[On the quest for the right way--life and work of Magnus Schmid (1918-1977), historian of medicine].

Magnus Schmid seems to have been an "ordinary historian of medicine" from 1950 to 1977 in Munich and Erlangen. Following his death he became forgotten by his colleagues. But despite the fact, that he did not publish great books, he modernized the subject and was open to new interpretations of history of medicine and to intercultural views on history. For more than 20 years he seemed to be a quite liberal researcher, but following the changes in society after the 1968/69 revolt, he became a fighter for a new conservatism. Schmid was unwilling to accept that people decided freely about their body and health, without consulting doctors like him while he believed in an unchangeable foundation of ethics in medicine (e. g. abortion). So Schmid, in the last years of his life to the fact, made his valuable scientific works disappear behind his dubious campaigning against the modernized western German society.