Romanticism and Medicine

Summary

Romanticism was not only a literary movement but a sustained philosophical challenge to the mechanistic account of nature that dominated Enlightenment science. Beginning in the German-speaking world in the 1790s and spreading across European intellectual life through the mid-nineteenth century, Romantic thinkers insisted that life, mind, and history could not be adequately explained by the decomposition of things into their parts. In medicine, this produced a tradition (Naturphilosophie) that sought to unify the sciences around a vision of nature as an organic whole governed by developmental forces. Romanticism aestheticized certain diseases, particularly consumption and melancholy, linking them to creative genius. It transformed medical historiography by introducing organic metaphors of growth and development. And through the work of Schelling, Oken, and Goethe, it laid conceptual groundwork for the vitalist tradition, the birth of psychoanalysis, and recurring critiques of scientific reductionism.

Philosophical Foundations: Herder, Schelling, and Naturphilosophie

The Romantic challenge to Enlightenment medicine began with a challenge to Enlightenment philosophy of nature. The Enlightenment had largely inherited from Descartes and Newton a picture of nature as a machine: extended substance governed by mechanical laws, analyzable without remainder into quantitative relations among inert parts. By the late eighteenth century, this picture faced several difficulties. It could not easily account for the apparent purposiveness of organic life, the way biological organisms seem to be organized toward ends. It offered no persuasive account of how matter could give rise to mind. And it seemed, to many critics, to produce a flattened picture of human history, one that could not account for the way cultures develop and decay.

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) addressed the third difficulty with particular force. In his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-91), he proposed that human history was not best understood as a linear progression toward a universal rationality but as the unfolding of distinctive cultural forms, each shaped by climate, geography, and accumulated tradition.(Temkin, 1977) Herder organized this argument around what scholarship has since recognized as a threefold parallelism: the development of the individual organism from embryo to adult (ontogeny), the sequential appearance of species in the history of nature, and the successive stages of human cultural history all followed analogous patterns of unfolding from within. The same “genetic” logic that explained why the embryo developed from simple to complex also explained why cultures moved through recognizable stages. This was not mere metaphor: Herder believed these three series were genuinely homologous, expressions of a single developmental force operating at different scales of nature.(Temkin, 1977)

The structural homology between embryological development and historical development would prove generative for both Romantic biology and Romantic historiography. Both shared what can be called a “genetic mode of thought,” a disposition to treat becoming rather than being as the primary category of understanding. A thing was not fully grasped by analyzing what it currently was; it was grasped by tracing how it had come to be what it was. This preference for process over structure, for development over static analysis, was the methodological core that united Romantic natural philosophy with Romantic historical writing.(Temkin, 1977)

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) gave this genetic mode of thought its most ambitious systematic expression in Naturphilosophie. Schelling’s starting point was dissatisfaction with Kant’s separation of nature and mind: for Kant, nature was the domain of mechanical causation, and the apparent purposiveness of organisms had to be attributed to our way of reflecting on them rather than to nature itself. Schelling rejected this limitation. Nature, he argued, was not dead mechanism but unconscious spirit in the process of becoming conscious of itself. The same productive force that appeared as gravity, magnetism, and chemical affinity in inorganic nature appeared as irritability, sensibility, and reproduction in organic nature, and as thought and freedom in human minds. What the Enlightenment had divided into separate sciences, Naturphilosophie sought to reunify around a single developmental principle.

German Romanticism drew additional resources from a reaction against political uniformity. The French Revolution had threatened to impose Napoleonic universalism and Prussian bureaucratic rationalization across the German states, and Romantic thinkers responded partly by valorizing the particular, the local, and the historically rooted against the universal and abstract.(James Aho, Kevin Aho, 2009) The movement drew on Christian mysticism, particularly the Rhineland tradition represented by Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler, as a resource for recovering what seemed to be a living, inward experience of nature and spirit against what one historian called the “rational uniformity” of Enlightenment administration.(James Aho, Kevin Aho, 2009) The political and the philosophical were deeply entangled from the beginning.

