A Short History of Romantic Medicine

At the start of the 1700s, scientists took on the challenge of penetrating the lawful mysteries of vital nature (natura naturans) using the same methodology that had proven so successful for inert nature. As we saw in Volume I of this series, Past as Prologue, the initial, formative phase of Romantic medicine provided a considered rational foundation for a more effective approach, based on a vital dynamics, to deal with the issues of health and longevity, illness and death. This...
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At the start of the 1700s, scientists took on the challenge of penetrating the lawful mysteries of vital nature (natura naturans) using the same methodology that had proven so successful for inert nature. As we saw in Volume I of this series, Past as Prologue, the initial, formative phase of Romantic medicine provided a considered rational foundation for a more effective approach, based on a vital dynamics, to deal with the issues of health and longevity, illness and death. This foundation not only offered a resolution to the crisis of Western medicine at that time, but now, as further developed over the last two centuries, again provides the very foundation needed to resolve a similar crisis in our time. Today's healthcare crisis is a repetition of that which medicine faced two centuries earlier because philosophy, science and healthcare rejected the vital path blazed by the Romantic movement and chose instead, starting in the latter half of the 1800s, to tred the more familiar materialistic and mechanistic path laid down for inert nature. The underlying assumption is that the laws governing the 'living' (vital nature) were derived from and could be reduced to those governing the 'dead' (inert nature), that mind was a product of matter. Science, the methodical, rational inquiry into nature, was essentially reduced and restricted to the study of the inert (inertial sciences). In rejecting the path blazed by the Romantic movement, however, material science rejected any direct approach to the mysteries of Life, and its many adherents became effectively 'children of a lesser god'.Romantic philosophy and science was able to establish that the laws prevailing in vital nature are not the same as those governing inert nature, though accepting that the latter play an important secondary role (physics, chemistry) given that living organisms also involve a material body. This is the story set out in Part I of this series, Past as Prologue.The initial phase of the Romantic revolution in science and medicine was not able sufficiently to develop and ground its dynamic insights and understandings (the requisite developments in physiology, biochemistry and biophysics not having yet emerged) in the face of the growing materialistic and mechanistic tendency as reflected in the great Age of Industrialisation. The materialistic worldview favored intellectual-based knowledge (Wissenschaft) of the outer form of things (quantitative and sense-based), and discouraged, if not disparaged and devalued, that noetic knowledge (Erkenntnisslehre) related to the inner essence of things (qualitiave and phenomenolgical) arising out of a new organ of cognition (Goethe's Gemüt). However, 'a few good men' resisted the siren call of materialism. These individuals worked mostly alone to advance the understanding of vital nature and resist an increasingly a materialistic paradigm that sought to reduce illness to germs and physiology to biochemistry, ignoring the internal and external environment that made one more or less susceptible to them, and essentially removing regimenal factors (nutrition, hydration, respiration, toxification, dormition, exercise, sun, etc.) from consideration in healthcare.By the 1950s, it appeared that mechano-material science and the medical system based on it ('Better Living Through Chemistry'), had fully eclipsed and driven its opponents from the field. However, the pioneering work to validate and advance a more holistic approach to illness based on a dynamic view of life (vital science) provided the foundation for a significant advance several decades later, the results of which are now coming to fruition.