The Gestation of German Biology

Philosophy and Physiology from Stahl to Schelling

John H. Zammito

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780226520797
• eBook ISBN: 9780226520827
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: Biological Sciences

The emergence of biology as a distinct science in the eighteenth century has long been a subject of scholarly controversy. Michel Foucault, on the one hand, argued that its appearance only after 1800 represented a fundamental rupture with the natural history that preceded it, marking the beginnings of modernity. Ernst Mayr, on the other hand, insisted that even the word "biology" was unclear in its meaning as late as 1800, and that the field itself was essentially prospective well into the 1800s.
 
In The Gestation of German Biology, historian of ideas John Zammito presents a different version of the emergence of the field, one that takes on both Foucault and Mayr and emphasizes the scientific progress throughout the eighteenth century that led to the recognition of the need for a special science. The embrace of the term biology around 1800, Zammito shows, was the culmination of a convergence between natural history and human physiology that led to the development of comparative physiology and morphology—the foundations of biology. Magisterial in scope, Zammito's book offers nothing less than a revisionist history of the field, with which anyone interested in the origins of biology will have to contend.

CHAPTER ONE

Animism and Organism: G. E. Stahl and the Halle Medical Faculty

I am convinced that Stahl, who is disposed to explain animal processes in organic terms, was frequently closer to the truth than Hofmann [sic] or Boerhaave, to name but a few.

KANT, 17641

PIETISM AND ENLIGHTENMENT AT THE HALLE MEDICAL FACULTY

Envisioned from about 1688 and starting its first operations already in 1691, the University of Halle celebrated its formal inauguration in 1694. It was created by the rulers of Brandenburg-Prussia to train new civil servants for the ambitiously expansive territorial state and to serve as a cultural symbol of its prominence in Germany by rivaling the nearby Saxon university at Leipzig.2 Brandenburg-Prussia had to deal internally with the problem of multiple confessions. In 1613, to the dismay of his subjects, the Hohenzollern Kurfürst (elector) of Brandenburg converted to the Reformed faith, even though the bulk of the population in his territories remained staunch Lutherans.3 For their training, most Lutheran clergy in Brandenburg attended the stringently orthodox Lutheran universities of Leipzig and Wittenberg in Saxony. This appeared a double detriment to Hohenzollern dynastic ambitions. Thus, both for bureaucratic staffing but also for religious policy, a new Lutheran university to rival Leipzig (and Wittenberg) became the priority of Frederick III/I (b. 1657; r. 1688–1713).4

The Hohenzollern dynastic strategy found powerful convergence with the needs of a new religious movement, Pietism.5 “[T]he regime in Berlin saw in the Pietists a group within the Lutheran church that would be much more accommodating toward the Huguenot refugees, much less hostile to the Reformed faith in general, and perhaps quite useful to the state as a counterweight to the heavily orthodox Lutheran leadership.”6 A new university at Halle served both Pietist aspirations and those of the dynasty.7

Two figures proved central in establishing the character of the new university: the legal and political philosopher Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) and the Pietist theologian and activist August Hermann Francke (1663–1727).8 When he was named professor of Greek and Oriental languages, Francke was also appointed pastor of the Lutheran congregation in the Halle suburb of Glaucha, where he immediately began active social reform.9 The famous orphanage (Waisenhaus) and its penumbra of attached institutions (the so-called Halle Anstalten) made Halle a remarkable venue for experiments in social welfare. The educational institutions that Francke established at the Anstalten were as important as his orphanage.10 From very early on, Francke included medical care for his orphans and the local poor as part of the Anstalten. The manager of the highly lucrative Anstalten pharmacy, Christian Friedrich Richter (1676–1711), took charge of medical care in 1697, working closely with Francke in institutionalizing “Pietist notions about the meaning of illness and health.”11 By 1708, substantial medical operations were under way at the Anstalten, with student volunteers from the Halle medical faculty working with the patients in exchange for free meals and thus gaining important clinical experience. Eventually, this program was taken over by Johann Juncker (1679–1759), who proceeded to make clinical training at the Anstalten part of the official curriculum of the Halle medical school after 1716.12

