Wow. Hitler's germany was of a similar bent. The western world is slowly catching up.
he Nazi war on cancer? Other readers may be as incredulous as I was when this book came to my attention. We think of Hitler's regime as waging war on nations and peoples, not on behalf of public health. But good historical work surprises us by recovering forgotten facets of the past. Robert N. Proctor, a veteran historian of science who teaches at Pennsylvania State University, has produced a book full of surprises.
Going well beyond the ''cancer'' of his catchy title, Proctor surveys an extraordinary range of health campaigns that predated the Nazi regime but to varying degrees allied with it and climaxed under it. These included minor and spurious ones like colonic cleansing; major efforts to promote organic foods and medicines purged of toxins; barbarous programs of sterilization and murder of alleged social defectives; and serious efforts grounded in superior science to conquer cancer. German experts, for instance, were the first to link smoking with lung cancer and to promote breast self-examination by women. As the book's rich illustrations show, modern advertising techniques accompanied many health campaigns, like the one against smoking. ''Our Fhrer Adolf Hitler drinks no alcohol and does not smoke. . . . His performance at work is incredible,'' one magazine gushed in 1937.
Motivations ran the gamut: nostalgia for an imagined premodern Germany of rural health and vigor; faith in Germany's scientific prowess; ambition to make Germans fit for war; and longing to purge the nation of presumed social bacilli and cancer, with Jews sometimes described as a ''cancer'' on Germany and, like Communists and homosexuals, sometimes blamed for bad habits like smoking and drinking. Proctor summarizes the ''spirit of millenarian social engineering'' that these motivations nourished: ''Aggressive measures in the field of public health would usher in a new era of healthy, happy Germans, united by race and common outlook, cleansed of alien environmental toxins, freed from the previous era's plague of cancers, both literal and figurative.
he Nazi war on cancer? Other readers may be as incredulous as I was when this book came to my attention. We think of Hitler's regime as waging war on nations and peoples, not on behalf of public health. But good historical work surprises us by recovering forgotten facets of the past. Robert N. Proctor, a veteran historian of science who teaches at Pennsylvania State University, has produced a book full of surprises. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/23/reviews/990523.23sherryt.html
S