[Biography as discipline tradition. The idealization of the pharmacologist Wolfgang Heubner (1877-1957)].

Abstract

Taking a german professor of pharmacology, Wolfgang Heubner (1877-1957), as an example, the paper shows how hagiographic traditions were used to construct a scientific ideal in Post-War Germany. This ideal tended to (re-)legitimate German Science after World War II and to justify institutional and personal continuities in the 1950s, but I argue that it is a specific construction of the 1950s, thus serving to build a new image of science in a democratic society.