This archive-based study investigates tuberculosis policy in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from the 1940s to the 1960s. The focus is on the sanatorium as the major site of treatment and on BCG vaccination as the major preventive tool. The article tests and accepts the thesis that the GDR's guiding health paradigm is best described by the term "medicalized social hygiene." The article finds that methods of both treatment and prevention were characterized less by radical change and innovation than by tradition and pragmatism at least until the mid-1950s. Thus, "forced institutionalization" of "asocial" patients continued after 1945. Yet the health ministry long hesitated to make BCG vaccination obligatory. The German past, the Cold War context of German-German rivalry, and medical and popular attitudes toward vaccination, TB, and TB patients are considered as possible explanations for the mix of continuity and change in TB policy.
This article discusses women and gender relations under communism, beginning in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, continuing through the Cold War era in Eastern Europe, and including Cuba and China today. It addresses communist gender theory, ideology, and discourse. Women’s role in politics and government is discussed. The article covers employment and education, the peasant and urban family, social policies, and socialist consumption. Under communism, the article argues, women, especially married mothers, broke through traditional resistance to women’s participation in paid, including skilled, labour. Their levels of education and employment increased dramatically in most communist states. Yet women did not attain economic equality with men in any communist society and their share of political power remained stunningly low.
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