The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today I wish to make a link with what I said yesterday at the conclusion of the lecture. I pointed then to a personality who was driven by his philosophical instincts, as it were, from knowledge of the soul-spiritual into an intimation of the connection of this soul-spiritual with the physical-bodily existence of the human being. This was Schelling. I said that out of these instincts Schelling not only occupied himself with theoretical medicine but also with all kinds of therapeutic treatments. I do not know whether this resulted in greater or lesser satisfaction for the patient than is the case with many well-trained physicians, for this question of how much improvement in a person's condition can be attributed to therapeutic measures is, in most cases, a very problematic one if it is not looked at inwardly.

This instinct arose in Schelling out of the entire disposition of his soul, and from this he acquired a principle. It would certainly be good if this became a kind of inner principle for every physician, became an inner principle so that the physician would coordinate his entire practical conception of the nature of the healthy and sick human being out of this principle. I quoted Schelling's own words, which show a kind of daring. He simply said, “To know nature means to create nature.” Generally what is first noticed when a genius comes forth with such an expression is its quite obvious absurdity, for no one seriously believes himself capable, as an earthly human being in the physical body, of creating anything out of nature simply by knowing nature. Obviously in technology there is continuous creation, but there it is not a matter of really creating something in the way that Schelling meant; rather, by putting things together, by a composition of the forces of nature, nature in turn is given the opportunity to create in a particular way and through a particular arrangement, and so on. With this sentence, therefore, we have fundamentally to do with an absurdity that a man of genius laid at the foundation of all his thinking.

Yesterday I indicated another sentence that could be contrasted with, “To know nature means to create nature,” and this sentence would be, “To know the spirit means to destroy the spirit.” This last sentence was probably not expressed by Schelling in such a fundamental way. In modern times, however, a person who once again approaches a spiritual science, developing his own spiritual investigation, sees that both these sentences basically point back to an ancient knowledge from inspiration. Schelling, who certainly was by no means an initiate but simply a man of genius, could arrive at the first sentence out of his instinct. When a person pursues the kind of spiritual investigation that was not being done in Schelling's time, this sentence immediately recalls a resounding from ancient wisdom. Then one is carried over to the other sentence, which resounds in a similar way from ancient wisdom. Neither sentence can be comprehended with the customary modern intellectual knowledge that we apply in our sciences. Considered either in relation to each other or by themselves, these phrases are absurd. They both point, however, to something of the greatest importance in the human organization, something as important for the healthy condition as for the diseased condition.

When we consider outer nature in relation to the finished processes of nature, we can say nothing more than that “To know nature means at most to recreate nature in thoughts.” Therefore what we call our thoughts bring us no further than recreating nature since they lack the inner formative force; this is what we develop in our thinking, in the soul life permeated by thoughts, by mental images. It has been pointed out previously, however, that this soul life permeated by mental images is basically nothing but what emancipates itself from the physical-etheric organism at the time of the change of teeth, what the human being therefore has within the physical-etheric organism until the change of teeth.

What is active in the human physical-etheric during the childhood years, what truly engages in a creative activity, thus remains in a weakened form, toned down in the soul life as a world of pictures or a world of thoughts or mental images, in short, as a world force in thoughts and mental images, a force in its creative substantiality. It simply sits in our organism; what we know from age seven on simply sits within our organism in an organizing way. It creates there, but not at all, in the same as we are able to see it creating in outer nature; we see it creating within our own organism. Thus if a child were already a sage and were able to express himself not about outer nature but rather about what goes on within him, if the child were able to look within to his inner nature and penetrate nature there, he would say, “To know this nature means to create this nature.” The child would simply saturate himself with the creating forces, would become one with these creating forces. And in his medical instinct, in his physiological instinct, Schelling merely stated something that for the entire later life is absurd; he drew forth something from the age of childhood and extended it by saying, as it were: all this knowing in old age is nothing but a faint web of images; if one were able to know as a child, one would have to say that to know actually means to create, means to develop creative activity. We are able to see this creative activity, however, only in our own inner being.

What is it, therefore, that actually confronts us as creative activity in our own inner being, which is expressed in a genius such as Schelling as I have indicated? It is true, isn't it, that the nature of genius is generally based on the fact that the person retains a certain childlike quality in later life. Those people who age no matter what happens and who take up aging in a normal way, as it were, take it up appropriately never become geniuses. It is people who carry into later life something of a positive, creative-childlike element who bear the quality of genius. It is this childlike element, this positive creative element, this knowing-creative element that—if I want to express myself in a simple way—does not have time to know things outwardly because it turns the forces of knowledge inward and begins: to create. This is the heritage that we bring with us in entering physical existence through birth. We bring with us the forces of organization, and we can perceive them, as it were, through spiritual science. And a person like Schelling sensed them instinctively.

Anyone who acquires such perception knows that these soul-spiritual forces that permeate the organism in an organizing way in the first period of childhood do not completely cease being active with the change of teeth. They have undergone only one stage. They become suppressed, as it were, to a lesser degree of activity so that later we definitely still retain in us the organizing forces. We have conquered in ourselves, however, the memory-forming element that entered consciousness with the change of teeth, detaching itself thereby from the organization. We have taken memory from its latent state into its liberated state; we have received as a soul-perceptive force our growth force, our force of movement, our force of balance, which were active in a correspondingly heightened degree in the first period of childhood. You can see from this, however, that in normal human development, this organizing force, this growth force, must be transformed to a degree into something soul-spiritual, let us say, into the force of memory, into the thought-forming force.

Let us assume, now, that too much of this organizing force active in the first period of childhood were held back due to some process; picture a development in which insufficient forces of organization were transformed into the memory-forming force. These forces then remain stuck below in the organism; they are not carried properly into sleep each time a person falls asleep but rather continue to course through the organism between falling asleep and awakening.

If an individual engaged in medical, physiological-phenomenological research in the direction I can only suggest in this short course of lectures, he would be led to the insight that it is possible for forces in the human organism[,] that should actually enter the soul-spiritual at the proper turning-point in life instead[,] to remain below in the physical organization. Then what I spoke to you about yesterday occurs. If the normal degree of organization-forces is transformed with the change of teeth, then in later life we have the proper degree of forces in the organism to organize this organism in accord with its normal shape and normal structure. If we have not done this, however, if we have transformed too little, then the organizing forces that remain below appear somewhere and we encounter new formations, carcinomatous formations, about which I spoke yesterday. In this way—just as Troxler suggested in the first half of the nineteenth century—we can study the process of becoming ill or of illness that occurs in the moments of transition in later life.

We can then compare this with childhood illnesses, for obviously childhood illnesses cannot have the same origin, because they appear in an early stage of life when absolutely nothing has yet been transformed. If one has learned the origin of illnesses in later life, however, one has also acquired a capacity to observe what underlies the origin of illnesses in childhood. One finds the same thing, in a certain way, only from another side. One finds that there is too much of the soul-spiritual force of organization in the human organism when childhood illnesses arise. To an individual who has acquired the capacity to perceive along these lines, such things appear especially significant when considering the phenomena of scarlet fever or measles in childhood. With these he can see in the child's organism how the soul-spiritual, which otherwise functions in a normal way, begins to stir; he sees how it is more active than it should be. The whole course of these illnesses becomes comprehensible the moment one really sees this restless stirring of the soul-spiritual in the organism as the basis of illness.

Now, I beg you to consider my next sentence very precisely, for I never go a step further than is justified by the deliberations preceding it, even if much may be suggested only sketchily; everywhere I merely indicate how far one can go, so I am not drawing a conclusion here. I am simply saying that now one is not far from recognizing something that is extraordinarily important to recognize for a true knowledge. First we must arrive at the point of recognizing that in an illness of the human organism during later life, one that goes in the direction of new formations, there is too much of the organizing force that results in an island of organization, so to speak. When we have reached this point we are not far from saying that, if the later period of life points in this way back to earliest childhood, this indicates ultimately that what reveals itself in childhood points back to the time before birth or, let us say, before conception; it points back to the soul-spiritual existence of the human being before he was clothed with a physical body. A person suffering from childhood illnesses is simply someone who brought along too much of the soul-spiritual from his prehuman, pre-earthly life; this excess then lives itself out in the childhood illnesses.

In the future there will be no choice but to allow oneself to be driven beyond the fruitless, materialistic approaches in which physiological and therapeutic matters remain stuck today, to be driven on to a soul-spiritual approach. It will soon be seen that what arises in spiritual science does not occur because the spiritual investigator is too little grounded in physical research, because he is, as it were, a dilettante in physical research (though I must add parenthetically that many who call themselves spiritual investigators are, in fact, dilettantes, but this is not how it should be). It is not necessary for the spiritual investigator to be grounded too little in physical research in order to become a spiritual investigator; rather he must be even more immersed in physical research than the ordinary natural scientist. If he sees through phenomena more intensively, he will be driven by the phenomena themselves into the soul-spiritual, especially when it comes to illness.

The sentence, “To know the spirit means to destroy the spirit,” is actually an absurdity similar to the first sentence, yet this sentence also points to something that must be recognized, that must be penetrated. Just as the sentence, “To know nature means to create nature,” points us to the first age of childhood, and actually to life before birth—if we extend it in the right way—so the sentence, “To know the spirit means to destroy the spirit,” leads us to the end of a person's life, to what kills the human being. You need only hold to this sentence in a paradoxical way—“To know the spirit means to destroy the spirit”—and you will find how one must not follow it but how it nevertheless exists in life as something continually being approached asymptotically.

For an individual who doesn't simply grasp knowledge aggressively but develops self-perception in the right way, to know the spirit means to see continual processes of breakdown, continual processes of destruction in the human organism. When we look into the creative age of childhood in the same way, we can see continuous upbuilding processes, but upbuilding processes that have the peculiarity of actually dimming consciousness. Therefore we are dreaming, we are half-asleep in childhood; our consciousness is not fully awake. Our own earthly spirituality, namely the conscious spirituality of pressing back the growth activity, is what actually organizes us inwardly. The moment this force enters consciousness, it ceases to permeate us with organizing forces to the same degree as before.

In looking into the age of childhood one witnesses the work of upbuilding forces, though forces that weaken consciousness; in the same way one witnesses the breakdown processes when surrendering oneself to perceiving the developed thinking processes, but these breakdown processes are particularly suited to making our consciousness clear and luminous.

Modern physiological science pays little attention to this, although this is perfectly obvious in physiology's revelations, as obvious as can be. If you direct your attention to the real revelations of modern physiology, you will see that everything known about the physiology of the brain makes it quite clear that with soul-spiritual processes occurring consciously we do not have to do with any kind of growth forces or forces that take up nourishment; rather we have to do with processes of elimination in the nervous system, with breakdown processes, with a continuous slow dying.

It is death that is active in us when we surrender ourselves to what is spiritually active in our consciousness. And just as we look through the unconscious creating forces to the beginnings of life, so we look through the conscious conceptual forces that reveal themselves as destructive forces; they reveal themselves as what begins to take hold of us more and more as we grow into earthly life, to break us down, and finally to lead us to confront earthly death; we see through these forces to the other end of life, to death. Birth and death—or, let us say, conception, birth, and death—can only be understood by taking the spiritual into consideration.

And what wants to be expressed in the sentence, “To know the spirit means to destroy the spirit,” is this: if a person wishes only to gaze into the spirit, to take it up more or less naively, to take it up in the same way that outer nature is taken up, then that individual would have to dam up what is active in this thinking, conceptual, sensing and feeling activity; the breakdown would have to be prevented. This means that in such a moment a person would have to diminish, to weaken, the power over the spirit, the inner consciousness, to the point of unconsciousness, to a working of the spiritual in unconsciousness. He would have to come to the point of forming something spiritual out of himself, of pressing something spiritual out of himself, as it were. To do this, however, he could not remain conscious, because the organization cannot be carried into this breakdown process, into this spiritual process.

Thus we can say that on the one hand we have the processes of organization that consist of the fact that we have the form-skeleton of the human organism, as it were (see drawing a), into which the organizing force (drawing b, red) enters as something spiritual. (Of course this is now considered abstractly.) On the other hand, as I have described in the second case, we have the form-skeleton of the human organism, but we do not wish to allow it to be permeated by the organizing force, by the force that weakens our consciousness to a certain extent: instead we wish to drive out the organizing force, which we now want to know as spirit (see drawing c). We cannot go along with our ego, however, because this is bound to the organism.

We have the other side as well, the side in which man clearly begins to develop the spiritual, that is, to develop will activity in the spiritual. This permeation with will activity remains unconscious, sleeping, as it were, dreaming; based in this permeation with will activity is a soul-spiritual element that we actually bring forth from our organization without consciousness. Here we have the other side, the manic side, the frenzied side, in which the human being goes mad; we have the varying forms of the so-called mental illnesses. Whereas with physical illnesses we have a soul-spiritual element that does not belong in the physical organism (drawing b), with the so-called mental illnesses we have something in the psychological realm that drives out of the physical-etheric something that should remain within it (drawing c). Something is driven out of the organism.

Today we will see what we arrived at yesterday illuminated from the other side. This viewpoint can lead us still further. We will see tomorrow the fruitful therapeutic consequences that can be arrived at particularly from this viewpoint, consequences that can then be confirmed absolutely in life, proving themselves in the most outward practice of medicine, in practical therapeutic measures.

If we are looking for the cause of physical illness, we must ultimately seek it in the spirit going astray in the organism. This should certainly not be pursued abstractly. Anyone who does not understand the relationship between the soul-spiritual and the physical organism should really stay quiet about these matters. Only with knowledge of the soul-spiritual element can one come to know the specific aspects of this: where in one organ or another there is too strong a force of organization, a hypertrophied force of organization, as it were; these details can be arrived at only if one knows the soul-spiritual concretely. The soul-spiritual element is made concrete in the same way as the physical-bodily element in the liver, stomach, and so on, and one must know this soul-spiritual element (of which psychology has no intimation) with its constituents, its members, just as well as we know the physical-sensible. And if the relationships between the two are known, then one can often indicate—even out of the soul-spiritual findings encountered with the human being—where there is some kind of excessive organization in a particular organ. In every case that is not the result of an external injury, such an origin can be indicated.

On the other hand, if we are considering the so-called mental illnesses, we remain purely in abstractions if we believe that anything can be gained from a half-baked phenomenology, if we believe that simply by describing soul-spiritual abnormalities one can arrive at anything (though to describe them is, of course, most useful). With such descriptions one can naturally create a sensation among laymen, because it is always interesting to learn how a person who has gone mad deviates from life's normal standard. Anything unusual is interesting, and in our time it is still rare to deviate in this way from normal life. But to remain stuck in simple description should not be the important thing. It is particularly important not to press on from that point to the dilettantish judgment that in such cases the soul and spirit are ill and that the soul and spirit can be cured somehow by soul-spiritual measures, as is commonly dreamed up by those who remain stuck in abstractions.

Indeed not. Particularly with the so-called mental illnesses it is absolutely clear that in every case one can indicate where the diminished organization of some organ resides. An individual who truly wishes to know the nature of melancholia or hypochondria driven to the point of mental illness must not wade around in the soul element; he should rather attempt to determine, from the condition of the abdominal organs of the person in question, how the diminished organization is influencing the person's abdominal organization. He should attempt to determine how a force of organization that works less strongly than normal allows something to precipitate out, so to speak—just as in chemistry one precipitates something out of a solution so that a sediment occurs—how a diminished force of organization in the physical-bodily element, which would otherwise be permeated by the force of organization, precipitates something out and how this precipitate is then present in the organism as something physical-bodily, how it is deposited in what takes place in the liver, gall, stomach, heart, and lungs. These processes are not so accessible to investigation as one would like nowadays, when people prefer to stick to the crude aspects—for histology also remains at the crude level. Psychology is necessary to such an investigation, but in every case it is necessary to lead the study of so-called mental illnesses back to the bodily condition.

Of course such illnesses may seem less interesting as a result, but this is nevertheless the case. It naturally seems more interesting if a hypochondriac can say that his soul life is active in such-and-such a way in the soul-spiritual cosmos than to say that there is a diminished force of organization in his liver. It is more interesting to look for the causes of hysteria, let us say, in the soul-spiritual; it is more interesting than if one simply points to the metabolic processes of the sexual organs when speaking of hysterical phenomena or if one speaks of irregularities in the metabolism that spread throughout the organism. Little will be learned about these things, however, if the investigation is not pursued in this way.

Spiritual science is not always simply seeking the spirit. This can be left quietly to the spiritualists and other interesting people—interesting because they are rare, though unfortunately they are not rare enough! Spiritual science does not incessantly speak about spirit, spirit, spirit; rather it attempts really to lay hold of the spirit, and it tries to pursue its effects and succeeds by means of this in reaching the correct place for a comprehension of the material. It is certainly not so arrogant as to try to explain mental illnesses abstractly by mental means; instead it leads, particularly in the case of mental illness, to a material grasp of mental illness.

One may thus say that it points in a clarifying way to some interesting phenomena. One need not look back very far—perhaps still with Griesinger and others, or in the pre-Griesinger era in psychiatry—to discover that not so long ago psychiatrists also at least incorporated the bodily condition in their diagnoses. But what has become more and more common today? It has become commonplace for psychiatrists to flood us with descriptions of illness in their literature that merely describe the soul-spiritual abnormalities, so that here materialism has actually led us into an abstract soul-spiritual domain. This is its tragedy. Here materialism itself has led away from materialism. This is what is so remarkable about materialism, that in certain regards it leads to a misunderstanding, to a lack of comprehension of the material world itself. One who pursues the spirit as a real fact, however, also pursues it where it works its way into the material and where it then withdraws so that the material is deposited, as in the so-called mental illnesses.

I had to present these things as a foundation in order to offer guidelines in relation to the therapeutic aspect tomorrow. What we discover when the physiological therapeutic domain is fructified with spiritual science also has a social aspect. Life is remarkable in that everywhere we are driven into the social element if we are not seeking the scientific in an abstract withdrawal, in an academic existence estranged from life, but rather in the life-filled comprehension of human existence, of human community, if we are seeking with a truly living science. As an example, we have an extraordinarily interesting social phenomenon in recent evolution: through the split of humanity upward into a bourgeois aristocracy and downward into the proletariat, we can see how the one-sided aristocratic nature is taken hold of by a false seeking after the spirit, by materialism in the spiritual realm, while the proletarian nature is taken hold of by a certain spiritualism in the material realm.

What does that mean—spiritualism in the material realm? It means remaining stuck when seeking the origins of existence. The proletariat has thus developed scientific materialism as a view of life at the same time as the aristocratic element has developed the teachings of the spirit materialistically. While the proletariat has become materialistic, the aristocracy has become spiritualistic. If you find spiritualists among the proletariat, they did not grow out of their own proletarian soil; rather it is a mimicry, it is simply imitative, merely something that penetrated the proletariat by an infection—I will speak about infection tomorrow—with the aristocratic-bourgeois element.

And if you see among the aristocracy the development of materialism, coming to behold spirits materially as one looks at flames, so that materialism is carried into the most spiritual, wanting to see the spiritual materially, then we see this growing out of the original, decadent one-sidedness that emerged from the universally human, from the totality inclining to the aristocratic, to the bourgeois element, infected by the aristocratic element.

If what applies to the spirit is compelled to remain in matter, because it has not been drawn out by an appropriate education or the like, if in its spiritual seeking the proletariat is compelled to remain in matter, then materialism develops as a view of life. Materialism was developed by the proletariat as a view of life in the materialistic understanding of history, for example. Materialism was developed by more aristocratic people as spiritualism, for spiritualism is materialism, masked materialism, which does not even remain honest enough to acknowledge it; instead it lies and maintains that those who profess things materialistically are actually spiritual. After this divergence, we will continue tomorrow with our studies.

In the short time available to us for this therapeutic portion of our meeting, it will naturally only be possible to speak in a general way about specific therapeutic measures. On the other hand, it is always questionable whether one should speak in detail about specifics, especially in medicine, if one is not speaking to a purely professional audience, as was the case when I gave a series of lectures in the spring (see Note 1). For the future development of humanity, it will indeed be necessary that the widest circles are familiar with the guiding principles of healing in order that a trusting relationship, well-grounded in facts, may develop between physician and patient. Though it will be necessary for such an understanding of the guidelines for medicine and social hygiene to be sought in the widest circles, it will nevertheless remain undesirable for an excessively dilettantish and lay judgment to intervene in medical matters; due to the state of medicine in modern times, this happens far too frequently today.

It must be firmly stressed that I have absolutely no intention of encouraging any kind of quackery. Within our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science we must instead strive to bring spiritual scientific knowledge into a true medical art based on a methodical study of medical science. We therefore will not align ourselves with those who, out of an unlimited ignorance concerning what they are actually speaking about, attack nearly everything they call academic medicine and the like. We should certainly not align ourselves with these people.

Something else must also be considered in discussing matters like those that will be raised today. Though in a certain sense this has been the case for a long time, something has permeated medicine particularly in modern times; this aspect has asserted itself in our time with all the vehemence with which matters tend to assert themselves in our chaotic social order: this is the formation of partisan groups even within the medical field. And these parties struggling among themselves are no better than political parties. In general it is quite clear that this cannot support the development of medicine. The battle between the allopaths and the homoeopaths, between the so-called academic physicians and those using natural remedies and so on, has generated a great deal of confusion in the understanding of medicine that is required in the wider circles of humanity. I needed to make these introductory remarks today so that what I have to say will not be placed on false ground.

I have already directed your attention to how, on the one hand, the soul-spiritual stands within the human process of organization; this then proliferates, as it were, in the physical processes of illness so that the soul-spiritual cannot work separately from the physical organ, as it should, thus wreaking havoc in it. When this happens we are faced with all those illnesses that tend toward new formations in the organism .

By contrast, we are also concerned with illnesses in which the soul-spiritual develops in such a way that it does not take sufficient hold of the physical organism, whereupon certain parts of the physical organism are abandoned, not to processes taken hold of by the human organization but to subordinate processes of natural existence. In this way organs “physicalize”—if I may use such a word—to an excessive degree rather than permeating themselves soul-spiritually. The soul-spiritual then flows out without being encompassed in the right way by the ego-consciousness, and as a result all the forms of illness arise that we designate inaccurately as mental illnesses (see Note 2).

This view must be modified, however, the moment one proceeds from a sound physiology to a sound pathology and therapy; it must he modified by being developed still more precisely. It must incorporate the view of the nature of the human being that has been presented here repeatedly, though in very different connections from those we require today: this is the view of the threefold nature of the human organism.

On the one hand we have to do with a threefold nature of the soul being: in forming mental images, in feeling, and in will impulses. This threefold nature of the soul being, however, corresponds very precisely with a threefolding of the physical-bodily being: a kind of head system or nerve-sense system, a rhythmic system, and a metabolic-limb system. I must stress particularly that this constitution of the human organism must not be understood merely intellectually but through inner perception. A person would be unable to comprehend how matters actually stood if he remained with an external picture, if he understood the head system as something that simply ends at the neck, the circulatory or rhythmic system as being encompassed by the trunk, while the digestive system encompasses the limb system, the sexual system.

What is important here is that while the nerve-sense system is located primarily in the head, it nevertheless extends over the entire remaining organism as such. We may thus say that when we speak here with an anthroposophical purpose about the nerve-sense system, it is the system of functions in the human organism (for we are concerned here not with spatial limitations but functional limitations) that is located essentially in the head; nevertheless the head activity extends over the entire human being so that in a certain sense the whole human being is head. The same is true for the other systems. It was thus mere foolishness when a superficial professor of medicine, who did not intend really to study these matters but only wished to discredit them to the world, spoke about the “belly-system” in order to ridicule what is actually referred to by the metabolic system. He has merely shown his total lack of understanding for how the threefold constitution of the human being is functional, and not defined by spatial limitations.

When an individual really understands this constitution of the human being—about which many lectures could be given to describe it in full detail—he reaches the point of being able to perceive clearly the distinctions between the head system, and therefore the nerve-sense system, on the one hand, the metabolic-limb system on the other hand, and the mediating system, the rhythmic system, whose essential role is to bring about the balance between the two other systems.

If we thus wish to encompass the entire nature of the human being, we must consider the following. The actual conceptual and perceptual activity of the human being has as its basis—one cannot even say as its tool, but as its physical basis—everything that takes place physically in the nerve-sense system. It is not the case, as is suggested by modern psychology and physiology, that those processes connected primarily with the feeling and willing systems also take place in the nerve-sense system. Such an opinion does not hold up before a more precise study of the issue. You will find such a precise study, at least suggested in its outlines, in my book, Riddles of the Soul (see Note 3).

