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.
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.
Thomas Willis (1621-75) is regarded as the founder of modern clinical neuroscience. He established the speciality of neurology and left a body of work that defined mid-seventeenth-century medicine. Recent interpretations of Willis’ work have led to a growing appreciation of his significant contributions to paediatric neurology, a speciality founded approximately three centuries after his death.
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.
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