A Short History of Romantic Medicine: Past as Prologue

By Rudi Verspoor

History. The word conjures up dry and dusty writings, a procession of dates and personages from a time long past, of little, if any relevance to the affairs of men today. Most persons have developed a certain reticence if not life-long immunity against studying anything to do with 'history'. If you are reading this, it is undoubtedly the word 'Romantic' in the title that has piqued your interest, enough to overcome the likely antipathy to the use of 'history'.Between these two words lies the very content of this book, suspended as it were between the general antipathy to the one and the sympathy for the other. The meaning of 'Romantic', in particular as it relates to 'Romantic medicine', provides the subject material and is laid out in some detail.The growth of knowledge, in the sense of the discovery, development and application of these ideas, what Coleridge termed 'growledge', is uneven, and periods of great discovery can be followed by periods of turning away from the implications of these discoveries. The idea and light of reason can run far ahead of the capacity of the minds of men of a given age to comprehend and absorb, much like an advance guard of an army penetrating deep into enemy territory, its success placing it beyond the capacity of logistics to supply them. This is essentially the situation regarding the scientific ideas that emerged during a particularly rich and intense period of cultural ferment over 200 years ago, referred to as Romanticism or the Romantic movement. Far from being an artifact of the past, as the court chronologers would have us believe, jettisoned for a more 'scientific' paradigm, the ideas that emerged during this period remain valid and relevant today, all the more so as they have continued to be developed since then and now provide the way out of the crisis that Western medicine increasingly finds itself in. In order to move forward, out of this modern crisis in healthcare, we must, as the iconic movie title of the 1980s told us, go 'Back to the Future', back to a time when ideas arose that provide the solution for the box that the mechanistic, materialistic approach to life has gotten us into. But the solution can only emerge out of a correction of the lacunae, errors and distortions to be found in the existing accounts of Romantic medicine. The topic has widely been ignored by those writing about the period, even on matters of science, and the brief histories of medicine that do exist are heavily influenced by the prevailing paradigm, seeing Romantic medicine as an aberration, albeit colorful and to be seen with some amusement, but largely left behind and replaced by a more scientific approach. As far as the current medical model is concerned, there is really nothing more to see and we should just move on.On the contrary, there is indeed much to be discovered that has remained hidden or been suppressed that raises serious questions about the futility and illogic of relying on the prevailing materialistic-mechanistic scientific paradigm at the heart of the medical crisis, to also then provide the solution to that crisis. This crisis is not one of technology or finance, but of ideas. The idea that life, no less than mind and consciousness, is an epi-phenomenon of matter, that the laws governing vital nature can be reduced to the laws directing inert nature is directly challenged by the Romantic idea that mind evolves and matter adapts, and that there is a science of vital nature that is distinct from and of a higher order to the science of inert nature. The first scientific revolution that saw the geocentric world view replaced by a heliocentric universe and that gave us the laws and principles (science) governing the inertial world, must now be advanced by recognition of a second scientific revolution, even more 'earth shattering', that followed a few centuries later, a revolution concerning the discovery of the laws and principles governing the living world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1521229309
• ISBN13: 9781521229309
• Release Date: May 2017
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 174 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.4" x 6.0"