The Role of the Hospital in the Health Policy of the German Social Democratic Movement before World War I

Abstract

In this article, the author aims to contrast the traditional architecture-oriented history of hospitals with an empirical sociohistorical approach. The main topic discussed is the hospital's role in health policy as seen by German Social Democrats in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Social democratic hospital policy developed as a compromise between two extreme positions: the party theoretician's abstract ideals on the one side and the rank and file's pragmatic view on the other. Thus, the social history of the hospital can illustrate how, around the turn of the century, the political labor movement in Germany shifted from radical revolutionary aims to pragmatic social reform in everyday political practice. At the same time, the hospital underwent a fundamental social change from a charity institution to a municipal center of modern medical care. This implies that any static or one-sided interpretation of the hospital's history and sociology is inadequate: its social role constantly changes according to broader social change and different interests of social groups and organizations. As for the social history of medicine in general, modern medicine's development can not be adequately understood from the narrow perspective of medical institutions themselves. It has to be seen in the broader context of socioeconomic and sociocultural development.