Romantic Science

The more general misunderstandings of Hahnemann’s teachings have been systematically set out by the authors in The Dynamic Legacy: from Homeopathy to Heilkunst. This work seeks to deal in more detail with one particular aspect, namely the “psora theory” and its implications for medical treatment within the context of Dr. Hahnemann’s complete medical system, Heilkunst.

This essay will address some of the intersections between surrealism and the ecological view, looking at the latent Darwinian position of the surrealists' uncanny dissolution of the boundaries between the human and non-human natural realms; how the surrealists' critique of instrumental reason and insistence upon the significance of poetic, inter-connective, thinking finds accord with ecologists' research into the continuities between humans and nature at large; and how the general politicizing thrust of surrealism, particularly its critique of 'restricted', liberal economics, presented a resistance to the naturalizing of self-interest and the Hobbesian view of nature that continues to legitimize the anti-ecological global hegemony of the corporate-industrial bloc.

Frankenstein is a speculative narrative that asks, what would happen if man created human life without the biologically and relationally necessary woman and with indifference to God? What if Adam were to reject his own Creator and create life after his own fleshly or material image? Mary Shelley's answer to these questions is not a triumphant humanist manifesto, nor is it an ironic subversion of a supposedly outmoded theistic perspective. Rather, she offers a philosophical nightmare revealing the horrific consequences of methodological naturalism taken to its logical conclusion. Frankenstein explores the ideological vacuum engendered by scientific materialism and examines the spiritual bankruptcy of replacing theism with secular humanism. Victor Frankenstein's transgressive autonomy, grounded in scientific materialism, results in a reductionism that ultimately leads to existential despair, individual crisis, and communal disintegration.

In this essay I examine the use of nitrous oxide, sulfuric ether, and chloroform in the antebellum United States. I argue that the transcendent possibilities of anesthetic intoxication fueled early interest in  these drugs, and that growing medical concern about their use was intertwined with the eclipse of a romantic form of science.

The purpose of this book is to provide the first systematic analysis of Hahnemann’s occasional writings leading up to the first edition of the Organon der Heilkunst (as set out in the book, The Lesser Writings). A proper knowledge and appreciation of these writings is necessary to a genuine practitioner of the remedial art, as Hahnemann would say (Heilkünstler). The analysis was undertaken in the light of new insights based on a new inter-linear translation of the extended Organon (that is, including its full references) by Steven Decker.
The complete results of the extensive collaboration of the authors regarding Hahnemann’s writings have been published in Homeopathy Re-examined (2001) and its successor, The Dynamic Legacy: from Homeopathy to Heilkunst (2002), available as an on-line book (completely searchable and cross- linked) from the publisher. The reader is encouraged to read this last work for the more extensive context and understanding of Hahnemann’s complete medical system, Heilkunst. As research proceeds, this work is continually being expanded and refined.
The reader is also referred to the public material available on the Internet through the website, www.heilkunst.com.

Christoph Hufeland, one of the most prominent and celebrated physicians of the late 1700s and early 1800s in Germany and the Western medical world, even to this day, is presented as having been critical of the vitalist stream of medicine at the time, in particular of the period of controversy over the so-called Brunonian system, based intially on the work of the Scottish physician, John Brown. Hufeland has become a symbol of medical orthodoxy. The various honors bestowed upon him then and since, as well as his continued positive references in medical history, attest to that perception.
And yet, a closer examination of what he himself called his ‘medical credo’ and “the key and commentary to my other works,” as it organizes the principles underlying them into a system,  is quite revealing. Contrary to what is generally held, Hufeland was a proponent of the stream in German medicine and physiology concerning the workings of a vital activity and energy system, termed Lebenskraft, and in particular the generative side of that life force, called by Blumenbach, Bildungstrieb. He was also cognizant of the scientific works of one of his patients, Wolfgang von Goethe, which also formed a major part of this dynamic stream in German scientific thought and medicine. A closer look at Hufeland’s 1800 masterpiece reveals a dedicated scientist, setting out the foundation for a truly rational system of medicine and understanding of physiology based on laws of vital nature that stand above, yet incorporate and integrate those related to inert nature, insofar as they operate within the living organism and bio-economy.