The Paracelsian Inheritance: Boehme and the Path to German Idealism

Naturphilosophie was not built without predecessors. The most historically significant line of descent ran through Paracelsus (1493-1541) to the theosophist Jakob Boehme (1575-1624) and from Boehme to the German Idealists. Paracelsus had insisted that medicine required knowledge of nature as a living whole, that the physician must understand the cosmic context of disease, and that the alchemical tradition held keys to that understanding that Galenic anatomy did not. This vitalist sensibility, rejected by mainstream academic medicine in the seventeenth century, did not disappear. It was absorbed and transmuted by Boehme, who built from Paracelsian categories a theosophical vision of nature as a self-differentiating force proceeding through contradiction toward self-realization.

Boehme’s influence on German Idealism was more direct than is often recognized. Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer all drew on Boehme’s vocabulary and conceptual framework, particularly his understanding of nature as a living process driven by internal opposition.(Weeks, 2008) The trajectory from Paracelsus through Boehme to German Idealism and Romanticism was, as one historian has noted, “the most far-reaching” of the lines of influence emanating from the sixteenth-century figure who had set himself against the Galenic establishment of his own century.(Weeks, 2008) What arrived in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie was not Paracelsus raw, but Paracelsus filtered through two centuries of mystical and theological elaboration and then systematized within a post-Kantian philosophical framework.

This inheritance mattered for medicine because it meant that Naturphilosophie carried within it a set of commitments with deep roots in a pre-Enlightenment medical tradition: the primacy of the organism over its parts, the operation of internal developmental forces rather than external efficient causes, and the unity of nature over its analytic decomposition. The Romantic physicians were not simply applying abstract philosophy to medicine; they were, in part, recovering and systematizing impulses that the orthodox academic tradition had suppressed.

Goethe and Participatory Science

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) developed the most epistemologically distinctive alternative to Enlightenment natural science, one that drew directly on the Schellingian framework. Goethe’s morphological investigations, which encompassed the metamorphosis of plants, comparative anatomy, and the theory of the archetypal plant (Urpflanze) and archetypal vertebra, proceeded from a methodological conviction that the scientist did not merely observe nature from outside but participated in it. He learned this participatory framing in part from Schelling himself: in knowing nature, the scientist “produces nature.”(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) The knowing subject and the known object were not cleanly separated; the scientist brought natural processes to expression through the act of knowing.

For Goethe, this meant that careful, attentive perception of natural forms, rather than experimental decomposition, was the primary scientific act. The botanist who genuinely attended to the plant would come to perceive the underlying morphological plan of which each actual plant was a specific expression. The aim was to move from particular instances to the generative type (the Urpflanze, or archetypal form) that governed all the variations. This was not mysticism but method, or rather a method based on a different theory of what genuine knowledge of living things required.

Goethe’s science stood in deliberate contrast to what he regarded as the abstractions of Newtonian optics and Cartesian analysis. Where Newton decomposed white light into its components by means of the prism, Goethe insisted on attending to color phenomena in context, in relation to light and darkness and the observing eye. Where Descartes decomposed the animal body into mechanism, Goethe attended to form as a whole. The Romantic critique of Enlightenment science was nowhere more precisely articulated than in Goethe’s scientific practice, and his morphological work directly shaped the biological programs of the early nineteenth century, including those of Lorenz Oken (1779-1851), who extended the vertebrate archetype theory into a comprehensive system of comparative anatomy.

Romantic Medicine Proper: Vitalism, Organism, and Becoming

Schelling’s Naturphilosophie generated, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, a distinct style of medical thinking that historians have grouped under the heading of Romantic medicine. Its practitioners included not only Oken but Henrich Steffens, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, and, at a further remove, John Brown’s British school. Brown predated the Romantic movement proper and was assimilated into it rather than generated by it, but the compatibility was real.

The central commitment of Romantic medicine was to the organism as the appropriate unit of medical analysis. Where mechanistic medicine analyzed the body as a machine composed of parts acting on each other according to physical and chemical laws, Romantic medicine insisted that the living body was organized according to principles that could not be reduced to those laws. Life was characterized by self-regulation, by the capacity of the whole to maintain itself against perturbation, by developmental processes that unfolded according to internal rather than external principles. Disease, on this account, was not merely a mechanical breakdown but a disturbance of the organism’s developmental trajectory, a disordering of the immanent purposiveness that was life’s defining characteristic.

