Constitutional medicine, neoromanticism, and the politics of antimechanismin interwar Germany

One of the defining features of interwar medical debates in German-speaking countries was the remarkable popularity of holistic concepts among both ex perts and the lay public. Attacks on the allegedly too-mechanistic outlook of modern medicine were frequent and were often associated with calls to re search and treat the constitution of patients rather than isolated causes o f disease. This paper traces the rise of the new constitutional medicine, l ocating its roots in nineteenth-century medical science. The essay attempts to explain the increasingly antimechanistic outlook of promoters of consti tutional medicine by relating it to the larger context of the politics of h ealth in Weimar Germany, to concerns of medical practitioners over the rise of the welfare state and the popularity of nonlicensed healers, culminatin g in the widespread notion of a "crisis of medicine." Drawing on case studi es of, among others, the Danzig surgeon Erwin Lick and the Vienna gynecolog ist Bernhard Aschner, the article distinguishes between rationalist and neo romantic constitutionalists and aims to demonstrate that antimechanism in c onstitutional medicine was related to neoromantic tendencies in art and oth er realms of society, while rationalists were concerned with making German men and women fit for war and the requirements of modern industry.