Professionalization and Socialization of Physicians in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany

Abstract

This study is an attempt to construct a typology of physicians in Germany, from the founding of the Second Reich in 1871 through the first world war until the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933. In this typology, the German doctor of medicine emerges as a persona striving, because of an arduous process of professionalization, for a meaningful and mutually complementary interaction with a society that was itself in flux, and sometimes in upheaval, during the period under discussion. As shall become explicit in this paper, the physician's characteristic image is viewed as having evolved, after a juxtaposition, and frequently a confrontation, of paragons of the medical establishment with representatives of other social environs who put their stamp on the doctors: academe, the political hierarchy, the military (in peace and war), women and Jews. If the model that is being built here for the collective of the doctors does not convey an altogether flattering impression, it must be kept in mind that it is an ideal type denoting an average, a tendency, or a trend, which would always allow for exceptions. No invective against individual doctors is intended. There may, indeed, have been no 'bad' doctors in Germany any more than there were in France or England at that time. But on the other hand, it was the German physician, not the French or English one, who, after 1939, went on record for crimes against humanity on an unprecedented scale. And so it is possible that a study of this kind will help to determine what elements in their professional development pre-disposed the German physicians to fascization in the twentieth century and ultimately set many, if not the majority, apart from other doctors of the western world who had once sworn the Hippocratic oath. Against the background of conditions in nineteenth-century German society and state, the by now well-charted professionalization pattern involving physicians was remarkably uneven. Both mode and quality of this professionalization resulted in an uncertain relationship between physicians on the one hand, and state and society on the other, during

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.