Doing Drugs in Socialist East Germany: Gendered Prescription and (Ab)use of Pharmaceuticals in the GDR, 1949–1989

Based on the examples of treating sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) after the World War II, the distribution of Western insulin at the beginning of the 1960s, and the issue of addiction and the use of aversion therapy during the last two decades of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), this article investigates gender-specific experiences of patients in a socialist society. The District of Dresden is used as a microstudy to examine state authorities as policy makers, doctors as prescribers, and patients as consumers. It shows that persistent gender bias and traditional gender roles affected the social and medical treatment of people with STDs, diabetes, or addiction, to the detriment of women. Doctors withheld penicillin after 1945, for example, using the outdated therapy for STDs to educate their female patients. More broadly, this article contributes to the ever-growing body of literature that complicates the medical and sociocultural history of the GDR.