War Imprisonment and Clinical Narratives of Psychiatric Illness, Psychiatric Hospital Charité, Berlin, 1948-1956.

While the historical analysis of psychological trauma from warfare has been extensive, traumatic illness in East German psychiatric practice after the Second World War has drawn little attention. The dominant literature uses West German political and medical discourses as sources to investigate the relationship between traumatic experience and psychiatric illness. This paper instead draws from East German patient files from 1948 until 1956 to examine efforts at the Charité Hospital in Berlin to interpret the psychiatric illness of former prisoners of war (POWs).

"History, Theory and Ethics of Medicine": The Last Ten Years. A Survey of Course Content, Methods and Structural Preconditions at Twenty-nine German Medical Faculties.

"History, Theory, Ethics of Medicine" (German: "Geschichte, Theorie, Ethik der Medizin", abbreviation: GTE) forms part of the obligatory curriculum for medical students in Germany since the winter semester 2003/2004. This paper presents the results of a national survey on the contents, methods and framework of GTE teaching. Semi-structured questionnaire dispatched in July 2014 to 38 institutions responsible for GTE teaching.

Sauvages' paperwork: how disease classification arose from scholarly note-taking.

What was classification as it first took modern form in the eighteenth century, and how did it relate to earlier ways of describing and ordering? We offer new answers to these questions by examining medicine rather than botany and by reconstructing practice on paper. First among disease classifications was the 'nosology' of the Montpellier physician François Boissier de Sauvages de Lacroix. Analysis of his hitherto unstudied notebooks and of the nosology's many editions (1731-1772) shows that Boissier de Sauvages broke with earlier physicians' humanistic ordering of disease while sustaining the paper practices they had used.

The neurological manifestations of trauma: lessons from World War I.

Changes in the clinical presentation of functional disorders and the influence of social and cultural factors can be investigated through the historical case notes from mental hospitals. World War I (WWI) was a potent trigger of functional disorders with neurological or psychiatric symptoms. We analysed 100 randomly selected case files of German servicemen admitted to the Department of Psychiatry of the Charité Medical School of Berlin University during WWI and classified them according to contemporaneous and retrospective modern diagnoses.

Writing the history of psychiatry in the 20th century.

As editors of the special issue, we try to summarize here the historiographic trends of the field.We argue that the field of research is accommodating the diversity of the institutional, social and political developments. But there is no narrative in sight which can explain the psychiatry of the 20th century, comparable to the authoritative coherence achieved for the 19th century.

[Formalizing observation: The emergence of the modern patient record exemplified by Berlin and Paris medicine, 1725-1830].

The paper focuses on the material basis of the development of modern clinical documentation. With the examples of Berlin and Paris medicine, it analyzes the various ways of recording clinical data in the 18th century, from where they came, and how they were introduced into bedside observations. Particular interest is given to the interrelation between administrative techniques (registration, book-keeping etc.

[The suspicion of simulation. A psychiatric case history between appropriation and disciplinary action at the end of the 19th century].

This case history explores how the question of agency was dealt with historically in two developing, normative orders of deviant behaviour. Examining the institutional career of the supposed adulterer, marriage swindler, and craft baker, we can trace the different observation regimes and systems of knowledge acquisition in the prison and in psychiatry, in both institutions there was talk of simulated madness; the explanations, however, were different. For the prison doctors and civil servants, the baker was a criminal; his deviant behaviour was a matter of consciously planned-out deception.

The administrative stabilization of vaccines: Regulating the diphtheria antitoxin in France and Germany, 1894-1900.

It is well known that the development of a diphtheria anti-toxin serum evolved in a competitive race between two groups of researchers, one affiliated with Emil Behring in Berlin and Marburg, and another affiliated with Emile Roux in Paris. Proceeding on the basis of different theoretical assumptions and experimental practices, the two groups developed a therapeutic serum almost simultaneously. But the standardized substance they developed took on very different forms in the two countries.

[Psychochemicals crossing the wall. The introduction of psychoactive pharmaceuticals in the German Democratic Republic--a perspective from the new historiography of drugs].

In recent years, the development, certification, and marketing of drugs has become an important field of research in the Science Studies. Attempting to analyse the growing complexity of the modern health care market, researchers have focused on the close links between pharmaceutical industry, clinical research, and drug regulation in Western Europe and North America. However, corresponding developments behind the Iron Curtain have received little attention.

["Treating mankind honestly": medical innovation between market, public and science around 1800].

This contribution is based on a case study of Professor Gottfried Christian Reich (1769-1848) of Erlangen, who in 1799 published what he considered to be an infallible method of curing any illness associated with a fever. This paper shows how in the course of a published debate the focus shifted from a medico-scientific issue to a moral one. Furthermore, the experiments carried out at Berlin's Charité hospital by order of the Prussian Medical Authority illustrate how the public debate had an effect on the assessment of the empirical evidence produced.