Medical enrollment at Halle had remained very low until Juncker’s institutionalization of clinical training at the Anstalten. By the 1730s over five hundred students were enrolled in the Halle medical faculty.13 Several cohorts of students, otherwise too impecunious and socially marginal to have had any other opportunity, received their preliminary education via the Anstalten and eventually attended the university with substantial assistance (e.g., the famous Freitische) from the Anstalten, in exchange for services to its charitable institutions of education and health care.14 Tension between high-living and high-class law students and the more abstemious theological and medical students marked an important cultural divide within the university, leading to a famous allegation about attending Halle: “‘Halam tendis? Aut pietista aut atheista reversurus!’ (‘So you’re going to Halle? You’ll return either a pietist or an atheist!’).”15

The Halle medical school played a major role in the gestation of German biology in the first half of the eighteenth century. It was a tiny faculty, founded with only two professorships, extended to three in 1718, and not to grow again until 1780. The founding faculty, Friedrich Hoffmann (1660–1742) and Georg Ernst Stahl (1659–1734), presided from the university’s founding in 1694 to Stahl’s departure for Berlin in 1715. Hoffmann was the first called to the faculty, and he proved decisive in configuring its program, “introducing into medicine at Halle the innovations of the Dutch and the English.”16 Stahl joined the faculty only two years after Hoffmann, and they were friendly rivals until 1715, when Stahl was called to Berlin to become head of the Royal College of Medicine. Notably, in their earlier careers both Hoffmann and Stahl had close relations to the Pietist movement, and evidence suggests Francke played a role in their recruitment to Halle.17

All in all, what distinguished the Halle medical school in its heyday was the prominence of its two great theorists. The medical faculty had real weaknesses in other areas, however. Hoffmann and Stahl had “neither resources nor facilities [weder Hilfsmittel noch Anstalten] at their disposal to carry out their teaching mission,” one historian has noted.18 Another is even more critical: “For its first decades Halle had no theatrum anatomicum or even a hortus medicus. . . . Compared to Leiden, ‘science’ was at a minimum.”19 The medical faculty at Halle was not nearly as advanced as Leiden in basic physics and chemistry and severely lacked facilities for direct experiment in botany and anatomy. In the area of medical theory, “physiology and physiological chemistry are absent as independent disciplines in the curriculum of Halle in the eighteenth century.”20 The botanical garden got a tiny start on a tract of land acquired in 1683; after the medical school was established, this garden was entrusted to Stahl, but he left it “utterly neglected [völlig verwahrlost].”21 Things proved no better under his successor.22 There was no anatomical theater until 1725, when Georg Daniel Coschwitz (1679–1729) started one at his own expense; it became operational only in 1727.23 Coschwitz (MD, Halle, 1694) was a student of Hoffmann’s and Stahl’s who became extraordinary professor in 1716, then third ordinary professor in 1718. When he died in 1729, no ordinary professor of anatomy replaced him (his full professorship went to Juncker, instead), and so extraordinary professors (professors who did not receive salaries) had to take it up. That included buying the anatomy theater from Coschwitz’s heirs! These anatomy instructors proved mediocre, leaving the field in limbo at Halle for the better part of two decades.24 The contrast with Leiden (and eventually Göttingen) could not be more striking.25

Jürgen Helm argues compellingly that one cannot separate the history of the medical faculty from the history of the Halle Anstalten.26 In Francke’s theology, the source of illness was sin; the affliction was a test from God for the already pious and a warning from God to the impious. Thus, illness required a “soul-cure” as well as a “body-cure.” Only God’s intervention would ultimately heal, though the physician should also work on the physical symptoms. This approach to medical practice, which Helm calls “Waisenhausmedizin,” dominated not only the Anstalten but the Halle medical faculty, where it merged fully with Stahl’s theoretical approach and with the clinical orientation that Stahl and Hoffmann shared.

