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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 75.1 (2001) 154-155



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Book Reviews

Medizin und Kolonialimperialismus: Deutschland 1884-1945


Wolfgang U. Eckart. Medizin und Kolonialimperialismus: Deutschland 1884-1945. Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1997. 638 pp. Ill. DM 84.00 (paperbound).

"Colonial economy should make the negroes' strong arms subject to its purposes, hygiene should preserve their strength and increase their number" (p. 59). This is a statement made in 1911 by Ludwig Külz, physician to the German Imperial government in Togo and Cameroon. Külz was eager to point out that the specialist in tropical medicine had the responsibility of preserving the most valuable possession the colonial power had: the natives' physical fitness.

As Wolfgang U. Eckart expounds in his book, the economics of human resources (Menschenökonomie, in Külz's terminology) was one of the driving forces of German colonial medicine, alongside missionary enthusiasm and scientific and medical ambitions. The ideological background was formed by social Darwinism and racial hygiene. Eckart shows that physicians had a much more important function in German colonial politics than has hitherto been known, and their role was much less philanthropic than the Albert Schweitzer-type of hagiographic account would have us believe. Medicine at the colonial periphery of the Kaiserreich was the dark side of the prestigious German medical science of the time. The examination of colonial medicine gives evidence of, in Eckart's words, "the Janus-faced character of German medicine in the first half of the twentieth century" (p. 549), and he does not hesitate to reveal the motives hidden behind the humanitarian rhetoric of colonial medicine: economic objectives, and imperial power ambitions.

The institutionalization of German colonial medicine can be sketched with the help of a few milestones: the establishment of the Hamburg Institute for Marine and Tropical Diseases in 1901, the foundation of the German Association for Tropical Medicine in 1907, and the appointment of Bernhard Nocht to the first chair of tropical hygiene at the University of Hamburg in 1919. After elucidating the ideological background in the first part of the book, the author goes through the individual colonies one by one, describing the quality and character of medical care in the colonial contexts of Togo, Cameroon, German West Africa, the Pacific Protectorates, and the German leasehold property Kiaochow. He addresses the scope and quality of medical supply and the establishment of medical infrastructure, and he describes how the authorities dealt with special situations such as epidemics, and to what extent physicians respected or broke ethical rules. As it turns out, despite the existence of some prestigious hospitals, medical care of the indigenous population remained deficient. Also, some physicians used natives to conduct veritable human experiments that would have been impossible in their home country for ethical and legal reasons.

The third part of the book, on "medicine and colonial revisionism," deals with the period after the First World War. Before that time physicians had already been deeply involved in the conception and legitimation of the Kaiserreich's colonial politics. After the Empire's defeat in the war, they once more played a prominent role when Germany laid claim to its former colonies. Thus, Eckart is [End Page 154] able to draw a continuous line up to the neocolonial race ideology of the National Socialists and the preparation of biological warfare in the Second World War, a continuity that secured a special position for German tropical medicine within the NS medical system after 1933.

As opposed to British historiography, there is a striking dearth of studies on the history of German colonial medicine. This gap has been filled by this sizable and instructive volume, which combines approaches from social, intellectual, and political history. The book is based on diligent work with a wealth of archival material, most of which has never been looked at before. It is, however, a pity that Eckart did not use this solid base to go further with his analyses. One wishes he had taken into account the large corpus of literature published on colonies other than the German ones...

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