The 18th Conference of the German-Polish Society for the History of Medicine (Web)
Time: 03.-04.06.2021
Venue: virtual space, via Berlin
Registration and access to the event’s links (Web)
Reproduction is a subject in the ongoing debates on “marriage for all” and “rainbow families” and has sociocultural implications with regard to medical progress, such as uterus transplantation, not to mention the decades old intense debate on the topic of abortion. The aim of the conference is to sound out the historical dimensions of these problems across a broad field where human biology, reproductive medicine, family policy, and government social programmes intersect with fundamental conceptions of desired or feared social developments which are projected onto religious and cultural ideals.
Using the example of the changing political, social, cultural and scientific relations between Germans and Poles and the corresponding interconnections in Central Europe, a historical understanding of the role of medicine in the conceptions of family and gender, as well as of the role of relevant socio-cultural institutions and medical development professionals will be examined. The history of reproduction opens the floor for addressing fundamental questions about historical anthropology.
Sections

• Reproductive Behaviour and the Private: Numbers and Meanings
• Mother and Child
• Public Health and Public Discourse in the Interwar Period
• Experts and the Public in Reproduction Discourses
• Reproduction and the Material World: Architecture and Industrial Design
• Midwives as Experts
• Clerical, Political, and Medical Advice
• Abortion Cultures
• Silent and Noisy Revolutions: Discourses on Reproduction in Late 20th Century

Program and Abstracts … (PDF)
Conference’s organizers: Zentrum für Historische Forschung Berlin der Polnischen Akademie der Wissenschaften; Deutsch-Polnische Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Medizin e.V.; Institut für Geschichte der Medizin und Ethik in der Medizin der Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin