This collection of chapters deals 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.

Introduction : Framing Issues of Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe
Christian Promitzer, Sevasti Trubeta and Marius Turda

Part I: German Eugenic Paradigms
Racial Expertise and German Eugenic Strategies for Southeastern Europe, Paul Weindling

Part II: Hygiene and Health Politics
Orientalizing Disease. Austro-Hungarian Policies of ‘Race,’ Gender and Hygiene in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1874–1914, Brigitte Fuchs
Typhus, Turks, and Roma: Hygiene and Ethnic Difference in Bulgaria, 1912–1944, Christian Promitzer
Health Policy and Private Care: Malaria Sanitization in Early Twentieth Century Greece, Katerina Gardika
Combating Infant Mortality in Bulgaria: Welfare Activities, National Propaganda, and the Establishment of Pediatrics, 1900–1940, Kristina Popova
Politics, Modernization and Public Health in Greece: The Case of Occupational Health, 1900–1940, Leda Papastefanaki
‘Like Yeast in Fermentation’: Public Health in Interwar Yugoslavia, Željko Dugac

Part III: Eugenics and Reproduction
Marital Health and Eugenics in Bulgaria, 1878–1940, Gergana Mircheva
Eugenic Birth Control and Prenuptial Health Certification in Interwar Greece, Sevasti Trubeta
Eugenics and ‘Puericulture’: Medical Attempts to Improve the ‘Biological Capital’ in Interwar Greece, Vassiliki Theodorou and Despina Karakatsani
Controlling the National Body: Ideas of Racial Purification in Interwar Romania, 1918–1944, Marius Turda
The Eugenic Fortress: Alfred Csallner and the Saxon Eugenic Discourse in Interwar Romania, Tudor Georgescu
Fighting the White Plague: Demography and Abortion in the Independent State of Croatia, Rory Yeomans

Part IV: New Research Agendas
Remapping the Historiography of Modernization and State-Building in Southeastern Europe through Hygiene, Health and Eugenics, Maria Bucur

Andy Byford, Slavonica (April 2012)

"Individual chapters are rich in detail and provide informative historical overviews of their respective case studies. Despite the fact that authors deal with different countries or different eugenic and public health issues, the contributions are thematically well integrated, with numerous interconnecting strands of argument between them. The editors' introduction and the concluding discussion by Maria Bucur are both helpful in bringing together the volume's core themes, placing them in the context of modernization, nation-state formation and racial discourse as these apply to South East Europe as a whole".

Galina Goncharova, Aspasia ( Vol 7, 2013)

"It is easy to agree with the editors of the second volume of the CEU Press Studies in the History of Medicine about the general contribution of the authors of the chapters, which they see as a precise reconstruction of the “international diff usion of health, hygiene and eugenics and their implementation” (20) in diff erent regional contexts. Taking as a starting point the claim for a national and social renaissance in the interwar period, they undertake the ambitious task of presenting, in a comparative framework, important episodes in the establishment of professional and institutional networks of public health policies in Southeastern Europe up to 1945. ... The sequence of chapters in the book corresponds to the aim of the editors and contributors to reveal the diverse dynamics of modernization and the medicalization of social life in Southeastern Europe. ... The index, containing scientifi c and popular concepts and the names of prominent physicians, political leaders, and... more

Galina Goncharova, Aspasia ( Vol 7, 2013)

Patrick T. Merricks, Medical History (April 2013)

"A superb collection.... Such incisive and intriguing contributions to this field suggest that there are exciting times ahead for the history of this fascinating region."

Paul A. Hanebrink, Slavic Review (Winter 2012)

"The contributors to this volume show collectively that connections between state building and health policy, hygiene, and eugenics develop differently in a particular regional context like southeastern Europe. Second, the historians who present their fi ndings here insist that medical and technical aspects of debates around issues of social hygiene, health policy, or eugenics must be taken seriously in their own right, before these debates can be understood in larger political and ideological contexts. These pleas for disciplinary and regional specifi city make this an especially exciting and thought-provoking volume."