Interaction between women and men has always been particularly intense in the field of health care and social services. Women were offered multiple opportunities for professional activities – more than in any other vocational sphere. On the other hand, female patients were highly sensitive as regards the male-female-relationship which often was one of control and (perceived) physical encroachment. Doctors not just examined, treated and advised but also controlled the social background and the individual habits of their female patients. While in recent years gender history has frequently dealt with the health system, this volume presents some current studies containing articles mostly based on research projects and dissertations. The volume is the result of an international conference at the “Universitaet der Bundeswehr” in Munich.

Although the title might suggest a bi-national comparison of women´s part in both the German and the British health system, only 4 out of 11 articles explicitly compare developments in both countries. The articles are distributed into three sections dealing with women as professionals like doctors (Cornelie Usborne; Paul Weindling) and welfare officers (Silke Fehlemann/Jörg Vögele; Sigrid Stöckel), mothers (Nicol Matzner-Vogel) and patients (Flurin Condrau). This wide range of topics opens insights into the various roles which women played and demonstrates that they were not just passive patients resp. victims. Moreover, they acted consciously and according to their class interests, often neglecting notions of female solidarity. The similarities between a female doctor with an academic background and a lower-class mother of seven children are rare – and gender-history in this respect reaches its limits, although the understanding of gender relations within the health system remains essential. Quite surprisingly one major role that females played in the health system has not been considered at all: there is no analysis or even mentioning of nurses, which account for the biggest female group within the health system next to the patients. Female doctors were a minority and a social elite. To include nurses into the discourse would therefore have enlarged the perspective on women from lower social classes and make the analyses more representative and evident.

However, the articles explain the differences between the British and the German health system, the latter distinguished by a high degree of social-medical control. The British health system encouraged combined concepts of prevention, consulting and therapy at an early stage of time, whereas the German system focussed on therapy alone. Here the public health insurance was responsible for financial transactions, while the National Health Service in Britain was financed on the grounds of taxes. The editors point out that the German system of a “strong” welfare-state had primarily been created to secure male labour force during the period of the industrial take-off. The British “weak” – or liberal – welfare system focussed on a larger group of individuals and was open to everyone. The German health system was closely tied to the concept of patriarchal supervision, which in fact strengthened gender differences resp. antagonisms. This sounds convincing although more proofs and comparisons might have been desirable. Moreover, in Germany, racial concepts became vital to the discourse on the people’s health, as Sabine Schleiermacher and Uwe Puschner demonstrate with their articles on the situation in the German Empire and during National Socialism.

Yet, both health systems are classified as patriarchal and clearly male-dominated according to the standard bourgeois set of ideas. The notion that veneral diseases are spread only by women with frequently changing sex-partners can be found at any times both in Britain and in Germany (Ulrike Lindner). Even the American military administration in Germany between 1945 and 1949 (Dagmar Ellerbrock) insinuated that German “loose” women and not the soldiers were responsible and therefore to be controlled and subject to compulsory examinations. The differences between both nations’ health system live on, as Charlotte Augst shows with the help of the parliamentary debates on reproductional technologies in the late 1980s. A – at least in German eyes – strikingly liberal law passed the British Parliament leaving the choice of how to get a baby mostly to women. Thus it becomes clear once again that a society´s set of rules and norms is founded on long-lived historical traditions.

This volume provides the reader with an insight into the latest gender approaches on women´s part in particularly the German health system. It shows how the historical category of gender determined the habits and perceptions of both men and women, whereas men clearly benefited by these more or less subtle distinctions. It is highly desirable to go ahead with this kind of bilateral or even multilateral international comparisons – not for the single goal of finding out if there was a German “Sonderweg” or not but to analyse the mechanisms resp. malfunctions of co-existence of both sexes in modern societies.