August Sander’s Portfolio “The Doctor and the Pharmacist”: German Patients between Professional and Lay Medicine

Abstract

This article takes photographer August Sander’s portfolio “The Doctor and the Pharmacist” as an opportunity to reflect on tensions and fractures in German medicine in the modern era. This group of twelve portraits, which includes both professional and—in the person of three practitioners of alternative medicine—non-professional physicians, draws attention to the complex and often contradictory process of boundary formation that accompanied the emergence of scientific medicine in the early twentieth century. The article also considers the complex relation of the photographic medium itself to this process of boundary formation.