The onset of large-scale worker immigration to West-Germany in the 1950s opened a new chapter in the history of medical care, a chapter that today, more than thirty years later, has not yet come to a close. Because the migrant workers came from other cultures and accordingly brought with them different concepts and customs concerning therapeutic measures, this wave of immigrants — like the later medical challenges in the countries encompassed under the term "third world" — had an impact upon both the forms of comunication and the forms of knowledge in the medical world.