Krankheit, Sexualität, Gesellschaft: Geschlechtskrankheiten und Gesundheitspolitik in Deutschland im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (review)

Lutz Sauerteig. Krankheit, Sexualität, Gesellschaft: Geschlechtskrankheiten und Gesundheitspolitik in Deutschland im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert. Medizin, Gesellschaft und Geschichte, no. 12. Yearbook of the Institut für Geschichte der Medizin der Robert Bosch Stiftung. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1999. 542 pp. Tables. DM 168.00; öS 1226.00; Sw. Fr. 168.00 (paperbound, 3-515-07393-0).

Imperial and Weimar Germany saw some of the most heated and innovative debates on the prevention, control, and therapy of sexually transmitted diseases. These form the core of this excellent study by Lutz Sauerteig, who has delved into a small mountain of documents to produce a major study. His coverage is thorough and wide-ranging, including the contentious issues surrounding the organization of prevention, compulsory notification, education, therapy, and rights of the individual.

A key role in Sauerteig's narrative is taken by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für die Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten, which from 1902 was a leading pressure group for reform, and itself an arena for divergent views. Its 157 founders are analyzed in a biographical appendix. The medical surveillance of prostitutes aroused heated debate, as state medical surveillance was contested by feminist critics of male immorality. Eugenicists favored health examinations prior to marriage, and this proposal was publicized in the 1920s. The overall result is an on-going interaction between the state, the medical profession, women's organizations, municipal interests, and the public. By the Weimar period, there are conflicting party political positions, making consensus on a new law on sexually transmitted diseases particularly difficult. Sauerteig stops short of the Nazi period, when some of the most innovative venereologists were dismissed, and the Association was subject to state direction.

Overall, this is an impeccably researched, lucidly written, and fluently argued analysis.