Born of a postgraduate course in May of 1988, this volume delivers what its title purports. The intent of the course and text was to integrate the fields of medicine, history, and legislation around the catastrophic events of World War II in western Europe. It was hoped that trends and lessons for the future could be identified.
First, a historical background of medical care in the Netherlands before, during, and after the war is provided. The medical aspects of the Nazi invasion and occupation, primarily focusing on stress, form the more interesting corpus of the work. Introducing the medical section are brief and somewhat cursory overviews of the neuroendocrine and immunologic aspects of stress as well as starvation. Subsequent chapter titles, however, such as "The Pathophysiology of Imprisonment, Deportation, and Resistance," reflect some of the difficulty of hybridizing basic medical science with history.
Some of the theories presented, such as