[Experiments on living subjects: the vivisection debate in German and British medical weekly journals 1919-1939].

By the end of the 1920s, animal experiments were considered a standardized procedure for testing medical substances and therapies. In the context of the so-called "crisis of medicine", however, some physicians and the wider lay public in Germany and Great Britain criticized animal based research. While British antivivisectionists had little relevance in the 1930s, their German counterparts allied with the National Socialist Party and gained social and political force. The debates within the German and British medical profession about doctors' interventions in that debate, as well as the public perception of doctors will be analysed on the basis of the most important medical weekly journals of the time, that were involved in these debates.