Medizin am Toten oder am Lebenden?

Medicine on the Dead or the Living?
Pathology in Berlin and London, 1900-1945
Pathology, as the study of suffering, became a medical specialty and the backbone of the emerging scientific medicine in the 19th century. Through the opening of the deceased patient's body, systematic knowledge about diseased organs, tissues, and cells was first developed. This advancement originated in Germany, particularly in Berlin.

The present work examines the further development of the field in the first half of the 20th century, as human medicine was preparing to become a therapeutic discipline. The comparison between Berlin and London highlights two different developmental trajectories of the field and, consequently, of Western human medicine. While pathology in Berlin focused on work in the autopsy room, London pathologists drew on other German traditions by establishing clinical pathology after 1900. This approach was less oriented towards the dead than towards the living patient, whose bodily fluids and tissues were examined in the laboratory while still alive. This differing practice of pathology corresponded to the respective social, economic, political, and ethical-moral conditions in both cities. Medicine on the Dead or the Living? This is the question of country-specific cultural frameworks of medicine in the 20th century.