Soziale Ungleichheit vor Krankheit und Tod. Zur Socialgeschichte des Gesundheitsbereichs im Deutschen Kaiserreich

focusing on the "uric acid" scares of Alexander Haig. And the last two chapters shepherd the story into the present century, examining two of America's most enduring health fads. On the one hand, cycling (though as many Cassandras lamented its likely brood of pelvic deformities and fallen women as there were zealots for its tonic qualities); on the other, body building, pre-eminently in the "physical culture" movement of Bernarr Macfadden, the first Charles Atlas. Whorton is alert to many of the wider cultural resonances of these episodes, and he effectively contextualizes his crusaders. For example, Fletcher is seen to reflect the pressures in the age of Social Darwinism for individual survival in the business rat-race, and Kellogg is shown to have been au fait at least with popularizations of metabolic organic chemistry in the research tradition of Gowland Hopkins. Bernarr Macfadden's body building is located as part of an international hygienist and eugenic drive for "strength through joy", which in other cultures formed part of a Fascist movement. Macfadden's conviction that the big-breasted woman was the healthy woman echoed Aryan idealization in the mother-type. But Whorton also has an eye for slower sea-changes in orientation. He traces the gradual secularization of rationales for alternative therapies and regimens, as also the shift from tight sexual self-restraint early in the nineteenth century through to more modern emphasis on body culture and sexual self-expression. He also traces the "absorption" of fitness movements within hegemonic values. Thus, whereas the Thomsonians and Grahamites wanted to escape from an urban Mammon they saw as physically as well as spiritually corrupting, modern health reformers offer their nostrums precisely as ways of "getting on". This assimilation has been possible, he explains, because American fitness movements had always been fundamentally individualistic rather than social or environmentalist. Within this atmosphere of medical Lutheranism, health lay in your own hands. Self-control, self-dosing, self-realization-you had a duty to save your own skin and body, much as you should look to your own soul's salvation. Ultimately, however, this is not the penetrating revisionist work of scholarship needed to raise our understanding of quacks, faddists, and health reformers from the level of diverting personal history on to a higher plane. More searching questions need to be posed, and basic social analysis carried out. Alongside biographical vignettes, we need to be able to gauge the depth, breadth, and duration of the crusaders' appeal. Just how …