Much detailed work must still be done in this regard, however. Then what spiritual science has to say with certainty from its side will be elaborated from the other side, from the physical-empirical side. It will become clear that man's feeling is not connected in a primary way with the nerve-sense system but with the rhythmic system, that just as the nerve-sense system corresponds to mentally active perception, so the rhythmic system corresponds to feeling. Only through the interaction of the rhythmic system with the nerve-sense system, by the roundabout route of the rhythm in the cerebral fluid, pulsating against the nerve-sense system, is the nerve-sense system engaged as the carrier of the conceptual life. Then, if we raise our feelings to mental images, the dull, dreamlike life of feelings is perceived and pictured by us in an inner way. Just as the life of feeling is directly connected with the rhythmic system and is indirectly mediated by it, so the life of will is connected directly with the metabolic system. This connection in turn acts in a secondary way, since metabolism takes place also in the brain, of course, so that the metabolic system in its functions presses against the nerve-sense system. In this way we are able to bring forth the mental images of our will impulses, which otherwise would unfold in a dull sleep-life within our organism.

Thus you can see that in the human organism we have three different systems that carry the soul life in different ways. These systems do not simply differ from one another; they actually oppose each other (as I said, I can only sketch these matters today) so that on one side we have the nerve-sense system and on the other side all that constitutes the functions of the metabolic system, the metabolic-limb system (see drawing). Regarding the connection of the metabolism with the limbs, you can arrive at appropriate images if you simply consider the influence of the moving limbs on the metabolism. This influence is much greater than is ordinarily assumed in outer consciousness.

These two systems, however, the nerve-sense system and the metabolic-limb system, are in opposition, are polar opposites in a certain way. This polar opposition must be studied carefully in order to arrive at a sound pathology and therapy, particularly a pathology that could lead organically over into therapy; it must be studied carefully in all its countless individual details. If one enters into the detailed effects, it becomes evident that what I suggested yesterday is truly the case.

Within everything connected with the head system or nerve-sense system, we have breakdown processes, so that while our conceptual activity takes place in the waking state, when we perceive and form mental images, this activity is not bound up with growth and upbuilding processes but with breakdown processes, processes of elimination. This can be grasped if one looks in a sound way at what empirical-physiological science has already presented concerning this. There is already empirical evidence or to express it better, empirical corroboration—for what spiritual science provides through its perception. You need only pursue what certain inspired physiologists are able to present about the physical processes in the nervous system, which unfold as parallel phenomena to perceiving and forming mental images. You will see then that this assertion is certainly well supported, the assertion that when we think, when we think and perceive wakefully, we have to do with processes of elimination and breakdown, not with upbuilding processes. By contrast, where the will processes are mediated for the human being in the metabolic-limb system we are concerned with upbuilding processes.

All individual functions in the human being definitely interact with one another, however. If we look at the matter correctly, we must say that the upbuilding processes from below work up into the breakdown processes, and that the breakdown processes from above work down into the upbuilding processes. Then if you pursue this logically you have the rhythmic processes as a balancing system, as functions introducing the balance between the upbuilding processes and the breakdown processes, rhythmic processes that press breakdown into build-up and build-up into breakdown.

If we do not study the matter purely outwardly, we see that in the so-called blood circulation of the heart, in the aeration of the human body, we have everywhere special processes, as it were, that are somehow interrupted. I cannot go further now into this interruption, which has its purpose, but everywhere we have a specialization of this rhythmic curve that I have sketched here (see drawing). The course of breathing is a special aspect of this curve, the process that you draw if you follow the course of the blood from the heart upward toward the head or respectively toward the lungs and down to the rest of the body. Thus you have a specialization of these processes. In short, if you enliven what is suggested here, you penetrate into the functional tissue of the human organism, not in the dead way that is customary but in a living way. To do so you must enliven your own mental images. A mobile image of the human organism can thus be pictured. The human organism cannot be encompassed with static, abstract mental images, as modern physiology and pathology would like to encompass it today; it must instead be grasped with mental images in movement, with mental images that can really penetrate into the working of something that has inner movement, that is in no way merely a mechanical interaction of organs situated at rest in relation to one another.

We thus can see that within the human organism there is basically a continuous interaction between the breakdown processes, the deadening processes, and the upbuilding processes, the growth or proliferative processes. The human organization cannot be grasped without this activity.

What is actually present there, however? Let's look at the matter more precisely. If the breakdown process of the nerve-sense organization works into the metabolic-limb system through rhythm, something is present there that works against the metabolic-limb system, something that is a poison for this metabolic-limb system. The reverse is also the case, that what is present in the upbuilding system, working into the head system in rhythm, is a poison for the head system. And since, as I have indicated, the systems are spread out over the entire organism, a poisoning and unpoisoning are continuously taking place everywhere in the human organism, and this is brought into balance by the rhythmic processes.

We are therefore unable to regard such a natural process as taking its course one-sidedly, in the way that one normally pictures things, so that healthy processes are simply designated as normal. Rather we look into two processes working against one another, where one is a process that is thoroughly illness-engendering for the other. We simply cannot live in the physical organism at all without continuously exposing our metabolic-limb system to the causes of illness from the head system and exposing the head system to the causes of illness from the metabolic system. A scale that is not balanced properly is thrown out of balance by entirely natural laws so that the beam does not rest on the horizontal; similarly life, because it is in constant movement within itself, does not simply exist in a state of balanced rest but rather exists in a state of balance that can deviate in both directions toward irregularities.

Healing, then, means simply that if the head system, for example, is working in a way too strongly poisonous on the metabolic system, its poisoning effect is relieved, its poisonous effect is taken away. If, on the other hand, the metabolic-limb system is working in a way too strongly poisonous on the head system, which means working over abundantly: then its poisonous effect must also be removed.

It is possible to arrive at a comprehensive view of this realm, however, only if one now extends what can be observed in the human being to the observation of all nature, if one is able to grasp all nature in a spiritual scientific sense. If you look at the plant-forming process, for example, you can see clearly and macroscopically the upward striving of plant-forming processes, a striving away from the center of the earth. You may make a stimulating study of this metamorphosing formative striving of the plants, at least in a rudimentary way, on the basis of the guidelines offered in Goethe's Metamorphosis of the Plants. In Goethe's Metamorphosis of the Plants there is a sketchy rendering of the first composition, the first elements that are to be studied about the nature of the plant in this direction, but the direction of such a study must be developed further. The initial guidelines must be pursued, for then we may obtain a living view of everything involved in plant growth: when rooting in the soil the plant's upward-striving develops in a negative direction in the root; the plant begins to grow, then grows upward, overcoming the force of attraction of the earth prevailing in the root; then it wrestles through other forces in order to come ultimately to blossom, fruit, and seed formation. A great deal takes place upon this path.

On this path, for example, an opposing force once again intervenes. The opposing force that intervenes can be well observed if you study, simply to take an example, the common birch, betula alba. Pursue very precisely the process that takes place from the root formation through the trunk formation, particularly the bark formation. Consider how, on the basis of everything that works together in the trunk and bark formation, there develops what later comes into manifestation in the leaf formation. This can be studied particularly well in a spiritual scientific way if the still-brownish young birch leaves are studied in the spring.

If this is studied vividly, one also receives a view of forces self-metamorphosing, forces that are active there within the plant. One receives a view of how, on the one hand, there is a formative force active in the process of plant formation that works from below upward. On the other hand it is also possible to behold the force that retards, which in the root still, works strongly as the force of gravity but which, as the plant wrestles itself free from the earthly substance out into the air, is able to work together in another way with the upward-striving force. We then reach an interesting stage, a stage very helpful in understanding how in plant formation during this upward-striving process certain salts, potassium salts, are deposited in the birch bark; this is simply the result of the interaction of the forces working downward with the forces working upward, tending toward protein-formation, you could say, toward what I would like to designate as the albuminizing force formation.

In this way it is possible to penetrate into the plant-forming process. I can only indicate this here. By looking at how the potassium salts are deposited in the birch bark, how something wrestles itself free from this force drawing downward (a process somewhat comparable to what happens when a salt precipitates out of a solution), coming to the process that takes place when the solution rids itself of the salt, we come to see, to grasp in a living way, the process of protein formation, the process I would designate as the albuminizing process. We thus have a path to study what outwardly surrounds the human being, to study it vividly.

Then when we look back at the human being, we can see how, fundamentally speaking, the human being has the same form of forces in him—if we consider the breakdown process working from above downward—that work from below upward in the plant. We can see that in what is active in the forces working downward from the head system toward the metabolic-limb system there is something like an inverted plant element active within us. We can see that in fact those forces that we see sent upward in plant growth work in a downward direction in the human being. If the human being inappropriately holds back this process of plant formation active within him, so that he doesn't permeate the bodily life in the right way with what is active in the head—the astral, the ego-being—and if this then penetrates the bodily nature, this penetration expressing itself within the body, then something is held up there, something that should proceed into the human organism. We thus have to do with a pathological phenomenon like that which confronts us, for example, in cases of rheumatism or gouty conditions. If we study what is brought about in the human organism when this breakdown process is dammed up in a certain way, we discover its effects in the process of rheumatism, in the process of gout-formation, and so on.

Let us now shift our gaze again from within the organism to a process of plant formation like the one we have in the betula alba. From this we can arrive at the following. We look on the one hand into what takes place in salt formation and on the other hand into protein formation. We find, if we understand this process of protein formation in the right way, that the opposite process is within it and is held up there. We find held up in the organism that process which should take place in a way similar to the correct process of albuminizing in the leaves of the birch. We are thus able to come to the relationship between those processes that take place in the birch leaves, for example, and the processes within the organism if we process what is in the birch leaves into remedies. We can then give these remedies to the human being, by means of which we can bring about a healing, because the remedy correctly opposes this damming-up process that occurs in rheumatism and gout. In this way we look both at what is taking place outside in nature and at what takes place within the organism, and then we arrive at an idea of how we should guide the healing forces.

On the other hand we can see instances when the breakdown processes proceed in such a way that the organism cannot restrain them so that they pour themselves downward, and the rhythmic system does not press them back in the right way; they thus reach the periphery of the body pressing outward, as it were, toward the skin. Then we get inflammatory conditions on the outer portion of the human being, we get skin eruptions and the like. If we now look hack again to our plant, to the betula alba, we find the opposing process in the disposition of the potassium salts in the birch bark: we thus become able to see how we can fight against the process of skin eruption, which is an excessive function of exudation within the human being, by preparing a remedy from the birch bark.

We are therefore able to study how plant processes, how mineral processes, are active, and we grasp the connections between what is outside in nature and what is active within the human being. In other words, medical empiricism, therapeutic empiricism, ascends to what Goethe calls in his sense—not now in the intellectual sense but in his sense the rational stage of science. We arrive at a science as therapy, which is able really to penetrate into the connections.

These things are not so simple, for one must study things in detail, at least in accordance with certain types, at first in accordance with secret types of the human personality and in accordance with secrets of natural existence. It should not be assumed that if the process has been studied in an example such as the betula alba, an overview has already been reached of what needs to be considered. In each different plant-forming process—for example in the horse chestnut or whatever—these formative processes will manifest themselves in an essentially different way. What has been indicated here should not in any way lead to a generalized twaddle but to a very serious and extensive study.

Now I wish to direct my words particularly to the students here. If this study is undertaken in a rational way, it need not drive you into a panic regarding the extent of study necessary, for if everything now present as examination-ballast falls away—to speak in Paracelsus' terms—and is replaced by something active, leading in this way to a rational view of a therapeutic pathology and a pathological therapy, students will have to study not more but less. And because this study will permeate you with life, it will bring forth a much greater enthusiasm than what leads you to the human being today, yielding only the ability to see organs. Such organs are by no means at rest and can be understood only if they are grasped in their living function and in their interaction with other organs, can be understood only if this organization is studied and if one strives to enter completely into the functional element. We need an outer natural science that is also striving to reach the functional element.

It is absolutely necessary to study in parallel the inner process in the human being, that peculiar process taking place as poisoning and poisoning effects that have fallen out of balance, and those processes that take place in the natural order. And because the outer relates itself in a polar way to the inner, the outer processes must be used in a certain way polarically. By this means we can be guided into pathology, or, said better, into a therapeutic pathology and a pathological therapy.

I have only been able to suggest here what is necessary to direct the steps needed to heal medical study, and was only able to suggest how spiritual science wishes to work into this medical study. This evening I will give you a few more examples, to show you how intuitively looking together at the outer workings of nature and the workings of the inner organism can lead to therapy and to knowledge of pathology. At that time I would like to go into particular substances.

During the brief time available to me here, I have only been able to indicate the principle, as it were, concerning the example of betula alba, and this evening I will give some further indications, but in every instance I will try to hold myself to indicating only what can add to a general understanding of the human being. Proceeding from this, the physician must move into further specialization. He must enter into the specifics. To deal with specifics always requires an individual evaluation, and here it is only necessary, out of the laymen's understanding of medical directions, of medical principles, for an understanding to grow of what the physician has to undertake within the outer world.

If you consider rightly the course that an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wishes to pursue in medicine—and I will speak more about this tonight—you will really be able to say that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not wish to encourage quackery and dilettantism; rather it wishes above all to work toward a healing of science, toward a true, serious science that will itself engender social effects.

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Note 1:

Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Science and Medicine, twenty lectures given to physicians in Dornach, 1920. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1975.

Note 2:

In German, the illnesses, are called Geisteskrankheiten, diseases of the spirit as opposed to those of the body. As Steiner is speaking here of the role of the spirit in bodily-phenomena, it may be helpful to keep in mind the thought of spiritual illnesses, though in the translation we have chosen the more commonly used English equivalent, mental illnesses.

Note 3:

Rudolf Steiner, Von Seelenraetseln, 1917. Excerpts of this are published in English under the title, The Case for Anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1970.

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Tonight I would like to add a few things to the lectures I have been giving to you in these past few days as a substitute for the scheduled lecturer. I would like to point aphoristically, as it were, to something that may still be able to clarify a principle for the fructification of medical-therapeutic study through spiritual science. Obviously for the reasons already mentioned this morning, I cannot speak too much detail here; that is due not so much to the shortness of time—that too, naturally—but more to the fact that detailed knowledge must be held for a really professional gathering of physicians, again for the reasons I presented this morning.

Nevertheless, I would still like to contribute something in this direction, something that can lead to a general understanding of the nature of medicine so that a kind of social influence can emanate from a spiritual scientific study of medicine, bringing about a certain trust between the public and physicians. The better our understanding of the nature of medicine, the more effectively will medicine be able to work.

This morning I directed your attention to the fact that the life of the human organism consists of the nerve-sense system—the head system—working oppositely to the metabolic-limb system; these two are then balanced by the rhythmic system. All breakdown processes, the completely necessary breakdown processes of the nerve-sense system, are continuously brought into harmony and exchange with the upbuilding processes of the metabolic-limb system. You can imagine (and this can be verified in detail) that because the two systems of the human organism work in a thoroughly opposite way, they also work upon one another. Thus what goes on in the details of the metabolic-limb system, for example, should not be influenced too strongly from the head system, bypassing the rhythmic system; when this happens an activity suitable only to the head system works its way into the metabolic limb system.

If we adequately penetrate what we are concerned with here, we will come to understand how such intrusions of one system upon the other can take place. It will be understood, in other words, how the head system, the nerve-sense system (in which there must also be metabolic processes, as I have explained to you), can occasionally be overcome by metabolic processes that make the head system resemble the metabolic-limb system inwardly and functionally. The reverse can also take place, because the same functional system that is normally active in the head is also active in the metabolic-limb system, though in a subordinate way Occasionally this activity can get the upper hand, can become too intense in the metabolic-limb system, where it should only reach a certain level, having its actual significance in the head.

This is possible, in other words, because the nerve-sense activity that is also present in the metabolic-limb system strongly impregnates the metabolic-limb system with head activity, which thus becomes predominant in the abdomen, for example. Said in a better way, it becomes an activity whose intensity is too great. Then what should normally take place as breakdown processes only in the nerve-sense system will take place in the abdominal organs. Of course it will take on another form in the abdominal system, but it will nevertheless cause mischief there. In fact, by looking in this way into the organization of human nature, we can see in the phenomenon I have just described the development of a serious human illness, namely, typhus abdominalis. The manifestations of typhus may certainly be studied empirically, but they can be understood and placed within the entire human organization only if one is able to penetrate the human being in this way from the standpoint of a rational medicine, if I may use this Goethean designation.

I have also shown you this morning how it is possible to make the transition from the physiological-pathological to the therapeutic by attempting not only to penetrate what goes on in human nature but at the same time to penetrate what goes on in outer nature. Processes take place in outer nature which, if penetrated in the right way, can be introduced into the human organism by administering the appropriate substances. Because outer nature—the plant nature, for example—works in a certain way by virtue of its striving upward, working in an opposite sense to what strives downward in the human being, substances from plants can restrain certain processes that are unfolding improperly among the three systems of the human organism.

It is interesting to explore how what I presented to you this morning about the plant world and its connection with the human being can be penetrated in a similar way in relation to the mineral world. In order to penetrate this matter in relation to the mineral world, however, we must first gain certain anthroposophical understandings of the human being.

The soul-spiritual, the etheric, and the physical are all active in the human being. As we will have been able to discern through the considerations in these lectures, this soul-spiritual element works in such a way that it can be penetrated by full ego-consciousness. If this is the case, the human being is organized in the normal way, as it were. On the other hand, the ego-consciousness may be weakened, may step back in some way. If the soul-spiritual element kicks up some kind of fuss, going its own way without being penetrated in the right way by the ego, then various types of the so-called mental illnesses arise.

Everything that is soul-spiritual in the human being, however, as well as what in anthroposophical terminology is called the astral—that is, the more subconscious, dreamlike, or entirely unconscious soul life—and also what is understood as ego-activity, as the fully conscious soul life, has its physical carrier by means of which it works in a certain way in physical life. We may therefore say that if we study the human being we must direct our gaze not merely to what expresses itself as ego-activity, which is a purely spiritual activity we must rather direct our gaze to the actual, carrier of this ego-activity in the organism. We find that the actual carrier of this ego-activity is essentially anchored in the blood.

I could certainly demonstrate to you in detail how, especially through the particular activity of the blood, through the working together of the metabolic activity in the blood with the rhythmic activity in the blood, the ego works with the rest of the soul element, but to go into this now would lead too far. What should interest us more right now, however, is the bridge from physiology and pathology to therapy. There we find something exceptionally important. We can influence the physical scaffolding, as it were—the physical carrier—of a soul-spiritual element, of the fully conscious ego, let us say, through certain processes that we bring about in it. The physical carrier then withdraws from the ego-activity, as it were, yet continues to perform a function similar to what otherwise takes place only under the influence of the ego-activity.

Drawing 1

Let me refer to a specific case in this connection. Imagine, please—I will sketch this for you—that what is active as ego-activity builds up, through the human blood system, something like a scaffolding, a scaffolding of forces. I will designate the ego-activity itself by these colored lines next to the line of this force-scaffolding, the line that designates the soul-spiritual element of the ego-activity (see drawing, red). If one can now influence the force-organization lying at the basis of the ego-activity in a certain way, it could be possible for this force-organization to become independent, as it were, to tear itself away and as physical activity, as scaffolding of physical force-activity, to separate itself from the soul-spiritual and yet remain like an image of the soul-spiritual activity, though working merely physically. In a certain way we thus incorporate into ourselves a kind of double that works deeply in the subconscious but that work; similarly—though only in space, which means only physically—to the way it normally works when surrendering itself as an unencumbered instrument for the ego-activity.

This can be brought about by introducing too much phosphorus into the human being, by administering to someone a powerful dose of phosphorus. (This does not actually need to be done; in elementary cases one can already see this. It is always possible to find the point designated by Goethe as the one behind which nature reveals its manifest secret, if one follows the appropriate path.) It is possible to separate out the bodily carrier of this ego-activity from the ego-activity itself. Then this ego-activity is carried out in the body as in an image. What would be the result of this? The result would be that, particularly under the influence of the phosphorus forces, the blood activity would proliferate beyond its normal extent, particularly in the bony system. In the bony system a kind of hyperemia would arise. In this way, through this hyperemia, an excessive blood activity in the region of the bone cartilage would run rampant, and the calcification process of the bones would be opposed.

I have described to you what could result from treating someone with too much phosphorus, where the function that phosphorus is normally able to fulfill in the human organism is excessively enhanced. Those forces that are outside in the world, however, anchored in the different minerals, are present in the human being in another form, as it were, in a super-sensible form, and they can be active within the human being. Man is a microcosm in a certain respect. If these forces that are normally anchored in phosphorus outside in nature are active within the human being, as can occur particularly in early childhood, then the illness rickets occurs. By penetrating the connection of the human being with the surrounding world, we have been able to ascertain that the manifestation of rickets in the human organism is a process similar to the one that takes place outside in nature in the manifestation of phosphorus. I am speaking to you aphoristically and obviously in a way in which not all the parts of a sequence of proof are connected; by means of a specific case, which is actually only indicating the direction, we can see how to search in a spiritual scientific way for this connection between the human being and the rest of the world.

Drawing 2

Now, however, it is possible to proceed further. I have shown you earlier today how, with the metabolic-limb system on one side and the nerve-sense system on the other side, the balancing rhythmic system in between, these two systems work together in a way (see drawing). You see, in fact, that what serves as an irregularity in the metabolic-limb system, bringing about illness, is just what induces health in the head system. Thus in the human head system there are always certain functions that stem from phosphorus, though from a very slight quantity of phosphorus that is found in the human brain. We have already become acquainted with this phosphorus-activity from the other side, in the way I have described to you, as something that brings the proper breakdown in the calcification processes in the metabolic-limb organism. These phosphorus processes in the brain, however, must be present wherever there is to be breakdown and where, above all, this breakdown is to be continually active. In other words, because the phosphorus process is present in the brain, we continuously have a kind of manifestation of rickets in the brain in, you could say, a status nascendi.

This is precisely the basis of our brain-activity, that bone continuously wants to be formed, but this bone formation is continuously inhibited once the skull has developed to surround the human brain in the right way. In the human brain—and this reveals itself to human perception—we have a continuous striving toward bone formation, but this bone formation reaches its conclusion at a certain age, at which time this activity of bone formation ceases. We thus have here something that is really conducive to illness but that is balanced from the other side, from the other pole of the organism; we have here a continuous striving toward rickets.

It is interesting that a rhythm such as this one that can be observed in the human being is also present outside in the rest of nature, though appearing in a certain respect as the opposite. If we look at the remarkable significance of phosphorus for the human brain, we have to say to ourselves that as phosphorus is taken in it is worked through up to the head. It undergoes a transformation within the human organism itself. It follows the same direction as the growth in the human being. It incorporates itself into this direction of growth in the human being, thus reducing its own activity to a minimum, as it were, diluting it. By means of this dilution the restrained rickets of the head can become the carrier of just those soul-spiritual processes that must be undertaken by means of the human head's mediation.

It is interesting that if very small doses of phosphorus are administered to the human being in the right way, rather than the somewhat larger, ordinarily perceptible doses of phosphorus, something different is achieved even in the function of phosphorus. If these small doses are administered to the human organism, they work in the same way as phosphorus works in the human brain. They now work in the rest of the organism as small doses able to restrain the rickets process if it has begun in children. Phosphorus in small quantities, in the smallest doses, can therefore serve as a remedy against rickets. In a more comprehensive sense, phosphorus can generally be used as a remedy against everything in which this ego-scaffolding, the physical ego-scaffolding (see Drawing 1, white), which I have sketched under the red, is freed within the organism, as a result of illness, from the actual soul activity: in other words, phosphorus brings back the soul activity, returning the condition to normal.

I would have to present a very complicated exposition about human nature for you to be able to see what actually lies at the basis of the dispute between allopathy and homoeopathy. In certain areas, however, you could say that what homoeopathy reveals becomes perfectly evident, as in these cases I have indicated to you. With certain small doses of phosphorus, or also sulphur (in short, something combustible—I will return to this) rickets as well as other inflammatory conditions can be healed, illnesses that stem from a blood-activity that has been freed from the ego-being.

You see, then, that when we begin to study the human being as suggested by spiritual science, as in this case, the connection of the human being with outer, inorganic nature becomes transparent. What I have just touched on here today can definitely be extended to other inorganic substances. One need only pursue this in detail. It is precisely this attempt to bring about a union of pathology, physiology, and therapy that requires a devoted study of the world within and the world outside of the human being. We may call phosphorus and sulphur combustible substances. If this study is really extended further, combustible substances reveal themselves as working in a way thoroughly akin to what has been described of phosphorus. They work so as to re-insert the emancipated ego-scaffolding into the ego-activity.

Certain salts work in the opposite way, substances now that are not combustible but that dissolve in water and then precipitate out again when the water is cooled. These salts, carbonates and other salts, work in such a way that they call forth a too-intense union of the soul-spiritual, particularly the ego-activity, with the scaffolding; they do not loosen it from the scaffolding but rather impress the soul-spiritual too strongly into it. They can therefore be used as remedies if this connection is for some reason too loose.

