PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This paper arises in connection with a presentation given by the author at the Digital Humanities and Gender History conference in February 2021. The aim of this paper is to show that the Berliner Klinische Wochenschrift, which was published in the period 1864-1921, is a suitable source for gender history questions by offering an exemplary gender history narrative. Since the corpus comprises a total of over 73,000 pages, it was made machine-readable by means of so-called OCR procedures in order to prepare it for the methodological procedure of blended reading. On the methodological level, it will be shown how this immense amount of data can be explored in the sense of distant reading by using visualizations on the basis of algorithmically determined word frequencies and how findings can be extracted from the exploration that can be analyzed by close reading procedures. Drawing on Foucault's concept of biopolitics, the study examines the extent to which physicians became political actors during the First World War by deciding on pension payments for physically and psychologically war-disabled soldiers. In doing so, doctors decided not only on the soldiers' disease status but also on the devaluation of their masculinity. This article focuses on these facts in order to show that doctors acted as biopolitical actors during the First World War and created forms of deviant masculinity.