Romanticism’s particular contribution to vitalism was to locate the organizing principle in terms drawn from idealist philosophy rather than from earlier concepts of vital spirits or pneuma. The organism was a point where nature became self-conscious, where the developmental force operative throughout nature achieved a temporary individuality. Disease was understood not as alien invasion alone but as deviation in the organism’s own developmental sequence. This is why Romantic medicine was drawn to therapies that supported the organism’s own restorative capacities, including diet and hydrotherapy, rather than to approaches that directly attacked localized pathology.

Schwann’s cell theory work in the late 1830s illustrates how unstable the boundary between mechanism and vitalism remained within Romantic-era science. Schwann himself held a quasi-vitalist belief in a formative cytoblastema, a generative substance from which cells arose that carried something of the Naturphilosophie tradition’s developmental force.(Canguilhem, Georges, 1952/2008) The mechanical and the vital were not cleanly separated camps but overlapping orientations within a single period of extraordinary biological creativity.

The Aestheticization of Disease: Consumption, Melancholy, Nostalgia

One of the most culturally consequential products of Romantic medicine was the aestheticization of certain diseases: their transformation from conditions to be overcome into signs of refined sensibility, creative genius, or spiritual depth. Two diseases bore the weight of this aestheticization with particular intensity: consumption (pulmonary tuberculosis) and melancholy.

Romantic culture built around consumption an elaborate symbolic economy.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) The wasting of the body came to signify the intensity of the spirit consuming itself in creative effort. The pallor, the feverish cheek, the hectic beauty of the tubercular sufferer became aesthetic signs. Keats, Shelley, Novalis, Chopin: the list of Romantic artists who died of or lived with tuberculosis was long enough to make the coincidence seem meaningful, and Romantic culture made it more than a coincidence. Consumption was aestheticized as “the refined disease,” the disease of those whose spiritual intensity outran their physical constitution.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) The operatic tradition reinforced this: the doomed soprano, wasting through three acts with increasing beauty, made the aestheticization of tuberculosis a mass cultural form available to audiences who had never read Keats.

This aestheticization had consequences for medical understanding. If consumption was a sign of spiritual refinement, it was less clearly an ordinary disease requiring aggressive intervention. The Romantic physician faced a patient whose suffering had been culturally valorized, and who might, in some cases, have internalized that valorization. The medicalization of consumption proceeded fitfully against this symbolic background.

Melancholy followed a related but longer trajectory. The association between melancholy and creative genius had roots in Aristotle’s Problemata, the pseudo-Aristotelian text that asked why all exceptional men in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts were melancholic, and was elaborated through the Renaissance by figures like Ficino and Dürer.(German E. Berrios & Roy Porter (eds.), 1995) By the time Romanticism arrived, a centuries-old tradition had already distinguished melancholy from mere sadness, associating it with the reflective, inward-looking intellectual or artist who suffered from an excess of sensitivity to the world’s contradictions. Romanticism inherited this tradition and intensified it: Romantic Weltschmerz (world-pain, the ache of the sensitive soul wounded by the gap between ideal and real) became the characteristic emotional register of the Romantic artist-hero.(German E. Berrios & Roy Porter (eds.), 1995)

The historian Stanley Jackson has traced what he calls the “great age of melancholia” as a tradition inaugurated by the Renaissance, refined by the Enlightenment, flaunted by Romanticism, taken to its extreme by the Decadents, and finally theorized by Freud.(Radden, Jennifer (ed.), 2000) Each phase intensified the association between melancholy and cultural prestige, making the condition simultaneously a mark of distinguished sensibility and an increasingly medicalized object of clinical attention. By the Second Empire in France, Carter (writing in 1958) identified the transformation of Romantic Weltschmerz into concern with neuropathologies: the same emotional register that Romanticism had aestheticized was now being classified and treated as neurological disease.(Micale, Mark S., 1995) The literary representation of this transition was substantial: the historian Jacqueline Carroy identified approximately twenty male-authored French literary works between the Romantic and symbolist eras that applied the hysteria metaphor to cultural and political life, showing how medical language was absorbed back into literary Romanticism even as literary categories were influencing medical nosology.(Micale, Mark S., 1995)

