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Axel C. Hüntelmann. Hygiene im Namen des Staates: Das Reichsgesundheitsamt 1876-1933. Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein Verlag, 2008. 488 pp. Ill. (978-3-8353-0343-0).
In Hygiene im Namen des Staates: Das Reichsgesundheitsamt 1876-1933, Axel Hüntelmann provides a lucid and meticulously researched account of the first half-century of the German Imperial Health Bureau (Reichsgesundheitsamt; RGA), the central but little-known health body of Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic. In 416 densely written pages, and on the basis of a bibliography covering another forty pages, Hüntelmann describes how the institution developed from an insignificant miniature office without either a clear mandate or competence into the primary health body of the federal government.
Rooted in public concern about pauperization as a source of social unrest and of spreading disease, the project soon mixed with attempts by organized doctors to find professional representation. This contradictory beginning reflected an ongoing ambivalence in which efforts to improve public health obscured contradictory underlying motives ranging from medical and social reform to a...