We can therefore say that if we understand the actual results of introducing a substance into the organism, how it influences the entire organization, then we can see how to work against a process that is proceeding abnormally and must be countered.

For certain processes, for example the process lying at the basis of pulmonary tuberculosis, it is precisely such salt-like substances (therefore soluble substances) that are particularly effective. What pulmonary tuberculosis is demanding is something to work against a process which, in the human organism, is the opposite of what takes place when a salt dissolves into a solution. What is important here is that broadening one's knowledge about all of human nature leads into the human being's connection with all his outer, worldly environment.

In these thoroughly aphoristic considerations I can only offer examples. What I have just been speaking about could be illustrated by still other examples. We can find such examples everywhere, but let us take an example from a realm that can at the same time lead us into the whole connection of the soul-spiritual with the physical. What is transmitted through the nerve-sense system in human life constitutes the conscious life of the human being from waking to falling asleep. We are thus able to say, more or less, that the head system is the expression for the conscious life of the human being. The metabolic-limb system is not the expression for the conscious life of the human being in the same way. We go through the world with conscious head but with unconscious limbs. These limbs become conscious only when they are touched in some way, when they endure an insult of some sort. We may therefore say that the normal condition for the head system, for the nerve-sense system, is waking consciousness, whereas for the opposite system in the human being it is unconsciousness. It is possible, however, to produce artificially in the human being a kind of consciousness for this other system, for the metabolic-limb system. This happens through massage, for example, which consists of making conscious through outer measures what otherwise remains unconscious. What is important here is that through massage an improvement can be brought about of an inadequate connection between the soul-spiritual and the physical. Take the case of a person who has a tendency to illness because his soul-spiritual element is insufficiently inclined to penetrate his metabolic-limb system. Then the physical aspect of this metabolic-limb system can be supported by massaging it, by lifting it, to a certain degree, from the condition of the spiritual into the condition of consciousness; the effectiveness of the system is thus supported, thereby calling forth a stronger permeation of this system by the soul-spiritual.

If it is understood how this metabolic-limb system works, if it is known, for example, that what pulses in the arms and hands, what pulses there as the soul-spiritual element, continues inwardly and rules the inner metabolism of the human being, then it will also be known what it means to bring about a partial consciousness in the arms and hands through massage. It means that the soul-spiritual element in the metabolic system is enhanced—the metabolic system that works within the human being in a constructive way, bringing about digestion, the taking up of substance.

If one finds, therefore, that a person is suffering inwardly and organically from metabolic disturbances, metabolic disturbances that are responsible for the inability of his nourishment to integrate itself properly in the body or for the results of this nourishment to proceed further into the upbuilding processes, if one finds, therefore, that the metabolism that proceeds inward is not working properly, then it is possible in certain cases to be of some help with arm and hand massage (of course detailed knowledge is necessary to carry this out in the right way). Such assistance consists of supporting the soul-spiritual element in its activity through the degree of consciousness brought about by means of the massage.

If the legs and feet are massaged, something else occurs. The soul-spiritual element that permeates the legs and feet is connected organically with processes of elimination, with breakdown processes. One will be able to offer assistance with a massage of the legs and feet, therefore, if the digestion in the direction of the process of elimination is not being accomplished in the right way.

You can see that if the nature of medicine is illuminated in this way by spiritual science, such insights can be arrived at not simply by chance in an empirical way, should they happen to present themselves empirically; rather it becomes possible to work fully consciously to cultivate the connections among physiology, pathology, and therapy in the most varied domains. I am saying these things to you, as I have mentioned previously, only to illuminate the directions one must pursue here. I know very well how astonishing such things appear because it is not possible, of course, to bring together all the details here.

If we consider an illness like diabetes mellitus, for example, which presents doctors with so many concerns, we must again look to the connection of the soul-spiritual element and particularly the conscious soul-spiritual element, that element permeated with the ego—with the physical carrier of this ego-activity. Something different now takes place from what was described in the first case today. Let us assume that this ego-activity becomes too great within the human organism. It extends itself beyond its proper measure. Then abnormal processes of elimination take place like those we find in the diabetic. In this case we are dealing with an excessive ego-activity in the organic itself, with an excessively deep immersion of the ego into the organic, so that through this deep immersion something is driven outward in a way that manifests particularly in the diabetic.

Let us now shift our gaze again away from what goes on within the human being and direct it to what goes on in the world outside the human being. In this world outside we have plants. This morning we already became aware of how plants in a certain way develop a process from below upward, a process that develops in the human being from above downward. What takes place in diabetes as the hypertrophy of ego-activity in the organism actually proceeds in the direction opposite to that of plant growth. If we are able to discern the right function in the growing plant, then under certain circumstances we can establish a relationship between what works downward in the diabetic and upward in the plant. We must conceive of the plant in such a way, however, that we say: the plant is a being; it is also physical; it grows, it reproduces, and therefore it has an etheric body. For spiritual perception it also has an etheric body, but it does not bring it to the point of inner soul movement; therefore it has no astral body, and also no ego-activity. Nevertheless it grows toward the ego-activity, the astral activity. The same thing that the plant unfolds from below upward the human being unfolds from above downward.

If we understand that we must observe what actually goes on in the plant, seeing how it grows in the opposite direction to which the human being develops his ego, from above downward, then we find how something arises in the plant element that is able to have an inner relationship to this inner ego-activity through the fact that it also has something to do with combustibility. Earlier I drew your attention to combustible substances. Now we see a combustible, volatile substantiality, a substantiality approaching combustion that develops out of the plant in the etheric oils. If we see the etheric oils appearing in certain plants, then we can discover in a study such as the one I have been suggesting, that this formation of etheric oils is the opposite of the activity enacted by the ego-activity pressing itself into the human organism through which a person becomes diabetic. If what is present in the outer world as the opposite is introduced into the human being in the right way, it is then possible to work against diabetes mellitus.

In this case this must be done by adding these etheric oils to baths, for example, or adding the plants themselves from which these oils are developed, allowing the diabetic to bathe in them. In this way the forces that the plant unfolds in the etheric oils work from outside inward against the forces that bring about diabetes. We will be able to help the person afflicted with this illness particularly by means of such baths.

I am only introducing a few individual examples here out of the rich wealth of examples that could be presented: I offered a large number of them this spring in the course for physicians (see Note 1). I am introducing them here only to illustrate the principles involved, but you can see from these examples how medicine can gradually become rational. These are examples through which one really comes to see the process taking place within the human being and the process in outer nature; one comes to see how these two processes either support each other or work against each other and therefore how a process in the human organism can be restrained, how one can work toward healing. If we extend this way of studying into knowledge of the physical human being and its connections with the soul-spiritual human being, we will progress further and further.

You know that in modern medicine, according to the natural scientific view, the problem of heredity plays a tremendous role. This problem, however, is treated in a thoroughly abstract and external way. Through outer science it is possible to make very few connections with what is actually active in human nature. Now I would like to present something to you that can only be arrived at out of a rich anthroposophical investigation. I will present it to you as a result of such an investigation: the human being is, in fact, formed out of the whole rest of the world, which belongs to him as the earthly world and also as the extraterrestrial world. He is formed out of this in various ways. We find, for example, that the female organism is formed out of nature, out of the cosmos, in such a way that there is a predominance in the female organism of those forces that are less bound to the forces of the earth, as it were. In the female organism there is something strongly extraterrestrial. In the male organism forces are primarily developed that are connected with earthly life. In ordinary life this does not come so strongly into consideration, but it must be considered in reproduction. In reproduction what matters is that the forces active in the female organism and contributing to reproduction are actually the transference of what inserts itself as the extraterrestrial element into general human nature. What draws the human being down into the earthly world, however, is inserted into the male organism.

Now let us consider what is actually present in the human being through his earthly environment. The most noticeable thing in man through his earthly environment is the ego-activity. This ego-activity gives the earthly evolution of the human being its full meaning. We must evolve ourselves from other worlds into the earthly world in order to be able to develop the ego-activity fully in our soul-spiritual element. I have already indicated to you how this ego-activity is bound to the scaffolding of forces mediated by the blood. We must therefore say that what is primarily inserted into the blood, working in accordance with the ego-activity, is brought about by the male personality by way of reproduction. What inserts the extraterrestrial into the human being, which must first be penetrated by the ego-activity, stems more from the female side.

Thus we see male and female working together in this way in reproduction, and only through having insight into this are we able to gain correct concepts of heredity. To begin with, the female seed, the female germ, is touched by the male influence, and this female germ has a certain independence in the female organism. We must say that if we have before us a mature female organism, this extraterrestrial aspect works primarily in the rest of the female organism; in the part of the female organism giving rise to the formation of the germ, it is not active, particularly not after conception. Particularly the female germ that has undergone conception has a certain independence so that what it signifies as a transmitter of the ego-activity is transferred independently onto the descendants in a certain way.

If these things are known, they can be applied so that phenomena confronting us in the outer world illustrate what was first gained through spiritual vision. Through spiritual vision it becomes clear that something extraterrestrial is, in fact, anchored in the female organism and that the earthly, which adheres particularly to the blood-activity, is transmitted through the male organism. It becomes evident that through this transmittal the female ovum gains a certain independence, developing separately, as it were, from the rest of the extraterrestrial female organism by means of the fertilization.

A process such as this, which one comes to know soul-spiritually, can then stand in the background when one wishes to explain a remarkable phenomenon such as hemophilia. The curious fact emerges with this illness that there are people who suffer from an inadequate coagulation of the blood, so that the least injury—often even without a verifiable injury—causes them to lose a great deal of blood, tending toward hemorrhage. This illness has a most unusual characteristic: males originating from hemophiliac families do not manifest the symptoms if they are borne by women from non-hemophiliac families; women from hemophiliac families, on the other hand, do not get hemophilia through heredity, but if they have children, the males to whom they give birth will contract hemophilia. This means that hemophilia passes through the woman. This points us to the independence of the germ, about which I have just spoken. It points us to the outer phenomenon that can illustrate what we came to know through spiritual vision.

I have presented something to you in a narrative way which may be recounted as follows. I have shown you how on the one hand it is possible to look into the being of man through spiritual vision, into the concrete being of man, into his upbuilding and breakdown processes, into his processes of health and disease, which are actually in a continuous interaction and between which a balance must be sought. On the other hand, I have shown you how, through spiritual vision, it is possible to find the reciprocal relationship of the human being to his environment and thereby to build a bridge from physiology and pathology to therapy. Finally I wanted to show you with a specific example (I have selected an extreme case, hemophilia and the hereditary conditions connected with it) how, if one looks in the right way at nature in the cases where nature reveals her manifest secret, it is possible everywhere to receive an illustration of what was first known by spiritual scientific means. The objection often raised in this regard therefore has no validity; this objection is that a person who cannot yet see into the spiritual world has no way of finding any proof for what spiritual science maintains. This is not the case. What is important is on the one hand to be able to receive the results of spiritual science without dogmatism and belief in authority, and on the other hand to receive them without previously acquired, prejudiced skepticism. One simply receives them. One doesn't say, “I believe them,” nor does one rashly refuse them; rather one takes them and verifies them in relation to outer reality.

When you apply what may initially appear paradoxical to you, even incredible, drawn down as it is from the spiritual world through super-sensible vision in spiritual investigation, you will see that if you apply it in life, if you ask life, it will be confirmed in the points that matter. You will receive empirical confirmation everywhere for what spiritual investigation discovers. People today who refuse knowledge of the spiritual world with the excuse that they themselves are not able to see into the spiritual world are like the person who sees a shaped piece of iron (this was sketched) and says, “I will shoe my horse with that, for it is a horseshoe.” If one were to say to him, “It would be a mistake to shoe a horse with it, because it is a magnet, it has magnetic forces,” he would reply, “I don't see any magnetic forces—to me it is a horseshoe.” The spiritual is in everything material, and we are living in an age in which this spiritual element must be sought. A person who wishes to investigate matter, who wishes to ask questions without seeking the spirit, is like the one who uses the magnet to shoe his horse, who therefore does not really know how things in the material world are to be used.

Though what I have presented to you today had to be full of gaps and aphoristic in nature, I simply wished to indicate the direction in which medical studies must proceed in the future, for these medical studies are so intimately connected with the social question. Just as the human world can be healed socially only if spiritual knowledge is carried into social judgments, so our medicine can bring health only if spiritual vision is carried into it.

We are not dream-spinners in any realm. We do not by any means want dilettantes in any realm. What is important is serious research, research that has developed the fundamental principle often applied today. If a hypothesis is dangled here or there, it is said that it is merely a comfortable tool fur the grasping of phenomena. Even in mathematics the point has been reached of hatching such hypotheses or directions of thought. Spiritual science is firmly rooted in the principle that nothing should be avoided that may be necessary for the progress of human life, that nothing should he avoided in applying forces in the direction of what is required for this. From the course of human evolution it is clearly perceptible today that the signs of the time are saying to us: it is no longer possible to progress in the old tracks.

What we have here in Dornach has only been able to develop because it is no longer possible to progress in the old tracks; new guidelines are to be sought for here. We are specialized enough. What is important now is to bring together the individual specialties again. Perhaps you will see from this course that the spiritual forces that will bring together these individual specialties must flow from a center. In order to do this, however, one must depart from those comfortable paths that are so frequently sought today. The fruits will lie above all in the direction of the progress of humanity. For this reason, I would have especially liked it if everything that has been said here out of spiritual science could have been said also by specialists. Therefore I was not so pleased at having to substitute for you in an important area; this is how things happened, however, and nothing else could have been done, so we must simply accept what happened.

Most important, however, whether a specialist or a general observer were to present what is necessary here, would be to show that even in this difficult area of medicine progress is possible only through fructification by spiritual investigation. This would have been revealed more clearly if someone could have stepped forward in this area who could speak both out of the tradition of the time, out of everything that the time itself is able to offer medicine, and out of an open sense for spiritual science. Such an individual could have shown that it is possible to stand at the pinnacle of contemporary medical science, of official medical science, and still to be such a good spiritual scientist that he can only believe, can only bear this medicine if it can be illuminated by spiritual science. Whether this became sufficiently evident to you, despite the fact that I had to replace the specialists in medicine, I do not know, but I do hope that there will be other occasions to show, in a way illuminated by outer circumstances, that medicine can work into the future only if the spirit penetrates it, as is intended or at least as is striven for here in this Goetheanum: only if the Goethean spirit is absorbed into medicine.

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Note 1:

Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Science and Medicine, twenty lectures given to physicians in Dornach, 1920. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1975.

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The wishes that are to be considered first have already been expressed by you, and we will begin today by addressing some of them. I hope that everything can be covered in the three hours that we have available. In these few introductory remarks, I would like to speak about these matters as they arise out of anthroposophy. We do not want to consider how these things are currently being discussed in other fields, but rather we want to address the issues as they arise out of anthroposophy, especially in relation to the wishes that have been expressed.

The first question that has been raised, and with which many others can also be dealt with at the same time, at least in principle, is the question of the diseases of the luetic type. The diseases of the luetic type, which we have so far discussed only briefly, are those which, firstly, must be carefully distinguished from all kinds of secondary symptoms, neighboring symptoms, and so on, and which actually indicate to the most intense degree how the organism behaves in general in a diseased state. The reason why the symptoms of tuberculosis are such an important medical and therapeutic issue is that for them, quite unequivocally – let us speak without prejudice, you will see that we do not want to stop at prejudice – a specific remedy is available in the mercury cure. But a consideration of the mercury cure will show us how to deal with the evil that lies therein in a more appropriate way.

Every illness is fundamentally based on the fact that the three systems of the human organism – the nervous-sensory system, the rhythmic system and the metabolic-limb system – are not working together harmoniously. You only have to consider what this harmonious interaction is based on. In the metabolism-limb system, we have an activity of the human organism that takes place with the preferential involvement of the etheric body. But the other parts of the human organism also play a role in each system. So one cannot say, for example, that in the metabolism-limb system the two parts of the human organism, the physical organism and the etheric organism, work together, but rather that the two mainly work together. The other two, the astral body and the ego organization, also play a role. For example, in the main organization, that is, in the entire nerve-sense organization, we have the ego organization and the astral organization playing the main role, with the etheric and physical organizations playing a subordinate role. Above all, we must realize that the difference between the waking state and the sleeping state is that during sleep, the activities that emanate from the astral organism and the ego organism and are directly effected during the waking state continue, so to speak, through a kind of persistence of the organism. In the sleeping state, these activities resonate without the astral body and ego organization being present. Can you understand that? They continue, just as when I push a ball and the ball still runs away even when I stop pushing, so the activities of the astral body and the ego organization continue during sleep. Therefore, one should not say that if something is derived from the ego organization or the astral organization, it could not therefore be there during sleep. Sleep must only cease when there is danger that the astral or ego after-effects will cease. At that moment, sleep must in turn cease and wakefulness must occur.

These things cannot be taken in the same schematic way as they sometimes have to be presented in anthroposophy for the sake of laypeople's understanding.

What is really important now is to present the facts correctly. All these questions about causes should not really relate to the internal organization of the organism, but rather only to the external causes of the matter. These should always be known. The diagnosis should always be made up of a complete history of the disease. But speculating about causes within the organism does not actually lead to finding the right remedy.

If I now ask the question with this in mind, I have to say: what is it that is present in the case of syphilis itself? Let us therefore separate syphilis from all the other possible sexually transmitted diseases, from all gonorrheal diseases, from all chancre symptoms and so on, in other words, from all the things that basically — we will deal with this separately — do not belong to the actual syphilis, but are basically a different disease. The actual syphilitic disease is essentially based on the fact that the human ego organization is overburdened for the metabolic limb system, preferably for the metabolic system. In a sense, the human ego organization slides down into the abdomen. And all the symptoms that occur stem from the fact that the ego organization slides too far down into the abdomen. This is precisely how the processes arise that are expressed through the symptoms you are familiar with, those processes that cause the ego organization to predominate over the etheric organization, which is not supposed to be present in this part of the human organism. There is simply too strong an ego organization in the sexual tract. That is the fact. We must first look at this fact, rather than at the infection and so on; we must look at this fact, because it is there. And the cure must actually start from this fact.

Now let us consider the effect of mercury therapy on this condition. What actually occurs in the human organism with every mercury treatment? Mercury treatment, as you know, is a very old treatment, and it is sometimes extraordinarily beneficial, not only for luetic patients but also for others. But what happens during mercury treatment?

Mercury is one of those remedies that was actually found to be beneficial in times when medicine was based on a certain instinctive knowledge of the human organism. But what actually cures when one has to have a mercury treatment for syphilis? It cures exactly as much as one introduces into the blood in the correct dosage of the mercury preparation. It cures exactly as much. Now think about what the consequences of this are. Firstly, as far as I know, it is not common practice to inject mercury into syphilitic diseases. In recent years, however, this has become the norm because, as we shall hear in a moment, the earlier smear cures are no longer effective, or are too strong; but on the whole, this partial transition has also been brought about empirically because it was seen that there is something about the smear cure that leads to disaster.

And what is the case here? When you use the smearing cure, it basically leads to a partial, even general infection. It is calculated on the whole to enter the blood circulation. That is what it is calculated on. But when you use the smearing cure, there are other channels for the mercury impulse in the human organism. What is healing is essentially that which enters the blood; while that which does not enter the blood but comes through etheric channels is carried along in etheric channels that, for example, run along the nervous system, along the nerve cords, and this is all bad. All this spreads, so to speak, the ego organization throughout the whole organism, and you basically just get the evil spread throughout the whole organism in a different form, which, after years of internal preparatory processes, causes you to suffer from all those symptoms that occur as a result of the mercury cure.

Therefore, it can be said that the healing effect of mercury is already evident in the treatment of syphilitic diseases with mercury. What is the reason for this? We can really say, in very general terms, what the factors involved are, as I said in my general lecture yesterday. From a certain moment onwards, organic substances are no longer influenced by terrestrial forces, but by the cosmic forces that act peripherally from the periphery to the center of the earth. And from a certain moment on, everything that we get into our organism through ordinary digestion is also under the influence of cosmic forces, cosmic rounding-off forces, right cosmic rounding-off forces, when it has passed through the intestines.

Now, the ego organization primarily lives in these cosmic rounding-off forces. If it interferes too strongly with the metabolic system, then there is simply a tendency for the ego organization to atomize, to round off and organize individual links in the human organism instead of organizing the whole body according to its shape. And all the phenomena of syphilis, all the symptoms of syphilis, are the result of this partial atomization, this atomistic organization. Thus the ego organization intervenes in very small systems of the human organism, while these small systems should reserve themselves for the organization of their own etheric body, which alone, not by the detour of the ego organization, is subject to the cosmic-peripheral forces.

Now, mercury has the peculiarity that, when introduced into the human organism, it is the substance that most strongly and most intensely mimics the outer form of the cosmos in earthly terms. The moment the mercury is introduced directly into the blood circulation by injection, the tendency arises for the mercury to give up this partial organization, this small atomistic organization, and the ego organization is released again, acting through the whole organism and is thereby able to restore the state of health by reaction.

But all this depends on the patient never taking in more mercury than is absolutely necessary. This is a problem that can never really be solved. Because you must never expose yourself to the danger of giving just a little too much mercury during the mercury cure. You have to give exactly as much as can be absorbed into the circulation according to the respective medical condition, because everything else remains behind as a residuum and causes precisely those sequelae that then occur and that you know.

Therefore, when using mercury therapy, it will always turn out that one cures, but that the patient may have to pay for the cure quite heavily with the terrible consequences, which then also look syphilis-like, but which actually have to destroy the organism little by little and irrevocably. It is precisely the certainty of healing that mercury provides that shows how problematic its use is.

It was not always problematic. You see, not exactly for syphilis, but for many other diseases, mercury was always used, we may talk about it in the next few days. Mercury did indeed evoke a very specific emotional response in the highly instinctive patient. The patient knew when he had had enough. He was saturated with mercury. Today, of course, the instincts have degenerated. The patient can no longer provide a yardstick for what happens to him through the mercury. He no longer gets enough of the mercury, he becomes oversaturated. That is what usually happens today: The patient becomes oversaturated with mercury, and then the well-known consequences occur in a very devastating way, so that just as one can clearly see the effect of sulfur and phosphorus in the organism, and just as one can clearly see what happens in the organism when salt dissolves, so one can clearly see what happens in the organism when mercury is taken, but one must always pay close attention to the dosage. We know the basis for the effect of mercury.

Now the question is whether it would be possible to carry out such a treatment that would be harmless even if too much was dosed, because simply an excretion would occur if the dosage was too high. Mercury has the peculiarity of not being excreted outwards if too much is administered to the body, but of being excreted inwards. In this respect, it was extremely important to me in my younger years how Hyrtl simply took the bones from people who had been treated with mercury, and then smashed them open at autopsy, and how one could then find the small mercury droplets in the bones under the microscope. So the whole bone system had been contaminated with mercury. That is the peculiar thing about mercury: it is not excreted outwards, but the organism takes it up, and the whole ego organization of someone treated for mercury has to constantly deal with the organization of these tiny mercury droplets, mercury atoms, which are everywhere in the organism, especially in the calcareous parts.

And so we can already say: We must try to find something in nature that, when applied like mercury, is absorbed by the organism and replaces the ego organization in the organism, thus relieving and freeing it. But if too much of it is taken in, which is unavoidable, then it must be excreted not inwardly but outwardly, like anything else that is digested.

It is therefore important to come up with something that corresponds to the ego organization in the external nature and that can be prepared in such a way that it actually enters the blood circulation and, so to speak, creates a phantom of the ego organization in the blood circulation. It is necessary to introduce an artificial ego into the blood circulation.

And our doctors in particular should carry out the appropriate experiments, and without doubt you will see that you will get results that will certainly be surprising.

Take what you can gain from those parts of the plant that have become extremely hardened, that have thus transferred the root process of the plant to the rest of the plant. In the root process of the plant lies an extraordinarily strong imitation of the ego organization. The flower of the plant is of etheric organization. In what is below the flower, the plant plays around the astral organization; where the plant is rooted in the soil, the I-organization intervenes. In every strongly lignified root, which is still attached to the plant, which has not yet passed over into the inorganic because it has been separated from the living plant, we have impulses of the I-organization.

Now, however, if one were to take plant roots directly and extract substances from them to inject, one would hardly be able to cope for the reason that although the root of the plant contains the I-organization very strongly, it is, so to speak, a phantom of the I-organization, but what lives in it as impulses is limited to the nerve sense system and does not have a strong effect down into the rest of the organization. Therefore, one can say: If you only take hold of the root organization at the root, then you will hardly be able to form a preparation suitable for the purpose mentioned. On the other hand, there are plants in which the root organization has a strong effect on the whole plant. And one such plant, in which the root organization actually penetrates the whole plant right up to the fruit, is Astragalus exscapus, the tragacanth root, which is also known as wolfberry. It has fruits that look like pods, but they are as hard as stone and inside them are grains. I am talking about what is, as it were, completely cornified. Or take certain woods that are already used, where the effectiveness is based on what I say.

