Frage der Form einer historischen Verantwortungsübernahme immer wieder diskutiert. Sie findet ihren praktischen Ausdruck z. B. in Diskussionen mit der Öffentlichkeit und in der Umbenennung von Preisen.

ZusammenfassungDer Leipziger Arzt Hermann Rohleder wurde bereits von seinen Zeitgenossen als Pionier der Sexualmedizin angesehen. Sein Werdegang führte ihn von der Behandlung von Geschlechtskrankheiten über die Urologie zur medizinischen Sexualwissenschaft. Er setzte sich für die Institutionalisierung der Sexualwissenschaft ein, seine Versuche der Etablierung einer Professur an der Universität Leipzig scheiterten jedoch mehrfach. Das Leben und Wirken Rohleders zeigen, wie eng die Disziplinenentwicklung der Urologie und Sexualwissenschaft zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts verknüpft waren.

ZusammenfassungIn Kooperation mit der und gefördert durch die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Humangenetik hat eine Arbeitsgruppe des Instituts für Geschichte, Theorie und Ethik der Medizin der Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf zu Beginn des Jahres 2017 ein Forschungsprojekt zur Geschichte der Humangenetik in Deutschland seit den 1970er-Jahren begonnen. Ein weiterer Kooperationspartner ist das Institut für Medizingeschichte und Wissenschaftsforschung der Universität zu Lübeck. Methodisch zeichnet sich die Forschung dadurch aus, dass die Erinnerungen von Zeitzeugen mithilfe der Methode der Oral History erhoben und systematisch ausgewertet werden. In diesem Beitrag stellen wir die inhaltliche Ausrichtung des Projekts auf Basis des derzeitigen Forschungsstands zur Zeitgeschichte der Humangenetik in Deutschland vor. Dabei beschreiben wir die Herausforderungen des Schreibens einer Zeitgeschichte der Medizin und problematisieren die Zeitzeugenbefragung als Methode.

In this contribution we describe the life and work of the Berlin physician Carl Posner (1854-1928). We present his central role as a member of the founding generation of urology, andrology, and academic sexology in Germany. His clinical work, research and publication illustrate the central role these new disciplines played in the urological field. Finally, we describe how Posner is remembered in the history of urology and sexology.

Kurzlich konnten Untersuchungen den Weg zu den Nobelpreisverleihungen an die Urologen Werner Forssmann (1904–1979) 1956 und Charles Huggins (1901–1997) 1966 rekonstruieren. Die Laureaten bilden allerdings nur einen Teil der Gesamtzahl von Kandidaten. Bereits zu Beginn des Jahrhunderts gab es in der Urologie Nominierungen u. a. fur James Israel (1848–1926), Berlin, Felix Guyon (1831–1920), Paris, Peter Freyer (1852–1921), London oder Edwin Beer (1876–1938), New York. Diese Nominierungen spiegeln den hohen Stellenwert und die vollzogene Fachspezialisierung der Urologie bereits im ersten Drittel des 20. Jahrhunderts.

Recent historical research has reconstructed the roads leading to the Nobel Prize for the trained urologists Werner Forssmann (1904-1979) in 1956 and Charles Huggins (1901-1997) in 1966. However, the story of urology and the Nobel Prize does not start and end with the laureates. Taking James Israel (1848-1926), Félix Guyon (1831-1920), and Peter J Freyer (1852-1921) as examples, this paper shows that pioneers in urology were in fact runners-up for the award much earlier.The study is based on an analysis of original files in the Nobel Prize archive in Stockholm, scientific publications of the early twentieth century, and secondary literature.We argue that Israel's, Guyon's, and Freyer's candidacies reflect not only scientific trends and controversies in urology at the turn of twentieth century, but that the development of the specialty itself was reflected in nominations of physicians working on problems of the genito-urinary system.

This paper reviews the files in the archive of the Nobel Prize Committee for Physiology or Medicine on the Austrian physiologist and pioneering researcher in the emerging fields of urology and sexual medicine: Eugen Steinach (1861–1944). It reconstructs and analyzes why and by whom Steinach was nominated for the Nobel Prize between 1920 and 1938 and discusses the reasons why he never received the award, although the Nobel Committee judged him as prizeworthy. Steinach’s Nobel nominee career is extraordinary – not only because of his strong support by renowned international nominators from different scientific and medical disciplines, but also because of the controversial discussions within the Nobel Committee on his achievements, colored by the debates in the international scientific community. The Nobel Prize story adds a new perspective on how contemporary international scholars evaluated Steinach’s research on reproduction, “male-making” females, “female-making” males, homosexuality, and the concept of rejuvenation.

