Mission statement

Welcome to the Gaeromed Db (short for: German Aeromedical Database).

This site is a “by-product” or “left-over” from my PhD work, which only partially dealt with German aviation medicine. However, I collected much more material on the topic than I have actually used for my thesis (as you do). After using that material to publish some articles and give presentations, I decided to create a small bio-bibliographic database in order to carry out a network analysis of the data. After a while, I realized that the database might be of interest to other scholars as well, given that a lot of the information is somewhat hard to obtain outside Germany.

The site is work in progress, so make sure you check back often. I am grateful for feedback, corrections or additions. However, as I have moved on to other research topics, I develop the site and database in my spare time, basically. Thus, don't expect a quick turn-around time, please. I know that there are some things left to be desired, such as translating terms from German to English, or biographical data yet to be researched, but that's why I said the site is work-in-progress. :-)

I focus on publications dedicated to aviation medicine (such as journals or monographs) on this site, and ignore publications in general medical or aeronautical journals from the period (like Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, Pflüger's Archiv, or Luftwissen) as publications on aviation medicine in them are rather random. However, I may change that approach at one point to look at publications before 1933, i.e. when there were no journals dedicated to aviation medicine in Germany, to show co-authorship before that time (Hubertus Strughold, for example, published papers with Hermann Rein in the 1920s already).

Nomenclatur

Dates on this site are given in ISO 8601 format, including for incomplete dates. For example, a date like “1945-04” refers to “April 1945”, a date like “1935-05-10” refers to “10 May 1935”.

Place names are usually given in English spelling. Where historic places and adminstrative affiliation is concerned, these are maintained — such as places belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Empire at a certain date, which does not exist anymore, obviously, and the place might now be a part of another state. This in no way means any kind of political statement (like revisionism), but is just a tribute to historic correctness. The site gives links into the GeoNames website for every place, which gives the current place name and affiliation, among other things.

Some German terms are difficult to render into English, as they often have a specific cultural and historical context. While every effort is made to give a proper translation, some terms may have to be left in its original form, and there might not be enough space to give an explanation. I hope this can be sorted out, so please bear with me for the time being.