Nostalgia underwent a parallel but distinct trajectory. The term had been coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer to describe a severe homesickness that Swiss mercenaries suffered when serving far from the Alps, a condition treated as a genuine medical disease, potentially fatal if untreated. By the high Romantic era the word had entered the French Dictionnaire de l’académie (1835), but it remained a primarily medical term rather than a benign sentiment.(Thomas Dodman, 2018) Balzac described nostalgia as a “horrible malady” producing an “atonia that weakens the flow of life,” still a disease, not a pleasurable sentiment.(Thomas Dodman, 2018) The transformation of nostalgia from a medical disease into a widely understood emotional experience was what one historian has called a “protracted, fitful process spanning the nineteenth century,” one in which Romantic culture played a significant role by valorizing backward-looking sentiment and the imaginative recovery of lost worlds.(Thomas Dodman, 2018)

The picturesque movement that paralleled literary Romanticism aestheticized wild, uncultivated nature in ways that reinforced the Romantic critique of Enlightenment improvement ideology.(Porter, 2000) Where Enlightenment landowners drained marshes and straightened rivers in the name of rational improvement, picturesque aesthetics valorized rough terrain, ruined abbeys, tangled woodland: the marks of time and natural process operating without human intervention. This aesthetic preference was continuous with the Romantic medical preference for supporting nature’s own restorative processes over aggressive mechanical intervention.

Romantic Melancholy and the Genius Tradition

The specific figure of the melancholic genius, brooding, inward-looking, wounded by a world that failed to match the intensity of his inner life, was one of Romanticism’s most durable cultural products, and one with particular medical relevance. The literary and artistic tradition had established a split along class and value lines between the maniac and the melancholic: the maniac was violent, dangerous, threatening to social order, while the melancholic was gifted, creative, worthy of sympathy.(German E. Berrios & Roy Porter (eds.), 1995) This split, with its roots in classical medicine and Renaissance elaboration, was reinforced by Romantic culture to the point where certain physicians began to speak of a specifically “Romantic” constitution: a kind of person whose emotional and intellectual characteristics made them susceptible to both the heights of creative achievement and the depths of melancholic suffering.

The migraine literature of the nineteenth century offers a telling micro-example. Nineteenth-century clinicians constructed a “Romantic” view of the migrainous constitution, imagining those prone to the condition as characteristically “small, trim, quick-witted women with red hair,” a portrait that carried aesthetic connotations borrowed from Romantic portraiture.(Sacks, Oliver, 1970/1992) The point is not that this portrait had any clinical validity, but that Romantic aesthetic categories had infiltrated medical typology at the level of how clinicians imagined the patients they were treating.

The medicalization of Romantic sensibility moved in both directions. On one side, Romantic aesthetic categories gave clinical conditions a cultural glamour they might not otherwise have had, making patients reluctant to seek treatment for conditions that marked them as belonging to a prestigious emotional register. On the other side, the growing apparatus of neurological and psychiatric medicine began to claim the states that Romanticism had aestheticized as properly medical objects, including anxiety, melancholy, and nervous exhaustion, and to treat them with the instruments of a clinical science that was itself partly a product of Romantic biology.

Romanticism and the Birth of Psychoanalysis

The connection between Romantic medicine and the emergence of psychoanalysis at the end of the nineteenth century runs through several channels. The most direct runs through what Hermann Bahr, the Austrian critic, identified in 1890 as “nervous romanticism”: a cultural turn inward toward the sexual and psychological self that rejected positivism’s claim that everything real was publicly observable and measurable.(Makari, George, 2008) Fin-de-siècle Vienna’s intense interest in the hidden life of nerves, in the symptoms of hysteria, in the possibility that conscious life was shaped by forces invisible to introspection, was continuous with the Romantic insistence that nature had depths that empirical analysis could not reach.

Freud’s relationship to Romanticism was ambivalent but real. He was trained as a neurologist and aspired to the standards of Helmholtz’s physiological reductionism; but the conceptual architecture of psychoanalysis carried the marks of Romantic developmental thinking. The unconscious appeared as a domain governed by its own developmental logic; the libido as a force that could be redirected or blocked; the organism as an entity that remembered and repeated its own history. The concept of the unconscious itself had a philosophical history that ran through Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann, and the Romantic Naturphilosophie tradition before Freud transformed it into a clinical concept.

