Marius Turda is a Reader in 20th Century Central and Eastern European Biomedicine at Oxford Brookes University, and Deputy Director of its Centre for Health, Medicine and Society.
Charles Webster has worked in Oxford since 1969. He has written extensively on science and medicine in the early modern period, most recently, a detailed study of the political and religious outlook of Paracelsus published by Yale University Press.
Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is a historian of ideas, who works on historiographical and philosophical interpretations of the Holocaust, comparative genocide, history of anthropology, and the cultural history of the British Right.
It has become common to argue that the Nazi Euthanasia programme was an important way-station on the ‘twisted road’ to Auschwitz, that the elimination of ‘undesirables’ that began with the murder of asylum inmate
Volker Roelcke: born in 1958; graduated in medicine (M.D., Heidelberg University 1984) and social anthropology (M. Phil., Cambridge University 1988); clinical psychiatrist (board exam 1992); from 1992 until 1999 lecturer at the Medizinhistorisches Institut, University of Bonn; 1998/99 visiting scholar at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science/ Presidential Commission on the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Society during the Nazi period; from 1999 until 2003 associate professor for the History of Medicine and Science,
In this lecture, Volker Roelcke details the history of the relationships between eugenics and medical genetics between 1910-1060, demonstrating that the history of eugenics can yield broader analytical tools for investigating the international dimension connecting medicine, science, and politics. Volker reconstructs the emergence of institutionalized research agendas in the field of psychiatric genetics in three national contexts,
In this fascinating lecture, the Natural History Museum in Vienna’s Maria Teschler-Nicola explores the points of convergence between Austrian anthropological and medical traditions between 1850 and 1920. Investigating a largely neglected period dominated by physicians, anatomists, pathologists, and geologists and their respective research interests, this lecture focusses on the lives and achievements of various key figures such as Ferdinand v. Hochstetter and the anatomist Carl Toldt who promoted the young physician Rudolf Poech. Poech, a member of the team the Academy of Sciences sent to study the 1897 plague outbreak in India, was also an early supporter of a ‘modern biology’ that increasingly centred on hereditary theories, an approach he explored through numerous research projects on both European as well as non-European populations.
Benedek Varga studied history, archivist studies and philosophy at the ELTE University, Budapest. He was an honorary visiting fellow at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, in 1991-92; and a visiting researcher at King’s College Cambridge in 1994 (2 months) as well as at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, in 2000.
Ignaz Semmelweis (1818 – 1865) was a Hungarian physician who, in 1847, discovered that the incidence of puerperal fever could be drastically cut by improving on hand washing standards. As head of Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, he reduced puerperal fever’s mortality rate to 1-3%. Although his achievements were welcomed by some, he also encountered serious criticism. Dismissed from his post in 1850, Semmelweis returned to Budapest where he worked as a university professor in obstetrics. But by the time of his death aged 47 in 1865, Semmelweis’ mental balance had collapsed, he had been deserted by his family and friends, and was soon forgotten.
Prof Paul Weindling is a Wellcome Trust Research Professor in the History of Medicine at Oxford Brookes University, and an internationally renowned expert on the history of eugenics, public health organizations, and twentieth century disease patterns. Paul Weindling’s research covers evolution and society, public health, and human experimentation post-1800.
Juris Salaks (October 11, 1961 in Latvia) – physician, Dr. med. (1991), prof. (2005). Graduated Riga Medical Institute in 1987. Postgraduate study (1987-89). Completed his Dr.med. (1991) at Free University Berlin. From 1991 scientific director of the Paul Stradin Museum of the History of Medicine in Riga.
Ken is interested in History of physical anthropology, racial studies, eugenics and medicine.
1982-1986 University of Tartu, biology (unfinished);
1986-1993 University of Tartu, history (archaeology / physical anthropology), B. A. degree;
1994-1995 Central European University, Budapest (Medieval studies), M.A. degree.
