Die Arzneimittel in der Physikotheologie

The place of natural pharmaceuticals in the framework of an early modern teleological and explanatory scheme called physicotheology would appear an arcane subject. Nonetheless, it should be of interest to students of the history of medicine and the sciences in the early modern period. In particular, it will help address specific aspects of the complex relationship between scientific progress and established religion that no longer support traditional assumptions of a poor fit. Although physicotheology was a general phenomenon among Protestant natural philosophers, Gisela Dehmel concentrates on the ongoing and conscious effort within the early modern German Protestant community and its scholars and medical men to maintain an integrated worldview. Often linked only to the eventual deism of eighteenth-century philosophers, this movement was not altogether an elite phenomenon but had a much broader message that, Dehmel argues, was received in English-speaking countries until well into the nineteenth century. English natural philosophers like William Derham consciously set the accelerating discovery of the forces governing the material world into a nonmechanistic context that demonstrated, through nature, “the being and attributes of God” (p. viii). The American reader might be interested to know that at least one multivolume work of physicotheology was imported for the instruction of the German-American Lutheran community in the late eighteenth century.

Dehmel’s study expands to the field of pharmacotherapy recent English and German research into a natural theology that tried to embrace all fields of early modern knowledge. Her work originated in the Marburg Institute for the History of Pharmacy and is prefaced by a concise and valuable summary of the philosophical issues by her mentor, Fritz Krafft, a historian of physics. Against the more traditional claims of popular fatalism and pastoral insistence on disease as just punishments for man’s—and woman’s—sins, Dehmel demonstrates a positive and almost activist view of health and healing in the works of a range of German religious reformers, beginning with Martin Luther and the early Pietist Johann Arndt (1555–1621). Limited to Protestant thinkers and practitioners—and thus excluding Paracelsus as a prominent postmedieval proponent of the signs of God in nature—her subjects are an interesting group of advocates of active therapy. They include renowned secular physicians like Friedrich Hoffmann (1660–1742) and Johann Georg Hoffmann (1672–1730), as well as popularizing pharmaceutical writers emphasizing the medical generosity of divine providence like Julius Bernhard von Rohr (1688–1742) and Johann Jacob Schmidt (1691–1754), who painstakingly linked physical, geographical, and medical phenomena to specific biblical passages. As students of German literature may know, by the mid-eighteenth century this genre was invaded by a particularly tedious form of German Enlightenment literature, the Lehrgedicht or instructional epic (Dehmel includes work by Barthold Heinrich Brockes, but Haller comes to mind as well).

This eventual link to the Christian Enlightenment illustrates, if further proof were needed, that a main mission of Protestant reform and reformation was popular and uplifting instruction in all matters physical and spiritual. Clergy and secular providers were particularly concerned to lift the populace from the welter of traditional magic beliefs into an informed if devout understanding of divine providence and the active use of medical help. It would have been surprising indeed if the religious establishment, which still permeated every part of society, had not managed to integrate into its message the numerous biblical and apocryphal injunctions to use the gifts of nature in order to maintain life and health and thus enable people to live a Christian and productive life.

For the researcher interested more in attitudes toward medical practice and in pharmaceuticals than in the finer distinctions between deism and Christian medical philosophy, there remains much interesting topical material in this volume. Luther’s support of the medical profession is well known, but contrary to many assumptions, his tradition lived on in Pietist edification literature, from Arndt to Spener. Dehmel reproduces in full the 1740 edition of a chapter of Julius Bernhard von Rohr’s...