The Nazi War on Cancer (review)

The Nazi War on Cancer. By Robert N. Proctor (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1999) 380 pp. $29.95

Proctor "addresses the complicity of science under fascism but also the complicity of science within fascism" and the disturbing fact "that Nazi doctors and public health activists were . . . involved in work that we . . . might regard as 'progressive' or even socially responsible [and] . . . that . . . was a direct outgrowth of Nazi ideology" (5). Proctor quotes Herbert Mehrtens' apt characterization of "irresponsible purity" in studying the "blind-eyed failure to reflect and resist" of the representatives of "good science" in the Third Reich (6). For Proctor, in line with much recent research on the history of science and society under Adolf Hitler, the important issues are not the old exculpatory dichotomies between "survival" and "suppression" or "collaboration" and "resistance" but rather the complicated mix and clash of opportunity, ideology, and pragmatism among factions within both the Nazi regime and the German scientific community. Proctor argues that the Nazis conducted a comprehensive campaign of prevention against cancer that, while often compromised by events and structures, reflected a new "optimism" and that might have contributed to a lower incidence of some cancers in Germany after 1945 (27).

It is by no means Proctor's aim to demonstrate a "good" side to National Socialism; rather, it is to document the cohabitation of what he calls "the monstrous and the prosaic . . . a history of both forcible sterilization and herbal medicine, of both genocidal 'selection' and bans on public smoking" (277). Proctor's view, also evident in his first book, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), is that of a historian of science who studies scientific ideas as products of their social environment (265). His work is interdisciplinary insofar as it demonstrates a sure knowledge of medicine, for example, disease incidence as reflective of actual change and/or just "better diagnostics" (121). Within these bounds, The Nazi War on Cancer is a probing, insightful, and engagingly written study of science "pursued in the name of antidemocratic ideals," relevant as well to the pursuit of science in a democratic environment (249).

What The Nazi War on Cancer is not is a definitive comparative cultural study of the effects of medical science on society as a whole. Proctor focuses on the science and policy of the application of knowledge to medical problems, which inevitably throws some light on the social history of chronic and acute disorders within various segments of German society in the modern era in general, as well as on connections to temporal variations of diet and drug use. Proctor does argue that the postwar decline peculiar to Germany in the incidence of lung cancer among women was likely the result of Nazi policies. He concedes that other factors (such as wartime and postwar deprivation) may have played a role, but his case for continuity from 1933 is at some odds with his argument for relatively little continuity before and after 1933 in the understanding of the link between tobacco and lung cancer. The latter serves Proctor's argument for the Nazi regime as the locus for dramatic growth in the science and policy of the prevention of lung cancer, but this is in some tension with the evidence that Proctor himself provides on such a link going back to at least 1912 in Germany. He rightly argues against the idea that the 1950s marked "a kind of Stunde Null (zero hour) of tobacco health research," but one could likewise qualify Proctor's similar argument for Nazi Germany (173).

One could also take issue with some small assertions--such as whether Reich Health Leader Leonardo Conti was "one of the most potent figures in all of Nazi Germany" (241). But, all in all, Proctor has produced a thoughtful and thought-provoking book on a new and important subject.

Geoffrey Cocks
Albion College

...