But then it is a matter of taking these grains from a plant, let us say from the tragacanth root, from the wolfberry, grinding them finely, but then treating them with the juice of one's own plant, that is, with the flower and leaf juice of one's own plant. In this way, one obtains a preparation that can perhaps be brought up to the third decimal place. In the third decimal, if it is now injected, it will actually introduce this phantom of the ego into the blood circulation, and then, under the influence of this preparation, in the case of actual syphilitic disease, which is already the disease of the whole blood, one has exactly the same picture as with the mercury cure, and then one has to ensure that the excess is driven out by means of strongly heating baths. So you will have to combine these two things: on the one hand, injection with a preparation as indicated, and then drive out what is in excess through strong baths.

But something else comes out as well. What comes out is what is present in the blood of the syphilis patient as harmful substances. This must also come out through perspiration. So we have to say: what has to be brought out must be brought out by sweat secretion alone. But first it has to be held. And it can be held by this rounding-off effect of the impulses contained in the wolfberry seeds. Now, you see, you can only cope with these things if you combine diagnosis and therapy closely.

Individualization is indispensable in medicine, and you can very well observe that especially in syphilitic diseases, the clinical picture in a fat person is quite different from that in a lean person. In a fat person, the syphilis toxin is extremely difficult to remove. I don't know if there are friends here who have experience in this. It is more difficult to remove the syphilis toxin from a fat person than from a thin person. A thin person eliminates it relatively easily. With a thin person, you may be able to do well by proceeding as I have described. But you must be sure that a reaction will occur, that there really is a strong perspiration, otherwise you will naturally get all kinds of internal diseases as a result, because the disease process will not occur. The reaction must be there. But it could be that in order to achieve the effect with fat people, too, so to speak, you have to resort to something else. And here it will be very good to turn to that which has already emerged more in nature, also in the astral process. It will be very good to take gallnuts in certain cases where you see that you cannot achieve a reaction with the usual plant. I mentioned them yesterday in a different context.

In the gallnuts you have already mentioned the essential roundness; the gallnut already shows you the mercurial nature in the vegetable kingdom. If you now treat the gall apple by grinding it on one side and taking the poison from the wasp that produced the gall apple on the other side and grinding it in with a very small dose, you will get a preparation that has a considerable effect and can even cause a reaction where it would otherwise be difficult to do so.

It is really the case with us that we actually have far too few cases of illness that we can observe piece by piece. I can imagine that for our friends who are treating physicians, bringing syphilis patients into the institute is not exactly ideal. But such things shed light on the whole therapy. You really learn something from such a treatment for the whole therapy, and I am also convinced that if someone sees how a patient who has been injected in this way and gets out of the bath, his skin looks different than it did before the bath ; how his skin looks, so that to the finer eye – one can perhaps see it with a microscope – it looks as if it is covered with little pockmarks, almost with smallpox, then one will learn how the organism is affected by something like this. So I think that this is the way to go in terms of syphilis treatment.

Because, you see, with this disease in particular, it is necessary not only to see to it that the patient is helped and then released, but it is also necessary to see to it that the patient endures the cure in his or her next life. And here I come to a question that was asked at the same time and that will be extremely interesting for most of you: meditation in addition to drug treatment, is there some kind of typical advice?

Well, I mention the previous syphilis just in connection with this question for the reason that in fact this question can perhaps be answered most intensively precisely in the case of syphilis. It will depend on whether the apparently cured syphilitic patient – and every syphilitic patient is initially only apparently cured, because it depends entirely on whether the disease can flare up again due to some later cause, and every apparently cured syphilis can flare up again later under certain circumstances – has made his organism anything other than a non-syphilitic patient. He has a different constitution, and it must be ensured that this different constitution is actually maintained for the future life, otherwise it will simply prove to be too weak in the face of certain attacks of ordinary life, and the syphilis can flare up again.

Now, of course, we will only deal with the question of meditative treatment in general, but it can be linked precisely to this. What happens with syphilis is that the ego organization becomes somewhat independent, which is not otherwise the case in a normal person. The syphilis patient has, through the injection, created a phantom out of his own organism, and as a result, for the rest of his life on earth, his ego organization is more independent than that of someone who has never had syphilis. He has this more independently, and this must be taken into account. So if you want to permanently cure a syphilis patient, you have to make sure that he begins to take a strong interest in pondering certain highly abstract thoughts over and over again in his mind, pondering them meditatively. You must therefore recommend that he meditatively think through, for example, geometric or mathematical problems, that is, in recurring rhythmic repetition, so that he never fails to actually maintain this artificial abstraction of his ego organization. You must accustom his thinking to entering into a certain inner constitution. Therefore, you will do him a great favor if you advise him: Every morning after you wake up, think about how a small triangle that resembles a large one behaves. They have the same angles but different sides. Think about it slowly at first: the same angles, different sides. Then think about it a little faster, then think about it even faster, then think about it so quickly that you can hardly keep up. Then start thinking more slowly again.

So thinking at different speeds, brought about by your own arbitrariness, will guide you in caring for this independent ego organization. That is one type of meditation. But wherever you see that the ego organization has become more independent through some healing process, you can try to make it possible for it to continue on its path through life by means of such a meditation, which, however, has to be applied particularly strongly in the case of the syphilis patient. Actually, the syphilitic patient must be encouraged to really supply his independent ego organization with such a meditation, which proceeds in a modified rhythm, on a permanent basis. Can you understand it?

These things lead us to consider other questions that have been asked. We will come back to everything again, I just want to have a context that is required by the matter.

Question about tragacanth.

They are pods. You open the pods and inside are seeds that are as hard as stones and have to be ground into a very fine powder.

Now another question that has been asked, which apparently has nothing to do with it – but inwardly things are connected – is about the occurrence of glaucoma. Today, I believe, glaucoma is hardly treated in any other way than by surgery, at most by homeopaths; but homeopathy is not yet rational. But now it is a matter of realizing what exactly such a phenomenon as glaucoma is based on. Glaucoma is, in a sense, viewed organically, according to the four limbs of human nature, physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, actually the opposite phenomenon of all possible ear infections from the overall process of the organism. The two things are almost polar. Ear infections are on one side, and glaucoma-like phenomena are on the other. If you just take the facts, it is like this: in glaucoma, there is a strong activity that infiltrates and substantially constitutes the vitreous humor of the eye. The vitreous humor becomes too intense internally in relation to its own substance. This results in a hypertrophy of the vitreous humor activity, and the glaucoma disease is actually based on this hypertrophy of the vitreous humor activity. But what then occurs?

The eye, as a sensory organ, is at the point where it is sufficiently independent according to the general bodily constitution, sufficiently objectively separated from the whole organism. If it is somewhat more separated from the whole organism than is the case with normal vision, then it is so diseased that the whole organism can no longer expand its activity over this organ.

In the case of glaucoma, it is extremely interesting to see how the etheric body – which is so extraordinarily important in the case of the eye – permeates the eyeball, so permeates it that the physical substance in the vitreous body appears quite strongly as a physical substance. If it goes beyond this boundary, it appears too strongly as a physical substance. The etheric body can no longer reach it, can no longer infiltrate it. So you have to make sure that the etheric body comes into action again, or that the physical activity in the eye is toned down. It is of course trivial, but true, to say that when something like this occurs, the entire organic activity in this part of the human organism is just too weak, partially paralyzed. It is too weak and must be stimulated. You can only stimulate it by making the exhalation of the human organism stronger than it is in the case of the person suffering from glaucoma at the time of his illness, or in the course of his illness. Therefore, if you can determine the correct moment, you will be able to self-correct the symptoms of glaucoma – but in relation to such partial illnesses the organism sometimes performs something extraordinary – by doing everything you can to organism to promote exhalation and thereby stimulate it to increase activity within the head, and you will then be able to counteract the activity within the glaucoma formation. And such a thing can be achieved by introducing calcium carbonate from bone meal into the human organism and combining it with some aerial roots of plants. This produces a preparation that does indeed regulate respiratory activity in the way it is needed in this case.

So I mean it like this: If we take calcium carbonate from bone earth and introduce it into the human organism, we get a correspondingly strong stimulation to exhale. But in order for the organism itself to become involved, we have to add some kind of impulse to this carbonic acid lime, so that it does not run sluggishly, so to speak, without the organism. These impulses are present in the roots that come from some trees or plants that climb rocks, roots that live outside in the air, and where what otherwise thrives in the ground as roots is carried out into the air. This changes the roots so that their impulses actually become more similar to respiratory activity, and this makes it possible to get the respiratory activity within oneself. One then feels it. Otherwise, the respiratory activity is stimulated quite involuntarily by the carbonate of lime. But if you mix the calcium carbonate with the sap of such aerial roots, then you get the urge to breathe in that way, and from that urge to breathe in that way, the strengthening of the whole human organization arises, which you need to balance what has been snatched from you in the formation of glaucoma.

It is precisely from such a case that one sees how it is necessary to look at the whole person everywhere. But the physical body is never the whole body. The physical body is always only a part; the physical body is liver, is stomach and so on, and the individual parts are connected with each other. The etheric body is already relatively strong for the whole person. And in a very grand sense, the whole human being is the astral body. It is just that this astral body is very strangely constituted. One might say that what is the astral body of a person up to the diaphragm – roughly speaking, locally confined – is quite different from what is the astral body below the diaphragm. What the astral body there does towards the head, towards the nervous-sense organization, is in its work, in its polarity, completely opposed to what is done in the metabolic-limb system. And consider the metabolism altogether, which essentially proceeds under the influence of the astral body. What we usually call metabolism is actually an activity of the human organism in which only the activity matters. In the metabolism, it is actually only a matter of absorbing and excreting substances. One might say that food as such, in substance, is basically not what interests the metabolism, but rather the overcoming of the outer substantial form of the food and the metamorphosis, not what the organism needs. But excretion begins right there in the metabolism itself. It actually goes from absorption directly into excretion. Only some of it is secreted. And this penetrates into the nerve-sense organization. The nerve-sense organization is of extraordinary importance in terms of substance, because the nerve substance is the metabolic substance taken to its logical conclusion.

As grotesque as this may seem, the reality is that the intestinal contents are, after all, nerve substance that has been left behind halfway through. The nerve substance, especially of the head, is the intestinal contents that have been processed to the end, the intestinal contents that have been transformed by the human organism, especially by the ego organization. The intestinal contents stop halfway and are excreted halfway. The contents of the nerve substance are driven to their very end and must then be processed by the organism as completely 'used up'. So the astral organism in the actual metabolism performs a completely different activity than the astral organism in the central nervous system. They are truly polar opposites. That is, one stops halfway, the other is carried to completion, and in between lies a zero point. It is actually the case that a complete polarity takes place. If you were to draw the etheric body, you would still draw it as an egg-shaped form, but you can no longer draw the astral body as an egg-shaped form. You have to draw it as two parts, above and below, which are actually quite different from each other in the way they work. And without understanding this, one can actually understand neither the healthy nor the sick human being. One must be clear that there is a completely different activity within the metabolism than within the nervous activity, within the nervous system. And only from this insight does the possibility arise to have a corresponding effect on the human organism. If, for example, you give a person preparations obtained from the flowers of plants, say, as essential oils, then you do not bring them from the lower part of the astral organism into the upper part, and they can only be used to bring about certain processes in the lower part, in the actual metabolic tract. The moment you use anything derived from the root of the plant, it expresses itself through from the lower to the upper tract of the astral body, and you have it in it because it in turn reacts from the head back to the organism. You have it in the whole organism.

Because you must understand that the ordinary view of the composition of the human organism is actually a terribly amateurish one. No, one would imagine that if, say, in some part of the human organism, after a certain period of life, new substance has appeared, that it has come through the process of ordinary metabolism, that is, the old substance has been shed, and through the process of ordinary metabolism the new substance has appeared. At least, that is how we imagine it. I do not believe that anyone who has studied medicine in any way today imagines it differently, as that substances in the human body, which are summarily different after a certain period of life, have come there by way of the usual metabolism, have been exchanged, other than through the metabolism.

But that is not the case. If you find a different substance in any part of the human organism after a certain period of life, it has never been excreted by the ordinary metabolism. The ordinary metabolism provides only the nervous system, only the internal structure of the nervous system, only the building blocks of the nervous system. Through the activity of the nerve-sense system, in connection with breathing, substances are then absorbed from the cosmic environment in an extraordinarily finely distributed state, which are incorporated into the organism by the nerve-sense organization and substantially replace what is lost. For the losses are much slower than one thinks. So the human body is never built up from food. Food only maintains the activity that is needed to organize the nervous system. The building, the substantial building, does not happen at all through nutrition, that is only chimerical, but it actually happens from the cosmos. So when you cut a nail that grows back, the substance that grows back is not from the food, which in turn has nothing else to do than to rebuild the nervous system, but it is the one that grows back, which actually replaces the organic substance in the human being substantially, absorbed from the cosmos.

This, of course, presents a very different picture of the composition of the human being than if one believes that the human being is a kind of tube, with food entering at one end, being exchanged in the meantime, and what is unusable being secreted. But the human being is not this tube. What happens in a tubular form takes place entirely within the human organism itself. That by which man is rebuilt after a certain period of life comes into the human organism through the senses with breathing and even with fine absorptions from the outside world through the senses. In this respect, the ears are extraordinarily important organs of absorption, as are the entire sensory organs that are spread over the body. So if you look at the human being properly, you will have to say from the outset that metabolism is the inner work of the human organism. The rhythmic organism and the nerve-sense organism are also involved in the construction of the human being.

Now, we will take it from there tomorrow and gradually answer the other questions that have been raised. Please tell me if you would like another session, since we only have so few hours. I think we will get to the individual problems that have been raised. If anyone still has problems, I would ask them to tell me tomorrow.

I have just been informed that some confusion has arisen because I spoke about mercury treatment on the one hand and about the preparation that I mentioned yesterday on the other. What is really at issue is that the mercury treatment has only been mentioned as a specifically effective treatment, but as one that is actually dangerous and can be avoided. So yesterday I meant to have given a complete replacement of the mercury treatment with the given preparation of tragacanth root.

I will start with the questions that are still on the old list, as we have another hour tomorrow. I believe there is something else among the newly arrived questions that is related: “How can we understand the success of Salvarsan therapy in the case of Lues?”

First of all, it would be a matter of describing this success in more detail. With such a therapy, it is always the case that a certain success can be achieved, but harmful side effects are present. And with Salvarsan therapy, it is completely unthinkable that one can even speak of rational therapeutic treatment, because the preparation, at least as it is described, is such that it tears apart the human body, that it tears the person apart. Nothing fits together. You can add whatever you want to the body, it can always be a success, but what then becomes of it, that is precisely what is unquestionably incalculable with salvarsan, because the things contradict each other. Therefore, one can only say: Salvarsan therapy is truly a child of the current way of thinking. And basically, the fact of the matter is that you can't seriously go into something like that. Does anyone perhaps wish to say something further about this?

Dr. Rascher: Does that then apply to all modern metal therapy in general, including bismuth therapy?

Not true, bismuth therapy can be overlooked from our point of view. What I mean is that in my courses themselves, bismuth therapy is discussed. But the preparation Salvarsan is impossible to overlook. It tears the body apart. Of course, there may be bismuth preparations that do the same when combined with other preparations. But our courses of treatment can show how bismuth itself acts.

Dr. Noll: Can an antimony preparation be effective against Lues?

Antimony is most effective between the sexual and respiratory tracts. Thus, anything in the human organism between these two tracts can be treated with antimony; the rest only insofar as the effect of one tract radiates into the whole organism. But it is not really possible to treat the sexual tract specifically with antimony for anything that is wrong with it. So, of course, the sequelae of syphilis can very well be treated with antimony, but to treat syphilis itself with antimony will certainly not lead to a complete cure. Antimony affects the pronounced middle organization of the human being, the entire digestive tract, the transition from the digestive tract to the circulatory tract and, of course, that part of the circulation that then passes into the sexual organs. But it is distinctly limited to this tract.

Dr. Kater: The deaths are enough confirmation of the bad effects of Salvarsan.

The most likely scenario is the following: Salvarsan has been used, not too long ago. The worst effects in their culmination will emerge in the patient after about five to ten years, maybe even in a seven-year period. Unfortunately, these case histories are not kept today. It is much more important for medical knowledge that the case history be continued beyond the healing process. Much more can be gained by this than by studying the internal make-up of the organism before the onset of the disease. Of course, this may be quite important in certain circumstances, but in most cases external factors are of particular importance.

Here I must again mention such cases: our friend Dr. Haakenson brought me a patient in Christiania. He had inexplicable symptoms of a rash. He was about forty-five years old when he was brought, and the whole picture presented itself to conventional medicine as an impossible-to-define complex of symptoms. You see, if you proceed purely from the organism, you cannot possibly arrive at a plausible cause. Of course, the doctor is usually dependent on what the patient tells him. I was able to say the following to this patient: I said, leaving out the intermediate links, “You must have been poisoned sometime between the ages of nine and 11 or 12.

Now it gradually came out that the man, who was about forty-five years old at the time, was thirsty as a boy at school. There happened to be a laboratory next to the schoolroom, with a weak hydrochloric acid solution on the window, which he drank to quench his thirst. And it was this poisoning that was still evident at the age of forty-five.

So you have to look at this external cause as the most important thing if you want to understand an illness. But afterwards, you actually have to carefully observe the organism after the healing to see what the healing does in the organism.

And that would be of particular importance in salvarsan therapy. In the case of salvarsan therapy, you certainly cannot apply what I said yesterday for the treatment of syphilis in general. I gave you a kind of meditative treatment afterwards, that is, with abstract concepts that have to be carried out conscientiously at different speeds, increasing speed, then decreasing speed again. This will enable you to make use of a psychic after-care, which admittedly takes years, especially with syphilis, if it is cured in the way I described yesterday. Even with mercury treatment, although I do not recommend it, such a psychic after-treatment would be beneficial. With salvarsan treatment, if you undergo such follow-up treatment, you will probably develop, at a later age, something that cannot be called dementia praecox, but is very similar to dementia praecox in later life. While with mercury treatment, if there is no follow-up treatment for mental health issues, psychiatric symptoms will develop due to the reasons I mentioned yesterday. But with Salvarsan treatment, it will turn out, precisely because of the disruption, that a kind of schizophrenia will actually occur, especially if you try a follow-up cure in the mental sense.

Dr. Palmer: It would be very interesting if you would share with us your opinion on so-called tertiary syphilis and iodine therapy.

From what can be said about it, it is essential to realize that when dealing with a very generalized disease such as syphilis, one is dealing, firstly, with the actual focus of the disease and its radiations, but then, because syphilis affects the whole person, reaching up into the ego organization, one is dealing with the counter-image in the nerve-sense man. It is quite possible to say schematically: the disease is located in the metabolic-limb-human being, but has its counter-image in the nerve-sense-human being, to which, for example, the larynx tract also belongs, everything that is connected with the differentiating upper breathing. These two things are intimately connected. What one accomplishes with mercury refers to the actual source and its radiation. What one accomplishes with the iodine preparation relates to the upper part. So that the polarizing effects in the nerve-sense apparatus can be paralyzed again by iodine when mercury treatment is applied. So that is the connection.

Now, as you will recall, yesterday I essentially indicated two parts to the entire syphilis treatment. The first is the injection with the preparation, the second is a bath treatment that expels. This corresponds to each other in a much more natural, rational sense, just as mercury and iodine do here. That is how it is intended. In most cases, therapy leads us to a balancing treatment of the two polar opposite organizations.

Dr. Palmer: So the gummata are to be considered as a consequence of too strong mercury therapy?

Yes, that is absolutely the case. Is there anything else to ask that is directly related to this?

Dr. Kater: What is the effect of arsenic?

The effect of arsenic in general is that arsenic essentially energizes the human astral body. That is the archetypal phenomenon of the effect of arsenic. Arsenic, even in its compounds, has such a strong effect on humans that one can say: arsenic energizes the astral body. Therefore, if you use arsenic, especially in liquid form, simply as Roncegno and Levis water in the appropriate dosage, you will always be able to act when it is necessary to stimulate the astral body to develop its natural impulses, so to speak.

Now, in every such disease, by the way, in syphilis as well as in other venereal diseases, a defect in the astral body is either the cause or the consequence. Therefore it is quite natural that arsenic also has an observable effect on it; but it need not heal. It does not go deep enough to be able to speak of healing. Dr....: Are the conditions in a child with congenital syphilis different from those in an adult?

You mean with hereditary syphilis? With syphilis in children, the conditions are of course completely different. And with children, if you can diagnose in time, you will achieve something with the arsenic cure, but not with the Salvarsan cure, but with the arsenic cure, in which you use the arsenic in its stronger dilution and, if possible, by adding lactic acid or something similar, you can have it work far enough in the body. In this way, you can achieve very favorable results, especially with children. For hereditary Lues is not actually syphilis, but hereditary Lues differs from syphilis in that syphilis, among the human organs, especially in adults, when it has occurred through infection, has its essential effect in the etheric body. The hereditary passes only into the physical body and is then not in the etheric body. And so you can, if you strongly stimulate the astral body with arsenic, transfer it to the etheric body, and then you really fight it rationally in the physical body. The difficulty with hereditary syphilis lies precisely in the fact that what is so difficult to access by earthly means has been thoroughly ruined.

What I described in the general lecture as being subject to the peripheral forces comes into consideration here. If you want to have any influence at all on such deformations and degenerations, on damage that is connected to the peripheral forces, then you have to set etheric forces in motion somehow.

Now this wolfberry, which I mentioned yesterday, has the peculiarity that it hardens, becomes horny, and is therefore not actually continuously surrounded by etheric forces. If you then obtain these etheric forces through the sap of its own flowers and leaves, you will end up with a preparation like the one I described yesterday. This then leads to rational thinking about the matter. Dr. Palmer: There is another question about tertiary syphilis.

One can only say about tertiary syphilis: the only truly rational thing to do is to not let it get close, to strive to catch syphilis in its first stage. Because once syphilis has become secondary or tertiary, then, especially for an occult observation, there is such a complicated complex of symptoms that does not need to be the same in two patients. It only appears so on the outside; on the inside, it does not need to be the same. So it is very difficult to get to the bottom of it, because you are really curing at one end and at the other end it breaks out in the opposite sense. Therefore, one can only say, when one has to take a position on it: secondary syphilis must, of course, be treated as I said yesterday, and in the case of tertiary syphilis, the aim will be to achieve a cure under certain circumstances, but it will always remain problematic.

Dr. Palmer: Regarding the glaucoma process and the ear process: the glaucoma process is seen as a kind of tumor process; ear processes are pus processes, inflammatory processes. Now, the eye in its entire development is to be understood as an inflammation process, and in the development of the ear we see a tumor formation process. Is it precisely this polar opposite that is the clinical picture of glaucoma on the one hand and ear suppuration on the other?

Isn't that obvious? If in the eye, under normal conditions, there is an inflammatory process, and if in the ear, under normal conditions, there is a tumor process, then the disease process in the eye must be an inflammatory process and in the ear an inflammatory process, namely that which occurs as the opposite. It is obvious, so to speak, that it must be so.

Now, on this occasion, it is perhaps possible to speak immediately of these polar processes of inflammation of the ear, especially of the middle ear. In the case of inflammation of the ear, one is dealing with an overgrowth of the etheric organization in this local tract. That this is so is evident not only from occult observation but also from the simple sight of a final state, final stage of inflammation of the middle ear with the adhesion of the organs and so on.

One can already see from the physical organism that this is an activity of the etheric body getting out of hand. Now it must be clear that this excessive ether organization in this tract immediately leads to a strengthening of the ego organization for this tract, which goes down into the subconscious.

We therefore have a physical formation that should not be there and that is dependent on the ego organization. We can best deal with this by, as it were, getting the breathing process going again. Internally, the respiratory process can be stimulated so that exhalation becomes more lively by using levisticum internally in an appropriate dosage. This stimulates the respiratory process in the opposite sense to that mentioned yesterday for the formation of glaucoma. One breathes more so that the strengthening of breathing goes inwards, whereas in the levisticum process it must go outwards. So the strengthening of the breathing process goes more inwards. And then, as strange as it seems, it will prove to be particularly beneficial for the ear infection if eurythmy is also used for the ear infection, eurythmy therapy. And it will be extremely beneficial to practise eurythmy therapy with the L, M and S in particular. That is to say, everything that relates to the ear is really only a localized process for a process in the whole human etheric body. Therefore, everything that is localized in the ear can be treated by promoting breathing in such a way that one also promotes only breathing - by having the letters listed performed in eurythmy therapy.

Now I would like to talk about a few more things.

Dr...: Would the eurythmy be different for ear infections and sclerosis?

