Alfred Grotjahn

GROTJAHN, Alfred (born 1869), is one of the most significant representatives of social hygiene. In terms of his theoretical views and practical activities, however, he is a representative of radical bourgeois thought and an exponent of the ideology of modern German social democracy in the field of social policy. The son and grandson of a physician, Grotjahn took up medicine more out of family tradition; his personal inclinations drew him toward socio-economic sciences. Grotjahn attended lectures on sociology and economics and later participated in the well-known political-economic seminar of G. Schmoller.

Having begun (1896) to work in Berlin as a practicing physician and

becoming a pioneer

he asserts the necessity

of studying social

factors of health; in his "Social Pathology," Grotjahn re-examines the main groups of diseases from the point of view of their social conditioning, laws of spread, social consequences, and the paths of public struggle against them. Grotjahn published a number of social-hygienic works, edited an annual comprehensive bibliographic review of literature on social hygiene in the major European languages ("Jahresberichte über soziale Hygiene u. Demographie," Berlin, since 1902), in 1906 founded the solid journal "Zeitschrift für soziale Hygiene," organized together with R. Lenhoff the Society for Social Hygiene, and published together with J. Kaup the "Handwörterbuch der sozialen Hygiene" (Vol. I–II, Leipzig, 1912). From 1920, Grotjahn, who substantially contributed to the formation of social hygiene as a distinct discipline, became (the first in Germany) an ordinary professor of social hygiene at the University of Berlin. In his later years, Grotjahn was engaged primarily in questions of declining birth rates and eugenics, being a proponent of the rationalization of human reproduction. Grotjahn was a deputy of the Reichstag in 1920–24 and a member of the All-German and Prussian Health Councils. The main works of Grotjahn: "Soziale Pathologie, Versuch einer Lehre von den sozialen Beziehungen der Krankheiten als Grundlage der sozialen Hygiene" (1st ed., Berlin, 1912; 3rd ed., Berlin, 1923; Russian edition—Moscow, 1925–26); "Geburtenrückgang und Geburtenregelung im Lichte der individuellen und sozialen Hygiene" (Berlin, 1921); "Hygiene der menschlichen Fortpflanzung, Versuch einer praktischen Eugenik" (Berlin, 1926).

The text provided for this entry was fragmented due to OCR errors; the translation above reconstructs the biographical narrative based on the available context.