This collection of essays addresses, in a comprehensive and critical fashion, fundamental issues in the history of medicine in modern Germany. The essays also investigate important continuities and discontinuities in German history, and between Germany and the West. The central focus of the collection is on the professionalization of modern medicine and the medicalization of modern society. The problem of Nazi Germany is a common and prominent theme of many of the essays, partially because of its influence upon the debate over the nature of modern German government and society in relation to Western social, political, and economic development. Other topics include: the social place of hospitals in the early nineteenth century, the various forms of social Darwinism, the politics of state-run health insurance, the influence of eugenics on medicine and psychiatry, social control and "shell shock" in World War I, the history of sterilization and euthanasia, Nazi experimentation on humans, the abortion debate, and the role of former Nazis in the West German medical leadership.

Introduction Geoffrey Cocks; 1. To benefit the poor and advance medical science: hospitals and hospital care in Germany, 1820-70 Johanna Bleker; 2. From traditional individualism to collective professionalism: state, patient, compulsory health insurance and the panel doctor question in Germany, 1883-1931 Alfons Labisch; 3. In search of German social Darwinism Richard J. Evans; 4. Modern German doctors Charles E. McClelland; 5. The mentally ill patient caught between the state's demands and the professional interests of psychiatrists Heinz-Peter Schmiedebach; 6. Rationalizing the therapeutic arsenal Paul Lerner; 7. Sterilization and 'medical' massacres in National Socialist Germany Gisela Bock; 8. The Nuremberg doctors' trial and the German Sonderweg as harbinger Geoffrey Cocks; 9. The debate that will not end: the politics of abortion Atina Grossman; 10. The sewering scandal of 1993 and the German medical establishment Michael H. Kater.