¿Curar el cáncer? Los orígenes de la radioterapia española en el primer tercio del siglo XX

ethical choices-but it raises challenges that have not been fully solved. The result creates an asymmetry. The earlier chapters include accounts of how each of the four main scientists discussed responded to National Socialism and fared under the Nazi stateWertheimer and Goldstein were prominent members of the intellectual migration. The last chapter, however, attempts to examine "wholeness" as a value across a very broad front of biology and medicine, and indeed to ask whether the value was in some way contributory to the events of 1933-45, not least with murderous medicine. Not surprisingly, the discussion loses the focus of the earlier intellectual biographies; for instance, it tries to deal with crass Nazi slogans, with the opportunism of individuals who promoted themselves as Nazi biologists, and it enters into the deeply emotive debate about the role of particular scientists or physicians (the psychosomatic physician Viktor von Weizsacker is the principal case here). There is an enormous literature on all of this, and "wholeness" does not perhaps serve well as a guiding thread. The last chapter is intended to show that the value of "wholeness" became entwined with diverse political agendas. But one would not, I think, expect a one-to-one correlation between a particular philosophical value and a particular politics. More deeply, any assessment of the relation of philosophies of life to political processes raises perfectly general questions about science and values which tend to get lost when discussed in relation to the special horrors of the Third Reich. Thus, in the earlier chapters, an uneasy question is left unaddressed about the elitist values of scholars, an elitism exemplified by the opinions of the aristocratic von Uexkiill, who welcomed the fall of Weimar. Elitism was also evident, though of course differently expressed, in Goldstein's socialism. This suggests questions, not about what happened in 1933-45, but about what links particular conceptions of scientific truth, and the access to truth by only a restricted number of scholars, and undemocratic values before (and after). Historians, physicians and students will all value this book, and it ought to be force-fed to anyone who fancies the word "holism". It makes accessible to English-language readers, in a quietly informed history, a central body of writings in the struggle to sustain an idealist philosophical anthropology of man in the face of both technology and mass society. By linking biography and cultural history, it raises many questions about the ambivalent politics of that struggle.