The Jewish scientist Robert Meyer received worldwide professional recognition as a pioneer gynecopathologist. Before his death, he wrote a memoir in which he gave an entirely positive assessment of his life. The latter, however, is at odds with the fact that he was disenfranchised by the National Socialists and driven into emigration.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPathol Res Pract
December 2020
Kurt Aterman (1913-2002) is regarded one of the leading experimental pathologists of his time with a strong focus on pediatric and hepatopathology. Without doubt, he is also one of the most international representatives of his field: Grown up in the German-speaking area, he studied medicine in the former Czechoslovakia and the United Kingdom, and then taught at universities and hospitals in the USA and Canada. Less well known is the fact that he was persecuted by the Nazi regime because of his Jewish decent after the Nazis started their annexation policy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe German-Australian Hans Bettinger is regarded as one of the most important and influential pathologists of his time. Bettinger's research focused on gynecological pathology, with a particular interest in intersexuality, ovarian and cervical cancer. He received global recognition for his achievements: among others, he was a Honorary Fellow at the International Academy of Cytology, the Royal Australian College of Physicians, the Royal College of Pathologists of Australia, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists, London.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhereas the scientific community is aware of atrocities committed by medical doctors like Mengele, the specifics of radiology and radiation oncology during National Socialism remain largely unknown. Starting in 2010, the German Radiology Association and the German Association of Radiation Oncology coordinated a national project looking into original archival material. A national committee convened in 2013 to discuss the project's findings, which were also the subject of a symposium at the University of Tuebingen in 2016 on radiology under National Socialism.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe history of 'electroshock therapy' (now known as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)) in Europe in the Third Reich is still a neglected chapter in medical history. Since Thomas Szasz's 'From the Slaughterhouse to the Madhouse', prejudices have hindered a thorough historical analysis of the introduction and early application of electroshock therapy during the period of National Socialism and the Second World War. Contrary to the assumption of a 'dialectics of healing and killing', the introduction of electroshock therapy in the German Reich and occupied territories was neither especially swift nor radical.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe article considers the history of electroshock therapy as a history of medical technology, professional cooperation and business competition. A variation of a history from below is intended; though not from the patients' perspective (Porter, Theory Soc 14:175-198, 1985), but with a focus on electrodes, circuitry and patents. Such a 'material history' of electroshock therapy reveals that the technical make-up of electroshock devices and what they were used for was relative to the changing interests of physicians, industrial companies and mental health politics; it makes an intriguing case for the Social Construction of Technology theory (Bijker et al.
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