The connection through Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) is more explicit. Jung’s early intellectual formation combined neo-Romantic philosophy (Schopenhauer, Kant, and Nietzsche) with an interest in spiritism and séances that would have been recognizable to the participants in Romantic-era animal magnetism investigations.(Makari, George, 2008) Jung’s mature concepts of the collective unconscious, the archetypes, and the individuation process were, in a direct sense, the Romantic concept of nature as a self-developing organism translated into psychological terms. The individual psyche, for Jung, was a microcosm that recapitulated the developmental history of the species and of nature itself, a Herderian parallelism applied to the clinical encounter.

Mesmerism, the practice of animal magnetism developed by Franz Anton Mesmer in the 1770s and enormously popular in Romantic-era Paris and elsewhere, represents a related channel. Whitney Cross’s historical analysis showed that in the American context, mesmerism led, through a chain of not intrinsically necessary but historically specific connections, to Swedenborgianism and thence to Spiritualism. The trajectory was driven by the “romantic assumptions” of the American participants rather than by any logic internal to the practices themselves.(Haller, 2010) Romanticism provided the interpretive framework within which mesmeric phenomena were understood as evidence for the existence of invisible natural forces linking human bodies to each other and to the cosmos, a framework that could easily accommodate both Spiritualist conclusions and, eventually, the language of the unconscious.

Romantic critics of industrial society, including Blake, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, and, earlier, Rousseau, had expressed persistent apprehension about industrialization’s tendency to devalue nature, bodily instincts, and emotional experience.(James Aho, Kevin Aho, 2009) This critique did not disappear with Romanticism’s waning as a literary movement. It continued as a current in both alternative medicine and in the psychological traditions that descended from Romantic biology, providing a persistent counterpoint to the dominant biomedical framework.

Romanticism and Medical Historiography

Among Romanticism’s less visible but historically significant contributions was its transformation of how medical history was written and why. The Enlightenment had approached the history of medicine largely as a narrative of progress, the gradual accumulation of facts and the correction of errors, culminating in the rational medicine of the present. Romanticism introduced a different framework: medical history as the unfolding of a developing spirit, with each era expressing a distinctive and internally coherent understanding of health, disease, and nature.

This transformation was part of a broader revolution in historiography that included Hegel’s philosophy of history, with its concept of the Idea expressing itself through successive historical forms, and the “genetic mode of thought” that Herder had pioneered. Ideas, on this account, did not simply get things right or wrong; they had a life of their own, driven by inner developmental forces, and the historian’s task was to understand each idea’s inner logic and its place in the developmental sequence.(Temkin, 1977) The consequence for medical history was significant: medical ideas from the past were no longer simply errors to be superseded but expressions of their cultural-historical moment, each with its own internal coherence and its place in the development of medical understanding.

This Romantic approach was, as one medical historian observed, “a major force behind the rise of medical history teaching in early 19th century Germany.”(Rosen, George, 1974) The organicism, the emphasis on continuity and development, the interest in understanding each period on its own terms: these were specifically Romantic contributions that distinguished the German tradition of medical history from the French and British traditions and gave it a philosophical depth that influenced the discipline for generations. Karl Sudhoff (1853-1938), Henry Sigerist (1891-1957), and the tradition of socially oriented medical history that descended from them were all, in different ways, inheritors of a historiographical sensibility shaped by Romantic Naturphilosophie.

The structural homology between Romantic embryology and Romantic historiography was not incidental.(Temkin, 1977) Both applied the same “genetic mode of thought,” treating becoming as more fundamental than being, understanding the present as the product of a developmental sequence that needed to be traced if the present was to be genuinely understood. The physician who wanted to understand a disease had to understand its history; the historian who wanted to understand medical ideas had to understand their development. Both forms of inquiry assumed that understanding required genetic tracing rather than static analysis.

