Explore the vast range of titles available.

This volume is a collection of chapters that deal with issues of health, hygiene and eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945, specifically, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece and Romania. Its major concern is to examine the transfer of medical ideas to society via local, national and international agencies and to show in how far developments in public health, preventive medicine, social hygiene, welfare, gender relations and eugenics followed a regional pattern. This volume provides insights into a region that has to date been marginal to scholarship of the social history of medicine.

This article engages with the commonly encountered claim that Bulgarian physical anthropology \"features a long, fruitful, and honorable existence,\" by discussing Bulgarian anthropology's contribution to the controversial issue of ethnogenesis. With the Russian influence waning from the mid-1880s on, the pioneers of Bulgarian anthropology were largely influenced by the German example. But the first generation of Bulgarian anthropologists' tradition of \"racial liberalism\" (Benoit Massin) was lost after World War I. On the eve of World War II a debate on racism raged among Bulgarian intellectuals. By the time blood group analysis had joined anthropometrics, adherents of a closer collaboration with the Third Reich used it to argue for the Bulgarian nation's non-Slavic origins. In 1938 they even disrupted a lecture given by the biologist Metodiy Popov when he wanted to stress the Bulgarians' ethnic relationship with the other Slavic nations, and to repudiate the idea of a hierarchy of races. During the Socialist period a new generation of anthropologists went on to investigate the Bulgarian ethnogenesis using the term \"race\", although this clearly contravened the 1950 UNESCO statement on the race question.

In the spring of 1928, a local typhus epidemic broke out in Sofia-two people, among them a fiscal officer, died. At that time, typhus was one of the most dangerous infectious diseases, feared for its high mortality rate, with doctors putting their lives at risk in suppressing such epidemics. The appearance of this lethal disease (in the capital city of Bulgaria and, furthermore, among the urban middle class) was a matter for discussion for the Bulgarian parliament, which agreed unanimously on the issue. Iliya Yanulov (1880-1962), professor of jurisprudence and deputy of the Social Democrat party, used the incident to criticize Sofia's sanitary services. He complained that the Roma could walk unmolested through the city in their search for garbage. Georgi Danailov (1872-1939), professor of political economy and member of the ruling Democratic Alliance, took up Yanulov's criticism and proclaimed that in the interest of public health, Sofia's Roma population should have been removed from the city long ago. 1

In the 1942 issue of the German-Bulgarian Society Yearbook (DeutschBulgarische Gesellschaft), the Bulgarian zoologist Stefan Konsulov (1885-1954) contributed a piece on the \"nature of the Bulgarian.\" One page was devoted to Bulgarian attitudes towards racial hygiene: In the past, the selection of bride and groom was made by the aged, by those who were well experienced [...]. In its essence, the nature of this responsibility was definitely racial hygienic. As in many cases the Bulgarian people expressed their experience of the past in coarse proverbs and popular sayings. To quote one of the many racial hygienic proverbs: 'Take dogs and women from a good tribe!' The relatives of the mate carefully investigate the tribe and the descent of the bride and the groom: whether the members of the family are economically active, quarrelsome, alcoholics or mentally disabled and so on; and after having finished preparations for marriage, the women of the kin of the groom accompany the bride to a bathing place, while the men of the bride's kin accompany the groom in the same process. Therewith each group should take a close look at the body of the future mate and ascertain whether there are any defects, which may have been hidden by clothing. 1

In 1819 the Austrian poet Franz Grillparzer journeyed to Italy, visiting the crownland of Styria, whose southern part was populated by Slovenes. Leaving the German-speaking part of the country, he wrote in his journal: The landscape is changing here. The beautiful, cheerful region of the German Styrians ends and that of the Slovenes begins.… The landscape is increasingly barren and unpleasant, the cottages throughout Slovene Styria are filthy; the people look poor, the children ran some one-half mile along with the coach begging for money.¹ Grillparzer, who is known as a fierce opponent of all forms of nationalism, German or

The historic myths of a people/nation usually play an important role in the creation and consolidation of the basic concepts from which the self-image of that nation derives. These concepts include not only images of the nation itself, but also images of other peoples. Although the construction of ethnic stereotypes during the \"long\" nineteenth century initially had other functions than simply the homogenization of the particular culture and the exclusion of \"others\" from the public sphere, the evaluation of peoples according to criteria that included \"level of civilization\" yielded \"rankings\" of ethnic groups within the Habsburg Monarchy. That provided the basis for later, more divisive ethnic characterizations of exclusive nationalism, as addressed in this volume that examines the roots and results of ethnic, nationalist, and racial conflict in the region from a variety of historical and theoretical perspectives.

Demography and nation: Social legislation and population policy in Bulgaria, 1918-1944, by Svetla Baloutzova, (CEU Press Studies in the History of Medicine, vol. I), Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2011. Pp. 296. $45.00 (ISBN 978-9-639-77666-1).

In a programmatic text on \"Health Politics\" penned immediately after the end of the First World War, the pioneer of social medicine in interwar Yugoslavia, Andrija Štampar (1888-1958), identified the emergence of a \"national and social renaissance,\" which he insisted was \"at the same time a health renaissance.\" 1 Guided by this vision, this volume engages with developments in the history of health, hygiene and eugenics in Southeastern Europe and the national contexts within which these developments took place. The geographic scope of what is usually understood as Southeastern Europe (Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, the former Yugoslavia and Romania) inevitably carries with it various conceptual problems, including asymmetrical comparisons between Central and Western Europe and the countries in the region. This juxtaposition of different, and often antagonistic, perceptions of European symbolic geographies presents a picture of intellectual and cultural history that is characterized by more complex processes of scientific appropriation and knowledge transfer across European countries during the first half of the twentieth century than was previously assumed.