If it is a case of sclerosis, then vowel eurythmy therapy will be used. This would involve vocalizing in eurythmy therapy. In inflammatory processes, it would be a matter of consonanting, and in particular L, M, S and such sounds.

Now other questions have been raised, which I would like to address in turn. The case that was asked about here and about which we already have some experience is particularly interesting. The question has been raised here:

Is therapeutic intervention still possible in cases of chronic arthritis deformans? We are currently trying one percent phosphoric oil and stannum. Is consonantal eurythmy indicated here as well?

Perhaps I could ask Dr. Palmer to briefly report on our Stuttgart case of arthritis deformans.

Dr. Palmer: The case we treated back then, and whose therapy has become widely known, was a very fresh case of arthritis deformans. It was Mrs. X., who, after four to five weeks of treatment with one percent phosphorus oil and four to five percent stannum trituration, had all symptoms that had previously been treated elsewhere in clinics. At that time, too, the patient underwent eurythmy therapy in addition to the medicinal treatment. Of course, we did not have the same success with the cases that came to our clinic and where we used the same therapy as we did with this fresh case. A small boy who had already developed the disease at the age of three or four was also treated with phosphorus oil and stannum, but we also had to give injections of levicowater to intensify the effect. At that time, this boy had a very acute inflammatory stage of arthritis deformans in his hip, and all the symptoms there also subsided, becoming completely painless. Of course, the destruction in the joints and the destruction of the cartilage was already so extensive that in this case, restoration of joint mobility was no longer possible.

That is, of course, the difficulty in general. Let us now first consider the two cases, because that will be very instructive. How old was our female patient, Mrs. X?

Dr. Palmer: Maybe in her late twenties, and the boy would have been twelve or thirteen years old, he was the American boy.

Dr. Kater says that her patient is twenty-seven years old and has been suffering from the condition since the age of twelve, a second patient is forty-five years old and has been suffering for three years, and a female patient is around seventy years old.

Now the question is whether you have achieved a cure. Have you used the same treatment here?

Dr. Kater says that she has only just applied the treatment.

The matter is extremely important because, with this disease, an enormous amount really does depend on the person with whom one is dealing. And it can be said that with this disease, with deforming arthritis, it is really the case that in all cases one must actually individualize to a certain extent, because the origin of this disease is closely related to the overall development of the person. Sometimes, when a disease occurs in middle age, as in the case I first asked Dr. Palmer to interpret, you have to ask yourself: does the cause lie very far back in childhood, or does it lie in later years?

The peculiar thing is precisely this: that with the appropriate physical disposition, namely with a constitutional weakness of the etheric body, in most cases the cause of arthritis deformans lies in psychological processes, namely in people who into a weak etheric body on waking, so that the astral body becomes stronger than it should be because of the weakness of the etheric body, because it is not sufficiently weakened when it penetrates into the etheric body. Grief, worry, shocks and consuming misery that arise in the soul actually act as the cause of this illness.

But now comes the strange thing: if you have a child, let us take an imaginary case, a child of ten years of age has, let us say, due to a previous measles disease or something similar, an etheric body that is only temporarily weakened; the astral body is too strong. Therefore, in this life-time of the child — I do not want to say ten, but twelve years, you will soon see why — if it has a grumpy educator who brings it into all sorts of states, so that it causes discord within itself, such childish sorrows initially predominate. And now let the fourteenth year approach, approximately of course, then you have two years from the twelfth year to the fourteenth year, and then two years to the sixteenth year, and in the sixteenth year there is again a possibility that the period of completion of completion of the period after sexual maturation, as the insult occurred before sexual maturation, that the matter is repeated rhythmically, but that then, of course, no new sorrow occurs, which would have to come from outside, but that the organic counter-image of sorrow occurs. Then the question is: how long does this process take to become properly peripheral, according to the periods that develop? At twenty-one years of age there is another period, that is, at nineteen, two years before this period, and two years after, at twenty-three years of age, there is again the possibility for this child that somehow the matter will progress. Now it is only a matter of how long this process takes to become properly peripheral, that it appears as a deformation? This may, under certain circumstances, range from the age of twelve, when the first causes lie, to the age of thirty, or even to the beginning of the age of forty. Then one has a completely different picture than when, for example, someone experiences the psychic cause only after the age of fifty or at the end of the age of forty, when it can also be experienced. Then these deformations occur from a completely different depth of the organism. And so we can say, let us assume that we are dealing with a patient who, for my sake, is in his late thirties or early forties and has severe deforming arthritis, which shows us that the causes actually lie quite far back. Then, under certain circumstances, we can suggest the following treatment based on this fact. In answer to your question, I have therefore constructed an ideal case, and the idea would now be to use arsenic injections, stannum and so on to evoke in such a case what has been discussed here, by giving hydrogen sulfide baths, thus initially acting on the nerve-sense system, on which the corresponding baths always act, and thereby affecting the peripheral human being from the outside. Then give, say, highly potentized arnica substance, arnica tincture or equisetum, from the inside, which in this case would be the same, so you work from the inside out in the same way, and you will probably achieve a cure for even long-standing arthritis deformans.

It is quite true that one can say: This would be a case that might be treated like this. While cases like the first one, as interpreted by Dr. Palmer, which certainly did not have its cause far back, can be treated with stannum and phosphorus oil. I was very happy to mention this case because it is instructive to see, especially in such a very deep-seated disease, how one must individualize.

A case is described in which the patient underwent something similar in her youth. In her twenties, she then suffered from a gonorrheal infection, followed immediately by very severe chronic arthritis. She is now about forty-five years old and in a very desolate condition.

It's almost as if I had constructed this case ideationally earlier! Hydrogen sulfide baths and internally Equisetum or Arnica, possibly, if it is not directly attacking, injections.

Dr. Kater: The case you mentioned is exactly the same as that of the 27-year-old woman among my patients. You have outlined it precisely without knowing it.

Now we also have an interesting question here: diseases of the gastrointestinal tract as a result of shock. Well, these can occur as a result of shock, but I also believe they can occur as a result of other psychological effects, for example, from prolonged grief and the like, which is always rekindled; this will be the case especially in female personalities. Very painful colicky conditions can occur. There may also be a lethargy of the entire gastrointestinal tract, and even a complete failure may occur under certain circumstances, but a failure that is very often associated with pain at the same time. Isn't the clinical picture something like this? (Answer: Yes!) — This is now a very common illness, and it is very interesting to observe what actually happened. In each such case, the following has happened: The human astral body is a very differentiated organism. When you get to know this human astral body, you will find that the organs behind the sexual organs towards the renal tract and bounded at the top by the pulmonary and cardiac tracts, in other words in this part, the astral body adapts very strongly to the etheric body. So much so that one can actually say: the etheric body is the decisive one for this tract. The astral body takes on in its movements, in its forms, what the etheric body does. This is quite different in the sexual tract. In the sexual tract, the astral body is very active in itself, suppressing the activity of the etheric body to a certain extent. If a shock effect occurs here, then the activity that the astral body develops in the sexual tract forces its way into the digestive tract, so that one has a displacement of the astral activity, and all the symptoms are then the ones mentioned above. And one has to really initiate that process that brings the astral body back to its proper place in such a case.

One must really understand this connection, which actually takes place entirely within the higher members of the human organism. The other things that take place in the physical body are merely consequences, merely external symptoms. What takes place takes place between the etheric body and the astral body, and that is partially in the particular region of the body.

You will achieve something in all cases if you apply either compresses or rubbings with oxalic acid, i.e. simply oxalic acid, which you can best obtain by squeezing clover. You squeeze the clover to obtain the oxalic acid. This is where it is most effective. And of course it is best used by rubbing it in. It is extraordinarily effective in energizing the etheric system in the digestive tract. This results in a particularly strong activity. And now you have to try to get this astral sexual system, which has gone in there, back again. You get this back either through a silver preparation per os in the appropriate dosage, or through a silver injection used in the fifth or sixth decimal place. Silver, when introduced into either the circulatory or digestive system, always tends to restore deformations to the higher limbs of organization.

You see, if you apply these two processes one after the other, you will achieve very good results, especially with shock effects. Shock effects are extremely interesting. And if you have cured a shock effect, if, let's say, there is a typical shock effect as we have just described it, then you will notice the following when you continue to follow the patient. If you know how to ask the right questions, you will get answers from the patient that go something like this: It is very strange, but since I got well back then, my heart has been working quite differently; since then, when I perceive something startling, a cannon shot or something like that, my heart acts as if it wanted to calm me down, as if I had a being on it that wanted to calm me down.

In this you see how truly polarizing processes are present in every regulatory intervention, not only in a healing intervention, in the human organism. This heart effect, of which the patient speaks, which also essentially takes place in the etheric and the astral, is the polarizing counteraction to what you actually did to establish the correct relationship between the sexual tract and the digestive tract. That is what needs to be said with regard to this shock effect.

Now tomorrow I will talk in more detail about an interesting question, namely nervous diseases, in particular spinal cord diseases, which is written down as the first question, so to speak. We will meet again tomorrow at half past eight. I just want to say something now, because it seems to me that there really is a very topical question here, which is also on the note, namely about children wetting the bed. It seems to be occurring in a very intensified form.

When children wet the bed, it is a typical weakness of the astral body. The astral body simply does not have the strength it should have. But if you use arsenic in the case of bedwetting, even in the healthy form of Levicowasser or Roncegnowasser, then you will usually achieve a strong but extraordinarily short action, especially in the case of bedwetters, through their overall organization. The children will still wet their beds; but you will definitely achieve good results if you use the substance that you can obtain by squeezing the leaves and flowers of St. John's wort, Hypericum perforatum. I don't know if you know that this is the only plant that has three sets of stamens. It belongs to the 18th Linne class, it has yellow petals and leaves that look as if there were holes in them when you look through them. If you squeeze this plant, you get a juice. It is essentially due to this bitter extractive contained in this plant, also a substance that has a very strong and lasting effect on the inner mobility of the astral body and strengthens it. And as a result, it may lead to healing if you then still have a moral effect on the child by simply saying that he is obliged to pay attention to his functions. This moral influence should actually take place precisely in the case of such things, which, don't you think, are on the border between naughtiness and disease. Please don't misunderstand me, I know, of course, that it is a disease, but it is on the border between naughtiness and disease. And because moral will does indeed have a great influence, it should not be disregarded. If you cure such a thing in a child – of course you can cure it with Hypericum – you weaken the child's will if you do not at the same time encourage it, give it an impulse in the moral sense. That would be said with regard to bedwetting.

Then tomorrow we will talk about neuropathic children, especially children with various forms of dementia praecox. Then we will discuss some other questions, and I will try to take all of these questions into account.

Dr...: The question is asked as to how old the juice may be.

It should not be allowed to become too old; but if you prepare it by squeezing it as well as possible to a certain quantity, say one gram of leaf and flower mixture, half and half, then you will be able to supply a glass of water with it, and you can then portion it out and use it in this way for half a year.

I would now like to deal with some of the questions that have been put to me, and here there are a few questions that seem to me to be particularly important to you.

The first question is about gonorrhea. Now, in order to understand what should actually be done, it is necessary to study the nature of the disease. It seems to me that in this area in particular, people are all too easily satisfied with simply saying: infection, infection, and more infection. That is, after all, what is actually being said. Certainly, in these and similar diseases there is an extraordinarily great and powerful possibility of infection; but the knowledge of contagion is the very least that can be inferred from the knowledge of the healing remedies. It is not much to know that something is contagious. The only thing one can do is to take precautions to reduce the risk of infection. That is something that is self-evident. But it is good to penetrate into the matter at hand, especially with such things.

Now, we must be clear about the fact that the human organism really is a closed system, and that, to a greater or lesser degree, everything that lies outside of it is poisonous to the human organism. So, in fact, anything that lies outside of the human organism is a poison. There are, however, certain adaptations in which the effect that would otherwise be a toxic effect is, so to speak, isolated. And this isolation of an effect that would otherwise be a toxic effect occurs for the realization of etheric impulses and astral impulses, namely when female and male seed unite. It also occurs in numerous other cases, but especially when female and male seed unite. The effect is eminently toxic when the two polar substances combine. So the effect is eminently toxic, but it is isolated and exposed to the forces of the cosmos in isolation, which can even be described in detail. These are the concentrated forces of the sun and moon, to which what arises from the union is then exposed.

This exposure is only possible if the male and female seed actually interact. With any substance that lies outside the female seed, that is, that is produced in organs that are not the female sexual organs, the male seed gives a useless poison everywhere in the human organism as well as in the outside world. Conversely, the female seed releases a poison that cannot be processed with every substance, except for that which is secreted by the male sexual organ. This poison is actually, basically, only under metamorphosis, sometimes a poison for the oystercatcher, sometimes a poison for the tripper. And with that, we are dealing with diseases that are something essentially different than the syphilis diseases that we have discussed. We are dealing with the production of poisons that cannot endure exposure, either in the human organism or beyond the human organism.

Now, such substances are also, in essence, extremely potent infectious agents. They are, in fact, the carriers of parasites of the smallest kind, hypermicroscopic organisms. And it is with such an effect that we are dealing, that is to say, with an interaction of the astral-etheric organization in the male and female, which then, when it works down into the physical, produces these corresponding poisons. That is the essential thing. The danger of infection is secondary. It is always there precisely because in this way the strongest poisons of all are produced for the organ.

I believe that it is extremely important that such things are understood at last, so that we do not always look at the corresponding symptoms, as I would like to call them, in the same way that the entire reproduction of the human race was once viewed, by tracing the whole human race back to Eve's ovary for all of the Earth's future. This is, of course, a very superficial consideration. It is also an easy way out to say: This disease is infectious; the infectious one has been infected again, and one naturally ends up being vague, but one does not arrive at any real insight. But if one arrives at such an insight, as I have just indicated, then one naturally asks oneself the following question. Then one says: How can we now get at the effect that arises in the human organism under the influence of this poison?

So you have to create something to which you can expose this poison, just as you can expose the fertilized female germ to the universe. So you have to create an atmosphere, so to speak, in the astral-etheric organism, an atmosphere that has a certain absorption capacity, not for the poison, which is then excreted when the poison-producing forces are absorbed in the astral and etheric.

And now it is precisely in such things that the healing powers are often allowed to work together from two sides, and one will really be able to achieve good things in such a case if one takes a preparation, such as some carbonate of alkali, alkali carbonate internally and then applies compresses locally, strong oily eucalyptus compresses locally, but allows both things to work together. This will most certainly lead to a cure, even if it is perhaps slow but thorough. This is because the alkali carbonates essentially work in such a way that they create a special etheric body from the human being's entire etheric body, so to speak; and the eucalyptus extract works in such a way that it flows through this created etheric tract as if it were astral. So that one actually creates an atmosphere around the genital tract that absorbs the poison-producing forces. This is what one can envisage in the process.

Would anyone like to say something about this right now? All these things are not really here to be discussed, but to be tried out. They will prove themselves. Now I would like to address a question that I have found here, and that is:

Can a patient who has become a morphine addict due to severe asthma be successfully weaned, including from morphine, using the remedies citric acid, Prunus spinosa and Nicotiana tabacum, as applied by the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute

in Stuttgart?

With asthma, it is a difficult matter, because asthma is essentially based on the fact that the exhalation, the exhalation current, encounters resistance as it passes through the airways. It gets stuck, so to speak. This is something that can be seen very clearly in the astral organism.

It is always somewhat problematic when recording these things, but you are all anthroposophists and will take the things as they are meant, of course. So, the outgoing air stream, you can actually see something like hooks in the human being's astral body, into which it sticks (see drawing). That is the finding. And that just goes to show that asthma is really the one form of illness that is right on the border of purely psychological illnesses, by which I do not mean so-called mental illnesses, but those illnesses that are related to the psychological life. Mental illnesses do not need to be related to the psychological life at all, but can merely be physical illnesses, in which case the psychological is merely a symptom. So-called mental illnesses should not be called mental illnesses at all, because they are almost always a real organic illness that finds a psychological counterpart, simply a shadow image, and that is merely a symptom. It is best to cure so-called mental illnesses by recognizing from the physical findings as a symptom complex whether there is a kidney disease, liver disease, or a real organic brain disease. By mental illnesses, however, I mean those where, for example, psychological effects really underlie them, such as shock effects or anxiety effects and the like, in other words, where psychological causes are present. And with asthma, it is indeed the case that you often have to go back a long way to find the psychological causes.

When one has grown as old as I have, one has always encountered cases of asthma of the most varied kinds, and I must say that often, when looking for the cause of asthma, one has to go back to the embryonic stage, if one goes back to find the cause of the onset, apart from the karmic one. And the external causes often really lie in the embryonic stage. They lie in the fact that the mother has had shocks or worries that have occurred again and again during pregnancy. Such things have an extraordinarily strong effect on the entire mucous membrane system of the respiratory tract, and it is from this that the causes for what later manifests itself in asthmatic symptoms already go out during the embryonic period.

Now, however, the following is of particular importance for asthmatic symptoms: asthma manifests itself in very different ways, depending on the individuality of the person, and it is very important that we can really fight the other symptoms of asthma that exist in the organism. Then we make the organism strong enough that it can do something itself later to fight the asthma. And so I would now like to indicate the possibilities of how to deal with these matters, since it is indeed an irregular movement of the astral body in the bronchial-lung area.

There is something, I might say, very ingenious at the bottom of it, as asthma is generally a very ingenious disease. If one examines a person suffering from asthma with, if I may say so, occult vision, one finds that in his case, above all, what I might call the inner appetite of the organism is eliminated.

Let us first agree on this concept of the “inner appetite” of the organism. You only come across this concept of the inner appetite of the organism when you observe very young children. They don't just taste with their tongues. I have always said this to teachers: young children do not just taste with their tongues, they taste with their whole organism. The whole organism is something like a fine organ of taste. It is just that later on this tasting is localized around the palate, tongue and so on. But this differentiation, which occurs relatively early, is only a partial one. In subconscious spheres, the human being tastes and thus generates this inner experience of appetite through his whole organism. Simply the whole organism has that striving power that is called appetite.

Now, when there is a loss of appetite in the separate main tract, as is experienced, there is also, and this is particularly the case with the asthmatic to a high degree, a loss of appetite in the organism. And in asthma, the whole organism loses its appetite; it has no desire to absorb the ingested nutrients, especially those that enter the general circulation. He even has an aversion, but he is unaware of it because it is unconscious within, especially towards cooked food. This can be observed quite well from external symptoms that occur in his life. This must be dealt with first. You must first restore the appetite of the organism.

It is generally good to know how to help an organism that you think has lost its appetite, that is, where the right connection between the etheric organism and the astral organism is interrupted, because that means being without appetite. Now it is good to know what is good for it. And it is always good to teach the organism the right dosage of what can be obtained in the form of tannic acid, for example from sage leaves, from nut leaves, from oak bark or willow bark; in short, if one teaches the human organism, I want to say, that which perhaps corresponds to the first decimal place, just only in terms of percentage, of tannic acid. This is what is particularly important for the astral body in such a case. It is stimulated to extend its activity to the ether body when it is supplied with this tannic acid. The ether body, on the other hand, does not react to this. So if you supply tannic acid on one side only, you will only cause disorder. You have to help the ether body on the other side as well. And this can be done, for example, by making a leaf extract from Veronica officinalis, from this speedwell, and extracting the bitter substances from it by name. These bitter substances are found in such plants – they can also be extracted from other plants wherever these bitter extractive substances are found in them — and then you will take one or the other in turn, in the morning one and in the evening the other, for example, and you can then regulate the rhythm between the astral and etheric bodies and in this way initiate the healing. Then you instruct the patient to lie in bed for weeks on end, not to get up at all, but to sleep in a chair, and when he tries to fall asleep, to meditate on breathing in the mind, thus to see or feel in the mind: inhalation, spreading the breath, exhalation, - to breathe quite consciously when he falls asleep; when he wakes up, to let him start breathing consciously again for a few minutes. If you strengthen your moral powers in this way, applying them to your own organism, namely to breathing, but in such a way that you can apply them unwaveringly - in any other position than when sleeping in a chair, especially when lying position, it is quite impossible for the patient to carry it out – and then use this as the third act of the cure, it is to be hoped that the asthma itself can be controlled even in very late stages of development. Morphine addiction is then only a consequence, and this will then be removed. One must try to fight the morphine addiction then.

Now for another interesting case that has been presented to me. However, I would like to emphasize that, of course, it is more or less problematic to give things without seeing the patient in question. It is just that I would like to say that the case can also be constructed ideally, but let us briefly state what is at hand in this forty-five-year-old postal clerk who, as a result of something, has suffered a nervous breakdown, then initially, it seems, became sleepless and ended up in a state where the patient is no longer in control of himself, where the head thinks alone, and is therefore automatic. That was probably the first stage. Then this stage seems to have passed into another, where he developed a trembling of the limbs after two years and probably also convulsive states in the limbs.

The main thing to do in such a case is to know that the whole condition is not located in organs other than those that have a directing effect on the human will system through the ego organization and the astral organization. The will system comes into consideration. And the irregular and abnormal nature of the will system is already evident in this peculiar surrender to the automatism of thought. This has nothing to do with thoughts, but everything with the will that underlies the development of thought. But everything is aimed at working deeply down into the subconscious in order to actually form the will in the mere metabolic-limb-organism, to pull it out of the rhythmic organism, to pull it out of the nerve-sense organism. So the tendency to relocate the entire physical and etheric will organs to the lower organism is actually present.

You would certainly have been able to observe this tendency in such a case, had you had the opportunity to observe this postal clerk, let us say, from some point in time and again after two years. You would have noticed that the reciprocal relationship between the lower lip and the upper lip had changed during these two years. Two years ago, it would have seemed to you that perhaps a certain, not quite harmonious relationship had taken place in the movement of the upper lip to the lower lip, that one has the feeling that it does not fit together as it does in normal people, and after two years it will have become stronger. The lower lip will have continued its naughty movements more than the upper lip. You will be able to observe such things. You will also be able to observe such an interrelationship between the legs and arms in discordant movements.

Now, in such a case, a combination of a drug treatment, a physical treatment, let us say, with a spiritual treatment in eurythmy therapy should be considered. These two things must be combined here, and this case is actually typical of this.

In such cases, use comfrey baths with a fairly strong addition of comfrey, which you can then count on for silicic acid. Comfrey has a very high percentage of silicic acid, so use comfrey baths and you will be able to achieve a significant strengthening of the ego organization through these comfrey baths. But it is only there under the influence of the bath. There is a constant danger that it will disappear again after a short time. It is driven towards the tendency to be something lasting if you now have eurythmy therapy vocalization, simply vocalization, after the bath has run its course, for an hour of eurythmy therapy vocalization. That is what you are stimulating then, which was initially only predisposed in the equisetum bath. And then you can hope, in this way, to fight the matter, above all from the periphery, from the limb organism. You just have to try to find the point from which you can fight the matter.

Now I have been somewhat concerned with this other case, which is very interesting; it is just not clearly presented. It says here:

Lupus-like, increasingly severe proliferation of the mucous membrane on the palate, causing difficulty in swallowing, in a thirty-seven-year-old female patient who had pulmonary tuberculosis seven years ago, second and third degree, but who has now largely recovered. She had an operation for gallstones that were not present.

I would like to know what happened immediately after the operation on gallstones that were not present!

Suffers from disorders of the digestive tract, from flatulence, which is beneficially influenced by eurythmy therapy S-exercise and has been minimal lately; has been suffering from severe grief for years. Could a successfully performed I-exercise have caused the lupus disease? What should be done?

Do you really think that this is something lupus-like?

It could also be scurvy; it just looks like that.

You don't have to assume that. In reality, it can only be that the plastic power of the etheric organism simply does not work sufficiently into the peripheral tracts. It cannot be anything else. And this would have to be remedied by simply injecting bee venom in perhaps a sixth decimal potency and making the process a total one, which arises from the fact that the bee venom very strongly stimulates the etheric body to take up the astral forces in a way that is truly directed towards the whole human organism.

The underlying organizing principle of the spiritual, bee venom, is at the root of it all again. So that, when it comes to seeing that the organic effect is, so to speak, breaking down at the periphery, and does not want to enter into the periphery, you can always do a great deal of good with bee or wasp venom, and then support the effect of the injection from within by making a liquid pulp of honey and milk, and then giving that as a daily nutritional supplement.

This is something that really presents itself in such a way that one sees that the organism, which has become cramped and shows such abnormal phenomena at various peripheral points, in turn spreads its effect on the one hand, under the influence of the insect poison that enters the circulatory system, and on the other hand, under the influence of that which is substantially related to milk and honey, develops and spreads in the organization. That is what I believe can be recommended in such a case.

Now I would like to talk about the question that, as it seems, is also close to your heart. This is the question of nervous diseases, spinal cord diseases and so on.

