Abstract

Abstract.While historians of science have demonstrated that in the late eighteenth century the emergence of the human sciences went along with the sexualization and medicalization of women, they paid almost no attention to the development of a medical knowledge on male (in)fertility. This paper argues that in the early twentieth century, the scientific investigation of the male role in reproduction was due to the rise of eugenics and the racial sciences. In order to illustrate this relation, I will discuss how in the context of the Nazi population and racial policy new research outcomes in the field of male (in)fertiliy research were achieved. More generally, I want to show that the transformation of man into a reproductive being and an object of medical knowledge is not only relevant for the history of reproductive medicine, but also for the history of the human sciences in the twentieth century.