This volume of essays would perhaps not have come into being were it not for the nagging and still inadequately answered questions raised by the Nuremberg Tribunal about the “perversion,” as Michael Kater has aptly called it, of German medicine. Perhaps the major question still looming over the history of medicine in twentieth-century Germany was succinctly put in the title of Alexander Mitscherlich's 1947 book on the Nuremberg physicians' trials, Medizin ohne Menschlichkeit, also translated as Doctors of Infamy. How could a modern medical community with a tradition of classical as well as scientific learning, the descendants of Hippocrates and the collective bearers of scientific professionalism, ignore the admonition in the Hippocratic oath to “maintain the utmost respect for human life from the time of its conception?” How could the German medical profession, the peer if not the envy of its colleagues abroad at the outbreak of World War I, have sunk to the level of a colluder in genocide during World War II? Can historical analysis offer anything to answer this question, especially its ethical, legal, and political dimensions? In particular, can the new social history, especially the history of education and professions, add any new hints?

In recent years historians' attention has shifted somewhat from a focus on the tiny minority of German doctors who carried out perverted experiments in death camps or had a direct role in mass murder. It is for the social historian equally interesting to ask about the “normal” people among the nearly 60,000 physicians working in Hitlers Germany.