Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

The paper examines the history of constitutional therapy in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Focusing on Walter Jaensch’s “Institute for Constitutional Therapy” in Berlin, it shows how a medical scientist successfully negotiated the changing social and political landscape of two very different political regimes. The focus will be on Jaensch’s visual diagnostic system which promised to diagnose children and youths with “developmental inhibitions” based on images of their capillaries. The structure of children’s capillaries, Jaensch claimed, could be determined through the microscopic examination of their skin. The resulting capillary image (Kapillarbild) could then be read like a text which revealed children’s mental age. Jaensch successfully positioned himself as a researcher on the verge of developing new diagnostics and therapies for feebleminded people, who threatened to become an intolerable burden on the German state. During the Nazi period he cast himself as a racial hygienist by convincing influential medical leaders that his ideas were a valuable complement to the negative eugenics of Nazi racial policies. “Constitutional therapy,” he claimed, could turn genetically healthy people with “inhibited mental development” into fully productive citizens and therefore make a valuable contribution to Nazi bio-politics.