Health Police

[madmusic]

Elsewhere in Europe in the 18th century other types of coercion in health policy were beginning to develop. In Germany for example, many medical journals included in their titles the term Medizinalpolizei,(medicine police), and later Gesundheits-Polizei (health police). The medical historian George Rosen has argued that the concept of medical police was part of a broader political force which sought to secure greater wealth for the merchant classes and the aristocracy by ensuring that workers were sufficiently fit for their semi-slave roles.

This trend, according to Paul Weindling at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine led to more far-reaching consequences:

"Medicine was transformed from a free profession, as it was proclaimed by the German Confederation in 1869, to the doctor carrying out duties of State officials in the interests not of the individual patient but of society and future generations."

This convergence of state and medical interests was also reflected in Britain in the rise of the eugenics movement in the early 1900s, following publications by Francis Galton and others. The philosophy enshrined the belief that the quality of human stock could be improved, as in the case of other animals, by preventing the reproduction of those of lesser quality while encouraging propagation of the superior variety. The term 'social hygiene', which quickly followed the development of eugenic ideology, incorporated notions of genetic selection with concerns for sanitation, diet, personal lifestyle and child care. While previously ill-health had been seen as an unavoidable misfortune, it now became (at least in part) the result of bad habits.

The fact that such dangerous philosophies were seen as persuasive by health reformers was due in large part to the pressures to achieve 'national efficiency' prior to the First World War. From the point of view of Charity Commissioners and the medical profession, the number of 'undeserving' poor in society had become unacceptable and radical steps were needed to reduce such a burden in times of economic recession. The eugenic ideology, therefore, found favour across the political spectrum, with 'left', 'right' and 'new liberals' all in agreement that control of breeding and lifestyles was a legitimate role for the State.

These patterns of convergence of the state and medical professions were the direct precursors, according to some historians, for the ultimate expression of lifestyle and health prescription which lay at the heart of the philosophy of the Third Reich. And comparisons between contemporary healthism and that which developed in Germany in the 1930s are, I'm afraid, so striking that they cannot be ignored. The philosophy of Gesundheit ist Pflicht - health is duty - initially took on forms that are disconcertingly familiar in modern health trends.

http://www.sirc.org/publik/bad_habits.shtml