Debating Sex: Education Films and Sexual Morality for the Young in Post-War Germany, 1945-1955.

After 1945 rapidly climbing figures of venereal disease infections menaced the health of the war-ridden German population. Physicians sought to gain control over this epidemic and initiated large-scale sex education campaigns to inform people about identification, causes and treatment of VD and advised them on appropriate moral sexual behaviour as a prophylactic measure. Film played a crucial role in these campaigns. As mass medium it was believed film could reach out to large parts of society and quickly disseminate sexual knowledge and moral codes of conduct amongst the population. This essay discusses the transition of the initial central role of sex education films in the fight against venereal disease in the immediate post-war years towards a more critical stance as to the effects of cinematographic education of the young in an East and West German context.

Medical Technologies Past and Present: How History Helps to Understand the Digital Era.

This article explores the relationship between medicine's history and its digital present through the lens of the physician-patient relationship. Today the rhetoric surrounding the introduction of new technologies into medicine tends to emphasize that technologies are disturbing relationships, and that the doctor-patient bond reflects a more 'human' era of medicine that should be preserved. Using historical studies of pre-modern and modern Western European medicine, this article shows that patient-physician relationships have always been shaped by material cultures. We discuss three activities - recording, examining, and treating - in the light of their historical antecedents, and suggest that the notion of 'human medicine' is ever-changing: it consists of social attributions of skills to physicians that played out very differently over the course of history.