Article I – Introduction to the Study of Romantic Science and Healthcare Outline of a Course of Study

The following articles on Romantic science and healthcare are the result of close and lengthy collaboration with the genius of Steven Decker, and are only a small deposit on the wealth of knowledge regarding Romantic healthcare to come, and which will be further elaborated in a new study program ) ( http://www.romantichealthcare.com/) and also in various books and articles to come. Any errors and omissions regarding the ideas and concepts here set out, are mine alone. – Rudi Verspoor

 

This issue of Homeopathy for Everyone contains a series of articles providing a completely new perspective and estimation regarding the importance and value of Dr. Samuel Hahnemann and his full system of medicine. This is the second step in the full explication and development of Hahnemann’s genius and the therapeutic potential of that system.

As a first step, we had presented in this journal new research setting out the full extent of Hahnemann’s system, which goes beyond homeopathic prescribing to include a dynamic physiology, the importance and use of the law of opposites (therapeutic regimen), as well as a dualistic understanding of disease and treatment, much of which was either not understood, ignored or even suppressed (https://hpathy.com/journal/homeopathy-4-everyone-June-2009/).

 

This research, which has been made freely available at www.homeopathiceducation.com for any serious student or practitioner, is the result of a lengthy and detailed analysis by the author and Steven Decker (Hahnemannian scholar and translator of the Organon) of all of Hahnemann’s available writings as well as additional historical material from the time. More recently the full history of the use of dual remedy prescribing, based on Hahnemann’s insights into the duality of disease, has been published (www.amazon.com/Scandal-Köthen-Homeopathic-Romantic-Healthcare-ebook/dp/B00WYL66QK) and a review made available in this magazine (https://hpathy.com/book-reviews/scandal-in-kothen-the-real-homeopathic-love-story-rudi-verspoor-and-steven-decker/).

The second step is to place this more comprehensive understanding of Hahnemann’s system within its proper context. We are taught, both by homeopathic schools and by allopathic medical history, that Hahnemann was an erratic boulder on the landscape of 19th Century Western medicine, a lone voice ‘crying in the wilderness’. We were taught nothing about the broader and congenial context within which he worked, and how deeply connected his work was and is to the broader development of Romantic science medicine. This isolation has led to a restricted interpretation, so-called ‘classical homeopathy’, which is as we have documented, a demonstrably misguided and in places false presentation of Hahnemann’s full system. It has also isolated students and practitioners from the broader, richer system of healthcare of which Hahnemann’s Heilkunst was and is an integral and critical part. This system, known historically as Romantic science and medicine, has been under continuous development in Western science and healthcare the past 220 years, albeit largely unknown. Hahnemann was a founding member and remains a guiding force in the modern version of Romantic healthcare, a true system of Western healthcare that provides a compelling challenge to the current system of materialistic and mechanistic science and disease management that prevails, as well as a clarion call for the organization of the currently fractured, divided and confusing ‘natural health movement’ into a truly wholistic system of therapeutics, properly grounded in the science of life and health.

Part A of this second stage is to provide the proper history of Romantic science and medicine, and the role of the various founding members, including Hahnemann, within it. This history gives us the foundational principles of a true system of healthcare. This history takes us to its seeming eclipse around the mid-1800’s when the material-mechanical worldview seemed to dominate, with Darwin’s mechanism of ‘natural selection’, Pasteur’s ‘germ theory’ and Virchow’s cellular hypothesis as the basis for life, and a mechanical, chemical version of organismic functioning. This mechano-materialistic paradigm became the predominant approach in an increasingly materialistic age. There was little scope for Hahnemann’s dynamic conception of disease, nor for the understanding that it was more the ‘terrain’ and not so much the ‘microbe’ that created health issues. It became a system of disease management drawing from the inertial sciences, rather than a true healthcare system founded on a true life science. Then it became reduced, with the growth of the oil and chemical industries and more recently rapid technological developments, to a symptom-suppressive, drug-based (‘pill for every ill’) and emergency-oriented approach. We have gone in popular culture from Marcus Wellby, MD and Dr. Killdare to ‘ER’, ‘House’, and ‘’Grey’s Anatomy’.

