Medizin, Gesellschaft, und Geschichte : Jahrbuch des Instituts für Geschichte der Medizin der Robert Bosch Stiftung
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Biography Historical Article
[Samuel Hahnemann: physician and adviser to the Princess Luise of Prussia from 1829 to 1835].
The nearly 500 pages of letters (edited and commented in a medical dissertation by the author), written by a Prussian Princess in the 19th century to Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homoeopathy, provide a fairly complete patient history thanks to the homoeopathic method which obliges patients to observe and describe the complaints and the changes they experience during treatment. The achievements of Hahnemann's therapy were so remarkable that the patient engaged his disciple Dr. ⋯ It was less so in taking verum, applying mesmerism and changing her lifestyle. The success of the treatment was limited by the Princess's court and family circumstances and probably by Hahnemann's restriction to psora theory and C30 potencies. The dissertation is the most extensive patient history from Hahnemann's medical practice ever published.
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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.
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Biography Historical Article
[Associative disorder. On the relationship between the interpretation of disorder and society in the early writings of Eugen Bleuler].
Around 1900 the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler developed a new interpretative model of mental illnesses: schizophrenia. He named the breaking of associative threads of thought as the core symptom of the disorder. ⋯ His contempories noticed early on the peculiar relationship that existed between the crisis diagnosed as schizophrenia and the broader societal "crisis of modernity" around 1900. The author shows in what ways this seeming relationship between the interpretation of the disorder and society was already preconfigured in Eugen Bleuler's early writings by reconstructing and contextualising his theory of schizophrenia as developed in the years from 1890 to 1910.