Article ID: CBB845213653

Constitutional Therapy and Clinical Racial Hygiene in Weimar and Nazi Germany (2016)

unapi

The paper examines the history of constitutional therapy in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Focusing on Walther Jaensch's “Institute for Constitutional Research” at the Charité in Berlin, it shows how an entrepreneurial scientist successfully negotiated the changing social and political landscape of two very different political regimes and mobilized considerable public and private resources for his projects. During the Weimar period, his work received funding from various state agencies as well as the Rockefeller foundation, because it fit well with contemporary approaches in public hygiene and social medicine that emphasized the need to restore the physical and mental health of children and youths. Jaensch successfully positioned himself as a researcher on the verge of developing new therapies for feeble-minded people, who threatened to become an intolerable burden on the Weimar welfare state. During the Nazi period, he successfully reinvented himself as a racial hygienist by convincing influential medical leaders that his ideas were a valuable complement to the negative eugenics of Nazi bio-politics. “Constitutional therapy,” he claimed, could turn genetically healthy people with “inhibited mental development” (geistigen Entwicklungshemmungen) into fully productive citizens and therefore made a valuable contribution to Nazi performance medicine (Leistungsmedizin) with its emphasis on productivity.

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Authors & Contributors
Monika Ankele
Roberto Cea
Borri, Matteo
Paniga, Massimiliano
Federico Edoardo Perozziello
Vikram Patel
Concepts
Medicine and politics
Public health
Medicine
Hygiene
Therapeutic practice; therapy; treatment
Medicine and society
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
20th century, early
18th century
Places
Germany
Weimar Republic (1919-1933)
France
Italy
Africa
Hamburg-Langenhorn (Germany)
Institutions
Rockefeller Foundation
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