The humane expert
the crisis of modern medicine during the Weimar republic
pp. 105-122
in: Elke Kurz-Milcke, Gerd Gigerenzer (eds), Experts in science and society, Berlin, Springer, 2004Abstract
During the Weimar Republic orthodox physicians tried to develop discursive strategies to address the crisis of legitimacy of modern scientific medicine. The long university training of physicians in the sciences, as well as contemporary technological visions of modern medical practices, provided important symbolic resources for physicians who wanted to convince the lay public of their competence as modern experts. However, such modern images of medical practice were a double-edged sword, because they also implied an emotional distancing between practitioners and patients, which neither patients nor physicians found appealing. From the point of view of some contemporary physicians, the solution to this dilemma was a new form of expertise that combined the impersonal authority of the modern expert with the personal authority of the outstanding healer personality. This was an attempt to construct a new form of expertise in order to cope with the contradictions of modern society: On the one hand, images of scientific and technical competence create utopian hopes of technological feasibility, on the other hand, these same images provoke fears of an alienating, impersonal society.