Of all nervous diseases, spinal cord diseases are of course the hardest to treat. The other nervous diseases are much more treatable. But one would be able to treat the so-called nervous diseases much more if one considered that in the nerve, in the nerve cord, in the nerve at all, there is a substance that continuously tends towards crumbling. Unlike other parts of the organism, the nerve contains no constructive, sprouting or growth forces. Instead, the nerve contains everywhere that which tends towards the ego organization, in that it actually always wants to separate and crumble. It just has to be continually prevented from crumbling. In the moment when the ego organization is not strong enough to prevent the nerves from crumbling, then the most diverse phenomena actually arise. Depending on whether it is the ego organization or the astral organization that is not strong enough, either the actual nervous diseases arise when the astral organization is not strong enough, or when the ego organization is not strong enough, the various neuralgias arise, or the various conditions with semi-psychic symptoms, and so on.

Now we have to be clear about how to act on the nervous system in such a way that a kind of phantom of the astral and ego organisms arises in the nervous system. This really occurs when one attempts to get the forces – that is, when there is an already severe nervous disease, not a partial one – the silica effect into the whole nervous system. This is, so to speak, something of a postulate, to get silicic acid into the nervous organization.

Now, if there are no particular obstacles or inhibitions, you get the silicic acid into the nervous system because there is an extraordinarily strong affinity between the form of the human nervous system and the arnica substance. This is already very strong. And if you give arnica injections, especially in high potency, of course, in the fifteenth, twenty-fifth, even thirtieth potency, you will find in most cases that the arnica injection works in such a way that the sick person then even gets the urge and drive to do something against his nervous state. For it must always be brought about that the patient suddenly realizes: whatever is in the nerves is relieved by some remedy, and I can now use my ego organization, my astral organism. In this case, it is a matter of relief. In a nervous patient, the ego and astral organisms are intensely occupied with the nervous process. Something must be introduced into the nervous process that imitates the ego organization and the astral organization. And that is precisely what the remarkable configuration in Arnica does. Arnica is, after all, a mixed compositum of all kinds of things, and it is truly a kind of microcosmic imitation of all kinds of macrocosmic things. The Arnica substance does this to a very special degree.

Just think of everything that happens. First of all, there is the silicic acid that is found in Arnica montana. This is the basic substance. It is extremely sensitive, a deeply significant reagent for all possible cosmic influences. Silicic acid is an extremely fine reagent for everything that affects the earth. Then there is always a tendency in Arnica montana to transfer these fine silicic acid perceptions of the cosmos, one might say, and to shape them plastically in the potash salts and also lime salts, which are distributed in Arnica montana in a wonderful way.

Now imagine the whole effect that I described earlier for tannic acid; this effect on the astral organism is also present in arnica. So that what is now brought in from the cosmos is, as it were, plastically imprinted in the potassium calcium salts by the silicic acid, and directly carried into the organism through the tannic acid content of the arnica. Then, as if by a miracle, the arnica substance simultaneously develops a sedative so that the person does not feel the disturbing effect of the penetration of foreign substance into the physical correlate of the astral body. This is because the arnica substance contains something camphor-like. So it contains its own sedative. Then the arnica substance, wonderfully embedded in rubber and similar substances, contains protein substance, which gives it an affinity to the etheric body. And then we have phosphorus inside, namely essential oils, which builds the whole thing up in such a way that it directly becomes a phantom of the human ego-organism. |

Therefore, if you introduce the correct dosage into the organism – but by injection, the other things will not work as strongly by injection – a substance from Arnica montana, you will usually see that, at least initially, there is a strong influence on the nervous system. The right process will be there when you can see how the patient now feels stronger and believes that they can now conquer the problem on their own. This feeling must be evoked. If it does not come, then take the help of Arnica montana, alternating with that which now supports him by also boosting the effect of Arnica montana from the respiratory side, so alternate with a fairly high-percentage formic acid injection. You will see that then the thing can occur.

If you cannot manage that, then it is of course necessary to take an extract of the part of the nervous system of an animal in which the actual source of the disease can be found, depending on whether it is in the brain or in the spinal cord, and then inject this in high potency instead of formic acid in alternation with arnica. So, for example, if you suspect that the nerve disease originates in the visual area, then take the secretion from the four-hilled substance or such a substance of an animal, extract it, take it in a fairly high potency and inject it to support the Arnica montana. Let the support go exactly where it is needed. These are things that one must always observe.

However, a mild toxic effect may occur, especially when Arnica montana cures are successful – it should even occur – that can be observed in something. But you will always see that this mild toxic effect can be counteracted by per os alkalis in some combination. I believe that what I have described here is actually very important for what should be done in the case of nervous diseases, including spinal cord diseases, which could only be diagnosed in the right stage, and in which one should get rid of that medical impudence that is so rampant, especially in Western Europe, that one attributes almost all cases of tabes dorsalis to some kind of syphilitic cause. It is complete nonsense. And if you obstruct your own view from the outset, you will naturally not be able to come to terms with your view. Most of the diseases of the spinal cord do not at all arise from any syphilitic starting points, but from colds that appear harmless to most people, in the gastric or other abdominal tracts, or from the fact that the spine itself has been exposed to a cold. It is just that, well, of course, according to the well-known social conditions of the last decades, the purely external complication of syphilis and spinal cord disease occurred very frequently, and the view was then distracted by this, and one did not do the right thing, namely to fight the consequences of syphilis on its own and those of spinal cord disease with something like what I have just described. It should always be considered and treated as a nervous disease, as I have just described.

Now the interesting thing is that if you localize the nerve disorders in the digestive tract or even in the stomach and they do not go further beyond the digestive organs, you can achieve the same thing – and this is extremely interesting – if you take Chamomilla instead of Arnica montana and treat it in exactly the same way by injection. And this is interesting because you can see from this – because chamomile is almost completely lacking in silica – that silica is only necessary when you get beyond the digestive tract with the nerves. It lacks silica. On the other hand, it contains sulfur, which is particularly beneficial when it comes to stimulating the etheric body in the digestive system.

Now some questions have arisen, but we don't have more time to deal with things in depth: “What is the essence of short-sightedness and long-sightedness?”

Don't you think it's worth asking whether these things could be therapeutically influenced? The causes of these lie on the palm of your hand, and you don't ask about these things. You mean, how can they be therapeutically influenced, whether they can be cured by mere medical remedies? It will be possible to cure them, both short-sightedness and long-sightedness can be cured, and thus also prevented, because you are quite right, glaucoma is of course essentially connected with long-sightedness. People who are not clear-sighted do not easily develop glaucoma. But a medicinal cure, which is indeed possible, will only be successful if it is initiated perhaps even before the age of three. So you have to notice the tendency towards short-sightedness or long-sightedness in the child very early on. Then you can do a lot with highly potentized belladonna. But you actually have to notice it before the child has fully learned to speak and walk. Once the organism has reached the stage of physical development that it has reached, once it has learned to walk, stand and speak, the entire tendency towards the formation of the crystalline lens and the vitreous body, which underlie hyperopia and myopia, is already present. And because it is something purely mechanical and formal, it is difficult to do anything. On the other hand, as long as the eye can still be affected by the unformed, wriggling movements, the as yet unoriented arm movements and so on in the child, and this is achieved by a highly potentized belladonna, which is imbued with a certain feeling, a certain sensation, one might think that something can be done. But it will probably not be easy to make his observations. That is to be said about it.

Now, unfortunately, we have to conclude these considerations. I hope that we will continue them again at a suitable time. It will always give us a very special satisfaction here if we can, so to speak, insert into the announced medical college activity that we can give the doctors something when they come to such meetings. I hope that in the future this can always be achieved in some way or other. But it will also be possible for those friends who stay in touch with the Dornach School to receive answers to their questions about these or those things from time to time – we will make sure that this is done in the right way. So if you send questions to Dr. Wegman, we will provide answers together, although not in the supplement to the 'Goetheanum', of course, but in a form that can only be sent to the doctors. But I believe that we should set it up so that when someone asks a question, the answer should always go to our anthroposophical doctors, because it is always actually interesting for everyone and we will make the most progress this way. We will try to initiate communication with the doctors here in Dornach in a corresponding way.

Dr. Palmer: Dear Dr. Steiner, I hope you will allow me to express my colleagues' and my own heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule over Christmas to devote a few hours to us. We who work at the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute in Stuttgart know how much we need these hours, and we would ask you to continue to support us with your advice and assistance.

The only thing I would have liked would have been just that it could have been more hours. But however much we thought about it with Dr. Wegman, it did not result in more than these three hours. As I said, it would have been my wish that it could have been more hours; but hopefully another time! Hygiene as a social issue.

I think the main thing we will have to discuss should be discussed in connection with specific questions that you ask. I will only say a few words, I would like to say a few words in advance about the fundamentals.

In the course of human development, much of the reality has been lost because the knowledge of the spiritual, which also lives in everything physical, has gradually been lost. But medicine is undoubtedly one of the things that have lost the most, for the simple reason that by merely limiting oneself to knowledge of nature, all insight into the human being and his life must be lost. For it must be emphasized again and again that all processes that take place in nature are such processes that cannot take place in the same way within the human organism.

We want to disregard animal and plant organisms. Today, there is a belief that a process that is observed externally in nature can also exist in some way within the human organism. One speaks of combustion and all kinds of other physical processes within the human organism. Such do not actually exist in reality, and just as we have before us in the self-contained human organism something unnatural, which, to the external eye, is different from an extra-human natural object outside, so too is every single process in the human organism something thoroughly different. All the processes that take place outside of the human being in nature have a building and breaking down effect on the human being. And if we want to understand the human being, we must recognize three levels of breakdown.

The first degradation is the one that happens from the inside out, so to speak, through everything that affects the human being from the earth. The forces of the earth work in such a way that they degrade the human being from within. The forces that work from the air, primarily through breathing, and are transferred to the human being, have a degrading effect from the earth's orbit. And the forces of light from the Cosmos have a degenerative effect on man. Thus the extra-human forces of the Cosmos have a degenerative effect on man in three ways, and the degeneration occurs immediately if the ego organization and the astral body do not participate in the human organization. The astral body and the ego organization counteract the degenerative principles in man. In that moment, therefore, the breakdown by the extra-human forces must occur, in which the I and the astral body no longer work in man. But this also shows us that we cannot get by without gaining more and more real insight into the higher members of human nature, even when we consider the medical aspect.

Medicine has arrived at mere trial and error, experimentation, only because in recent times it has no longer dared to reckon with the higher limbs of human nature, with the supersensible. But the process of illness cannot be understood if it is not grasped as being connected with the higher limbs of human nature. And the process of recovery, the process of healing, cannot be understood either without being placed in such connections with the higher limbs of human nature. For, let us consider the following: In the human head, in the human skull, the processes of decomposition of the physical body and of the etheric body are essentially at work. These processes of disintegration that are active there make it possible for the astral and the I to be active in the human head. In contrast to this, in the metabolic limb organization, in all that is connected with the motor system and the metabolism, we are dealing with the building processes of the human organism, both of the etheric body and of the physical body. In these anabolic processes, only the ego and the astral body are active in the most eminent sense for the metabolic and motor system. The astral body and the ego are active in everything that takes place in the metabolism. The ego organization is active in everything that is movement. So that in the metabolism-limb system we have: I and astral body engaged; in the human head they are, as it were, exposed, there I and astral organization are quite free. So that if we wanted to draw schematically, we could draw: physical head, etheric head, but now free astral body and I, not engaged in physical and etheric. On the other hand, if we now omit the middle human being, the rhythmic, the blood human being, and consider the metabolic, limb-bearing human being, then, firstly, the etheric body is fully engaged in this. It is also present in the head, but in addition, the astral body and I-organization are engaged here – not left free internally, but rather effecting the processes.

When we look at the child, we see a complete connection between what is free in the head as the astral body and ego organization, and what is bound to the physical organization as in the body, whereas we do not have such an inner connection in the adult and therefore the whole body is not so dependent on what is going on in the head as it is in the child. In the child, the whole body is still dependent on what is going on in the whole head.

It is quite impossible to acquire a knowledge of human nature without really taking the higher aspects of human nature into consideration. For no one can really understand what is going on in the motor and metabolic systems of the human being without also taking the soul and spirit into account. At best, the organization of the head can be used as an aid, as it is very strongly modeled internally on physical, extra-human laws. The organization of the head is permeated by an etheric body and differs from the extra-human organizations, but it is most similar to the extra-human organization.

What does it actually mean to understand the disease? Assuming you are dealing with any organ of the metabolism, you have to assume a very specific connection between the physical and the etheric and how the astral body and I-organization intervene in this organ, say in the liver. The astral body and I-organization must intervene in a very specific way. The moment the I and the astral body withdraw somewhat from this organ, the organ becomes similar to the head organ, and one must always be aware that when any metabolic organ, and also anything related to metabolism, shows an irregularity, the astral body and I-organization are not involved enough in the organization of this organ; and in the head it is the other way around. If the astral body and the ego intervene too strongly, then the pathological condition occurs in the human head; so that actually the human head is that which is most strongly predisposed to the vegetable-mineral interior in man, and the motor and metabolic organs are those which are most strongly predisposed to the animal-human. Actually, one only sees the opposite. One believes that the head organization is the one that is most spiritual as an organization. But when the head organization becomes too spiritual, consciousness becomes clouded. At the moment when too strong vegetative processes intervene in the head organization, at that moment the head becomes diseased. In the moment when too few processes emanating from the ego or astral body intervene in the metabolic-limb organism, in the moment when the metabolic-limb system becomes similar to the head system, that system becomes ill.

The doctor's approach must therefore be to ask: How do I get it to happen that when I see any illness associated with clouding of consciousness, how do I get it to prevent this? I must prevent the too strong intervention of the I and the astral body. — Or, how do I get it to happen that the astral body intervenes more strongly when it intervenes too weakly? And you see, here we have a case where the way we think, our way of thinking, plays an extraordinarily important role, especially in medicine. For it is certainly necessary to become familiar with the healing substances, the healing remedies. But of course you will rightly ask how one comes to know the healing remedies. And you cannot get to know them unless you first experience in the spiritual what is really going on in the human being. Now, you see, in order to experience what is really going on in a person, a certain way of thinking is necessary. And that is what I wanted to say in principle in my introduction, that a certain way of thinking must already permeate the physician. For example, one must start, I would say, from more external natural things. First of all, the physician must realize that everything that can be called warmth, light, and so on, is actually present in two ways. You see, in summer, light and warmth come down to earth from the sun. Sunlight and solar heat take hold of what sprouts, sprouts, blossoms, and bears fruit on the earth. And actually, what is essentially interesting to us about flowering and fruiting is that they are the carriers of sunlight and solar heat.

But what about winter? In summer, sunlight and solar heat penetrate into the earth, and the sunlight and solar heat that are in the earth continue to have an effect throughout the winter. And so light and sun come into consideration from two sides.

But if we look at what the sun and the earth's orbit in general, the cosmic, brings to the earth from this orbit, we see that all of this has an effect on the human metabolic and limb system. The entire metabolic and limb system is already influenced by what comes in from the cosmos. Everything in the head is influenced by what was already preserved in the earth by cosmic forces. In this respect, the human being stands on the earth in reverse. His metabolic-limb system is influenced by what is extraterrestrial and cosmic. But you can extend this to every single substance. Take lead, for example, because lead is a particularly effective remedy for certain things. We find lead as it exists in non-human nature in the form in which it was created by the total cosmic forces; it works in the most eminent sense when it is there through the cosmic forces, and in the most eminent sense it works through the limb-metabolic system up into the head. If we melt the lead, that is, if we subject it to an earthly process, then it acts directly on the head system. This is the great difference.

Among our medicines, we have an essential remedy, antimony, grey spear luster. If we take it as it exists outside as a fibrous ore – the spear-like is formed out of the cosmos – then in antimony we have a remedy that acts on the metabolism. If we subject antimony to an earthly process so that it becomes antimony sulfate, then we are acting in a specifically human way on the human head.

And you see, it is a matter of penetrating everywhere with this way of thinking, not only into the substance, but into the processes, into what is happening. It is not right to say that lead is a remedy for this or that. It is a matter of knowing how the process has taken place, whether we have a raw material or whether we have subjected the substance to some process. The way in which substances are treated is, after all, the essential thing. And the way of thinking should stop looking for the remedy in the substance as such. We should increasingly say to ourselves: When there is disease, there is a process that is not embraced by the whole of the human organism. If we want a remedy, we must strengthen the person, we must subject the person to such processes that we understand exactly. That is what it comes down to.

I would now like to tell you something to which this whole introduction should lead, which may at first seem somewhat paradoxical to you, but which is necessary to be truly grasped in the whole of medical life. That is, if one studies all those processes that one has to study in the universe, one has to study them to see whether they are cosmic or telluric processes or those that vibrate between the two. We have no way of really getting to these processes if we cannot understand how the soul is structured in these three different regions of the human being. Without understanding the soul, it is actually impossible to really get to the person.

And you see, you have to take the following into account. In the adult human being, the soul is actually a much stronger unity than the physical organism. The physical organism is clearly divided into three parts: the nervous-sensory system, the rhythmic system and the metabolic-limb system. These can be distinguished from one another. But the soul fills both the head system, the nerve-sense system, and the rhythmic system, as well as the metabolic-limb system. It is only very sleepy, dreamy in the lower system, but it fills the whole human being according to its three parts. But when a person is supposed to develop a system in particular, when the soul is supposed to pour its activity into a particular system, what actually happens? It is true that a person can occupy themselves with thinking, walking, or working with their hands or legs – we have to speak of the middle system separately. But what happens to the soul when a person is actively engaged, when a person is walking? When a person walks or works with his hands, it is truly the case that the same power is expressed in all that is in the world that is called love, which remains in arms and hands, in legs and feet (gap in the text). A person must come to the boundary of his skin when he is active, which then, when it overflows beyond the human being, unfolds as love.

But what does it mean in practical terms: the human being walks? It means that he lovingly animates the human organism within his skin, that is, he energizes his astral or ego organization in an appropriate way. And when he walks, he energizes his ego organization in such a way that he draws it out to a certain extent from the physical and etheric organism. When thinking, he exercises it in such a way that he pours it into the physical and etheric organization. Man withdraws his astral and I-limbs when walking; while stretching out his legs, he withdraws the astral body and the I when walking. When he thinks, he radiates them in, of course, but only to the skin. And if we take this into account, we can say that we simply have the beginning of illness in the activity of the organism. Because when, without the person lovingly filling his organism, the astral body and I-organization withdraw from the metabolic limb system, then pathological conditions arise. If the etheric body and the physical body are filled in the head without it being caused by arbitrariness, pathological conditions will again occur. So that what a person does arbitrarily is immediately corrected. Daily life in thinking and moving: it is a continuous process of making oneself ill. Only the human organism can make itself healthy again immediately.

And an understanding of these things depends on the fact that one can now really muster so much love for what happens in the case of illness that one can look at it as what actually shows one in a physical way what the spiritual in man is. You see, when a person becomes ill in the liver, let's say he gets abnormalities in the liver, then his astral body is not sufficiently active in the liver. What is the corresponding spiritual activity where something similar happens? It occurs when I take a particularly strong inner interest in something external. At the moment when one looks at something with intense attention, one is actually suffering from liver disease at that moment. At that moment, the astral body withdraws from the liver, but it balances out again immediately. And by going through the various processes of illness in the human organism, one can always study what happens in a healthy person through their will, through their arbitrary life. If the arbitrary processes were not continually being balanced, the person would continually make themselves ill through the arbitrary processes. So one can learn what the soul and the spirit are like if one likes the processes of illness as processes of study, really loves them.

And this love of disease must, of course, be connected with something else. After all, one does not just want to study the disease; that is the less important thing. But if one can heal again, what does one have then? Then one has an insight into the way in which the divine world has come about from the most diverse spiritual activities and beings, how the world has been created. And that is the starting point for a doctor's work: to say to oneself, first of all, that disease processes lead one into knowledge of the human being. They are real processes of knowledge. But the healing processes can only be grasped with a religious attitude. To really relate to the world with a religious attitude must permeate all this medical work. Without that, knowledge will never come about in detail.

Of course, you will always be able to say: Well, yes, there we have the remedies, and anthroposophy also comes along and gives remedies, but the whole thing cannot be seen through! — It can be seen through if you take into account such things as have now been characterized, if you can permeate a real process of knowledge with the diagnosis and a real process with the therapy. These things must be taken very seriously. Only by adopting this attitude can we understand what has been put forward as what anthroposophy has to say for medicine. Of course, the details are only what can be put to practical use. But it is necessary to permeate all medical activity with this attitude that we have been talking about.

I would now like you to ask one or two more questions, so that we can move on to specific considerations tomorrow. I just wanted to touch on the qualitative side.

First question: As a doctor today, you are sometimes forced to use remedies that you don't like to use, and some of these remedies are certainly so that you shouldn't use them. Can't anything be said about remedies that you shouldn't use?

Dr. Steiner: I would like to say the following in principle to this question: There is a big difference between a remedy that I can understand how it works in the human organism and one that I cannot understand. That is a big difference. Of course, this difference is initially relative for external practice, as long as we do not have medical faculties where one goes through a course of study such as that taught by anthroposophy. Until then, it will always happen that the practical doctor will also take note of what is advised by anthroposophy: 'This is a remedy for this or that'. Of course, we would love to start by teaching the science of human nature, so that by looking at an onion we would know how the onion process works in the human organism under these or those antecedents. That would be our favorite, of course. But for the time being it is relative, and for the time being it can only be the case that a remedy is given for this or that. But from here, a remedy is hardly given without its inner effect in human nature being made known. For example, it is not said that silicic acid of equisetum is taken without knowing that it causes a kidney process. The irritated kidney is reduced in its over-irritability. So the over-irritability of the kidney is reduced when silica from equisetum is added to the kidney. This is obvious, and one should know (gap in the text). But now I ask you on the basis of trust: How do the investigations happen outside? They are done externally with the help of statistics, they are done in such a way that so and so many patients are given the remedy. Actually, we don't really know what is going on, and above all, the big difference between a real remedy and one that is not a real remedy is that with a real remedy, we understand the process and know how it affects the whole of human life. If today you heal something by any means, you cannot know what will become of it in five years. But if you understand the process completely, you do not need statistics. With our remedies, it is never a matter of statistics. You will see from the book that is about to be published how it is not dependent on statistics whether a remedy works or not, but on the study of the individual case. If you have a box of matches and try the match, you will not burn all the matches, but you know when you have burned a match that each one can burn. Likewise, you know that each process must proceed as you know it. It is therefore not a matter of statistics, but of understanding the individual case. Therefore, we will always have great difficulties when people say: Give out your remedies, they should be tried! — But that does nothing; it does not create trust in the remedies. Of course, our remedies will produce extraordinarily favorable results statistically, but the usual cases are either not correctly diagnosed or are cases where additional remedies have yet to be administered. Now, I believe that the essential thing when it comes to such remedies, which heal without being understood, is, above all, to really understand how things work. You see, it is remarkable that even the trial leads to all sorts of interesting things. Today, all kinds of remedies for syphilis appear. Arsenic plays a role everywhere. Why is that? With us you hear: Arsenic is something that stimulates the astral body to do so when it is lethargic, to stimulate it to intervene more in the physical body. This astral body is made active by introducing arsenic into the human being. These remedies, discovered by trial and error, are actually based on this effect on the astral body. Of course, you can also see how they are mistaken, how they are caused by an illusion. One relies on the penetrating effect of arsenic in cases where the astral body can really become so strong through arsenic. And in the case of syphilis, only arsenic really cures. So with all such remedies, one must always see through the effectiveness of the remedy. One should always strive to see through the effectiveness of a remedy. Our way of thinking must therefore become more and more known, and that is precisely what we want to achieve through the book, namely to introduce it into the medical way of thinking to be cultivated here and not so much to point out the remedies. It will also be important to point out the way of thinking for remedies that are not indicated by us. After all, there are good remedies outside our area, and if necessary one gives this or that.

Second question: When we were here last time, we talked about bronchial asthma. You indicated as a remedy that one should meditate on breathing. Are we justified in giving such a meditation in such cases? I didn't know what else to do, I found a saying by Goethe:

In breathing there are twofold blessings:
To draw in air, to discharge it,
The former presses, the latter refreshes;
So wonderfully is life combined.
You thank God when He presses you,
And thank Him when He releases you again.

I didn't know if that was right.

Dr. Steiner: You see, in such matters one must accept that because you are going half-spiritually or three-quarters spiritually for my sake, you also have something spiritual in your response when the attitude I have spoken of today is present. This being rooted in the earthly, then in the cosmic through the head, if the doctor has learned to think and feel spiritually and to behave in the same way towards the patient, then one can take responsibility for something like that. But if you approach the sick with an attitude that is often shaped by a materialistic world view, if you approach the sick with an attitude that is indifferent to the soul, then you can usually achieve the opposite of what you actually want to achieve with such things, even if they have nothing to do with the soul. You see, there are really many people who work with such things over and over again – and today it is not completely ruled out for doctors either – who work with such things. They will sometimes bring about relief, even if it is not a cure. If the sick person is strengthened by it, then this relief can really lead him to healing. But if people ask whether you can really achieve something like that, I have to say that if you really love the sick person, then it will be possible. But if you are indifferent towards the patient, then it will not help.

