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We Lived for the Body

Natural Medicine and Public Health in Imperial Germany

Avi Sharma author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cornell University Press

Published:15th Jul '14

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

We Lived for the Body cover

Nature was central to the Wilhelmine German experience. Medical cosmologies and reform-initiatives were a key to consumer practices and lifestyle choices. Nature's appeal transcended class, confession, and political party. Millions of Germans recognized that nature had healing effects and was intimately tied to quality of life. In the 1880s and 1890s, this preoccupation with nature became an increasingly important part of German popular culture.

In this pioneering study, Avi Sharma shows that nature, health, and the body became essential ways of talking about real and imagined social and political problems. The practice of popular medicine in the Wilhelmine era brought nature back into urban everyday experience, transforming the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. Sharma explores the history of natural healing in Germany and shows how social and medical practices that now seem foreign to contemporary eyes were, just decades ago, familiar to everyone from small children to their aged grandparents, from tradesmen and women to research scientists. Natural healing was not simply a way to cure illness. It was also seen as a way to build a more healthful society. Using interpretive methods drawn from the history of science and science studies, Sharma provides a readable and groundbreaking inquiry into how popular health and hygiene movements shaped German ideas about progress, modernity, nature, health, and the body at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.

Avi Sharma's book is a well-written presentation of the modern and positive aspects of German Naturheilkunde and Lebensreform, in which he combines description with substantiated critique on common historiography.

* Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Socie

ISBN: 9780875807041

Dimensions: 216mm x 140mm x 13mm

Weight: 454g

235 pages