[Medical Knowledge in Accident Insurance : Assessing "Pneumatic Tool Damages" at the Bergmannsheil Hospital,...

The article focuses on one central element of medical activity in the context of the German social insurance system: providing expert assessments in accident pension cases. Taking an example from interwar coal mining, it aims to reconstruct how social policy makers first conceived of "pneumatic tool damages" as occupational disease and how trauma surgeons had to deal with this new entity of social law once it had been institutionalized in 1929. Drawing on physicians' publications as well as archival sources from the supreme court in social insurance, the Reichsversicherungsamt, the article examines how the controversial generation of new knowledge took place. It argues that medical knowledge was neither simply applied to administration and law nor was it compromised by the necessity to adjust it to those fields of decision-making. Expert medical opinions should instead be understood as a specific form of medical knowledge.