empiricismEarly Science and and the Medicine ‘reasonable 18-4-5 (2013) physicians’ 453-470 [131] ISSN 1383-7427 (print version) ISSN 1573-3823 (online version) ESM Experiment, Observation, Self-observation. Empiricism and the ‘Reasonable Physicians’ of the Early Enlightenment Carsten Zelle Ruhr-Universität Bochum* Abstract This article aims to analyze the mechanisms of empirical data collection in medicine and psychology in the early Enlightenment by means of experiment, observation and self-observation, while associating them with their discursive forms of representation; namely, the case narrative. The combination of empirical and discursive anthropo- techniques leads to explanations on the anthropoietics of the Enlightenment; i.e., the question of how the habitus of man was shaped around 1750. Texts of four German ‘reasonable physicians’ will be considered: Friedrich Hoffmann (1660–1742), Johann Gottlieb Krüger (1715–1759), Andreas Elias Büchner (1701–1769) and Johann August Unzer (1727–1799). Keywords Andreas Elias Büchner, Christian Wolff, Friedrich Hoffmann, Johann Gottlieb Krüger, Johann August Unzer, anthropology, casus, empirical psychology, empirico-rationalism, experientia, experiment, historia morbi, observation, poetics of knowledge, ratio, self- observation Introduction The theme of this article arose in the context of research into literary anthropology in the eighteenth century, which initially focused on a group of ‘reasonable physicians’ at the Prussian reform university of Halle/Saale. Having overcome Cartesian dualism of substance, philo- * Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germanistisches Institut, Universitätsstraße 150, 44780 Bochum, Germany (
[email protected]). This article has been translated from the German by Julia Lippmann (Bochum). [132] 454 carsten zelle sophically educated medical scientists such as Johann Gottlob Krüger (1715–1759) or Johann August Unzer (1727–1799) expanded their perspec- tive to focus on the ‘whole man’.