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES:In the decades around 1900, dime museums and waxworks were popular in the United States and in Germany, respectively. They served similar purposes by providing entertain...

After World War II, Sachsenhausen Nazi concentration camp (Oranienburg) was administered until the spring of 1950 by Soviet occupation forces (Special Camp Number 7) and used mainly for political prisoners. Our study analyzes suicides in this camp during the Soviet period. Data was collected from the archives of Sachsenhausen Memorial, Special Camp Collection. Original documents containing certificates or autopsy reports of prisoners who committing suicide were reviewed. In this period, authorities registered 17 suicides. The age of suicides was between 19 and 64 years. The most frequent cause of imprisonment was Blockleiter (Kapo in Nazi period, n = 4), Mitarbeiter Gestapo (member of the Gestapo, n = 3) and Wehrmacht (military, n = 3). Hanging was the most frequent method of suicide. The average time spent in the camp until suicide was 715 days. The number of recorded suicides under Soviet control is considerably lower (calculated rate 2.8/10,000 per year) than under Nazi control (calculated rate 11/10,000 per year). This could be due to comparably more favorable conditions for prisoners and the abolishment of the death penalty during this period. Possible motives for suicides include feelings of guilt for crimes committed, fear of punishment and a misguided understanding of honor on the eve of criminal trials.

Purpose: In 1956, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Werner Forssmann, André Frédéric Cournand and Dickinson W. Richards for their development of cardiac catheterization. Forssmann performed a self-experiment in 1929 by inserting a urethral catheter into his right ventricular cavity via his antecubital vein. Despite his popularity as one of the first German Nobel Laureates after 1945, little is known about Forssmann personally. This contribution aims to close this gap regarding the Nazi period and early post-war Germany. Methods: Primary historical sources from Forssmann's private archive were examined, evaluated and interpreted for the first time. Additionally, a comparative analysis based on further archival and secondary sources was performed. Results: Werner Forssmann joined the Nazi Party, the Sturmabteilung (Stormtroopers, SA) and the Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Ärztebund (Nazi Doctors' Association) in 1932, a year before Hitler's assumption of power. In his autobiography, Forssmann referred to the political situation in passing. However, he expressed his personal thoughts in private letters which he wrote as a medical officer during the war. After World War II, Forssmann underwent denazification and was banned from practicing medicine for 3 years. He did not seem to be averse to Hitler's politics and in some ways expressed his approval. However, correspondence from the 1960s with 2 Jewish colleagues reveals that Forssmann may have changed his attitude toward National Socialism later. Conclusion: Werner Forssmann's political attitudes during the Third Reich and in the post-war era can be characterized as early agreement that gradually changed to a more critical distance to Nazi ideology. In this respect, Forssmann appears to be quite a typical example of a larger proportion of German medical doctors during these eras.

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE:In Europe, the second half of the 19th century can be described as a sequence of several wars (Crimean War, Italian Wars of Independence, First and Second Schleswig War, ...

Since the end of the 1990s, “Memory Studies” have become an important approach in cultural history, asking questions about who remembers the past how and why. Aleida and Jan Assmann distinguish between social memory as a more oral form of memory and cultural memory characterized by rituals and recording the past. Pierre Nora coined the concept of memory spaces (“lieux de memoire”), defined as a place of attachment for shared memory. Medical specialty societies can be understood as memory spaces, because they structure how their members and, in part, the public, remember. The authors offer an overview of the literature on memory studies, describe its application in the history of medicine, and provide an outline of the following articles in this issue.

The digital game BioShock addresses questions about human enhancement, unbounded biomedical research and unregulated technology. Our analysis is situated in an interdisciplinary field between media studies, the history of ideas, and bioethics. We focus on the processes of generating meaning and knowledge while playing a game, and therefore on the context in which the game is played and how it may be understood by different audiences. What marks this medium as potentially more powerful than movies or novels is that the player interacts with the game and participates in both the narrative and the ludic experience.

