Measuring instruments: tools of knowledge and control

GODWIN JESCHAL, Politik und Wissenschaft deutscher Aerzte im Ersten Weltkrieg, (Wutrzburger Medizinhistorische Forschungen, Band 13), Pattensen/ Han., Horst Wellm Verlag, 1980, 8vo, pp. 169, DM. 26.00 (paperback). This doctoral thesis from Berlin tells the old and unedifying story of how the leaders of the German medical profession followed their imperialist government in supporting the 1914-18 war inside and outside the Reich. The author illustrates this additionally by examining their attitude towards gas-warfare, nutrition, and abortion. For him this is the necessary consequence of the economic "bourgeois" condition of the German doctors. The author omits two basic facts: (1) this attitude was practised just the same by the leaders of the French and English profession; (2) this imperialistic attitude is practised today, even in peace-time, in those countries, where the bourgeoisie has been exterminated. This makes it obvious that in spite of the author's industry in collecting material, this is no scientific monograph but a political pamphlet, a fact which is anyhow obvious from the blind reliance on material from the socalled "German Democratic Republic", and the terminology and the general philosophy of the opus. You can call this science, if you want to, but as Friedrich Engels once wrote, "You can classify a clothesbrush as a mammal, but that doesn't make it grow mammae". By the way, S. Grumbach, whom Jeschal quotes repeatedly, as a "Swiss", was no Swiss, but a French socialist deputy. Erwin H. Ackerknecht Medizinhistorisches Institut der Universit'at Zurich