Part B of the second stage in understanding Hahnemann’s genius is to track the development of the radicals of Romantic science and healthcare into our present day, and to see the wealth of ideas, concepts and therapeutics available to deal with the modern scourge of chronic disease and illness resulting from the depletion, degradation and pollution of the air, water and soil and the rise of toxicity (environmental, iatrogenic, chemical). This is a large story and will have to be left to another time to address properly.

The current system of ‘modern medicine’ relies on drugs and surgery to deal with the various chronic disease conditions that have replaced the older infectious diseases, and essentially ignores regimenal measures (diet, nutrition, lifestyle factors). The infectious diseases of the past were all but eliminated or drastically reduced (both morbidity and mortality rates) prior to the rise of the modern medical system just after WW II. The transformation of medical schools and doctors into agents of the pharmaceutical industry over the last 50 years brings with it a high cost in the form of resistance to antibiotics and a growing list of disease effects caused by the very drugs used (iatrogenic disease), making it the single greatest cause of death in North America. The increasing awareness of this ‘death by medicine’ has given rise a grass-roots resistance known as the natural health movement, drawing from traditional fields in Western healthcare such as homeopathy, naturopathy, herbalism and natural hygiene, as well as looking to ancient systems of healthcare, such as TCM and Ayurveda. The resistance is increasing as the crisis in conventional medicine is growing, but resistance is fractured, divided and internally conflicted, as well as lacking a coherent methodology that can challenge the current paradigm. You can’t challenge and replace something with nothing. Rather than fighting a rear-guard action against a bankrupt disease management system, we need to develop and have available a comprehensive, truly wholistic and integrated system of healthcare. Romantic science has been advancing over the past 220 years from its foundations, including Hahnemann’s medical system, to a system that offers an effective and scientifically grounded alternative. Romantic science frees us from the mechanical-materialistic or on the other side, mystical versions of healthcare.

As a good general introduction, the reader is advised to start with the interview (click here) and then to proceed through the articles.

Background: The Current Crisis in Healthcare

 

Western culture is in the midst of a Healthcare crisis. In two short centuries we have gone from a world of high infant mortality, infectious diseases and short life expectancy to a vastly different world of low infant mortality, minimal threat from epidemic diseases, and longer life expectancy. The prevailing view is that this is due to the marvels of modern medicine; the more considered view of historians of Western medicine and healthcare is that this change is mostly due to improvements in hygiene and sanitation as a result of the dramatic rise of the West economically and technologically since 1800.

The greatest improvements in health and almost all of the decline in infectious diseases occurred between 1800 and 1950, well prior to the advent of what we call ‘modern medicine’: introduction of modern ‘miracle’ drugs, vaccinations and surgical advancements. “Most people credit medical advances,” says David Jones, a medical historian at Harvard—“but most historians would not.” One problem is the timing. Most of the effective medical treatments we recognize as saving our lives today have been available only since World War II: antibiotics, chemotherapy, drugs to treat high blood pressure. But the steepest increase in life expectancy occurred from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. Even some dramatically successful medical treatments such as insulin for diabetics have kept individual people alive—send in those #NotDeadYet stories!—but haven’t necessarily had a population-level impact on average lifespan. [http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/life_expectancy_history_public_health_and_medical_advances_that_lead_to.html]

Almost all of the increase in average life expectancy has been the result of reductions in infant mortality, most impacted by the prevailing infectious diseases of the past. Once a person reached adulthood, his chances of living to 80-90 were about the same as today. Vaccinations are often credited with the decline of infectious diseases, mainly those in childhood, but these were introduced only after these diseases had already declined to very low levels (both due to natural immunity increasing over time and to improved living standards).

 

Today, however, we face a modern plague of debilitating chronic health problems that affect largely the adult population (although also increasingly children as well in the form of autism spectrum disorders – ASD), against which the prevailing medical system is essentially helpless. The main issues facing Western culture are those that arise from that very culture. The leading health problems derive from environmental and lifestyle factors and are largely preventable – diabetes, obesity, chronic fatigue-fibromyalgia-chemical sensitivities, cardio-vascular issues, depression and other mental disorders, not to mention autism spectrum disorders.

The measures employed that have worked so well in the ER – surgery and drugs – and provide for dramatic and stirring movie scenes and TV shows, cannot cure these chronic disease conditions, but only palliate or suppress their symptomology. We have more a system of disease management than of real healthcare.

 

At the same time, the measures that seemed to work against infectious agents, are now becoming increasingly less effective, as microbes have mutated and changed into ‘superbugs’ that are even more dangerous than their original forms, and are highly resistant against modern drugs. As the WHO reports, “Antimicrobial resistance threatens the effective prevention and treatment of an ever-increasing range of infections caused by bacteria, parasites, viruses and fungi.” Even worse, modern medical procedures have themselves become a major, if not, the main contributing factor to debility and mortality in the form of iatrogenic disease, or ‘death by medicine’. The ‘standard of care’ of Western medicine, once thought of in terms of near miraculous intervention – antibiotics, insulin, heart surgery, etc. – is not only losing the war against disease, but has increasingly become part of the very problem it seeks to address. – http://www.webdc.com/pdfs/deathbymedicine.pdf

 

In addition to the disease-engendering effects of drugs, there is a major problem with reliable evidence of efficacy of medical procedures that form the ‘standard of care’ due to both the methodological problems of the prevailing medical research (dealing with multiple variables, observer bias, statistical complexity, problems of placebo) and to the increasing problem of research bias due to commercial and epistemological issues, particularly regarding the ‘gold standard’ or the RCT (randomized clinical trial). – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-larry-dossey/the-mythology-of- science_b_412475.html – The Mythology of Science-Based Medicine; http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/limitations-of-randomized- trials/

 

A third major problem forming the crisis in Western medicine is the corruption of the medical system by large corporate interests (drug companies, large-scale hospitals, both) more driven by bureaucracies and the relentless need for profits and expansion than concerns for health. – https://www.drmcdougall.com/health/education/videos/advanced-study-weekend-experts/peter-gotzsche-03/

 

A fourth major contributor to the crisis of Western healthcare is the failure to consider regimenal factors in illness and health (healing), due to the dominance of the one-sided ‘germ theory’ (hypothesis), giving us drugs (chemotherapy) and the propensity of a mechano-materialistic approach that sees surgical solutions to internal disturbances of healthy function – removing effects rather than treating causes. Many of these causes are lifestyle and environmental.

The Academic Medicine study found in 2009 that medical students averaged 19.6 hours of nutrition instruction throughout medical school, down from 22.3 hours in 2004. – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20736683/   Twenty-seven percent of schools met the minimum 25 hours recommended in a 1985 report by the National Academy of Sciences. –

 

A fifth contributor to the current crisis is the undermining of the previous presumptions that the body was static and fixed, largely due to the presumption that disease was genetic in origin, and genes were fixed and invariable. However, in the last decades, discoveries have led to a new field of study termed epigenetics, showing the important and even critical role of environmental and lifestyle factors in activating or de-activating (muting) various genes. The influence of thoughts and feelings on genetic function is also being explored and revealed.

 

The healthcare crisis today is the inevitable result of a decision taken about 150 years ago in Western philosophy, science and medicine to apply the mechanical-materialist model of the inertial sciences to living organisms, despite the emergence and development of an entirely different approach to healthcare, based on a physiology of living functions and an understanding of disorder and disease in a dynamic way.

 

Background: The Foundational Crisis in Western Science

 

The late 1700’s were a time of agitation and upheaval throughout Western culture. During a relatively stable and peaceful period following the Peace of Wesphalia starting in 1648, which had ended the long period of religious wars of the previous century, Europe experienced an expansion of knowledge known as the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment, a significant part of which was the emergence of an effective and compelling science of inert nature (physics) known as the Scientific Revolution and symbolized by Isaac Newton. However, attempts in the first part of the 1700’s to apply the methodology of the inertial sciences to the question of living organisms, that is, vital nature, and to replace the dogmatic and empirical medical orthodoxy of the time with medical science, was limited in usefulness and raised many more questions than it answered. The cultural revolution that took place at the same time is known as Romanticism, affecting philosophy, science and medicine, as well as the artistic realm. It was a time of ferment and transformation.

 

As in Ancient Greece, art and science for the Romantics are seen as inter-related, not separate. Matter is seen as the result of the polaric, dynamic inter-play of powers, forces and energies, and vital nature is of a higher order and gives rise to inert nature. Romantic philosophy and science gave rise to and nurtured a healthcare system based on living functions (dynamic physiology) and a dynamic understanding of disorder and disease as divergences from healthy function (pathology), the symptoms and signs being but the outward expression of the organism’s attempt to restore balance (homeostasis and palingenesis).

The path and approach to the question of life and health blazed by Romantic science, in particular that conceived by Goethe, is now being re-assessed as a solution, following the shattering of the classic Newtonian world by the discoveries of Quantum Physics – Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Bell’s Theorem, and the influence of the observer on the observed, and by the rise of epigenetics, where the gene is not directive, but serves rather as a receiver and transmitter for environmental signals, both sensible and super-sensible in nature.

 

The debates and struggles between 1750 and 1850 have very much shaped the world we live in now, and the issues raised and challenges posed to philosophy, science and medicine then, are still very much with us today. The victory of the material-mechanical model of science, based on inert nature (natura naturata) over the dynamic system (Coleridge) that formed the Romantic science movement was only apparent. The bankruptcy of using a methodology designed for inert nature to explore and explain vital nature (natura naturans), pointed out by the Romantic philosophers and scientists, was only staved off. The cost of not placing healthcare on the firm foundation of a true life science and dynamic physiology has simply increased, both financially and in terms of true health and longevity. What gains have been made in this direction since have come as a byproduct of the economic revolution and the unprecedented emergence of compounding income and wealth starting about 1800.

 

To understand the current crisis and the solution proposed by Romantic science, we need to go back to the start of the modern age. In 1965, Peter Laslett wrote a small book, The World We Have Lost, with a basic, but powerful idea – that around the time of Columbus, the world view of Western man shifted so profoundly that he now inhabits an entirely different state of mind. This shift follows on one of a similarly radical change in mind and consciousness that occurred culturally in Ancient Greece, between the time of the Iliad and the time of the Odyssey, a shift documented a decade later in another influential work, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes.

The first shift saw the coming of age and initial fruits of a new cognitive capacity, mentation, based on the intellect, that was analytical and separative in nature and function. The formation and gestation of mentation is documented in Genesis, in the symbol complex AYSH and ASHH, or often translated as ‘man’ and ‘woman’, the one being the capacity for independent, rational thought, the other the creative power to conceive (conceptions) based on the influx of spiritual ideas or archetypes (Plato and Bacon). The earlier form of cognition, based on an inner organ of participation known as the nous, operated mainly through innate spiritual wisdom residing in the bodily organs (Ancient Greek had numerous words for aspects of mind – pneuma, kardia, nous, phrenes, psuche, thumos, etor, etc.). The nous is polaric – nous patheticos, which takes in impressions and nous poieticos, which irradiates reason with Ideas inspired (in-breathed) from the Spiritual pole.

 

As this capacity, which Lévy-Brühl termed the ‘participation mystique’ (nous patheticos), waned while the mentative capacity waxed, increasing man’s separation from the unity (via wisdom), the Greeks sought to re-connect with the ancient spiritual and bodily wisdom (sophia). The deep and vast exploration of the world around them that resulted, and still is awe inspiring, came to be known as philosophy, meaning ‘love (philo) of wisdom (sophia)’. There remained sufficient ancient noetic consciousness to inform and irradiate the now budding mental faculty and prevent it from going off into abstraction and conjecture, as the surviving works of the Greek philosophers prove, even after the time of Socrates (who embodied the pure intellect seeking to make sense of the world) in the works of the twin pillars of Greek, and hence, Western philosophy, Plato and Aristotle. There is an important difference between the Socratic versus the Aristotelian approach to cognition, the first involving a dialectic within the mentative aspect of mind (Mens), and the second involving observation of nature guided by higher, spiritual ideas or archetypes and the drawing of conclusions about Nature based on this participative process (though this devolved and degenerated over time into the arcane and arid writings of the late Medieval Schoolmen (Scholastics), which set of mental cobwebs Bacon set himself the task to sweep away.

The Romans took over Greek philosophy and much of Greek culture, but in latinized form, and the separative, abstracting intellect (mens) came to dominate, until, by the end of the Middle Ages, it had completely eclipsed the Greek nous and forced this participative, associational capacity of mind into the arts, now also increasingly divorced from science. While Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the medieval Scholastics, managed to hold the two together through his genius, Scholasticism was increasingly riven between those holding to the old Greek noetic capacity, now largely lost, to connect with the name of a thing as symbol or archetype of the essence of the thing itself (Realism), and those following the rising mentative power who could only perceive the outer form, and for whom the name was just a name, a representation of the real thing (Nominalism).

The First Scientific Revolution and Inert Nature

 

The dominance of the intellect by the time of Columbus finally sundered any connection between the two aspects of mind (what Wilhelm Reich termed, the normal ‘schizophrenic split’), and gave rise to the possibility of the Scientific Revolution of Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. This revolution was largely based on Bacon’s brushing aside of the crumbling structure of the medieval philosophy of the Schoolmen and replacing it with a new approach to nature, that borrowed both from the original Plato and Aristotle (based on source documents that came to light during the Italian Renaissance). However, whereas Bacon had left a critical role in his new scientific method for insight and inspiration, which provided the organizing ideas (‘dry light’, or lumen siccum) for direct observation of nature, both outer form (natura naturata) and inner essence (natura naturans), the intellect tried to go it alone (Descarte’s Cogito, ergo sum), rejecting anything that was not sense-based or outer form as subjective, that is, invalid for science, and considering only inert nature, seeing any approach to vital nature as ‘occult’, that is, outside of what can be perceived by the mind, the mind here having been reduced to mentation, via the intellect (mens). The world was not only seen now as revolving around the sun (heliocentric universe), but also spinning on a mechano-material axis . Once the issues of heavenly and earthly mechanics had been settled in the form of the laws of physics, expressed through mathematics – the Newtonian world – philosophers and scientists sought to apply the method that had worked so well for inert nature, to vital nature, to the understanding of ‘living matter’. However, this attempt proved problematic, and a new approach emerged called Romantic science.

 

 

The First Scientific Revolution and Vital Nature

 

The Romantic approach to nature is dynamic rather than static, and involves, at the level of philosophy, the primacy of mind and consciousness over matter, the power of the creative imagination (versus fancy – Coleridge’s famous distinction) to shape reality, and the importance of the phenomenon as symbol. At the level of science, it involved the resurrection and nurturing of the Ancient Greek noetic capacity of mind in a new key by means of a new supersensible organ of participation called by Goethe, the Gemüt, a term with no English equivalent, which, however, has its physical seat in the solar plexus and autonomic system, and involves proprioception, rather than perception, and can super-impose on and penetrate to the living essential entity within a thing.

 

Romanticism is also based on the understanding of life as the product of an antithetical unity or resonant polarity, initially that of expansion (‘the heavens’) and compression (‘the earth’), from which derive all subsequent polar functions, and man as a unit of mind and consciousness (‘Adam’) that is an antithetical unity of masculine and feminine, as set out in Genesis, but is split over time, as creation unfolds (emanation), in terms of physical male and female bodies, and seeks perpetually to re-unite the two aspects. This descent risks leaving man imprisoned in matter, unless reversed in some way, which is the nature of the ‘Christ event’, which implants a new form of wisdom and a new dynamic power that is designed not for pro-creation, but for the use of the creative imagination of the mind of a re-unified Adam. It is this creative power for creation and the further evolution of mind and consciousness that literally re-sets the measurement of time, marking the point of conception of Western culture from that of the Middle East, and gestates for 1800 years, with labour and parturition taking place in the remarkable movement known as Romanticism, a movement that has undergone various growth phases and is just now coming of age.

 

Thus, the origins of the ‘Age of Revolution’ can be traced back to two events that form the twin pillars of Western civilization – the birth and flowering in Ancient Greece of a critical and analytical mind, focused on the mysteries of the natural world (philosophy), valued above the after-life; and the birth and rise of a world-view that not only established a direct relationship between the individual and God, based on love, not fear, and set Man over Nature, with a responsibility for its productive use, but was also progressive, optimistic and dynamic (as opposed to fixed, fatalistic and static).

The Enlightenment

 

Once the edifice of Scholasticism, static and belief-ridden, was swept away, the quest for knowledge ignited an intense and fruitful period of inquiry into nature, particularly into the movement of the ‘heavenly spheres’, celestial dynamics (Copernicus, Kepler, de Brahe) but also that of earthly motion (Galileo), producing what came to be called the ‘Scientific Revolution’. European thought was now full of optimism about man’s intellectual power to reveal the secrets of Nature, ushering in the ‘Age of Reason’ or what has also been termed ‘the Enlightenment’.

