DYNAMIS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hist. Illus. 2001, 21, 487-559.

Lutz SAUERTEIG. Krankheit, Sexualität, Gesellschaft. Geschlechtskrankheiten und Gesundheitspolitik in Deutschland im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag [Medizin, Gesellschaft und Geschichte, Beiheft 12], 1999. ISBN: 3-515-07393-0.

In 1927, the German national parliament passed a law for the prevention of venereal disease, the Gesetz zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankeiten, which required infected people to submit to treatment by a licensed physician. Furthermore, it gave public health officials the power to enforce mandatory health inspections of persons suspected to be infected and to order compulsory treatment. Under this law, prostitution was no longer regulated by the police; policing powers were transferred to public health authorities. It was a law that, as well as establishing medical control in matters of venereal disease, unequivocally put the interest of the state above the rights of the individual. In Krankheit, Sexualität, Gesellschaft, Lutz Sauerteig meticulously examines how venereal disease came to be seen as a matter for state intervention and the forms this intervention took. 

Sauerteig thus explores discussions about venereal disease and analyses public health policies directed against it between the 1880s and the 1930s; that is from the date of campaigns of women’s groups against police regulation of prostitution to the law of 1927 and its implementation. The book is broadly organised around two main questions: how moral attitudes towards venereal disease changed in this period, and the nature of public health strategies for its prevention. To address these issues, Sauerteig explores the circumstances which led to venereal disease becoming an issue of wide-ranging concern. The first chapter thus looks at the social, cultural, political, and medical factors that led to venereal disease being more and more perceived to be threatening society from within by the turn of the century and made state intervention seem increasingly desirable to a variety of interest groups. There then follows a detailed chapter on the organisation, membership, aims, and activities of the German Society for the Prevention of Venereal Disease, founded in 1902. 

By far the most extensive part of the book is dedicated to analysing public health strategies for the prevention of venereal disease. The author hence exami-nes policies for the treatment of infected people in hospitals and their position vis-à- vis the social security system. He outlines the politics behind the establishment of advice centres and gives a detailed account of controversies about sex education. He then moves to discuss the mounting measures of medical con-trol of people with VD, exploring the underlying, but shifting tensions between the rights of the individual and notions of the good of the «whole». Sauerteig looks at policies of compulsory registration and treatment, the shift towards medical control of prostitution, and the curtailment of free competition in the medical marketplace in relation to VD. He also explores discussions about health marriage certificates and prohibition of marriage (both of which were only later implemented under the National Socialist regime). 

In his analysis, Sauerteig pays attention to a large number of different interest groups and individuals, including women’s associations, social purity organisations, health officials, jurists, representatives of the army, the churches, and the spectrum of political parties. He thus shows that by the beginning of the twentieth century, VD was increasingly perceived to be an issue of national importance, opening the way to state intervention. As Sauerteig points out, after 1900, venereal disease was more and more seen as a threat to the health of the nation and the «race». Unfortunately, though, he takes the concepts of «nation» and «race» for granted and never seeks to analyse what different commentators meant by them and how these meanings changed. 

This is a thoroughly researched examination of public approaches to venereal disease, based on a wide range of archival material and published sources. It is regrettable that patients themselves do not figure in the processes delineated, not in the least because some of the most fruitful recent additions to the history of medicalisation, to which Sauerteig sees his book as contributing, have taken into account patients’ role and agency. Moreover, there is a curious lack of an explicit engagement with the question of the relationship between the policies here explored and subsequent National Socialist reproductive policies. Nonetheless, anyone interested in the history of sexuality and medi-cine of the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic will find this an informative and insightful study. 

KATHARINA ROWOLD London Guildhall University