NATIONAL-SOCIALISM AND MEDICINE
Address by Dr. F. Hamburger to German Medical Profession.
Translated (in part) from Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift, 1939, No. 6.
Medical men must beware of pride, a pride which is certainly wide-spread and which leads to the disparagement of the practical doctor and medical layman, and then further to the disparagement of the craft of nature healers. The practical doctor and the nature healer on the one hand tend towards an understandable disparagement of medical science and analysis and, on the other hand, tend towards superficiality. The superficiality of the opponents of science is, however, as unhappy an affair as the pride of the so-called scientists, but the one group should not demean the other. This would lead to successful cooperation to the advantage of the sick and health of the community.
Academic medicine and nature healers generally have one thing in common, that they underestimate the significance of automatism and suggestion. In this regard there is an absence in both camps of the necessary criticism and clarity. Successes are noted with specific methods without any confirmation as to whether or not suggestion and faith alone have not produced the improvement in the patient.
National-Socialism is the true instrument for the achievement of the health of our people. National-Socialism is concerned with the great significance of inherited traits and with the insight into the working of spiritual forces upon the body, with the study of the power of custom and, along with this, of the significance of education and nurture. (Hamburger here complains about the luxurious arrangement for dealing with the mentally ill in contradistinction to the neglect of Folk-health. This he attributes to the era of liberalism with its stress upon the single individual. He here also attacks the Socialism of Social Democracy and its conception of a Community of Equal Men. This is a false Socialism.)
So we scientists and doctors simply and soberly affirm the principle of strength of faith and the nationalist socialist principle of Positive Christianity which does not prevent us from the inspired consideration of natural and divinely willed phenomena. We doctors must never forget the fact that the soul rules the body.
Soul forces are the most important. The spirit builds the body. Strength springs from joy. Efficiency is achieved despite care, fear, and uncertainty—We speak here of thymogenetic automatism or the automatism of harmony ("thymogenetische automatismus oder stimmungsautomatismus"). The autonomous nervous system achieves, under the influence of joy, the expansion of the blood vessels in skin and muscle.... The muscular activity incited by joy means the use of calories and stimulation of appetite. Muscular contraction pulls and draws at the bones, ligaments are tensed, breathing deepend, appetite increased ... A child influenced by the daily exercise of joy develops physically strong and powerful. ... The Soul care (Seele Sorge) of the practical doctor is his most significant daily task alongside of prescriptions and manipulative dexterity.
Soul-care in the medical sense is a concern for the wishes, hopes and fears of the patient, the considered participation in his fate. Such a relationship leads to the all-important and generally recognized trust in the doctor. This faith, in all cases, leads to the improvement, often even to the elimination of symptoms, of the disease. Here we have clearly before us the great significance of thymogenetic automatism.
Academic physicians should not dismiss this because we do not know its biochemical aspects. (We must beware of regarding something as unacceptable because it is not measurable in exact terms, he warns.) We see its practical results, and, therefore, thymogenetic automatism must stand in the first rank as of overwhelming significance. Thus, also, the principle, strength through joy (Kraft durch Freude) stands firmly as an inescapable natural law.