Coping with Sickness: Medicine, Law and Human Rights-Historical Perspectives (review)

John Woodward and Robert Jütte, eds. Coping with Sickness: Medicine, Law and Human Rights—Historical Perspectives. History of Medicine, Health and Disease Series, no. 3. Sheffield, U.K.: European Association for the History of Medicine and Health Publications, 2000. xii + 211 pp. £24.95 (0-953-6522-0-3).

This short book of eight sprightly essays provides an entertaining and informative read. Though the subjects range somewhat eclectically from Spain during the counter-Reformation to Germany at the present time, the essays collectively demonstrate an overriding truth: when medicine, law, and human rights intertwine, the situation is almost always more complex than ideologues of any stripe would wish us to believe.

José Pardo-Tomás and Alvár Martínez-Vidal set the tone for this volume by reassessing the traditional view of the Spanish Inquisition as an oppressor of the medical profession. Surely some physicians suffered, and some groups of physicians—particularly the formerly Jewish Conversos and the formerly Islamic Moriscos—suffered disproportionately. But a great many other physicians thrived under the patronage of the Holy Office, and the Inquisition significantly upgraded the prestige of university-based medicine in Spain. Pardo-Tomás and Martínez-Vidal observe wryly that "there is no evidence of criticism of the aims and methods of the Holy Office from the medical establishment" during the centuries in which the Inquisition was active (p. 22).

In one of the volume's most outstanding essays, Helen Power compares drug tests routinely conducted on unwitting British soldiers from 1917 to 1938 with drug tests routinely conducted on equally unwitting indigenous populations in British Africa during the same period. Power reports "little more regard for the British soldiers than their African counterparts" (p. 121). The overall medical ethics of that era and the paternalistic assumptions of colonial rule proved to be more determining in the conduct of therapeutic drug tests (and hence perhaps even more troubling) than the so-called scientific racism alleged by scholars who have typically looked only at biracial situations.

Willem de Blécourt attempts to explain the dramatic popular impact of an English medical huckster who arrived in the Netherlands in 1891 and gained a large following during the next ten years, despite vigorous antiquack attacks upon him from the Dutch medical establishment. Blécourt's argument, that the huckster was a great communicator, seems less than satisfying, but the situation is fascinating. Angus McLaren demonstrates how French physicians of the late nineteenth century constructed the novel concept of "sadism" as an ideal way to address social fears and gendered insecurities. Roger Davidson and Lutz D. H. Sauerteig explore striking variations during the early twentieth century in the willingness of Germany, England, and Scotland to use state intervention and compulsory tactics to combat sexually transmitted diseases.

Three of the essays focus principally on Germany. Cornelie Usborne parses women's testimony in Weimar abortion trials to show that working-class women during the 1920s and 1930s were able to sustain their own attitudes and practices regarding abortion—which they viewed favorably, regardless of the law—and she also shows that "considerable emotional and practical co-operation between the sexes" existed on the issue of abortion (p. 102). Cay-Rüdiger Prüll reviews the tangled question of who gets to decide whether a given corpse can be subjected to autopsy. In the end, Prüll's essay turns into an editorial comment on contemporary German legislative proposals regarding this issue, but along the way readers will find intriguing insights into the various ways in which that determination has historically been made. In the book's final essay, Claudia Wiesemann shows how the German debate over brain death during the final four decades of the twentieth century produced an uneasy paradox in which the public accepted the concept as a "scientific" answer to deeper philosophical and ethical problems, despite enduring medical uncertainties...