Regulative Therapeutics in the German Ro• mantic Era: The Contribution of Jakob Fried• rich Fries ( 1773-1843)*

FREDERICK GREGORY

Dedicated to Prof. Dr. Heinrich Schipperges in this his sixty-fifth year

Recent investigations into the history of medicine in Germany during the early decades of the nineteenth century have rightly focussed on the unique challenge facing medicine during these intellectually tumultuous times. The challenge was, as Risse has put it, "to achieve greater medical certainty through the establishment of a 'science' of medicine with the help of philosophy" .1 This problem could only have risen to such great prominence in post-Kantian Germany. Kant had, after all, tried to draw a clear line of demarcation between genuine and nongenuine science.2 This distinction emerged directly out of his philosophical position and seemed to many of his successors in the Romantic period to be unnecessarily restrictive in the same manner that his general critique of reason had, according to them, overstated the limitations of the human intellect. The Romantics wished to recast the Kantian notion of science into a more holistic conception. In their eyes science should not be essentially an enterprise of exclusion, but one of inclusion. While Kant's assertions about the nature and limitations of knowledge provided the point of departure for the world of the early Romantic Era in Germany, the attempt to establish the scientific status of medicine represents one of the most important examples of the way in which some of the thinkers of the first decade of the nineteenth century tried to move beyond Kant. The physician, after all, had to deal with more than matter in motion, more than merely living matter. The physician treated human beings, in whom the realms of matter and spirit were uniquely joined. For this reason the field of medicine occupied a special position, for Schelling the highest position,3 among the sciences of experience. It was precisely by way of a re-examination of these Erjahrungswissenschaf• ten that Schelling had attempted to move beyond Kant. That a new philosophy of nature of some sort was bound to appear around the turn of the century should not be surprising for at least two reasons. First, the Kantian fracturing of the human intellect into its primary capacities, each

179 Frederick Gregory with its own prerogatives, each with its own limitations, was based on our alleged restricted ability to know the real world, including nature. If the Romantics wished to repair and restore the unity of human reason, they would have to demonstrate that mind and nature were in some sense identical to one another. Indeed, Schelling had not been the first to produce this kind of Naturphilosophie,4 nor was he to be the last. Secondly, there were loyal followers of Kant who opposed the redirection being given the sciences of experience by Schelling and his school. At least one of these Kantians realized that the time had come to formulate more explicitly and in far greater detail than Kant himself had done in his philosophical works a Kantian philosophy of nature. Only by working out more fully the implications for natural research of the Kantian critical position, it was thought, could the fundamental error and misdirection that the so-called Naturphilosophen were giving to natural science in general and medicine in particular be successfully exposed. 5 The acknowledged spokesman for this Kantian position in the Romantic Era was Jakob Friedrich Fries, who taught at Heidelberg and Jena during the first four decades of the nineteenth century. According to Kuno Fischer, Fries stood alone as the founder of the Kantian school in Jena that opposed the train of thought represented by Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.6 The influence of Fries in the nineteenth century was considerable, especially in Jena where E.F. Apelt, Matthias Schleiden, and others established the Abhandlungen der Friesschen Schule in the late 1840's. Fries's influence in our own century is visible in the new series of the Abhandlungen, edited by Leonard Nelson at Gottingen, the spirit of which is continued in the contemporary journal Ratio, founded by a student of Nelson. 7 In spite of this influence, Fries has, to be sure, remained in the shadow of especially Schelling, a somewhat surprising fact given the far greater affinity between his views and the empirical emphasis of modern science than Schelling's ideas have exhibited. It was Schelling who was all the rage in Jena in the early years of the nineteenth century, and it has been Schelling's incorporation of Brownianism into his Naturphilosophie that has occupied the attention nf historians of medicine.8 The Kantian position represented by Fries is instructive not only for its "modern" critique of Schelling's Naturphilosophie, but also because it presents us with yet another response to the surprisingly widespread acceptance of the medical theories of John Brown in Germany at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Brown's theory of disease appealed to the German Romantics because it was simple to understand, yet completely comprehensive in scope. Fries, like Schelling, discussed Brownianism as a philosopher. His conclusions are contained in a book of 1803 devoted to medicine, the Regulativesfor Therapeutics Arranged according to Heuristic Propositions of Philosophy of Nature. 9

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