[An era of pioneers?--the weekly "Der Spiegel" and its reports on service medicine in Western Germany 1947-1955].

After 1945, Western medicine was influenced mostly by investigations from Britain and the USA. This paper deals with the presentation of German medicine in the German weekly "Der Spiegel" between 1947 and 1955, when German society changed from a post-war community focussed on survival to a modern western society. The paper will particularly focus on medicine as a service, dealing not with diagnostic and therapeutic innovations, but with troublesome every-day problems of body and soul at the border of health and disease. The paper argues that "service medicine" was an important tool for German medicine to achieve social acceptance and to integrate itself into the new German democratic society with its private market economy.