Erwin Heinz Ackerknecht (1 June 1906 – 18 November 1988) was an active and influentialTrotskyist in the 1930s who had to flee Germany in 1933 afterHitler’s rise to power. It was in the United States, the country that granted him citizenship, that Ackerknecht became an influential historian of medicine. He wrote groundbreaking works on the social and ecological dimensions of disease and was a forerunner of contemporary trends in social andcultural history. He became the first Chair in the history of medicine at theUniversity of Wisconsin; the second such position in the United States.^[1]

Erwin Heinz Ackerknecht was born inStettin, now calledSzczecin. His father, Dr.Erwin Julius Ackerknecht [de], was a renowned librarian, author, literary critic and professor of literary history. He studiedmedicine (and sporadically economics, history of literature and arts) eventually graduating from theUniversity of Leipzig in 1931 with a dissertation on a study ofGerman medical reform in 1848. Throughout his studies Ackerknecht was affiliated with communist student groups inFreiburg,Berlin andVienna; in 1926 he joined the KJVT (Kommunistischer Jugendverband Deutschlands; Communist Youth Federation of Germany) and then the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands;Communist Party of Germany). As a student he was known as the leader of the KoStyFra (Kommunistische Studentenfraktion; Communist Student's Fraction). Together withRobert Soblen andOtto Schüssler he founded in 1928 a small oppositional group atLeipzig called the Bolschewistische Einheit (Bolshevik Unity). He was also affiliated with the Lenin League. In March 1934, Ackerknecht became one of the founding members of the United Left Opposition. Meanwhile, he was expelled from the KPD. After having moved from Leipzig to Berlin, he became a member of the 'political committee' of the Left Opposition of the KPD, the "Bolshevists-Leninists, the official German branch of the International Left Opposition led byLeon Trotsky and his sonLev Sedov. Ackerknecht closely co-operated with Sedov, Grylewicz and other prominent activists of the Trotskyist movement and became a co-editor and staff writer of the LO using the pseudonymBauer.^[2]

When the Nazis seized power in Germany, Ackerknecht, now one of the central figures of German Trotskyism, went underground. He fled Germany in June 1933, spent a short time inCzechoslovakia and paid a visit toLeon Trotsky in exile inTurkey. He eventually broke withTrotskyism andMarxism and turned his back to political activism. However, his opposition againstNazism and right wing politics of all kinds remained unrelenting. While in exile inParis he earned his living as a translator and began to studyethnography at theMusée de l'Homme withMarcel Mauss,Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, andPaul Rivet. He graduated from theSorbonne shortly before the outbreak ofWorld War II. He joined theFrench army and eventually fled to southern France where he waited for several months for his American visa. He arrived inNew York City in July 1941 together with his second wife.^[2]

He was first employed as a fellow in the history of medicine atJohns Hopkins University while working as assistant curator at theAmerican Museum of Natural History. He was then offered a position as theUniversity of Wisconsin's first Chair in the history of medicine. HisA short history of medicine, was published in 1955 but the most active years of his academic life was when he moved to theUniversity of Zurich (Switzerland), a position he kept until his retirement in 1971.^[2]

He died inZurich in 1988.

His most influential work was published in the 1940s and 1960s. His major contributions, namely on ethnomedicine, on the reconstruction of the Paris Clinical School, on the ecologically oriented study of nineteenth-century malaria, on a 'behavioral' approach to medical history, on the generally neglected history of therapeutics, and situating medical knowledge in a broad context, have become so intellectually assimilated that they have become 'invisible'.^[1]

• Malaria in the upper Mississippi Valley, 1760-1900, Supplements to the Bulletin of the History of Medicine ; No. 4. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1945.
• History and Geography of the Most Important Diseases, New York: Hafner Pub. Co., 1965.
• Medicine at the Paris Hospital, 1794–1848, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967.
• A Short History of Psychiatry, 2nd ed. New York: Hafner Pub. Co., 1968.
• Medicine and Ethnology: Selected Essays. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.
• Therapeutics from the primitives to the 20th century (with an appendix: History of dietetics). New York: Hafner Press, 1973.
• Rudolf Virchow. The Development of Science. New York: Arno Press, 1981.
• A Short History of Medicine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

• 1906 births
• 1988 deaths
• Politicians from Szczecin
• People from the Province of Pomerania
• Communist Party of Germany politicians
• Socialist Workers' Party of Germany politicians
• American historians of science
• American medical historians
• German Trotskyists
• Leipzig University alumni
• University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty
• Writers from Wisconsin
• Emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States
• Commanders Crosses of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
• 20th-century American historians
• American male non-fiction writers
• 20th-century American male writers
• German expatriate academics in the United States

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