Virtue and Medicine During the Enlightenment in Germany

Abstract

Medicine in the Enlightenment was influenced by the philosophical, pedagogical, and theological trends of the period [10, 12, 16, 17,19]. This was also the case for the views of virtues and their significance for medicine, for the sick person, the physician, and society. The health care practitioners of the 18th century remained at a distance from scholasticism and the philosophy of Descartes, and increasingly from the philosophy of Leibniz. They considered metaphysical systems to be suspect or superfluous, recommended a return to the thought of Hippocrates, ascribed more relevance to sensualism and popular philosophy, hardly recognized materialism, and held the progress of empirical and psychological knowledge over human behavior to be of central importance. The turn of medicine away from metaphysics found an exemplary expression in the controversy between Leibniz and the physician Stahl. An echo of popular philosophy in medicine was to be found in Unzer’s magazine ‘The Physician’. In 1798, relying on Kant’s formula, Osterhausen defined medical enlightenment as “the exit of a person from his minority into things dealing with his physical well-being” ([20], 1, p. 8). In the tradition of Locke and Hume, Weikard could see only a ‘fanciful hunting’ and convulsive illness in the transcendental philosophy of Kant. Then in the time of the Romantics health care practitioners were once again concerned with metaphysical bases of medicine due to the influence of Schelling.