You should really have the courage to heal. That is why I have always mentioned the courage of healing here with our institute, where this is the case. It is the worst thing a doctor can do, even when a patient is very seriously ill and you want to cure him, to think of death. As a doctor, you should forbid yourself to think of the patient's death as a possibility. After all, the imponderables are so strong. It is an immensely strengthening force when you, under all circumstances, send the thought of death away to the very end – to the very end! — and think only of what I can do to save the patient's life force, to save what can be saved. If this attitude is developed, many more people will be saved than if the opposite attitude is developed, which somehow predicts death from these or those things. One should never do that. And one must indeed take such things into consideration. Then one is justified in having the courage to heal.

Question: If one works as an assistant at a hospital and has to prescribe morphine and other drugs to patients, can something one does to the patient that is wrong be counteracted by something else, by one's attitude towards the patient, for example?

Dr. Steiner: Much can be achieved through the attitude. But if the interventions are necessary with physical substances, then these should be taken directly from the plant kingdom, not derived preparations, depending on how necessary it is to use the juice of the poppy plant directly. And not with an awareness of the inner process, on the contrary, by focusing on the outer form of the plant, on what is pleasing about the plant. It is difficult to give rules in such matters, because even when one is obliged to give the remedy, one's attitude is of great importance in picking up what comes to light in the patient. You have to pay attention to the mood that arises in the patient through the remedy, then you can intervene. The patient has become more transparent through the remedy in terms of helping. We will continue tomorrow, when I ask you to ask anything you have on your mind.

A participant asks about the significance of milkweed and dandelion juices as a remedy for leukemia. This remedy presented itself to him during a meditation.

Of course, it is important to take into account the accompanying symptoms, because leukemia can have a wide variety of causes. If it is the case that there can be a clear awareness that one is dealing with a disturbance in the rhythmic human being, then you will be right; then you will come to results. The thing is this: Wherever products are used that come from the plant kingdom and still have the remnants of the etheric body in them – and that is the case with resinous and milky juices, both in dandelion and in spurge; it is also the case with wax, for example in vegetable wax – all these substances have a strong effect on the human rhythmic system. But if we are dealing with something that has its primary cause not in the human being's rhythmic system but in the metabolism – these things merge into one another, but in principle they must be distinguished – then you will hardly succeed. Everything that still contains the etheric body within it has a very strong effect on the internal mobility of the astral body, and thus stimulates the entire activity of the organism from the astral body. And in this way one can achieve success. This is based on the fact that the astral body is strongly influenced by these substances and that, because it acts on the etheric body, it then also causes a balance in the etheric body.

What are the conditions for a smallpox epidemic to occur? It seems that this disease has lost its malignant character. I have observed such cases.

What does spiritual science have to say about vaccination?

In this matter, as with smallpox, we are dealing with a strong regression of the ego organization of all three other human bodies, both the physical and the etheric and astral bodies, in the individual. This strong regression, this weakening of the ego organization, can be due to the fact that the person, with their present ego, slips into the egos of past lives; and as a result, there is a strong affinity between the ego organization and the spiritual world. And what is remarkable about smallpox is that there is a certain similarity with what a person goes through when they undergo certain types of initiation. However strange it may seem, this is the case.

When a person, for example, really gets to know the effect of the zodiacal figures on people, such states of knowledge are associated with strong inner shocks. At least a person can undergo this by controlling it more, by working more on the soul, what is present in the case of smallpox, because it is a matter of the person living very strongly in the spiritual during the smallpox illness, albeit in a different way.

It can be said that the risk of infection is extremely high when suffering from smallpox. However, one should not be so careless as to always think of physical mediation in the transmission, but rather that the psychological predispositions are particularly strong in the case of smallpox. Proof of this could be that one can protect oneself very well if one is able to shut oneself away in the right way. I am able to speak about this because once, as a twenty-two-year-old person — I need not mention the circumstances — I taught a pupil whose mother was lying with black smallpox right next to it, separated only by a screen from the room in which I was giving my lessons. I did nothing about it, continued the lessons the whole time until the mother recovered. But I did it quite willingly, especially to see how one can protect oneself when one absolutely takes the smallpox patient, including those suffering from black smallpox, quite objectively like another object, like a stone or a bush, towards which one has no further feelings of fear or any other psychological stirrings, but takes it as an objective fact. In this case, the danger of infection must indeed be highly counteracted. Therefore, after all, the psychic factor can also play a strong role in the infection.

I have never been afraid of exposing myself to the possibility of infection, and in fact I have never been infected and have never suffered from an infectious disease. I was therefore able to determine that simply the consciousness, the strong consciousness of the existence of an illness can be the cause of illness from the astral body. The strong consciousness of an illness can be the cause of illness from the astral body.

And the smallpox vaccination? That is a peculiar case. You see, if you vaccinate someone and you educate them as an anthroposophist, it does no harm. It only harms those who grow up with predominantly materialistic thoughts. In such cases, vaccination becomes a kind of Ahrimanic force; the person can no longer rise above a certain materialistic feeling. And that is actually the most worrying thing about the smallpox vaccination, that people are virtually clothed with a phantom. The human being has a phantom that prevents him from getting rid of the soul entities as far from the physical organism as in normal consciousness. He becomes constitutionally materialistic, he can no longer rise to the spiritual. That is the worrying thing about vaccination. Of course, the statistics are always brought into play. The question is whether so much value has to be placed on statistics in these matters. With the smallpox vaccination, it is very much a psychological issue. It cannot be ruled out that the belief that the vaccination helps plays an incalculably large role. If this belief were replaced by something else, if people were educated in a way that would make them impressionable by something other than vaccination, for example, by bringing them closer to the spirit, it would be quite possible that, against the unconscious intrusion: here is a smallpox epidemic! - by complete consciousness of it: here is something spiritual, even if it is an unauthorized spiritual, against which I must protect myself! would work just as well as one would have to strengthen people against such influences.

If the circumstances are as they are, for example in our area, where the influence through education and so on is very difficult, how should one behave there?

You just have to vaccinate. There is no other way. Because fanatical opposition to these things is what I, not for medical reasons, but for general anthroposophical reasons, would not recommend at all. Fanatical opposition to these things is not what we are aiming for. Instead, we want to use insight to change things on a large scale. I have always regarded this, when I was friends with doctors, as something to be combated, for example with Dr. Asch, who absolutely did not vaccinate. I have always fought against that. Because if he does not vaccinate, someone else will. It is a complete nonsense to be so fanatical in the details.

Dr. Kolisko: As a school doctor, I observed that children who start school show a tremendous inner restlessness, which manifests itself particularly during sleep, so that the parents of children aged 6 or 7 complain that the children are plagued by nightmares, by motor restlessness, and that they have difficulty falling asleep. What are the circumstances that lead to this?

The conditions that children show when they start school, that is, in Germany, stem from the fact that, due to the nutritional conditions that have prevailed for years, rather than the general conditions, the inner ability to digest food - not the process that takes place in the stomach, but the inner ability, where it is important to drive the food pulp out of the intestines - is highly disturbed. It is the case that these children actually become incapable of properly interacting with their astral body in the etheric body. As a result, these children are usually unable to really transfer what they take in as food, even if they take it in through charity, into the organism. Every food has its own inherent laws; it must pass through a certain stage of digestion, every food must pass into the inorganic state. This is something that is not known in external science, that, for example, the protein we consume as vegetable or animal protein must be thoroughly disorganized, converted into the mineral state and then reconverted into human protein. The whole process takes place in the state nascendi, but it does take place. This transmutation must take place, otherwise the process does not take place as a human process, but as a foreign one. So we can say that within the human skin, roughly speaking, apart from the presence of direct salts, there must be nothing that occurs outside the human organism. There is nothing within the human skin that is outside except salt. Everything else is transmuted. Now, just when their etheric body is becoming free – it becomes free when they enter primary school age – these children lose the ability to organize this freed etheric body in the right way, starting from the astral body. This is what causes this digestive disorder. They have extra-human processes in them; and such things must be combated quite rationally physically. We have this remedy, which we prepared when we had some particularly bad examples of such children. I believe you will always have excellent success in this direction. Dr., do you remember the pale little boy in the second class? What about him?

He is much better.

He is now quite decent, relatively.

We have also used it on many other children.

That was the next occasion: there was a pale boy whom the doctors had already given up on; he was supposed to die in the near future. We used this remedy on him: calcium carbonate and calcium phosphate. It turned out that this remedy was very effective in promoting digestion; then the internal conditions improved. It is always the case that shortness of breath and breathing difficulties occur when the astral body cannot work properly. If it is held back, shortness of breath occurs, which can also be the cause of hidden anxiety. All this can be improved with this remedy. This remedy is of the

manner that one can say that if a person is no longer able to benefit from what he eats, despite eating, then this remedy is an extraordinarily good one.

What do you do for spinal paralysis?

What are the symptoms?

Just tenderness over the affected vertebra. The x-ray shows that the affected vertebra may have melted together a little on one side, that the vertebra has now taken on this (shown or drawn) shape instead of its normal shape.

It is natural that in such things, where there are such localized conditions, it is very difficult to approach the matter if one does not go back to the primary cause. Which vertebra is it?

The sixth thoracic vertebra.

Is there any kind of external mechanical insult that can be proven?

No, but the finding is that it is derived from pulmonary tuberculosis.

But there are changes in the hilar glands.

It is the case that in the x-ray image, larger shadows are found at this point, which enter the lung tissue in a scattered manner.

How old is the patient?

Thirty-five years.

Has he had this problem for long? Has it been noticed for long?

About three months. I have four such patients, all of them women. Two of them have a trauma on their back from falling down the stairs. In the other two, the x-ray image is such that one could conclude that the problem originates in the lungs.

Can't you prove that the neighboring vertebra is also affected?

Not a single one. In one case it is the tenth, in other cases the sixth. These are adults, about 36 to 39 years old. In one child the case is traumatic, in a twenty-year-old girl it is also traumatic.

In such a case, one would have to try to examine whether the lungs – the matter does not of course have its cause there – have insufficient space at some point, perhaps because they have been expanded. And in this case, one will find something in the area where the lungs unfold towards the front. And there it will be a matter of finding further dilations in some area of the lungs, expansions, for this shrinking - it is a shrinking process. Perhaps it is not in the lung area; it could even be in the bone of one of the ribs. That would have to be looked for. Then it would be a matter of using something that is suitable for balancing the formation of the human body. Now we have a substance that is excellently suited for balancing traumas. That is tobacco. Injected in dilution, it proves to be what balances deformities. If the aim is to bring the remedy to work freely in the organism, phosphorus must be used. Then it will certainly be possible to achieve healing processes in this way. It can definitely be said that healing processes will be achieved if the person concerned is under twenty-eight years of age. But it is not impossible, especially in women, to achieve healing processes even at a later age. And when you have very stubborn natures that are very reluctant, you would have to get them to be cheered up artificially, to cheer up their growth forces, their vital forces a little, and in this way promote the effect. That is what I mean, that in such a case you could do that.

In connection with what has been said about syphilis, I would like to ask how a patient who has received mercury and salvarsan can be freed from the damage caused by the medicine.

The following can be done to alleviate damage caused by mercury: give the patient a very hot bath every day or every other day and let the patient sweat profusely. This alone will greatly stimulate the body to defend itself against the mercury. It is necessary to defend oneself against the mercury to the very depths of one's bones when one has been treated with it. For you have perhaps all heard that after mercury cures, small droplets of mercury can be detected in the bones when an autopsy is performed. When the organism is strengthened by the hot baths, it is already a strong helper to the organism. That it helps sufficiently can be seen from the fact that the bathwater turns black from the returning mercury. Did you not notice that? You have to notice it! Because you don't understand why the bathwater is so dark. If that does not happen, then an arsenic bath should be taken, with about 5% of an arsenical water added to the bath; again, the patient should take a warm bath and, in particular, it should be ensured that the peculiar smell of ink that arises is actually smelled by the patient, so that he has a sensory impression of it. (Gap in the text.)

In such a case, a follow-up cure is needed. The mercury may have been almost completely removed, but the destructive tendency introduced by the mercury remains in the organism. We must bear in mind that mercury has an extraordinarily strong effect on the human organism. One must consider: what is mercury for the human organism? If you follow the embryonic development, you have an ascending embryonic development, that is, from the germ rising to what becomes a human being, and you have a descending development, something that falls away, that is gradually destroyed. The regulator of this destruction is that which, in the human being, is the inner mercurial nature. And if it should turn out that there are too many vital forces, then you could check it by means of mercury, which works constitutionally towards the destruction of the human being. This destructive tendency of mercury must be combated psychically. If you can induce a person to pursue a completely abstract science quite regularly, geometry, for example, dutifully for half an hour every day, then that is the follow-up cure. Sharp, logically connecting and separating thoughts that engage the mind and help to develop inner activity, not passive surrender to the world, but this inner activity, is what must actually be applied for a very long time. Then you will be able to heal someone of the forces of Mercury.

Sometimes women develop nodular hardenings in the mammary gland. Is it safe to use Viscum prophylactically, even if the diagnosis of carcinoma is questionable?

Have you found that prophylaxis in this case causes any damage?

You once said that with this remedy, which is being considered for a disease, there is also a risk of causing something in the wrong case.

We use the viscuminjection in a very specific way. Let us assume the case of an error in the diagnosis. That can be the case. Of course, one would not proceed prophylactically because one has diagnosed that carcinoma is in its early stages. As soon as the tendency is there, prophylaxis can no longer do any harm. But let us assume that an error has occurred. Now we inject seven times in a row; then we take a break. If there really had been an error, we would see it immediately, because a kind of carcinomatous tendency would have arisen that would immediately disappear when we did the second seven injections. We would not go any further. What would be created would be transformed again by a similar process. If one is careful, it is quite impossible to do any harm with Viscum treatment.

Dr. Köller: I had a conversation with a lay doctor about carcinoma treatment. I told him that I believe Viscum is a cure for this. He replied that this would be the case, but that one would have to take something else, namely Quendel; otherwise one would not have the possibility to get to the disease with Viscum. Quendel is what provides the possibility.

Did the man know this on his own initiative?

Dr. Köller: I got to know him because he had performed a remarkable healing. A girl who was almost blind came to see him. He is an eye diagnostician. It is not clear how he does it. He has 750 kinds of tea. It is so difficult to have a conversation with these people. They are all very optimistic. He said that everything can be cured, even cancer. He didn't ask how we do it, he just said it was through mistletoe. He told me that he and a few friends had once been walking through a landscape and had come across a cherry tree with mistletoe on it; the tree was stunted and had cancer. The man said to himself that there was a great healing power in mistletoe.

Viscum is the specific for carcinoma. There is nothing to be done about it. Of course, because basically every disease is treated differently, since every organism is in a certain condition, the remedies are sometimes supported by the addition of something else. It is possible that he has cured with mistletoe. He does not use it as an injection. In that case, it is possible that something else would be needed as an addition. But when Viscum is used as an injection, it is the specific remedy. You just have to pay attention to the differences in the individual case, whether you have the mistletoe from an oak tree, a cherry tree or another tree, such as an apple tree. The essential thing is that the use of mistletoe juice really depends on the fact that we actually have to enhance its effect. I don't know if you have seen that we are not seeking to use Viscum in such a simple way, but that we need an apparatus to do so. First we bring the mistletoe juices into a vertical movement, and then we let a horizontally rotating movement penetrate them. The aim is to make the mistletoe juice drip and to circulate it in drops, combining it again with mistletoe juice in horizontal circles, so that a special structure is created right down to the smallest circles. This is actually only the healing effect of the viscum, which arises. Of course, it is an effective remedy in itself; but the absolutely specific remedy only arises in this complicated way. The only thing that can be said is that when the disease occurs in a complicated way, quendel is used. Because the pure carcinoma, which is a self-contained disease, is not like influenza or flu, for example, where all sorts of things can be added. It is a self-contained disease that is treated with a self-contained remedy.

It is interesting that a person comes up with something like this just because of what he has told you and what you have said, but it is only a mask, not a mask known to him; because the knowledge can only come to such a person in his sleep. The Lord gives to his own in his sleep, truly. There is a prophetic foresight in his sleep that he is looking for mistletoe. Then he remembers this unconscious prophetic experience just as he comes to the mistletoe. A conversation takes place that is quite insignificant for the matter itself. It must be clear that a certain foreknowledge is possible, especially in cases of illness. You can rely on that. I remind you of the case of Schleichs: the person concerned knew that he would die the next night.

Dr. Köller: Basically, it turned out that he also cures in other ways. He said that he had not been at rest; he did not believe that I would get anywhere.

He does not inject. If you give the remedy mistletoe as an internal medicine, you cannot hit the cancer. You hit more of his soul. But you are hitting a malformation in the etheric body, which expresses itself through an impairment of the sensory. You cannot heal internally with mistletoe, only through injection. I understand what he is saying to you; he doesn't dare to approach the matter.

Is the cause of cancer the same in women and men? Is the cause different in the upper and lower human being? I believe I have noticed that the remedy satisfied in the case of stomach cancer but did not satisfy in the case of uterine cancer. Success was clear in the case of stomach cancer in men. In contrast, the matter drags on in the case of uterine cancer. In some cases we cannot get at it; we always injected into the periphery, even in the case of uterine cancer.

It is of course the case that you have to decide whether to inject further away from the site of the cancer or to get very close. If you can get very close to the site, you will achieve results more quickly than if the cancer is in a place where you cannot get close.

With the uterus, you can get close all around, while with stomach cancer you are much further away.

That is quite right. But on the other hand, there is much more communication between the surface and the stomach than between the surface and the uterus. The uterus is a more internal organ. However, the different success is not justified by the fact that there is a difference between men and women. There must be other conditions. All sources of error must be excluded. It is definitely the case that some of our remedies have gained a reputation for being less effective because the remedies in the way they used to be prepared were not as stable. Now, I believe, this no longer occurs in the same way; when they have aged, they will no longer work less well.

For some of the remedies, we are still in the experimental stage.

It has become much more apparent to me that the carcinoma remedy, as it has been manufactured so far, loses a great deal when it is one year old, while it is absolutely effective when it is not particularly old. So this matter would also have to be excluded, excluded as a source of error, and included. Possibly a considerably larger dose would also have to be used for uterine cancer.

A participant would like to ask about a girl who is now 29 years old and who went insane between the ages of 18 and 19. As a child, she was always unruly and naughty; now she has become completely dull. Especially during her period, she became wild. During the time when she became more and more dull, she also became increasingly fat; she now weighs 97 kilograms. So before she was what you might call a naughty girl; then between the ages of 18 and 19, a great increase in this naughtiness, dullness, stupidity, non-reaction, raging during the period, so that the straitjacket had to be applied; then she became more and more dull, less and less responsive, fatter and fatter, with regular periods. She was treated with thyroid extract with the result that the dullness and fattening subsided.

These symptoms all indicate that she had a very weak ego organization. And it is very likely that in such a case, a strengthening of the ego organization can be achieved by a silica cure, a silicon cure, whereby one would have to advise taking the cure twice, i.e. taking silica and taking silica baths. Also Equisetum, that is a good thing. It is likely that one can achieve something for her in this way.

She received silicic acid for a while, but not baths, two years ago; but everything has remained the same.

I would emphasize the effect of silicic acid through baths, especially because this, if it were to be effective, would already have a specific effect. The peculiar rhythmic states that occur through silicic acid would hold back this fat formation, would also combat dullness, and would make her more sociable. It could also be that she is in a state where she does not absorb silicic acid. In this case, an experiment should be made with a very highly potentized phosphoric acid salt, with phosphoric acid potassium. One would have to bring the matter to effectiveness again.

On further question:

The silicic acid to about the sixth decimal place. But really use quartz for internal administration, and equisetum for baths.

Question about a neurasthenic patient. The matter responded very well to formic acid injections, but came back this year and did not go away despite formic acid injections. Eventually, I went down the wrong track by taking out an ingrown toenail, after which the matter got even worse. I tried formic acid again, reinforced with silicon; but I couldn't get through. The pain became unbearable, radiating from the foot to the calf. It was a variety of pains, sometimes rhythmic. I had to give him morphine injections, which I had to increase a lot; I barely touched him to keep the pain within tolerable levels. He couldn't sleep anymore. He would sit holding his foot, complaining of terrible pain; I tried alternating foot baths. The foot had to be amputated halfway up the calf. I ask because unfortunately the process also wants to appear on the other leg. What can be done?

In such a case, it is important to determine what the primary cause is.

He traces it back to his time in the military, when he usually didn't have very good shoes. He is 47 years old and often had to lie in the wet.

But could the pain have occurred first not in the leg but perhaps in the abdomen? It is quite possible that the whole case originates from a deformation at some point in the intestine, that he received a splinter, fell off the horse, pushed himself up, and that this caused an intestinal deformation. This intestinal deformation has the peculiarity of migrating downward and causing such conditions as you have described in the legs, first in one, but then jumping over to the other. Usually this ends in bone tuberculosis. But if the case is as likely as it is, you can achieve something with the remedy that works against the deformation: tobacco. In such a case with tobacco enemas (see note 5. 326).

He smokes quite a lot.

That has nothing to do with it. Tobacco smoke does not affect the organism in the same way as when you use tobacco by injection or as enemas. You only need very diluted enemas if you use them. It has a completely different effect on the organism. When smoking, the tobacco does not have time to exert its re-deforming effect.

A boy who is now eleven years old learned to walk when he was one, and could also speak a little. When he was two years old, he was standing a little too close during a shooting exercise with cannons. It is said that he has been deaf and dumb ever since. His speech is an incomprehensible babble, and he hears absolutely nothing. Is there anything that can be done? He can walk; he even looks very intelligent.

Otherwise, there are no disorders except for not hearing and speaking? What happens if you somehow make an impression on the eye?

Then he reacts just like a normal person; only in the ear and in speaking is there a change.

How was the second teething?

Quite normal at seven and a half.

One would have to assume that in some way the vitality of the auditory nerve has been broken. Now, after all, we have had quite considerable success with edelweiss, especially in the 10th decimal; or first in the 6th, then in the 10th, to revive the auditory nerve. There have been failures, but basically these have been observed in fairly old people; not really in younger people. I do think you can try this. It is indeed extremely difficult to treat these devitalized nerves; but one can certainly be successful with edelweiss under certain circumstances.

During the war, a female patient had suffered some kind of shock. She believed that her fiancé was dead. She was alone at home and had no one to talk to about it. Since then, she has become epileptic. The attacks always occur before her period. The attacks occur with tongue biting and so on, very typical. As soon as the period begins, it is over. She is in an institution for epileptics, even though the seizures only occur before her period.

How is she treated?

(Answer missing)

In such a case, you start with belladonna. If that doesn't help, you move on to reindeer moss in 6 decimal, and finally you administer fly agaric. It is very difficult to say anything specific in this case without seeing the patient. There could be any number of underlying causes.

A fifty-year-old man had a very hard time in his earlier years. For eleven years he had rheumatoid arthritis, which killed a brother of his. Now there is still a change in the left knee. Until two years ago, he had episodes of blood rushing to his head. Two years ago, a clear change occurred. He gained weight, and the rush of blood to the head disappeared. But what occurred was what he briefly describes as asthma. He has breathing difficulties, he has to gasp for breath when he talks. I have the impression that the problem is now in the bronchial tubes.

At 48 years old. Just as the rush used to be to the head, now it's to the chest. Now it happens that the man sometimes turns a little blue; it just needs to be quiet for him to turn a little blue.

It's possible.

It is very likely that this man is able to convert too much of the oxygen he has taken in into carbonic acid, so that he always has too much carbonic acid in his blood. You can test whether the man does not feel relieved when given air with more oxygen. If that is the case, then it is quite clear. Then the man produces too much carbonic acid, and it is necessary to give this man - what is he? —

- engineer —

to add silicon in the first decimal place, i.e. five percent, and he should be encouraged to do so, if he has taken it, for about half an hour after taking the silicon, to make some kind of mental effort. Then he can get better. He then manages to reduce the excessive carbonic acid production capacity.

We must now conclude, and continue tomorrow in the same vein.

I don't find these types of questions fruitful. The individual gets a lot out of them, but the others don't get much out of them. One should ask more general questions, something more interesting. Tomorrow it should be done a little differently. Don't you agree, Doctor?

I am prepared to answer anything that is asked. You can give a whole lecture on each question. I could have talked about the subject until now, when the first one asked; but then only one person would have had their turn. I think it was quite good to hear something varied. It's not important that we are satisfied, but that the audience is.

