The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism.

Abstract

The second half of the eighteenth century is one of the most fascinating periods in the history of medicine.The old ideas of disease etiology were crumbling and physicians searched phrenetically for a substitute.This they thought they had found in the several systems of medicine, the neural pathology, homeopathy, and in mesmerism, although the concept of anatomical pathology which was eventually to replace most of these did not reach full force until the early nineteenth century.It follows that a book dealing with contemporary ideas of the Enlightenment (1740 to 1790) will be a useful work to provide a discussion of the background against which medical and scientific advancement took place.The author studies German thinkers and their historical consciousness, and he endeavours to show that the Enlightenment was not a unitary movement.In Germany it was dominated by two opposing intellectual traditions, pietism and rationalism.Their historical speculation explored relations between religion and rationalism, religion and law, aesthetic and historical thought, new theories of history, the use of causation in historical analysis and the rediscovery of the Middle Ages.By revealing these little- known aspects of Enlightenment thought, Dr. Reill shows how their purveyors anticipated nineteenth-century scholars, and he gives a new interpretation of a period usually thought to have been relatively static in the area of learning, historicism.His book is produced at a high level of scholarship and can be highly recommended to all students of the eighteenth century.A further study would be to see if any in- fluence was felt in the medicine and science of this period.

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