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’. They were hence the forerunners of a new medico-philosophical approach, which formed the basis of the Commercium-Anthropology of the ‘philosophical physicians’ of the late Enlightenment (e.g., Ernst Platner and Friedrich Schiller, to name just two).1 Such aspects of an anthropology or empirical psychology, which is centered around the ‘whole man’ have since that time been replaced by literary-scientific or ‘poetological’ questions of the discursive repre- sentation of anthropological or rather psychological knowledge, espe- cially in the prose genre of the case narrative (e.g., the medical history or historia morbi).2 Departing from the terminology that is commonly used in the relevant specialist literature, I shall here not refer to ‘case reports’, ‘case stories’, ‘case descriptions’ or ‘case studies’ but rather to case nar- ratives.3 The terminological choice helps to indicate the historiographi- cal difference between event and story and to take into account the narratological distinction between histoire and récit. In this context, ‘poetics of knowledge’ characterizes an approach that takes into account the discursive representation of knowledge or science, respectively. That means that it analyzes the types of texts in which knowledge is represented and the kinds of ways in which scientific texts are referred to, which metaphors are being used and which rhetorical strategies are employed to create evidence and effects of truth. Thus, questions of the intrinsic laws of expository texts, of narratology, meta- phorology and rhetoric shall play a significant role. The question of how knowledge, and also ‘scientific knowledge’, is represented, the ‘poetics of knowledge’ confronts one with the observation that a so-called factum is not simply ‘given’, but rather—in compliance with Latin etymology— is something that is ‘created’. According to Greek etymology, the ‘poetics

1) Carsten Zelle, “Zur Idee des ‘ganzen Menschen’ im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Udo Sträter, ed., Die „Neue Kreatur“—Pietismus und Anthropologie. Beiträge zum II. Internationaler Kongress für Pietismusforschung 2005, vol. I (Halle and Tübingen, 2008), 45-61. 2) Carsten Zelle, “‘Die Geschichte bestehet in einer Erzählung’. Poetik der medizini- schen Fallerzählung bei Andreas Elias Büchner (1701–1769),” Zeitschrift für Germanistik, 19/2 (2009), 301-16. 3) Cf. Stefan Willer, “Fallgeschichte,” in Bettina Jagow and Florian Steger, eds., Literatur und Medizin. Ein Lexikon (Göttingen, 2005), 231-35.