[The war at home: "war amenorrhea" in the First World War]

In 1917, the Göttingen gynaecologist Dietrich published a short article about a phenomenon which he called "war amenorrhea" ("Kriegsamenorrhoe"). The article attracted the attention of his colleagues. While the affected women did not pay much attention to their amenorrhea, the physicians considered the phenomenon a new disease which was mainly caused by the war. This new disease gave the gynaecologists the opportunity to present their specialty as a discipline with high relevance for medicine in times of war. Nevertheless, there was no consensus about the importance, the incidence, the diagnostic criteria, the causes and the appropriate therapy of"war amenorrhea". Although the gynaecologists failed to define a uniform clinical syndrome, they maintained the construction of "war amenorrhea" after the war and subsumed it under well known types of amenorrhea. We can conclude that under the conditions of war a new disease emerged which was not sharply defined.