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119 6 Heredity, Glands, and Human Constitutions Paul Kammerer was convinced that his three converging principles, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, mutual aid as a principle of evolution, and offspring quality as a principle of fertility could transform humanity. Modifying the environment in humane ways that focused on the young would improve the species, while respecting human dignity and human rights. Quality nurturance could even instill a new ethic—a species-wide drive to help that would elevate humanity to a deeper morality. He had what he believed to be a solution to the troubled state of Central Europe at the end of the Great War. But Kammerer was a relative nobody; though an accomplished scientist and technician, he worked as an assistant at a laboratory on the outside of Vienna’s elite academic structure. And he had powerful detractors. What could he do to implement his vision? Partly through his connections with Steinach and with Goldscheid, Kammerer acted to influence the one man he knew who was in a position of power and who would be sympathetic to his concepts, but with whom he had had little prior contact: the Viennese anatomist and politician, Professor Julius Tandler. In 1917, Kammerer wrote to Tandler, offering to serve in the newly founded imperial ministry of public welfare. Kammerer rightly assumed that Tandler would play a role in organizing the ministry, possibly even direct it, and he hoped to get involved so as to apply his biological vision to the public good.1 While the monarchy held, Tandler was not appointed to head the ministry. But only a year later, in November1918, the Emperor Karl, who had just assumed the throne after the death of the long-ruling Emperor Franz-Joseph, abdicated, and the Habsburg Empire, which in one form or another had ruled for over seven hundred years, fell. The socialists took power in 1918 in the coalition government that led the new Austrian First Republic. 120 PART II REFORM EUGENICS Tandler briefly served that government as the national undersecretary of public health. But the coalition fell in only two years, leaving the socialists without much influence in the national government. After the change in government , Tandler turned his efforts to the city of Vienna, where the socialists maintained strong control. In Vienna, Tandler became municipal councilor of health and social welfare. In this position, he wielded great power to shape the reforms that affected the health and well-being of families and youth in a capital city that had been devastated by war. He brought to the task a scientific framework that was strikingly similar to the one Kammerer was developing, but which, in Tandler, was accompanied by an elite scientific reputation, prestige , and position.2 He had been trained by the premier anatomists of Central Europe, and following the early death of his mentor, Emil Zuckerkandl, he was called to Zuckerkandl’s chair of anatomy at the University of Vienna. By 1914, he was dean of the medical faculty in one of the premier medical schools of Europe. As an academic physician and a scientist who was committed to health and social welfare, Tandler was in an excellent position to influence municipal social policy, and he did. He eventually spearheaded the fight against tuberculosis , rampant after the war; he reorganized, reformed, and founded hospitals; and he worked tirelessly for youth reform. By the mid-1920s, he was one of the most respected reform experts in a city that was filled with medical expertise. Though Tandler has received much historical attention—some of it quite critical—for the health reforms he implemented in Vienna after the war, his impact as a reformer and policy maker has not been effectively integrated with his science. As a medical scientist first and a politician engaged with public health second, his attitudes toward reform were deeply influenced by his scientific work and the assumptions underlying it. In this and the following chapters, I situate the reforms he implemented in Vienna in the context of his scientific views, their overlap with Kammerer’s turn to endocrinology, and Tandler’s political position during the postwar period, a period in which selectionist eugenics emerged in the new Austria. The socialist’s reforms were steeped in political, scientific, and social tensions. Sometimes, Tandler felt those tensions personally through, for example, antisemitic attacks that followed his rise to prominence. They altered the way in which he presented his science, and they affected his advocacy for the reforms that were...

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