"Die Arznei kommt vom Herrn, und der Apotheker bereitet sie": Biblische Rechtfertigung der Apothekerkunst im Protestantismus: Apotheken-Auslucht in Lemgo und Pharmako-Theologie (review)

This volume fits the historical phenomenon of pharmacotheology into the history of science and medical ideas and, in an interesting excursion, into the material culture of late sixteenth-century Germany. It is a final gift to a famous institution—the Marburg Institute for the History of Pharmacy—by its former director, Fritz Krafft, who succeeded Rudolf Schmitz. Krafft is a well-known historian of physics, not of physic, and in his double competency as historian of science and guardian of the history of pharmacy, he was uniquely equipped to undertake his largely successful attempt to restore physicotheology and -pharmacology—a short-lived phenomenon in the history of science—to our historical awareness. His work and that of his students on the divine justification and explicit medicinal purpose of the Book of Nature derives from Krafft's conviction, shared by many important German philosophers of medicine, that the refusal to exclude a continuously purposeful creator from his creation persisted beyond the seventeenth century and became an essential component of the German Protestant enlightenment.

Krafft leads the reader into the biblical justification of pharmacy and its ancient and modern practitioners via a discourse on physicotheology in the work and thought of early modern physicists, from Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Leibniz, and Samuel Clarke to the early deist John Ray (The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation, 1691 and many editions). For both physic and pharmacy, he invokes two early modern sources: an interpretive translation by Martin Luther of the well-known admonition by the Jewish physician Jesus Sirach (Liber Ecclesiastes, chapter 38) to honor the physician and his medicines; and Theophrastus von Hohenheim (Paracelsus) and his followers, in particular Oswald Croll's Basilica chymica. To the latter work, in particular the annotated editions by Johannes Hartmann at Marburg, Krafft traces the cleansing of the Paracelsian chemiatric universe from its philosophical and mystical—read heretical—elements, which in turn enabled the reception of alchemy and iatrochemistry into the body of early modern pharmacy. Relying in part on the work of Rudolf Schmitz and Bruce Moran, he places Hartmann, the first professor of chymiatria at Marburg, in the synchretic tradition of a Joseph DuChesne (Quercetanus). In the long perspective assumed by Krafft, this heuristic development, proposed for England minus its religious aspects by Debus and many authors, reconciled the Hippocratic and Galenic corpus with the new pharmacy of the iatrochemists and thus ushered in the pragmatic medicine of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries within a Christian framework.

Krafft cites Friedrich Hoffmann in Halle, Johann Julius Hecker, and Julius Bernhard von Rohr, author of the Phytotheologia of 1740, as main exponents of German eighteenth-century pharmacotheology in this attempt to face down the reductionism and implied deism of strict causality. Despite the ephemeral nature of Rohr's and similar works, however, they embody much of the rationale of previous and subsequent medical writers on the reasonableness of a creation that placed appropriate plants for treating specific diseases into the geographical regions where they were endemic.

Krafft then proceeds to link this reconciliation of pharmaceutical traditions to the evolving role of the apothecary, illustrating claims to standing and tradition through instances of material culture. This material culture used many vehicles, such as the well-known paintings depicting Christ as apothecary, the complex emblematics of printed chymiatric texts, and, less well known, a stunning example of an architectural and sculptural statement of the tradition of medicine and its biblical justification. Sadly, few will travel to the northwestern corner of Germany to see the remarkable seventeenth-century addition to the...