Pietismus, Medizin und Aufklärung in Preußen im 18. Jahrhundert: Das Leben und Werk Georg Ernst Stahls (review)

Johanna Geyer-Kordesch. Pietismus, Medizin und Aufklärung in Preußen im 18. Jahrhundert: Das Leben und Werk Georg Ernst Stahls. Hallesche Beiträge zur Europäischen Aufklärung, no. 13. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2000. viii + 283 pp. s68.00; Sw. Fr. 121.00 (paperbound, 3-484-81013-0).

Johanna Geyer-Kordesch is well known to American and English historians of early modern medicine for her many and wide-ranging contributions to the work of the Wellcome group in England. This recently published monograph on Stahlian medicine and medical theory goes back to an earlier stage of her work. It is both valuable and welcome, although it ignores much of the more recent literature on the linkage between medical and religious reforms at the end of the early modern period. Whatever the reason for this omission, there is still much to be done to elucidate how these reforms affected specific aspects of Western medicine in general, and German medicine in particular. In contrast to previous English-language work on Stahl—in particular, Lester King's classic studies—Geyer-Kordesch was able to work from a wide range of archival sources and of forgotten or neglected secondary literature to fill some of the gap.

Subtitled Das Leben und Werk Georg Ernst Stahls, the study provides a partial biography of Stahl (1659-1734) and a valuable if not exhaustive bibliography. The major focus is on Stahl's medical philosophy, and on his experience-based epistemology and his faith as inseparable strands of this philosophy. Using both a social history framework and a very detailed reading of his works, the author undertakes to tease out the essence of Stahl's rejection of mechanical and dualist models of human nature in favor of a dynamic and synergistic understanding of the interaction between body and soul. This is no easy task, in view of the difficulty of doing justice to Stahl's writing through the complexities of his Latin, noted by both Lester King and the author (p. 31), and through the numerous translations into the similarly complex German of the period.

The historical context is set out in terms of Stahl's role in and personal connections to the German Pietist movement of religious renewal, which enabled much of the reform of medicine under Pietist auspices at the new and Pietist-dominated University of Halle in Brandenburg-Prussia from its founding in 1694 to roughly 1740. Many medical practitioners and medical thinkers were profoundly disturbed by the various mechanistic models of bodily function and the various iatrophysical and iatrochemical schemes of disease causation proposed throughout Europe, since these conflicted both with their religious belief system and with their clinical insights. In the case of Stahl and his many and well-known students and followers—among them prominent physicians and teachers like Michael Alberti, Johann Samuel Carl, Johann Juncker, and the brothers Christian Friedrich and Christian Sigismund Richter—this conflict was not resolved through the embrace of physicotheology, a relatively shallow undertaking. Instead, they insisted that there was an essential, direct, and divinely driven linkage between the body as patient and the soul as agent; motion—the motus tonicus vitalis—acted as their intermediary within an organic entity that was split asunder only by death.

Geyer-Kordesch illustrates the central role of Stahl in this medical and philosophical scheme, which rejected the perfectibility of reason untouched by material constraints and insisted on the unpredictability and the possible errors of choice to which the soul is prone. There is ample evidence of the recognition of and indebtedness to his teachings by many who used medicine as their vehicle of nonconformity. A case in point is the chemist, medical contrarian, and radical sectarian Johann Conrad Dippel, who had studied in Leyden and who handsomely...