Paediatrics in the Reichsuniversität Straßburg

Children's Medicine at a Bastion of Nazi Ideology

By (author) Aisling Shalvey

Book cover: Paediatrics in the Reichsuniversität Straßburg

Extent: 250 pages

Publisher: University of Exeter Press

Subjects: Earth & Life Sciences , German Studies, Medicine

Language: English

Hardback (Published)

(June 2023)

ISBN: 9781804130896

6.14 x 9.21 inches

Price: $112.00

In stock

Examines the experience of paediatric patients, and the staff who determined their treatment, in the Reichsuniversitat Strasbourg, a Nazi-run hospital in occupied France from 1941 to 1944.


This sensitive yet incisive book addresses the medical treatment of children in the occupied city of Strasbourg during Nazi occupation. Exploring more than 1,000 previously undocumented patient files, it illuminates starkly the workings of paediatric care at a pivotal moment in history. Issues of nationality, social class, and diagnosis all contributed to the experience of each child, and here extensive data analysis is deployed to back up poignant individual stories. This is the first ever demographic overview of a vulnerable group who were treated in the hospital of the Reichsuniversitat Straaburg. Veering away from the well-established, top-down approach of examining the doctors, instead it makes the patient central to the analysis. A vivid picture emerges of the practical impact that war and occupation had on children who were suffering from illness, revealing how they were affected by Nazi ideology. Establishing a chronology of this important paediatric clinic, the author situates the core historical developments which brought it from establishment with optimistic and idealistic goals, to downfall just three years later when the Allies liberated the city. Based on previously under-utilized primary sources, this volume employs a novel and distinctive analytical framework, using Alltagsgeschichte (the history of everyday life) and patient experience theory to frame medical records and accounts. The book will be relevant to those interested in the history of childhood, politics, occupation and border disputes, psychiatry, medicine, denazification and the postwar era, the history of National Socialism, patient history and the Second World War.

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Author’s note
Glossary of Terms
Archive Abbreviations
Terminology Abbreviations

1. Introduction
2. Staff of the Children’s Clinic of the Reichsuniversität Straßburg
3. Paediatric Treatment at the Children’s Clinic of the Reichsuniversität Straßburg
4. Paediatric Patients in Psychiatric Care
5. Medical Research and Student Theses on Paediatrics
6. Paediatric Patients at the Internal Medicine Clinic
7. Final Days of the Reichsuniversität Straßburg and the Immediate Postwar Consequences

Appendices
Bibliography
Notes
Index

  • By (author) Aisling Shalvey

"A study that is crisply written, scrupulously detailed, and convincing in its conclusions."
—

A study that is crisply written, scrupulously detailed, and convincing in its conclusions.

— Michael Biddiss