A Survey of Historical Works on Pandemics in the German Language

The paper gives a brief overview of the historiography of infectious diseases published in German between 1792 and 2021, the majority of which was published after 1949. 3502 titles (articles and books) were selected from several printed bibliographies and online catalogues (for full data set, see https://doi.org/ 10.5281/zenodo.7096887). 71.1% of the titles are from West or Unified Germany, 5.6% from the GDR (1945-89), 13.8% from Austria and 8.4% from Switzerland. More than 40% cover the modern period, followed by the early modern period. The historiographical approaches represented by the titles are outlined, the themes addressed are mapped and the diseases covered are analysed. The approaches include all the major trends in the history of medicine, from biographies and the history of ideas to the social history of medicine and the linguistic, cultural, practical, and material turns. Topics covered include the relationship between the history of infectious diseases and medicine as a science, including debates about retrospective diagnosis or paleopathology. In addition, the social aspects of pandemics, their political dimension, vaccination, and military aspects are extensively covered. Comparative studies with a focus on the two German states are also on the agenda, as are Nazi health policies and experiments. The disease that receives the most attention is the Black Death, followed by cholera, leprosy, and smallpox. However, new diseases such as AIDS are on the rise in more recent literature. German-language literature covers similar approaches, topics, and diseases as other European languages. However, literature from Germany itself shows some special features with regard to uniquely German contexts such as the history of National Socialism and the existence of two German states between 1949 and 1989.