ABSTRACT
Hippocrates today is associated with humane medicine, with a strong emphasis on the individual patient (as opposed to depersonalised, large-scale hospital medicine), with organicist, even vitalist, connotations. But can we assume that Hippocratism did not carry different meanings when Nazi physicians underwent their training? As in Britain and France, a holist, neoHippocratic movement emerged in Germany among physicians and alternative practitioners in the mid-1920s.3 Worries about specialisation and the role of the laboratory, about state and mass medicine and the commercialisation of healing, along with the experience of economic and intellectual crisis, led many to proclaim a ‘crisis in medicine’.4 Hippocratism was seen as a solution to this crisis. In Britain, interwar neo-Hippocratism was mainly concerned with the individual. In Germany, however, in the wake of losing the First World War and in face of economic hardship, parts of the educated élite began to value the survival of the collective, the Volk, more highly than that of the single individual.5 Along with fellow intellectuals, German Hippocratists were not only concerned with individual patients, but also with the Volk.
