I fari di Halle: Georg Ernst Stahl, Friedrich Hoffmann e la medicina europea del primo Settecento, and: Differenza tra la dottrina di Stahl e la mia in patologia e terapia: Introduzione, traduzione e note di Francesco Paolo de Ceglia (review)

Mainly because of his animistic philosophy, Georg Ernst Stahl is a rather wellknown (if not always highly esteemed) actor on the European medical and chemical scene in the beginning of the eighteenth century. Johanna Geyer-Kordesch, among others, has devoted many important works and a documented biography to this controversial figure. On the contrary, his colleague at Halle University and longtime adversary, Friedrich Hoffmann, is not as well known outside the circle of specialized historians dealing with the German medical world. Rightly enough, in reconstructing their careers and medical theories, Francesco de Ceglia places them where the historian should like to see them, side by side, so as to highlight the parallels in the origins and development of their philosophical systems and medical doctrines—and their common religious background, the commitment to Pietism. I fari di Halle is composed of three chapters, the second specifically devoted to Stahl's medical system and the third to Hoffmann's. The first chapter deals instead with the parallel biographies and posthumous fortunes of the two physicians. This order, while providing a social and political contextualization for the story of their controversies, may be slightly puzzling for the reader.

When the two physicians began teaching at the medical faculty, Halle was a newly founded university, meant to become the stronghold in Prussia of this specific form of Lutheranism, as well as an institution where overt disagreements among members of the same academic body were to be scrupulously avoided. Nonetheless, the two harshly disagreed throughout their lives, as de Ceglia recounts with the help of previously lost or ignored documents (among them a lengthy autobiographical manuscript by Hoffmann, preserved in Berlin Staats-bibliothek). de Ceglia also underlines the meaningfulness of Hoffmann's work on the difference between his own and Stahl's medical philosophy, printed in 1739 but probably composed in the 1720s when Christian Wolff was exposed as a follower of Spinoza and dismissed from his chair at Halle. Hoffmann attempted to extend the accusation to Stahl himself. de Ceglia thus rather underplays the role of Pietism in the construction of Stahl's philosophy. In his opinion, Pietism explains the diffusion of animistic doctrines more than Stahl's medical system itself (p. 101), and it can be held that the "true" Pietist was in fact Hoffmann. The image of the two rivals, as constructed in the following centuries, has somewhat blurred this distinction, insisting on the religious roots of Stahl's spiritualism.

The question of religion and of its role in shaping Hoffmann's doctrine is apparent in the very title chosen for his 1693 inaugural lecture, De atheo convincendo ex artificiosissima machinae humanae structura, but de Ceglia does not deal with it at length, choosing to discuss instead the dispute on fevers that took place between the two physicians at the turn of the century. In fact, this book can be read as an essay on (scientific) controversy in the age of the early Enlightenment as much as a thorough analysis of two diverging systems in physiology, pathology and therapeutics. Behind and beyond doctrinary differences, a more substantial conflict took place. In the first years of the new century Hoffmann was appointed archiater to Friedrich I, king of Prussia, and moved to Berlin. In 1712, following the death of a son of the heir to the throne, Hoffmann was dismissed, and Stahl took his place at court. By treating the new king, Friedrich Wilhelm I, he rapidly gained European fame, while Hoffmann gradually sank...