Between August 1945 and February 1950, the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald was turned into the Soviet Special Camp Number 2 by the Soviet secret service to house individuals perceived as opponents of the Soviet system. We have investigated the system of health care for psychiatric patients in this camp. We have consulted and reviewed the archives of Buchenwald concentration camp (Arkiv der Gedenkstatte Buchenwald). Archival documents regarding the Soviet period have been partially declassified recently. During its five years of operation, 28 455 prisoners were held. In Buchenwald, psychiatric patients were held in the Psychiatric Station (barrack VIIc), guarded by a neuropsychiatrist and a nurse. The number of inmates who passed through this station is unknown, however, at one point there were more than 60. The medical system run in Gulags for decades was already exported to camps created in German territory after the end of the war. The internment of dissidents in psychiatric centers was a common practice of the Soviet authorities.

Die Grundung universitarer und nichtuniversitarer urologischer Kliniken verlief sowohl in Ost- wie Westdeutschland in einer schwierigen Situation. Gerade der integralistische Standpunkt chirurgischer Ordinarien bis in die 1970er Jahre behinderte lange eine rasche Entwicklung. In Nordrhein-Westfalen wurden vielfach die Leiter von stadtischen Krankenhausabteilungen (Aachen – Bochum/Herne) oder Oberarzte sich differenzierender chirurgischer Kliniken mit urologischer Expertise (Dusseldorf, Essen, Bonn, Koln) eingesetzt.

From the late 15th century onwards, cutting for stones in patients' heads to cure mental illness was depicted in European art. The earliest and most famous painting of this kind is The Cure of Folly, painted by Jheronimus Bosch around the turn of the 15th to the 16th century. In general, these depictions are thought to relate to surgical as well as mental health practices of that time. However, it can be questioned whether barber surgeons or quacks cut for stones in patients' heads, and if they did not, what the meaning of Bosch's and other artists' paintings might be. Paintings from the 15th to 17th centuries and historical sources from the history of medicine as well as art history served as a basis for this contribution. The combination of sources from the histories of urology and psychiatry opens a new perspective on depictions of cranial lithotomy. Taking this into account, it does not seem likely that surgeons or quacks cut for cranial stones in early modern Europe. Few therapy options existed to effectively treat mental problems, and, hence, most interpretations of Bosch's picture point to the gullibility of patients as its central theme. At the same time, the depictions of cranial lithotomy may illustrate the limits of the medical profession and an abstract hope for successful psychosurgery analogous to the surgical removal of stones from the urinary tract.

In diesem Beitrag wird der Umgang der Deutschen Gesellschaft fur Urologie (DGU) mit ihrer eigenen Geschichte in den Jahren von 1945–1961 thematisiert. Dabei werden die Wiederbegrundung der DGU 1949, personelle und institutionelle Kontinuitaten und Bruche, der Umgang mit der eigenen Geschichte im Nationalsozialismus, insbesondere mit den vertriebenen Kollegen, sowie die trotz zweier deutscher Staaten enge Verflechtung der deutsch-deutschen Urologie behandelt.

In a critical review of late twentieth-century gene-culture co-evolutionary models labelled as ‘global phylogeny’, the authors present evidence for the long legacy of co-evolutionary theories in European-based thinking, highlighting that (1) ideas of social and cultural evolution preceded the idea of biological evolution, (2) linguistics played a dominant role in the formation of a unified theory of human co-evolution, and (3) that co-evolutionary thinking was only possible due to perpetuated and renewed transdisciplinary reticulations between scholars of different disciplines—especially within the integrative framework of the ‘humanid’ and the ‘hominid’ branches of anthropology.

Compared to the rich literature on Nazi medicine in general, the connection between dentists and National Socialism is less well documented. Neither the elites of the field from this era nor those excluded from the profession are catalogued in a systematic manner. The aims of this contribution are to assemble and review the relevant literature and show how German dentistry organizations have handled this chapter of their professional history. Trends in the literature since the 1980s are examined and it is pointed out, which areas have received some attention and which have not yet been addressed. Thus, this contribution will serve as both the basis and the starting point for new research into the field.

