Medicine and Ethnology. Selected Essays

KEY ESSAYS ON THE HISTORY OF CULTURE IN MEDICINE BY ONE OF ITS PIONEERS. 9 inches tall hardcover, gray cloth binding, gil title to cover and spine, 195 pp, very good. ERWIN HEINZ ACKERKNECHT (1906 - 1988) was an active and influential Trotskyist in the 1930s who had to flee Germany in 1933 after Hitlers rise to power. It was in the United States, the country that granted him citizenship, that Ackerknecht became an influential historian of medicine. He wrote groundbreaking works on the social and ecological dimensions of disease and was a forerunner of contemporary trends in social and cultural history. He studied medicine (and sporadically economics, history of literature and arts) eventually graduating from the University of Leipzig in 1931 with a dissertation on a study of German medical reform in 1848. Throughout his studies Ackerknecht was affiliated with communist student groups in Freiburg, Berlin and Vienna. When the Nazis seized power in Germany, Ackerknecht, now one of the central figures of German Trotskyism, went underground. He fled Germany in June 1933, spent a short time in Czechoslovakia and paid visit to Leon Trotsky in exile in Turkey. He eventually broke with Trotskyism and Marxism and turned his back to political activism. However, his opposition against Nazism and right wing politics of all kinds remained unrelenting. While in exile in Paris he earned his living as a translator and began to study ethnography at the Muse de l'Homme with Marcel Mauss, Lucien Lvy-Bruhl, and Paul Rivet. He graduated from the Sorbonne shortly before the outbreak of World War II. He joined the French army and eventually fled to southern France where he waited for several months for his American visa. He arrived in New York City in July 1941 together with his second wife. He was first employed as a fellow in the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University while working as assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History. He was then offered a position as the University of Wisconsin's first Chair in the history of medicine.

Product Info

Publisher: Johns Hopkins Press

Year: 1971

Type: Used

Binding: Softcover

First Edition

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