Medizin, Gesellschaft, und Geschichte : Jahrbuch des Instituts für Geschichte der Medizin der Robert Bosch Stiftung
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The research for this paper was initiated by an Erlangen exhibition project on the history of homeopathy on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Samuel Hahnemann's birth in 2005. The founder of homeopathic medicine received his doctor of medicine degree at the University of Erlangen in 1779. ⋯ Thus, the article is not only about the history of homeopathy in Northern Bavaria (Franconia), but also about a shift in the use of media and about doing science the other way round, viz. by starting at the presentation and ending with the sources. The outcome of the project was that most of the crucial topics of the history of homeopathy could be covered on a micro-historic scale: trials, pharmacy, hospital, patients, university, National Socialism.
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Historical Article
[An age of medical paternalism?--Reflections on medical disclosure and patient consent in 19th century Germany].
Research on the history of medical ethics in Germany still regards the nineteenth century as the age of medical paternalism. The authoritarian manner of German physicians is particularly emphasised by assuming that patients were normally not involved in decisions about serious therapeutic measures. This paper will analyse if and how physicians dealt with the issues of medical disclosure and of patient consent concerning surgery and other painful interventions in the first half of the nineteenth century. ⋯ It is remarkable that, even where patients from lower social classes were concerned, physicians stressed the necessity of obtaining their consent for risky surgical interventions. However, it cannot be established with certainty if the patients were comprehensively informed by the physicians about the risks involved. Nevertheless, physicians' awareness of the necessity of such disclosure, as expressed by their rhetorical "self-fashioning" in the published case reports, is beyond doubt.