Illness was an equalizer; medicine was not designed to discriminate. “Admission to a hospital must be open to every ill person who stands in need of it,” he wrote, “whether he has money or not, whether he is Jewish or heathen.”32 In 1859, he was elected to the Berlin City Council (and eventually, in the 1880s, to the Reichstag). And he began to witness in Germany the resurgence of a malignant form of radical nationalism that would eventually culminate in the Nazi state. The central myth of what would later be termed “Aryan” racial superiority, and a nation dominated by “clean” Volk who were
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