How did typhus come to be viewed as a "Jewish disease" and what was the connection between the anti-typhus measures during the First World War and the Nazi gas chambers and other genocidal medical practices in the Second World War? This powerful book provides valuable new insight into the history of German medicine in its reaction to the international fight against typhus and the perceived threat of epidemics from the East in the early part of this century. Paul Weindling examines how German bacteriology became increasingly racialized, and how it sought to eradicate the disease by the eradication of the perceived carriers. Delousing became a key feature of Nazi preventive medicine during the Holocaust, and gassing a favored means of eliminating typhus. "Must reading for all historians interested in epidemiology and the Holocaust."-- CHOICE "Weindling...keeps the reader's attention through more than four hundred finely printed pages of this exceptionally well researched and well argued book....[A] brilliantly imaginative study."-- Bulletin of the History of Medicine Paul Weindling, Professor in History of Medicine, Oxford Brookes University.