Current dissertations

Institute of History, Ethics and Philosophy of Medicine

Doctoral candidate

Deniz Andre Sahal

Working title of the dissertation

Investigation of traumatized patients in the period after the Second World War using patient files from the Landesheil- und Pflegeanstalt Wunstorf

Abstract

Much research has been conducted in recent years on medicine under National Socialism, the effects of imprisonment in concentration camps on the surviving inmates, medical experiments and their consequences.

Before 1945, the work of the psychiatrists who worked in Wunstorf after the war also consisted of implementing racial hygiene measures. Some of them were demonstrably involved in the murder of patients. For this reason, the biographies of the physicians working in the Clinical Department at this time will be examined more closely and it will be considered whether their past had an influence on the diagnosis.

After the end of the war, they were confronted with people who had been bombed out and had lost close relatives and their possessions. Women who had fled from the former German eastern territories often suffered from the consequences of sexual violence. This thesis will examine how psychiatric physicians wrote about such traumatized patients in their files after the end of the war. The term psychotrauma was only recognized as a medical diagnosis much later. So what diagnoses were given to the presumably traumatized people, what means of treatment were available and used?

To a certain extent, the narratives of the patients recorded in the files provide an insight into how the experiences of violence were processed by the population. By systematically reviewing all surviving files from 1945-1952 on patients born between 1903 and 1928, it is possible to determine which patients of which gender and with which symptoms were admitted to the psychiatric ward.