Richards on Romantic Biology

Robert J. Richards’s The Romantic Conception of Life (2002) provides the most sustained scholarly account of the Romantic biological program. Richards situates Romantic biology as a species of the wider genus of German Naturphilosophie while arguing that the Romantic thinkers added specific aesthetic and moral elements to the content of ideas traveling under that rubric: all Romantic biologists were Naturphilosophen, but not all Naturphilosophen were Romantics.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) He argues that certain fundamental features of nineteenth-century biology, especially archetype theory and its articulation in morphological and evolutionary thought, came to life in the soil of the German Romantic movement.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) When the serious biology of the period is relocated within that movement, Richards holds that two fundamental features stand out that have been either denied or squeezed to the periphery of historical concern: the aesthetic and the moral dimensions of the science of biology.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)

The movement itself, in Richards’s account, is best conceived not as a group displaying unanimity of ideas but as “sympathetically minded individuals, by thinkers whose mutually supportive considerations of philosophy, literature, and science became enmeshed in the tangle of their personal and professional relationships.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Its intellectual architect was Friedrich Schlegel, who in early essays established the meaning romantisch would initially bear, using it to signify imaginative literature of a distinctively modern form contrasted with the writings of ancient authors.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Schlegel’s famous fragment 116 of the Athenaeum Fragmente declared: “Romantic poetry is progressive universal-poetry… the Romantic mode of poetry is still in the process of becoming; indeed, that is its very essence, that it eternally becomes and can never be completed.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002)

The positive program was articulated most memorably by Friedrich Hardenberg (Novalis) in a fragment from 1798: “The world must be romanticized. In this way one finds again its original meaning. Romanticizing is nothing other than a qualitative potentializing… Insofar as I give the common an elevated meaning, the usual a secret perspective, the known the value of the unknown, the finite an infinite appearance — I thus romanticize.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) At the programmatic level, Richards summarizes the Romantic aspiration as striving to unify, at least as an ideal goal, “what they found separate and fragmented: the unconscious with the conscious, the self with nature, freedom with necessity, the individual with the community, poetry with science, the classical Greek aesthetic with the Romantic modern aesthetic.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Isaiah Berlin, in his many essays, emphasized the heterogeneous character of Romantic idealism: the Romantics encouraged the notion that moral and aesthetic values would likely be multiple and irreconcilable, and that reason itself would struggle through infinite time without finally ordering individual lives according to one general principle.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)

Legacy: The Romantic Critique of Mechanism

Romanticism’s challenge to mechanistic medicine did not simply disappear when Virchow’s cellular pathology, Bernard’s physiology, and Koch’s bacteriology consolidated the biomedical model in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Romantic critique, that mechanism offered an account of the body’s parts but not of the organism as an integrated, self-regulating, historically situated whole, was absorbed into several subsequent traditions.

The most direct inheritors were the vitalist and organismic movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which drew on Romantic biology’s insistence that life was not reducible to chemistry and physics. Hans Driesch’s entelechy theory, the emergence of ecological thinking, the organismic biology of Jakob von Uexküll: these all carried forward the Romantic biological program in modified forms.

A second line of inheritance ran through the critics of scientism: the argument, persistent from Keats through contemporary theologians and philosophers, that the scientific method was being applied beyond its legitimate domain when it was taken to provide a complete account of human experience.(Wilson, Edward O., 1984) This critique, that science as practiced by the Enlightenment and its successors was not science per se but scientism, a philosophical overextension of scientific method, was a direct descendant of the Romantic protest against the reduction of nature and humanity to mechanism. It remained a live intellectual current a century and a half after Keats wrote his lines about Newton “unweaving the rainbow.”

The Romantic period also bequeathed to medicine a question it has not fully answered: how to account for the patient as a person with a history, embedded in a cultural and emotional context, rather than as a biological machine presenting with a diagnosable malfunction. The Romantic physicians were not scientific enough, and some of their speculations were productive of nothing but confusion. But the question they posed, of what it means to treat an organism that understands itself, that has a life-history, that gets sick in ways that cannot be fully disentangled from its meanings and its relationships, was a genuine medical question that mechanism alone could not answer, and has not answered yet.

See Also

• naturphilosophie
• vitalism
• johann-wolfgang-von-goethe
• melancholy
• nostalgia
• enlightenment-medicine
• mechanical-philosophy
• morphology
• naturalism
• psychoanalysis

Sources