History of Psychosomatic Medicine As Scientifically-Based Medicine in Europe: Approaching the Experience

Abstract

The history of humanist-scientific psychosomatic medicine (PM) in Europe can be traced to three sources: liberal, nondogmatic thought of the Upper Italian Renaissance, especially from Pomponazzi at the University of Padua (about 1520); discovery of the circulatory system by William Harvey (1627); theologic-philosophically founded individual autonomy from Martin Luther (1517) based on Erasmus von Rotterdam’s humanism. – Not the Church mediates between man and God/environment, instead, man relates independently to each (sola fide); at any time or place, the individual’s experience of NOW (here) becomes significant, and experience and word become flesh to live upon (to dwell). – Pursuit of autonomy develops from this, leading to Sydenham’s novel method of nosology (1685). Under Boerhaave’s influence (about 1720; Leiden, Netherlands), holistic, educational and research insights emerge all across Europe (France, Austria, England, Scotland, Ireland, Switzerland). In Germany this progresses to Romantic Medicine (Carus, Heinroth, Hufeland, Muller) around 1820. In its succession traumatic neurosis (Oppenheim) as an equivalent to today’s PTSD is described, as is transference/counter transference (Freud) in 1914 as a ubiquitous phenomenon in medicine and in 1930 aspects of psychosomatic treatment of patients in an internistic university hospital in a major German city (Wittkower). – The world-wide economic crisis and then the Nazi period bring the development of a humanistic-scientific PM to a sudden halt. This has long-term consequences, some unassessable up to the present, including the term “traumatic neurosis” or “PTSD” having been suppressed through the late 1980s. Not until this period, that is, the Peaceful Revolution in East Germany, could varied forms of advanced and postgraduate education be introduced at a national level. The path to these endeavors was paved by early postwar contacts within Europe which led to the foundation of the European College on Psychosomatic Research (ECPR) and a decade later, in cooperation with Pan-American and Japanese colleagues, to the International College of Psychosomatic Medicine (ICPM).