On the subject of science in Nazi Germany, we are apt to hear about the collaboration of some scientists, the forced emigration of talented Jewish scientists, the general science phobia of leaders of the Third Reich--but little detail about what actually transpired. Biologists under Hitler is the first book to examine the impact of Nazism on the lives and research of a generation of German biologists. Drawing on previously unutilized archival material, Ute Deichmann, herself a biologist, explores not only what happened to the biologists forced to emigrate but also the careers, science, and crimes of those who stayed in Germany. Biologists under Hitler combines exhaustive research with capsule biographies of key scientists to overturn certain assumptions about science under the Nazi regime. Biological research, for instance, was neither neglected nor underfunded during World War II; funding by the German Research Association (DFG) in fact increased tenfold between 1933 and 1938, and genetic research in particular flourished. Deichmann shows that the forced emigration of Jews had a less significant impact in biology than in other fields. Furthermore, she reveals that the widely observed decline in German biology after 1945 was not caused primarily by the Third Reich's science policy or by the expulsion of biologists but was due to the international isolation of German scientists as part of the legacy of National Socialism. Her book also provides overwhelming evidence of German scientists' conscious misrepresentation after the war of their wartime activities. In this regard, Deichmann's capsule biography of Konrad Lorenz is particularly telling. Certain to be regarded as the most thorough and comprehensive account of biological science in Nazi Germany, Biologists under Hitler will interest historians of science, historians of the Nazi era, and biologists, as well as those who wish to learn about the relationship between scientific truth and political realities. (view table of contents)

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Traces the history of government policy on the use of the pesticide, DDT, and examines the gradual discovery of the effects of DDT on the environment

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Despite historians' interest in cultural representations of the body, we tend to think of human anatomy and physiology as scientific fact, not historical artifact. In this study Barbara Duden asserts that the most basic biological and medical teams that we use to describe our own bodies - male or female, healthy or sick - are indeed cultural constructions. She sets out to cross the traditional boundary between history and nature by gaining access to the inner existence of a group of women who lived in bodies very different from our own. These women were the patients of Johann Storch, a physician who lives and worked in the town of Eisenach, Germany, during the first half of the 18th century. Storch meticulously documented the medical histories of approximately 1800 women of all ages and social stations, often in their own words. This rich and unique record of complaints, symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments reveals an alien understanding of the female body and its function. Physical processes - digestion, menstruation, pregnancy - were not associated with discrete internal organs. Blood ebbed and flowed rather than circulated; pregnancy did not exist until quickening; menses could be discharged in the form of tears. Physical examination was not necessary to medical care, and in many cases the doctor had no direct contact with his patient. Barbara Duden uses his material to reanimates the female body that Johann Storch treated and that his patients inhabited, showing that its structure, function and meaning - and therefore those of our own bodies - belong to history as well as to nature. (view table of contents)