Medizin der Goethezeit: Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland und die Heilkunst des 18. Jahrhunderts (review)

Abstract

Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland was one of the most famous medical personalities in German medicine during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Born into a long-established family of physicians in Thüringen in 1762, he studied medicine in Jena and Göttingen, and held prestigious positions during his lifetime in the courts of Weimar and Prussia and in the universities and government ministries in Jena and Berlin. Best known as a scholar for his work Makrobiotik, oder Die Kunst, das menschliche Leben zu verlängern, and as a teacher for his development of clinical instruction, Hufeland was also personal physician to the families of such literary greats as Wieland, Herder, Schiller, and Goethe. To Klaus Pfeifer, "Goethe's time" was marked by great advances in the natural sciences, as well as the pursuit of deep connections between all bodies of knowledge. Hufeland, he sets out to show, captured this spirit: deeply committed to scientific research, he also nurtured friendships with poets, philosophers, and theologians. But it is Hufeland's understanding of the role of the physician that seems most to move Pfeifer, who ends his introductory chapter with Hufeland's dictum that "the best physician is someone who is simultaneously a friend" (p. x) (my translation).