Whispering Legs
09-06-2005, 15:34
I remember reading part of Mein Kampf while a girlfriend was listening to Jane Fonda hold forth on being healthy, and the two crossed over in my mind, and I remember getting the odd feeling that the message of personal health, strength, and vitality was the same.
From the vantage point of a late-twentieth-century observer, the public health policies of the National Socialists who ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945 seem surprisingly modern. Those policies are illuminated in Robert N. Proctor's most recent work, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), which documents the war on cancer and other public health campaigns by the Nazis. A historian of science at Pennsylvania State University, Proctor has written extensively on medicine, public health, and their relations with politics and, especially, with National Socialism.
The Nazi government was known, and admired, for implementing the most progressive public health policies in their time. State-of-the-art research and regulation were applied to occupational, environmental, and lifestyle diseases. Cancer was declared "the number one enemy of the state." Nazi policy favored natural food and opposed fat, sugar, alcohol, and sedentary lifestyles. The existing temperance movement against alcohol and tobacco became more active under the Nazis, who were involved in what Proctor calls "creating a secure and sanitary utopia."
Not surprisingly, American narcotics officials of the time admired the Nazi war on drugs. Today, admiration would probably go in the other direction.
The longest chapter of Proctor's book is devoted to tobacco, "a focus justified," explains the author, "by the startling fact -- heretofore unnoticed -- that Nazi Germany had the world's strongest antismoking campaign and the world's most sophisticated tobacco disease epidemiology" (pp. 9-10). It is well-known that Hitler himself was a rabid antismoker, but the antismoking movement and interventionist public policies of the Nazi area involved much more than Hitler's personal whims. Tobacco was attacked as a "relic of a liberal lifestyle" and as "masturbation of the lungs." It was in Nazi Germany that medical researchers, some with strong Nazi connections, first established a statistical link between smoking and lung cancer. Antismoking crusaders published magazines like Auf der Wacht (On Guard) and Reine Luft (Pure Air). Half a century before the Environmental Protection Agency enrolled junk science against "environmental tobacco smoke," antitobacco activist Dr. Fritz Lickint coined the term "passive smoking." (He also thought that coffee was a carcinogen!)
Many antismoking controls were enacted, including restrictions advertising and bans on smoking in many workplaces, government offices, hospitals and, later, in all city trains and buses. Women could not legally purchase cigarettes in certain places. "The German woman does not smoke," proclaimed a Nazi slogan.
In 1941, the Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research was created under the direction of Karl Astel. A dedicated Nazi who committed suicide in April 1945, Astel thought that opposition to tobacco was a "national socialist duty" (p. 209). As president of the University of Jena, he banned smoking in all university buildings. It is at Astel's Institute that Proctor traces the most path-breaking scientific work on the relations between smoking and cancer.
Proctor is puzzled and distressed by the fact that "Public health initiatives were pursued not just in spite of fascism, but also in consequence of fascism" (p. 249). But his book is weak on the analysis of this issue: in the closing chapter, where he tries to address it, he does not go much farther than stating that German fascism was a complex mixture of the good and the bad. Fortunately, the extensive documentation provided by the author does gives us the means of pushing the analysis beyond where he left it.
Let us recall that fascism is based on the subjection of the individual to the collective. As Benito Mussolini wrote about the twentieth century, "For if the nineteenth century was a century of individualism, it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism and, hence, the century of the State" (Italian Encyclopedia 1932). The German brand of fascism, National Socialism, was characterized also by racist (as opposed to purely nationalist) beliefs. Let us recall further that, everywhere in the West, public health doctrine has drifted from public-good concerns, such as sanitation or contagious diseases, towards a frontal attack on individual choices and politically incorrect lifestyles (see my review of a book by Jacob Sullum's For Your Own Good, in The Independent Review, 3 [Winter 1999]: 460-465).
From the vantage point of a late-twentieth-century observer, the public health policies of the National Socialists who ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945 seem surprisingly modern. Those policies are illuminated in Robert N. Proctor's most recent work, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), which documents the war on cancer and other public health campaigns by the Nazis. A historian of science at Pennsylvania State University, Proctor has written extensively on medicine, public health, and their relations with politics and, especially, with National Socialism.
The Nazi government was known, and admired, for implementing the most progressive public health policies in their time. State-of-the-art research and regulation were applied to occupational, environmental, and lifestyle diseases. Cancer was declared "the number one enemy of the state." Nazi policy favored natural food and opposed fat, sugar, alcohol, and sedentary lifestyles. The existing temperance movement against alcohol and tobacco became more active under the Nazis, who were involved in what Proctor calls "creating a secure and sanitary utopia."
Not surprisingly, American narcotics officials of the time admired the Nazi war on drugs. Today, admiration would probably go in the other direction.
The longest chapter of Proctor's book is devoted to tobacco, "a focus justified," explains the author, "by the startling fact -- heretofore unnoticed -- that Nazi Germany had the world's strongest antismoking campaign and the world's most sophisticated tobacco disease epidemiology" (pp. 9-10). It is well-known that Hitler himself was a rabid antismoker, but the antismoking movement and interventionist public policies of the Nazi area involved much more than Hitler's personal whims. Tobacco was attacked as a "relic of a liberal lifestyle" and as "masturbation of the lungs." It was in Nazi Germany that medical researchers, some with strong Nazi connections, first established a statistical link between smoking and lung cancer. Antismoking crusaders published magazines like Auf der Wacht (On Guard) and Reine Luft (Pure Air). Half a century before the Environmental Protection Agency enrolled junk science against "environmental tobacco smoke," antitobacco activist Dr. Fritz Lickint coined the term "passive smoking." (He also thought that coffee was a carcinogen!)
Many antismoking controls were enacted, including restrictions advertising and bans on smoking in many workplaces, government offices, hospitals and, later, in all city trains and buses. Women could not legally purchase cigarettes in certain places. "The German woman does not smoke," proclaimed a Nazi slogan.
In 1941, the Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research was created under the direction of Karl Astel. A dedicated Nazi who committed suicide in April 1945, Astel thought that opposition to tobacco was a "national socialist duty" (p. 209). As president of the University of Jena, he banned smoking in all university buildings. It is at Astel's Institute that Proctor traces the most path-breaking scientific work on the relations between smoking and cancer.
Proctor is puzzled and distressed by the fact that "Public health initiatives were pursued not just in spite of fascism, but also in consequence of fascism" (p. 249). But his book is weak on the analysis of this issue: in the closing chapter, where he tries to address it, he does not go much farther than stating that German fascism was a complex mixture of the good and the bad. Fortunately, the extensive documentation provided by the author does gives us the means of pushing the analysis beyond where he left it.
Let us recall that fascism is based on the subjection of the individual to the collective. As Benito Mussolini wrote about the twentieth century, "For if the nineteenth century was a century of individualism, it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism and, hence, the century of the State" (Italian Encyclopedia 1932). The German brand of fascism, National Socialism, was characterized also by racist (as opposed to purely nationalist) beliefs. Let us recall further that, everywhere in the West, public health doctrine has drifted from public-good concerns, such as sanitation or contagious diseases, towards a frontal attack on individual choices and politically incorrect lifestyles (see my review of a book by Jacob Sullum's For Your Own Good, in The Independent Review, 3 [Winter 1999]: 460-465).