Anna Kolchinsky
"Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a grand scale."
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Abstract
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Political structures, ideology, and science interact to shape public health policy in a way that is
complex and still poorly understood. The German experience in the 20th century provides a veritable
laboratory for studying this interplay. An examination of major milestones in scientific understanding,
medical practice, public health policy, legislation, and regulation under successive German states and
governments will help to clarify their interaction.
I plan to investigate approaches to the treatment and control of tuberculosis under German
governments from the Kaiser Reich into the postwar period, when the discovery of streptomycin in 1945
presented the first effective cure. Over this turbulent era, profound changes occurred in the scientific
understanding of tuberculosis.
Tuberculosis had reached epidemic proportions in Germany in the wake of the industrial
revolution, spurring considerable research into its origins, treatment, and the conditions of its spread.
Robert Koch’s 1882 discovery of the tuberculosis bacillus launched a period of progress in diagnosis and
treatment that coincided with increased political interest in public health more generally. I will look at the
development and variation of tuberculosis control measures under the Kaiser Reich, during the Weimar
Republic, in the era of Nazism, and in the post-1945 occupation zones. While some tuberculosis control
strategies, such as sanatoria, were used throughout this era, others, such as quarantine, were applied from
time to time by different governments. There are numerous other examples that this study will chart.
Ultimately, I hope to understand, through the case study of tuberculosis treatment and control,
how the interaction between various German states’ ideologies, their medical traditions, and their scientific
knowledge shaped Germany’s public health policies and practices.
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