The paper explores the relationship between normalising bodies and normalising political orders by investigating medical discourses in Germany in the second half of the 19th century. It argues that medical scientists not only presented knowledge about bodies, health, and pathologies, but also used this knowledge to promote a specific form of political order as the ‘true’ and ‘proper’ political order. In the paper, discourses from two different medical fields are analysed. The first part focuses on physiology, because it was not only key in promoting new medicine as a natural science, but also because many of its proponents were involved in the revolution of 1848, and continued to advance democratic ideas after the failed revolution, throughout the second half of the 19th century. It is argued that even though physiologists favoured democracy, their understanding of it was nonetheless narrow and androcentric. The second part focuses on medical sub-disciplines that specifically addressed sexuality and gender, such as psychiatry and sexology. Instead of seeking to advance a democratic political order, protagonists here used their epistemological clout to pathologise and thereby actively discredit ongoing political struggles such as the feminist movement and the socialist movement that aimed to establish a fundamentally different political order. From a feminist perspective the paper reveals how the powerful constructions of ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’ structured both discourses: Imaginations of ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’ were deployed to produce and legitimate medical regimes of truths about the body and, as a consequence, about a specific political order.
In the Habsburg lands at the turn of the 19th century (as a consequence of Enlightenment critique of the legal, social and medical status quo), a change occurred in attitudes to voluntary death. This "new discourse" permeated all state-controlled institutions, being particularly evident in the transformation of teaching practice at medical schools and the introduction of new measures concerning self-willed death. This paper considers the reception of newly-introduced reforms - especially in law and medicine - in the Litoměřice region, and the impact of these changes on the way a suicide’s body was treated and where it was laid to rest. It addresses the question of how much and in what way official and medical investigations of suicides changed, which institutions were involved in such investigations, and how information was exchanged between the various judicial authorities. As a result of ever-closer collaboration between state institutions on the one hand and medical practitioners on the other, suicide in the Litoměřice region in the first half of the 19th century was, de facto, gradually decriminalized., Tereza Liepoldová., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
Wenzel Trnka von Krzowitz was born in 1739 in Tabor. He graduated from the University of Vienna, where after studying philosophy he studied at the Faculty of Medicine. His personality and systematic work attracted the attention of Gerard van Swieten, who in 1769 made a significant contribution to the institutional establishment of the first medical faculty in the Hungarian Lands. Trnka thus became one of the founding members of this faculty, where he was appointed professor of anatomy. The Faculty of Medicine was the last part of the Pázmany University to be established in Trnava, which could not meet the needs of a growing university, especially of the medical faculty itself, and so in 1777 the entire campus was moved to Buda. While still in Trnava, in 1775, Trnka published one of his most important works, Historia febrium intermittentium, in which he discusses intermittent fevers. These fevers were a relatively common and unpleasant phenomenon in Europe, especially in certain regions. They are caused by protozoa of the genus Plasmodium, discovered in the 19th century, which cause several types of malaria, all of them being characterised by periodic bouts of fever. In his work, Trnka discusses in detail both the actual course of the disease and the treatment, emphasizing the use of quinine bark. The work contains several historically valuable chapters. It describes views and treatments of malaria in the 18th century, focusing also on those areas in the Habsburg Monarchy where the disease was widespread. Through Trnka’s work, the article provides an insight into life with this now exotic disease, which is today of little concern in our part of the world.