However, nature was essentially reduced to matter (fixed forms) and where there was movement, it was regarded as mechanical. In this approach Man himself was regarded as fixed in nature and a tabula rasa, onto which was written sense-experience, the source of all knowledge.

 

The Enlightenment was based on the one side on the monumental discoveries about inert nature of the Scientific Revolution in large part due to the maturation of the mentative capacity of mind, and on the other, driven by the underlying iron logical order of the intellect (mens) as applied to, resulting in its other epithet, the ‘Age of Reason’. However, this approach contained an inherent problem: a split between subject (man as experiencing) and object (the thing being experienced), the inner world of the mind and the outer world of things, and a reliance on sense-experience filtered through a subjective mind, which resulted in a growing doubt about the possibility of scientific knowledge. This split led to a split in Western philosophy between materialism and idealism. For materialists, following Hobbes, matter and sense-experience are what is real, life being but an epi-phenomenon, the result of the ‘chance whirlings of unproductive particles’ as Coleridge criticized.

 

For the idealist, following Hume, the only reality was inner thought experience, the outer world of things was but a creation of the mind, and, thus, subject to doubt. While some philosophers combatted either or both of these conclusions concerning reality, notably Cudworth (idea of a plastic power that connected Nature, Mind and Spirit) and Reid (Common Sense Philosophy), the split persisted. Thus, Western science entered the 1700’s supremely confident in its ability eventually to wrest from Nature all her secrets using the power of reason, but accompanied by increasing doubts as to the reality of the very world it was exploring. However, the methodology that had worked for inert nature, based on materialism (considering only natura naturata or the outer form of things), floundered and threatened to break on the shoals of vital nature, that is on the thorny ‘question of Life’. Thus, science now came to face both a crisis of confidence in its methods of gaining knowledge and an epistemological crisis challenging the validity of that knowledge.

 

On the one side, science proceeded empirically to collect facts, ignoring the epistemological crisis. This produced promising results in the area of inert nature (chemistry, anatomy, surgery), but was less promising when it came to vital nature, the lack of progress manifest most immediately in the field of medicine, which occasioned a growing crisis. Kant tried, in a series of influential works, to rescue Enlightenment, that is, material science from itself. Kant’s solution was in essence an attempt to save face, by accepting defeat graciously, namely acceding the limits to knowledge pointed out by Hume, and by asserting that science could nonetheless operate ‘as if’ what it perceived was real. Kant’s ‘solution’ was to validate the split in the world created by the intellect: a world of objects, outer forms, which science could work with and manipulate in a practical sense based on hypotheses (presumptions of reality), and another, a real world of things in themselves (das Ding-an-sich), that supported the first world but could itself never be accessed and known. Kant’s ‘solution’ was itself based on a presumption, namely that one could only know by means of the intellect (Wissen/Wissenschaft). However, he did leave open the possibility that there might be another way to know (denken) but this would constitute an extraordinary ‘adventure of reason’. Romantic science and medicine is the response to Kant’s rather off-hand challenge. And fortunately so, as Kant’s equivalent of Chamberlain’s ‘peace in our time’ failed to stop the growing crises in 18^th Century philosophy and science, and nowhere more so than in medicine.

 

Romanticism emerged as the answer to both crises. On the one side, it set forth, essentially through the genius of Goethe, a method of study of nature (natura naturans) based on a revived and enhanced noetic capacity to see the world not as discrete objects, outer representations of a presumed inner reality (Kant’s Ding-an-sich), but phenomenologically, that is, to see the whole of a thing, both form and essence, as it actually is, namely as ‘that which shows itself, as itself, to itself’ (Heidegger). Romanticism sought to penetrate the veil of knowledge and bridge the gap between subject and object created by the rise of the intellect and mentation.  There were various debates and streams of inquiry regarding the nature of life and health, death and illness, in the 1700’s. This culminated in 1795 in a widely published critical article by a German physician, Johan Erhard, a critique of conventional medicine that became the ‘shot’ that was heard around the medical world. It acted as a catalyst for a gathering host of ideas and tendencies that had been swirling around the issue of vital nature, natural science, physiology and medicine. It is at this point that Romantic medicine emerged and gave birth to a system of Healthcare based on a true science of vital nature and of living functions, (physiology), a system that truly ‘did no harm’ and much good.