Frank's System of Medical Police

In 1766, when Frank was 21 and finishing his medical degree at Heidelberg, the dean, Oberkamp, asked what original work he hoped to do. Many diseases, Frank answered, needed some form of public control that a doctor and a patient could not supply alone. Oberkamp replied that there were only scattered ordinances. Frank meant to write the whole system, and he already had a name for it: medicinische Polizey, medicine administered by the officers of the state. He had a volume written by 1768. The Karlsruhe publisher Macklot turned it down, and Frank burned the manuscript.

In the years that followed he taught courses for midwives, with demonstrations and examinations. As town and county physician in Bruchsal he had charge of the garrison hospital and of the poor relief institutions of 36 villages, and he became personal physician to the Prince-Bishop of Speyer. In his autobiography he claimed that his supervision of midwives in one community cut maternal deaths from 1 in 85 pregnancies to 1 in 125. In 1776 he printed a Latin circular asking scholars to send him the health decrees of princes.

The first volume, its preface signed at Bruchsal in 1778, came out at Mannheim from the bookseller C. F. Schwan in 1779. Frank defined medical police as the part of the science of police that guards the health of people living in society, and of the animals they need for work and food. This volume dealt with celibacy, with marriages made too young, too late or between unhealthy partners, with the upbringing of girls as future mothers, with the protection of pregnant women and the unborn, and with care in labour and after birth. The third volume, of 1783, covered food and drink, dress, public amusements and the building and cleanliness of houses.

The book made Frank famous. After a year at Göttingen he moved in 1785 to Pavia, where he rose to direct the medical services of Austrian Lombardy and in 1790 spoke on the misery of the people as the mother of diseases. From 1795 he directed the General Hospital in Vienna; later posts took him to Vilnius and St Petersburg. The fourth volume of the System appeared in 1788, the fifth in 1813 and the sixth, in Vienna, from 1817 to 1819. Frank died in Vienna on 24 April 1821.