VIRUS Band 23, pp. 71-88, 2025/04/24
Schwerpunkt: Mensch - Tier - Gesundheit
At the beginning of the 20th century, syphilis was one of the most feared diseases. Intensive medical research on the disease was considered crucial to improving its curability, which moti-vated many changes in research practices until the 1920s. All these changes had one thing in common: they involved a large number of animals. The purpose of this article is to focus on those animals and to explore their shifting roles in syphilis research: In what ways were they and their bodies used? What was the nature of human-animal relationships? What were the ‘advantages’ of animal experiments over human ones? Using the example of two German researchers involved in many experiments (mostly on rabbits), this article links previous research on the history of animal experimentation to the specifics of syphilis – a highly stigma-tized disease with moral implications. It also shows how ideas about a human venereal disease were transferred to animal experiments.
Keywords: Syphilis, medical history, animal experiments, human-animal relations, 20th century, German Empire