Unquestionably, “Stahl’s medical theory became a rallying-point for Pietism.”27 By contrast, Hoffmann “did not share the ideological [weltanschauliche] opposition of Pietism towards dualism and rationalism,” even though he “sincerely supported Pietism’s practical concerns in Halle.”28 Hoffmann, as Roger French discerns clearly, saw himself as a moderate, an “enlightened Pietist,” who did not wish to let the differences between his theoretical stance and that of his esteemed rival, Stahl, become divisive; rather, he believed that they should serve as complementary stimuli in the education of medical students at Halle.29 The diversity was, in his view, constructive and contained, especially via the convergence of views concerning practice. In Stahl, by contrast, Pietists perceived an “unequivocal emphasis on the soul and its power to influence the body . . . in relation not only to the physiological but to the pathological.”30 His psychosomatic conception of the origins of illness seemed to have tight affinities to Waisenhausmedizin.

Most of Stahl’s famous disciples came through the Anstalten. They were particularly important in translating and popularizing Stahl’s difficult Latin texts. Francke’s close associate Christian Friedrich Richter published the most famous popularization of Stahl’s system: Höchst=Nöthige Erkenntnis des Menschen, sonderlich nach dem Leibe und natürlichen Leben (1710).31 Another key disciple was Christian Weisbach (1684–1715), who studied first with Stahl before obtaining his MD at Basel in 1711, then published the Stahl-Pietist guidebook Wahrhaffte und gründliche Cur aller dem menschlichen Leibe zustossende Kranckheiten in 1712.32 A mainstay for the learned physicians was Johann Storch’s Praxis Stahliana, das ist Herrn Georg Ernst Stahls . . . Collegium Practicum (1728; 2nd ed., 1732; 3rd ed., 1745), about 1,500 pages long.33 Michael Alberti (1682–1757), Johann Juncker, and Johann Samuel Carl (1676–1757), all Stahl students, published compendia of his ideas for classroom use.34 Carl was Stahl’s “most highly-esteemed student [gepriesener Meisterschüler].” He received his MD in 1699, then went on to edit Stahl’s works and publish a key popularization: Zeugnüsse von Medicina Morali (1726).35 These disciples adopted Stahl’s medical doctrines but inflected them in a clearly religious vein, along the lines of Francke’s theological approach to illness.

After his departure from the Halle medical faculty, Stahl’s acolytes Alberti and Juncker upheld the teachings of their absent mentor and participated actively in the Pietist campaign against the philosopher Christian Wolff (1679–1756), culminating in his 1723 expulsion from Halle and Prussia.36 Totally rooted in Francke’s Pietist Waisenhausmedizin, they dominated the medical faculty from 1715 through the 1730s. Both of these figures had begun as theologians, then switched to medicine.37 Alberti assumed Stahl’s chair in 1715, when the latter moved to Berlin. Juncker received his MD at Halle in 1717 at thirty-seven years of age, under Alberti. He continued to work at the Anstalten while he simultaneously served as Doctor legens (Privatdozent) for twelve years in the medical faculty. He received appointment as an ordinary professor only in 1729, after the death of the anatomist Coschwitz, and he never received an adequate salary.38 Together, Alberti and Juncker contested the aging Hoffmann within the Halle medical faculty until the triumphal return of Wolff in 1740. Alberti in particular showed strident hostility to Hoffmann’s theory, attacking it publicly in Specimen medicinae theologicae (1736), a fusion of Stahl and Waisenhausmedizin.39

Already from the beginning, as the architect of the curriculum for the medical faculty, Hoffmann had been committed to linking the pursuit of a medical degree with natural-philosophical training.40 Most of his students took a strong interest in physics and chemistry and showed less concern with theology than the followers of Stahl. Hoffmann’s connection with Christian Wolff grew closer after Stahl left Halle and Wolff assumed responsibility for the physics courses.41 Wolff’s forced departure in 1723 must have been a blow to this curricular commitment. After the expulsion of Wolff, Alberti took over both physics ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE
• CHAPTER TWO
• CHAPTER THREE
• CHAPTER FOUR
• CHAPTER FIVE
• CHAPTER SIX
• CHAPTER SEVEN
• CHAPTER EIGHT
• CHAPTER NINE
• CHAPTER TEN
• CHAPTER ELEVEN
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects