The right to health and social citizenship in Germany, 1848-1918

This chapter uses the intertwined histories of social medicine and the right to health to make two sets of arguments: one concerning the methodological problems involved in thinking about the relationship between medicine and politics; the other concerning the actual interplay of medicine and politics in the shaping of the German state from 1848 to the founding of the Weimar Republic. It argues that, although medical sciences may have evolved according to their respective disciplinary logics, public attitudes towards these sciences and the willingness to translate medical knowledge into public health policy did not depend only on the assumed scientific validity of such knowledge. It also argues that the breakthrough of the new discipline of social hygiene in the years leading up to the First World War went hand in hand with the emergence of a new Progressive conception of social citizenship. This medico-political synthesis ultimately provided the theoretical underpinning for the expanding network of preventive social hygiene programmes.