Research and professional experience:
Arunas Germanavicius has worked on numerous research projects since graduating from the University of Vilnius’ Faculty of Medicine with cum laude in 1994. He was the co-investigator of Lithuanian research team led by Prof.
Björn Felder received his PhD by University of Tübingen in 2006, and was awarded the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary history for his thesis comparing the both colonial and racist occupation policies implemented during the Soviet and Nazi occupations of Latvia as well as the local population’s responses to these.
M.D. Graduation at the University of Medicine and Pharmacy ‘Carol Davila’ - Bucharest, 1992. Master of Arts in Philosophy at the University of Bucharest, 1997, Graduate Thesis: Karl Jaspers’ Anthropology and Political Philosophy.Ph.D.
World War One marked a historic turning point for Latvia, and the interwar period was awash with assessments of the country’s perceived demographic crisis and the declining proportion of ethnic Latvians in Latvia. The ‘Institute for the Study of Living Strength’ was set up to battle this moral panic in Spring 1938, and comprised three departments – anthropology, population density, and eugenics. In this fascinating conference paper, Juris Salaks introduces the Institute’s hereditary and public health agendas, and its attempts to engage with the wider Latvian public unto its dissolution in 1940.
In his opening address to the conference on “Eugenics, Race and Psychiatry in the Baltic States: a Trans-National Perspective 1900-1945” (7/8 May, Goethe Institute Riga, Latvia), Paul Weindling introduces the themes and ambitions of various discourses on race and racial anthropology more widely, and discusses their relevance to the Baltic states and their ethnic composition in particular. Offering a fascinating insight into the general history of race and eugenics, Paul Weindling discusses the transformation from imperial dynasties to democracies and the intensification of anthropological research locally as well as internationally. During the First World War frequently anthropological traditions turned into biological determinism that although continuously criticized and challenged, nonethess gained great influence - and so too in the Baltics.
This lecture offers an analysis of the development of Lithuania’s psychiatric services between gaining its independence in 1918 and the Soviet occupation of 1940. Psychiatric services in Czarist Russian territories belonging to Lithuania had been underdeveloped, and in 1903 the only major regional psychiatric hospital was in Naujoji Vilnia (Vileika), a suburb of Vilnius. But its role eroded during the First World War when it served as military base.
Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926) is identified as the founder of contemporary scientific psychiatry, as well as of psychopharmacology and psychiatric genetics. Kraepelin believed that psychiatric diseases stemmed from biological and genetic malfunctions. His theories dominated the field of psychiatry at the start of the twentieth century, despite the later psychodynamic incursions of Sigmund Freud and his followers.
This paper seeks to examine these themes by scrutinising Latvian racial anthropology after 1918 within not only its local, but its European context. A ‘latecomer’ to the club of nation states, the Latvian state founded in 1918 was soon confronted with many of the problems it shared with many Central and East European states seeking to create a national history in the tradition of the European ‘master story’. The process of defining the Latvian nation was influenced by the contemporary European discourse that promoted biological paradigms as ‘modern’, while the Latvian national discourse on nationhood was dominated by ethno-nationalism by the 1930s, and that understood the nation as an organic unity generated by a distinct biological heritage. The introduction of a nationwide eugenic project in 1937 exacerbated the virulence of these biological tenets that came to dominate the definition of what a nation was.
In this lecture, Ken Kalling investigates the themes and agents that sought to biologize Estonian national thought between the turn of 19th century and the Second World War. Ken argues that Estonian eugenics’ popular appeal lay with its ability to constitute the lowest common denominator adjoining popular scientific knowledge, populism, and social reasoning. Analysing how a small nation’s self perception broached the questions of how to regulate the quality and quantity of it’s ‘stock’, and the influence exerted by its substantial pre-independence anti-alcohol movement, Ken traces the institutionalisation of Estonian eugenics from the 1924 creation of the ‘Estonian Eugenics Society’ unto the 1940 Soviet rescinding of the country’s eugenic legislation.
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