[File management and authorship. Medical writing in Viktor von Weizsäcker's “Subject Medicine”].

Abstract

Many physicians in the first half of the 20th century were seeking to create a renewed medicine which would promote psychophysical unity in humans. This related not just to the patient but also to the physician who was expected to make use of his/her emotional and hermeneutic faculties. Viktor von Weizsäcker's “subject medicine“ (both its theory and the clinical departments he headed) offers an opportunity to examine how this program was put into practice. Focusing on writing as a central feature of medical routines, this paper asks to what extent physicians' individual authorship of elaborate medical histories and management of records based on hospital labor divisions succeeded in shaping a new professional identity.