Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Scholarship on the history of intersex medicine has focused predominantly on Western European and North American contexts, while everyday clinical care in the GDR remains largely understudied. This project examines how internationally circulating concepts of sex assignment were translated into clinical routines in the GDR during the 1950s, and how these early stabilisations shaped later routinisation and local adaption in the 1970s and 1980s.

Methods: Drawing on a praxeological history of medicine, the study focuses on everyday clinical routines, decision-making processes and the implicit logics of treatment. Sources include a systematic analysis of the medical periodicals Kinderärztliche Praxis and Experimental and Clinical Endocrinology, unpublished archival materials from the University Children’s Hospital Leipzig and Oral History Interviews with three former paediatricians and surgeons, coded using MAXQDA.

Results: In the early 1950s, intersex variations framed in GDR medical literature as requiring prompt clarification, closely aligned with internationally circulating sex-assignment paradigms, especially John Money’s optimum gender of rearing model, and linked to administrative imperatives of early legal sex registration. As cortisone was introduced in the clinic in the early 1950s, congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) entered the discourse as a hormonally treatable condition. The introduction of cortisone transformed CAH into a chronic, manageable condition and reshaped sex-assignment decisions. CAH functioned as a gateway diagnosis: by normalising early intervention, it extended established clinical pathways to other forms of intersex variation. A 1957 publication by Waltraute Thieme (University Children’s Hospital Leipzig) illustrates the convergence, synthesising international research with local clinical cases. Findings from the 1950s closely resemble sex-assignment practices documented in Western Europe and the United States, pointing to the early adoption of internationally shared models within GDR clinical practice.

Conclusions: Medical treatment of people with variations in sex characteristics in the GDR was stabilised during the 1950s through internationally shared clinical paradigms, therapeutic innovation and administrative imperatives. Rather than representing a distinctly socialist medicine, early GDR clinical practice closely followed international models. These stabilisations provided the conditions for later local adaptions within socialist healthcare institutions. This finding contributes to a more differentiated picture of both history of intersex medicine and the place of GDR medicine within global health history.