Social hygiene

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Social hygiene is the designation for "public health care and health prevention that primarily refers to the connections between health, illness and social living conditions and, against this background, aims to have a preventive and curative effect".

term

The term is a concept that was essentially introduced by the physician Alfred Grotjahn in a lecture to the Berlin Society for Public Health Care in 1904 and was widely used by the chemist and physician Theodor Weyl , among others . Grotjahn presents social hygiene as both a descriptive (factual) and a normative science, which, according to Kurz, “explores the common causes of health and illness in human society and its social groups, as well as the means to promote the former and prevent the latter seeks ". He defined the descriptive component as “the doctrine of the conditions to which the generalization of hygienic culture among the totality of spatially, temporally and socially cohesive individuals and their descendants is subject”, while the normative component “the doctrine of the measures that make the generalization more hygienic Culture among the entirety of spatially, temporally and socially related individuals and their descendants ”.

history

The terms “social hygiene” or “social hygiene” appeared in the French hygiene movement as early as the middle of the 19th century and were introduced into German by Max von Pettenkofer in 1871/1872 . It serves as an alternative to the monocausal explanation of infectious diseases. Pettenkofer assumed that the microbes were only one component. In addition, a multitude of social influences such as hygiene , population density , diet and many others are decisive for the outbreak and course of an infectious disease. Other doctors who dealt analytically and journalistically with social hygiene on a larger scale at the beginning of the 20th century were the Heidelberg district doctor and medical advisor Ernst Georg Kurz (1859–1937), the chemist and doctor Theodor Weyl , who published the 1904 from him edited Supplementary Volume Social Hygiene to his Handbook of Hygiene , the Karlsruhe physician and health politician Alfons Fischer (1873-1936) and the Austrian Ignaz Kaup , from 1912 the first holder of an extraordinary professorship for social hygiene at the University of Munich . Ernst von Leyden and Max Rubner were on the board of the German Association for Public Hygiene, founded in Berlin in 1899 .

In addition to being closely linked to demography , social hygiene was historically closely linked to the eugenics movement . The social democrat A. Grotjahn, who was also a member of the Society for Racial Hygiene , developed socialist eugenics. In order to distinguish himself from social Darwinist and racial theoretical as well as scientific directions of eugenics, he differentiated, for example, "natural" and "social" selection and promoted the term "social screening", which he regarded as essential for regenerative perfection.

In the time of National Socialism from 1933 onwards, social hygiene measures were embedded in state measures for racial hygiene and public health. After scientists first examined the connection between smoking and lung cancer during this time, there were strict no-smoking campaigns and smoking bans. In Nazi propaganda, smoking was branded as a decadent fashion of political liberalism that was harmful to the race and later, during the World War, the non-smoking fascist dictators Hitler , Mussolini and Franco were highlighted as role models for the smoking heads of government of the Allies, Churchill , Roosevelt and Stalin .

See also

literature

  • Wolfgang U. Eckart : Social hygiene, social medicine. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , pp. 1344-1346.
  • Theodor Weyl: On the history of social hygiene. In: Handbook of Hygiene. Supplement 4, Jena 1904.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eckart (2005), p. 1344 f.
  2. ^ Walter Artelt : Ernst Georg Short (1859–1937). Senckenberg Institute for the History of Medicine, Frankfurt am Main 1963, p. 8.
  3. ^ Alfred Grotjahn: Foreword. In: A. Grotjahn, F. Kriegel (Hrsg.): Annual report on the progress and achievements in the field of social hygiene and demography. Volume 3, 1904, pp. III-XV.
  4. ↑ Ursula Ferdinand: The “Faustian shoulder-to-shoulder” in Alfred Grotjahn's social hygiene (1869–1931): Social hygiene and its relationship to eugenics and demography. Contribution to the conference "How National Socialist is Eugenics?" Basel 2006. (histsem.unibas.ch)
  5. ^ Ernst Short: Social Hygiene. Urban & Schwarzenberg, Berlin / Vienna 1907 (1906/1907 also published Kurz's series of articles on Social Hygiene in Medical Clinic ).
  6. ^ Walter Artelt : Ernst Georg Short (1859–1937). Senckenberg Institute for the History of Medicine, Frankfurt am Main 1963, especially p. 7 f.
  7. ↑ Wilfried Witte: Fischer, Alfons. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 401 f.
  8. ↑ Ulf-Norbert Funke: Life and work of Karl August Lingner: Lingner's path from shop assistant to large industrialist. Diplomica, Hamburg, 2014, ISBN 978-3-8428-7771-9 , p. 29. (books.google.com)
  9. ↑ JP Mackenbach: Odol, Autobahn and a non-smoking guide - reflections on the innocence of public health. In: Prevention and Health Promotion. Vol. 1, Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg 2006, pp. 208-211.
  10. ^ RN Proctor: The anti-tobacco campaign of the Nazis: a little known aspect of public health in Germany, 1933–45. In: BMJ . Volume 313, 1996, pp. 1450-1453. (bmj.com)