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES: For a long time fever was recognized as a dangerous, if transitory, state of being. It was recognized as unhealthy, yet clearly it was not an unusual symptom. During the Enlightenment, the idea of fever became a means to acknowledge the biological experiences that united humans. During the 19th century there was a change to understand the condition not in unique characteristics and life events of the individual but in tools of laboratory and pathology. This was, perhaps not accidentally, the time when surgery and urology found a new scientific basis. Moffait in 1810 was one of the first to describe an irregular fever after catheterization. In 1832 Benjamin Brodie (1783 -1862) differentiated an acute and a chronic form. Henry Thompson (1820 -1904) in 1867 connected urinary fever to pyelonephritis. Felix Guyon (1831 -1920) who did extended research on the subject, discussed intoxication of non-infected urine and uro-sepsis by infection. E. L. Keyes (1843 -1924) in his widely red textbook wrote about therapy (quinine and morphine) and discussed several contemporary authors. METHODS: Time related sources from medical journals and textbooks and new results from the history of medicine from several libraries and archives from Europe and the United States with assistance of the W. P. Didusch Center for Urologic history were reviewed and analyzed in a hermeneutical manner. RESULTS: Fever charts and the nurse s role in attending the patient s head became requisites of the modern hospital and the thermometer was part of the profound change in objectification of disease in urology and medicine. CONCLUSIONS: The study is intended to suggest the dimensions of the fever concept had on the differentiating specialty of urology. In its general perspective, this contribution tries to understand the impact of changing medical concepts have in the history of urology from a transnational perspective.

This contribution shows that evolutionary thought which dominated the discourse on the development of human populations, cultures, and languages in the nineteenth century (1) dates back to pre-Darwinian concepts that emerged in the times of the Enlightenment, (2) was only possible due to an ongoing interdisciplinary exchange between different branches of anthropology, and (3) was bound to the idea that lateral exchange of “racial,” linguistic, or cultural traits would contribute to degeneration instead of “progressive” development. Specifically, we would like to draw the reader’s attention to two quite contradictory strains in the history of science

Die 1907 gegrundete Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Urologie war eigentlich eine deutsch-osterreichische Gesellschaft, in der judische und judischstammige Arzte wichtige Rollen eingenommen hatten. Zum Zeitpunkt der nationalsozialistischen Machtergreifung 1933 war mit Hans Rubritius ein Osterreicher Vorsitzender der Gesellschaft. Der nicht „reichsdeutsche“ Vorsitz und die Ausgrenzung der judischen Kollegen aus der Fachgesellschaft und arztlichen Praxis fuhrten zu einer Lahmung der Gesellschaft fur Urologie, die bis Rubritius‘ Tod 1943 anhielt. Gleichzeitig wurde Mitte der 1930er Jahre in Deutschland die Gesellschaft Reichsdeutscher Urologen gegrundet, deren Mitglieder sich an nationalsozialistischer Gesundheitspolitik orientieren und im Gegenzug fachpolitische und personliche Vorteile erhielten.

Der Lebensweg des judischen Urologen Paul Rosenstein (1875–1964) charakterisiert exemplarisch das Schicksals eines Wissenschaftlers zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhundert im Spannungsfeld zwischen beginnender Fachetablierung der Urologie an grosstadtischen Krankenhausern, beruflichem Erfolg sowie massiven Einschnitten wahrend der NS Zeit und Flucht aus Nazi Deutschland uber ein von wirtschaftlicher Depression gepragtes und wenig aufnahmewilliges New York nach Brasilien, wo er seinen Lebensabend verbrachte.

Massenmedien haben eine subtile Offentlichkeitswirkung auf ein Millionenpublikum und dienen uber die Zeitlaufe der Einubung sozialer Verhaltensweisen. Daher gebuhrt ihnen sicherlich eine kritische Analyse. Im Nationalsozialismus wurde z. B. ein ausgeklugeltes System von neuen Medien wie Film, Rundfunk und auch Fernsehen zur Verbreitung der – mehr oder weniger – subtilen staatlichen Propaganda angeboten. Zwar wurde nach 1945 ein groser Teil von Filmen, die wahrend 1933 und 1945 gedreht wurde, verboten, dieses Verbot aber in den 1950er Jahren auf eine kleinere Zahl von „Vorbehaltsfilmen“ eingeengt. Doch sollten auch die heute nicht mehr zensierten Filme einer genaueren wissenschaftlichen Analyse unterworfen werden.