I think that something is being done here, as in the way clinics are held at the university, because the way of asking the question does not allow for the other question of how one can develop understanding within oneself.

That would come immediately if a question were asked about it. So tomorrow, ask a question about it, then it can come about. I don't think it's completely useless to go into this question. But other answers come up. We just evaluate them in such a way that the audience can be satisfied.

What about deepening the diagnosis? We can think about a patient in many ways. A lot of questions arise, and one often faces the difficulty of deciding what to do. Intellectually you cannot; you have to make a volitional decision. I would like to ask: Is it not possible to push back this intellectual volitional impulse at that moment, so that what you have to do comes to you? Perhaps you could say something about that?

You mean how one can make the diagnosis more transparent?

In treatment, you are faced with various possibilities. You can't decide whether to use herbal or mineral remedies; you have to decide on something. You should be able to approach the patient from deeper grounds and to merge all these ideas together so that you arrive at knowing that this is the right thing to do.

We will make something up tomorrow and then develop an idealized diagnosis.

In connection with the question raised by Dr. Husemann yesterday, we have decided to read out two cases from the book that Dr. Wegman will soon be publishing. We can then build on the presentation of these cases to address the issues that arise from your question as a need for further knowledge.

Of course, I will ask that these cases be treated with the utmost discretion at first, because they will be an integral part of the forthcoming book.

These cases are intended to show how to arrive at a therapy, especially by means of diagnosis. This is to be made clear, and it is to be done on the basis of anthroposophy. In this book we will not be embarrassed to speak entirely in anthroposophical terms.

Dr. Wegman reads the “Fourth Case” described in the book “Fundamentals of an Expansion of Medicine Based on Spiritual Science” on pages 97ff. [pp. 107ff. in GA 27, 1984]: “A child who was brought to the clinic twice, first at four years old, then at five and a half years old. In addition, the mother and the sister of the mother were present.

It is important that the mother and sister were present, and you will see why in a moment.

"The diagnosis led from the child's illness to that of the mother and sister. We were able to determine the following for the child: it is a twin child, born six weeks prematurely. The other child died in the last embryonic stage. At six weeks the child became ill, screamed an extraordinary amount and was taken to hospital. There the diagnosis was pylorospasm. The child was partially breastfed and partially bottle-fed. At eight months it was discharged from hospital. On arriving home, it had a seizure on the first day, which repeated daily for the first two months. During the attack, the child became stiff and rolled his eyes. Before the attack, the child was anxious and cried. The child also squinted with his right eye and vomited before the attack occurred. At two and a half years of age, another attack occurred that lasted five hours. The child became stiff again and lay there as if dead. At four years of age, an attack occurred that lasted half an hour. For the first time, we were informed that this seizure was accompanied by fever. After the convulsions that occurred after the child was brought back from the hospital, the parents noticed paralysis in the right arm and right leg. At two and a half years old, the child made his first attempt at walking, which turned out that only the left leg could step and the right one was dragged. The right arm also remained without will. The same condition was still present when the child was brought to us. The task was to determine the state of the child's organizational limbs. This was attempted independently of the symptom complex. It turned out that there was a strong atrophy of the etheric body, which in certain parts took up only a very slight influence of the astral body.

That is essentially the finding. We are dealing with an etheric body that is atrophied in the most diverse places and does not absorb the effect of the astral body in the atrophied places. There are such gaps in the etheric body (see drawing). The astral body does not penetrate into the areas where the etheric body is atrophied. This was the case in various parts of the organism.

“The area of the right side of the chest was paralyzed in the etheric body. In contrast, there was something like a hypertrophy of the astral body in the stomach area.”

One must use unusual expressions here, just as the term “hypertrophy” is used for places that are too active, too lively.

"Now the task was to harmonize the symptom complex with these findings. There is undoubtedly a heavy demand on the stomach during digestion due to the astral body, but this is blocked due to the paralysis of the ether body at the transition from the intestines to the lymph vessels. As a result, the blood is malnourished. We must therefore take the nausea symptoms as particularly important symptoms. Cramps always occur when the etheric body becomes atrophic and the astral body gains direct influence on the physical body without the mediation of the etheric body.

This is something important in principle. The occurrence of spasms is based on the fact that the regular connection between the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body is not there. One has to imagine this in such a way that the astral body only acts on the physical body with the help of the etheric body. If there are such atrophic areas, then the astral body takes hold of the physical body to the exclusion of the ether body. Spasm occurs everywhere where this is the case. We know that where spasm occurs, the ether body does not mediate properly between the astral body and the physical body.

"This was present to a high degree in the child. If this condition becomes permanent during the growth period, as was the case here, then those processes that make the motor system suitable for the normal absorption of the will are lost. This was evident in the child in the unusability of the right side. We now had to relate the child's condition to that of the mother. She is 37 years old when she comes to us. She states that she was already as tall as she is now at the age of 13. She had bad teeth early on.

I ask you to note this in particular. She has not grown any more from the age of thirteen until now, so that all her growth up to sexual maturity was complete.

"She had bad teeth early on, suffered from articular rheumatism as a child, claims to have had rickets. Menstruation started relatively early. The patient reports having had a kidney disease at the age of sixteen and also speaks of convulsive conditions she has had. At twenty-five years of age, obstipation due to spasm of the anal sphincter, which had to be stretched. Now she also has spasms during defecation. The findings, established without any conclusion from the complex of symptoms in direct observation, show an extraordinary similarity to those of the child. Only everything appears in a much milder form. It must be borne in mind that the etheric body of a person undergoes a special development between the change of teeth and sexual maturity. In the case of our patient, this is expressed in the fact that the available forces of the etheric body, which are not very strong, only allow for growth up to sexual maturity. With this, the special development of the astral body begins, which, with its hypertrophy, now overgrows the etheric body and intervenes too strongly in the physical organization.

This was the case with both mother and child: the astral body intruded too strongly into the physical body.

"This becomes evident in the arrested growth at the age of thirteen. The patient is by no means dwarfish, but very tall, which is due to the fact that the growth forces of the etheric body, although weak, caused a strong expansion of the physical body when uninhibited by the astral body. These forces were not yet able to intervene regularly in the functions of the physical body. This manifested itself in the occurrence of articular rheumatism and later in convulsive states.

Joint rheumatism is also connected with the fact that the astral body directly engages with the joints of the physical body. This engagement can also cause inflammation where it can occur. So either we are dealing with spasms or with inflammation.

"Due to the weakness of the etheric body, the effect of the astral body on the physical body is particularly strong. This effect is destructive. In the normal course of life, this is balanced out by the anabolic forces at work during sleep when the astral body is separated from the physical and etheric bodies. If the etheric body is too weak, as in the case of our patient, there is an excess of catabolism, which in her case was indicated by the fact that her teeth needed their first filling at the age of 12.

Due to the excessive intervention of the astral body, too much breakdown occurs. The physical body and etheric body build up; the astral body and ego organization break down. If there is now an excess of degrading activity, this is indicated by the fact that she has to wear fillings at the age of twelve. Each time she has become pregnant, her teeth have become worse.

"If the etheric body is particularly stressed, as in pregnancy, the teeth deteriorate each time. The weakness of the etheric body in relation to its connection with the astral body is still particularly evident in the frequency of dreams and in the healthy sleep that the patient has, despite all the irregularity.

If there is complete regularity in the connection between the astral body, etheric body and physical body, there is no excess of dreams. The moment the astral body can predominate because the etheric body is weakened, frequent and vivid dreams occur. And because the astral body is strong, it can easily come out and the sleep still remains healthy.

"The weakness of the etheric body is also evident from the fact that foreign processes take place in the physical body that are not mastered by the etheric body, and these show up in the urine as protein, isolated hyaline cylinders and salts.

These are the decomposition products that form due to the hypertrophy of the astral body. They must always be sought when one is dealing with a hypertrophy of the astral body.

"The relationship of these disease processes to those of the mother's sister is remarkable. The findings regarding the composition of the parts of the human being are almost exactly the same. Weak etheric body, hence predominance of the astral body. Only the astral body itself is weaker than in the sister. Therefore, just as in the sister, the menses begin early, but instead of inflammations, she experiences mere pains that arise from irritation of the organs, for example, the joints.

This is really very interesting. The mother and child have almost the same disease constitution. The sister, who is walking at the same time, only has weaker symptoms, everything to a lesser extent, everything, I would say, en miniature, in hints.

"The etheric body must be particularly active in the joints if vitality is to be normal. If the activity of the aetheric body is weak, the activity of the physical body becomes predominant, which is evident here in swelling and chronic arthritis. The weakness of the astral body, which has too little effect on subjective feeling, is indicated by a preference for sweet foods, which increase the astral body's sensitivity.

This is very interesting. In order to arrive at a diagnosis, one must actually ask what the person concerned likes to eat: sweet or bitter things, a preference for these or those sensory impressions. Some have a peculiar weakness with regard to olfactory impressions. All this shows that the astral body is to be engaged somehow. This preference of the astral body shows that it is not engaged; it is engaged immediately when it has sweets.

"If the weak astral body is still worn out by daytime life, then, if the weakness persists, the pains become more significant. The patient complains of increased pain in the evenings. The connection between the conditions of the three patients points in the ascension to the generation preceding the two sisters, in particular to the grandmother of the child. The cause must be sought in the latter. The disturbed equilibrium between the astral and etheric bodies in all three patients can only be explained by an equivalent disturbance in the grandmother of the child. This irregularity must be due to the defective formation of the embryonic organs of nourishment, especially of the allantois, in the grandmother's astral and etheric bodies.

This case is particularly interesting because it can be seen that the cause really lies in the inadequate development of the allantois of the grandmother. The whole condition of this astral body, which of course manifests itself more strongly in one person, the mother, and to a lesser extent in the other, can be traced back to the grandmother. It is not bound to one part, but constitutionally goes through the whole astral body and can only go back to that peculiar formation, the allantois, the embryonic period.

We have here an occult finding that must be taken up. But once we have come across it, the individual phenomena are quite suitable for verification. We must definitely get into the habit of verifying the causes from the causes. The composition of the symptoms actually only gives an unclear picture.

“This defective formation of the allantois must be sought in all three patients. We first established it in a purely spiritual scientific way. The physical allantois metamorphoses, passing over into the spiritual, into the efficiency of the forces of the astral body.”

What is more, we could only hint at this as a principle, in the physical allantois, which can only be embryonic as well; the entire organs that are present in the embryo are present in the born human being as the higher limbs. What is a physical accessory organ is, spiritually, in the adult state, so that we only have to see the physical correlate of the embryonic period in the allantois.

"A degenerated allantois produces a diminished efficiency of the astral body, which manifests itself particularly in all motor organs. All this is the case with the three patients. One can really recognize the nature of the allantois from that of the astral body.

It is important to know that the amnion is the physical correlate of the etheric body, the allantois is the physical correlate of the astral body, and the chorion is the physical correlate of the I organization of the adult.

"It will be seen from this that our reference to the ascendants does not come from a daring fantasy conclusion, but from a real spiritual scientific observation.

To those who may be disturbed by this truth, we would say that our statements are not motivated by a desire for paradox, but by a desire to share this knowledge with everyone. The mystical concepts of inheritance will always remain obscure if we are afraid to recognize the metamorphosis from the physical to the spiritual and vice versa in the succession of generations.

In therapeutic terms, such an insight can only lead to a view of the point at which the healing process is to be applied.

Now it moves into the therapeutic.

"If one had not been referred to the hereditary in such a way, but had simply noticed the irregularities in the connection between the etheric and astral bodies, one would have applied remedies that would have worked on these two parts of the person. But these would have remained ineffective in our case because the damage, which goes back generations, lies too deep to be balanced out in these links of the human organization itself.

It is particularly important that we consider this case. What is presented here ties in with yesterday's question. If one simply had the finding that the astral body and the etheric body are not in intimate harmony, one would have to take this or that remedy — then one would hardly achieve any particular effect. If one goes strictly further to the cause, then the therapy also becomes clearer. By being led away from direct observation into the succession of generations, the way was pointed to strict exactness.

"In such a case one must work upon the ego-organization and bring to bear in it everything that has to do with the harmonizing and strengthening of the etheric and astral bodies. This can be achieved by acting on the ego organization with, so to speak, intensified sensory stimuli (sensory stimuli act on the ego organization). In the case of the child, this was attempted in the following way: a bandage of the right hand was applied with a five percent pyrite ointment and at the same time the left half of the head was rubbed with emperor's sponge ointment.

And now we have the therapy: we work directly on the hand with pyrite, iron sulphide. This enables us to influence the astral body and the etheric body at the same time, thereby bringing about harmonization. We must work to bring the etheric body and the astral body closer together. This is the basis for healing. And for that we must apply means that go beyond the immediate, because it has been going on for generations.

"Pyrite, a compound of iron and sulfur, when applied externally, stimulates the I-organization to make the astral body more lively and to increase its affinity to the ether body. The substance of the Emperor's mushroom, with its special content of organized nitrogen, works in such a way that an effect emanates from the head, which, through the ego organization, makes the ether body more lively and increases its affinity to the astral body. The healing process was supported by eurythmy therapy, which sets the ego organization itself in lively activity. Thus, what is applied externally is guided into the depths of the organization. The healing process thus initiated was then further strengthened by means of measures that were intended to make the astral and etheric bodies particularly sensitive to the effect of the ego organization. In a rhythmic daily sequence, the following treatments were applied: baths with a decoction of Solidago, back rubs with a decoction of Stellaria media, and internally, tea made from willow bark (which particularly affects the receptivity of the astral body) and Stannum 0.001 (which particularly makes the etheric body receptive). We also gave poppy juice in a weak dosage to make the damaged self-organization recede in the face of the healing effects.

The mother received more the last therapy because, as a generation older, the forces of heredity had less effect. The same applies to the mother's sister. While the child was still in the clinic, we were able to see that it was easier to direct and that it was in a better mental state. For example, it became more obedient; and the movements it otherwise made very awkwardly, it now made more skillfully. Afterwards, the aunt told us that a great change had taken place with the child. It has become calmer, the excess of involuntary movements has decreased; it has become so skilled that it can play alone; and in terms of the soul, the former stubbornness has disappeared."

Perhaps you would like to say something? In this way, the diagnosis leads to the therapy. This is where the higher aspects of human nature come into play. The starting point is the clinical picture. In this case, the starting point is as follows: the sick organism was subject to a process that takes a certain course. This process must be reversed. By properly understanding the process, one arrives at the point of reversing the process by realizing how not only an organ, but the entire human interior is related to what is happening in the world.

So let us say you want to recognize how to treat some kind of damage, say to the gall bladder. Then you have to study the opposite process in the outside world; at least take this opposite process as an aid. If you recognize one of them, say, as the incoming process, you recognize the other as the outgoing process and thus have the closed circuit. Is there perhaps another question?

Sometimes with adults, sometimes with those who are psychically agile, one can arrive at a diagnosis. I have also tried this with children; but I have the impression that I have gone too far in this kind of diagnosis.

That you did not achieve what you intended by penetrating the soul? This is something that may be true or may be false. It depends entirely on how far one is able to coax the things one wants out of the child, and also on whether the child is communicative or not. It also depends on the memory effect; and on whether the right things from the soul are elicited. In principle, the child can give really great things, especially when there are condensed soul phenomena. If you expect the childish and it tells what it has seen of condensed soul phenomena, you can look very deeply into irregularities; these are always the correlate of this. You have to look at the case individually.

With adults, of course, it is fairly easy to penetrate the soul if you know the soul organism as such, if you know that people tell you anything. Now you move forward. Most of the time what they tell is not true. First of all, the patient does not say how it is. Now you have to find something to latch onto. You come across something that is mostly true. Once you have grasped that, you can move on. You have to distinguish whether one thing is true in relation to the other. An animal that has the beak of an eagle cannot at the same time have the feet of an ostrich. In the same way, things in the soul fit together. You have to guide the patient towards this. Until you have found the right point, you believe everything, that is, you believe nothing, but you make him understand that you believe everything. Once you have hooked on a point where the matter must be true, you then draw his attention very sharply to what cannot be. You then get a kind of soul organism that points very strongly to the physical organism. So it is useful to be based on a mental diagnosis.

A participant comments.

The direction you indicated yesterday is this: I make a diagnosis and then have the diagnosis before me. I know that when this turns out, these remedies are available to me. I can choose from among them. Now you wanted to know: how can one actually choose? The answer can only be given by saying: If I can choose between several remedies, I must assume that I have not yet completed the diagnosis and must continue the diagnosis until I arrive at a definite remedy. There is no such thing as an arbitrary choice. This was truly a happy case, and I was amazed. The fact that one goes from the condition of the child to the allantois of the grandmother is something that does not otherwise occur in the diagnosis. I was extremely astonished that this was the motif; on the other hand, the result shows that one must try to penetrate to the last cause.

Dr. Wegman reads the “Fifth Case” described in the book mentioned at the beginning on pages 114-116:

"A 26-year-old female patient came to our clinic with the severe consequences of influenza, which she had suffered through in 1918 with lung catarrh, and which had followed a pleurisy that had occurred in 1917. Since the flu, the patient had been unable to fully recover. In 1920, she was very emaciated, weak, and had a slight fever and night sweats. Soon after the flu, she developed lower back pain that continued to worsen until late 1920; and then, with severe pain, a curvature appeared in the lower back. There was also swelling of the right index finger. A rest cure supposedly brought improvement of the back pain. When she came to us as a patient, she had a suppurative abscess on the right thigh, distended abdomen with some ascites and catarrhal noises over the lung tips, both on the right and left. Digestion and appetite are good. Urine is concentrated, showing traces of protein. The spiritual scientific examination showed: hypersensitivity of the astral body and the ego organization; such an abnormality initially expresses itself in the ether body in that it does not develop the actual ether functions, but an etheric imprint of the astral functions.

This is very interesting when, as in this case, the etheric body is so weak that it does not perform its own functions but acts as a matrix, like wax, into which the astral body imprints its own functions. We have an etheric body that actually acts as a masked astral body. This is the case here.

"The astral functions are destructive. Therefore, vitality and the normal process in the physical organs must show signs of atrophy. This is always connected with processes that are, as it were, not human, but which take place in the human organism.

We must be strict about this. When something enters the human organism, whether it is from some aggregate state or warm air and so on, it must undergo a change in the human organism – roughly speaking, within the human skin. Nothing is the same outside of and within the human organism. The human organism has to work through everything that comes from outside. No heating process may take place in the body as it does in stone, where a temperature simply passes through and warms the stone. If we are warmed from the outside, like an inorganic body, we process the warmth that approaches us so deeply that it is completely revitalized. If a cold occurs, even if it is an internal cold of the internal organs, it does not come from within, but from an external imposition of heat.

This goes all the way down to the metabolic states. When a substance enters, it must be transformed in the human organism, right down to its most intimate processes. If we have ingested something – let's say a carbohydrate – another process takes place in the organism. The carbon-hydrogen-oxygen process, which takes place outside of human nature, must not be there in the same way. There is a process in the human being that is foreign to human nature. This is the basis for all disease states that are based on metabolic deposits. All of them are basically based on the fact that heat processes do not occur through the human being himself, but rather processes that arise as actual processes of matter because the human organization is not strong enough in some part. If, for example, the ego organization is too weak, one will find that the fat taken in is not processed in the right way. If the astral organization is too weak, one will find that carbohydrates are not processed properly. If the aether organization is too weak, one will find that the protein taken in is not processed in the right way. This is something to be aware of.

"The abscess, back pain, bloating, catarrhal phenomena in the lungs and also the inadequate processing of protein are caused by this. The aim of the therapy is to reduce the sensitivity of the astral body and the ego organization. This is achieved by administering silicic acid, which always strengthens the power of self-healing in the face of sensitivity.

So silicic acid always strengthens the power of self-healing in the face of sensitivity.

“We did this by adding powdered silicic acid to food and giving it as enemas. We also reduced sensitivity by placing mustard plasters on the lower back. Its effect is based on the fact that it causes sensitivity on its own and thus reduces it for the astral body and the ego organization.”

You see how one helps oneself: one applies mustard plasters to the lower back; this causes artificial sensitivity. This artificial sensitivity takes away the inner sensitivity of the astral body, thus creating an intimation. This is often the case when something is wrong in the human limbs, creating an intimation; in this case, a strong intimation of the astral body downwards. If it becomes strong enough, the sensitivity is no longer there. The sensitivity of the astral body decreases downwards. If the sensitivity moves upwards, it is increased.

"Through a process that dampens the hypersensitivity of the astral body in the digestive tract, we achieve a diversion of this astral activity to the etheric body, where it normally belongs. We achieved this by administering small doses of copper and carbo animalis. We counteract the possibility that the etheric body withdraws from the normal digestive activity to which it is unaccustomed by administering pancreatic juice.

This is only a help, a last resort.

"The abscess was punctured a few times. Large quantities of pus were drained off by aspiration. The abscess shrank and the swelling of the abdomen decreased as the pus formation steadily diminished and finally disappeared. While the pus was still flowing, we were surprised one day by a renewed rise in temperature. This did not seem inexplicable to us, since, given the constitution of the astral body described above, even slight psychic agitation can cause such fever. However, one must distinguish between the explicability of the fever in such cases and its severely damaging effect. For under the given conditions, such fever is virtually the mediator for a profound intervention of the catabolic processes in the organism. And one must immediately ensure a strengthening of the etheric body so that it paralyzes the damaging effect of the astral body. We used highly potentized silver injections and achieved a decrease in fever. The patient left the clinic with a 20-pound weight gain and in a strengthened condition. We are under no illusion that in this case, a follow-up treatment is still needed to consolidate the healing."

So the case is intended to show how one can really come to use therapeutically what is otherwise said more theoretically about the astral body and the etheric body. One can now be faced with the question that has always been raised by “well-meaning” people: Should one use the terms that have been used here as the naked truth and reality, or should one conceal them? “Well-meaning” people have said that one should not speak of the etheric body, but of functional processes or something similar. You can't get as far as the astral body that way. The fact of the matter is that most illnesses are not grasped in their essence if one does not go up to the astral body. The damage caused by the organization of the ego, that is, the severe damage caused by metabolic deposits: here the situation is such that this damage is already clearly present. On the other hand, the more insidious damage is the catabolic damage caused by the astral body. One really has to be very careful when talking about this.

Now the situation will be such that one can simply say – yes, that is what many people will say – one should not come to people with the astral body and the etheric body. But if you don't approach people with that, there is no reason at all to believe that something new is being presented here. People think that only a little of one or the other has been changed here, that it is done here just as it is done elsewhere, that at most there is a little progress. It is not like that! And that must be made clear to people with all the radical clarity. If one shows that these are not abstract things, but rather, in these many very concrete individual cases, points out how the individual cases are constituted, and then shows how the diagnosis leads into the therapy, and how, as soon as the therapy is applied, the healing progresses: it is indeed the case that this must be understood, otherwise one would have to despair of humanity's ability to understand at all. I am completely convinced that only this method can help us: to say things very boldly and courageously.

The question is how the scientific picture presents itself in the intimate study of carcinoma.

In the case of carcinoma, we are dealing with the fact that a sense organ is evoked at a point in the organization where there is no reason to evoke a sense organ. Take, I would like to say, the most radical sensory organization – just to understand the matter – take the eye. How does the eye come about? You know that it is actually formed partly from the outside; it is incorporated into the organism. Roughly speaking, the organism leaves out the eye socket. Then the eye is embedded. This indicates that essentially extra-human processes are at work in the formation of the eye. The eye is only embraced by the human being. When we have such a striking sensory organ as the eye, we can say that a foreign body is incorporated into the human organism. This is a radical concept because it is so unusual. Nothing like the shape of the lens or vitreous humor, or the substantial composition of the lens or vitreous humor, would ever arise from the human organism. Now, all that is deposited, which is partly even in the eye ethereal, not merely physical, is embraced by the astral body and the ego organization, which are actually as emancipated as possible from the physical and etheric in the eye. In the eye, the connection between the I, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body is quite different than, let us say, in a piece of muscle. In a piece of calf muscle, you see a very intimate connection between the ego, the astral body, the aetheric body and the physical body. This is the normal constitution in this respect. If I were to write a chemical formula to describe the eye, I would say that the ego and the astral body are closely connected (see drawing I and A), and the other two are also closely connected! There is only a loose affinity between the etheric body and the astral body. This is only the case with the eye.

With other sense organs, for example with the ear, it is not so, there it cannot be so pronounced. There is actually a loose affinity between the ego organization and the astral body and again between the physical body and the ether body. It is somewhat different for each sense.

If there is a tendency towards a sense organization somewhere in the human organism where there should be no sense organization - and the tendency can arise in any part of the human organism; what should happen in another place, the tendency for it can arise in any other place - then you can see how the physical body and ether body on the one hand, and the astral body and I on the other, fall apart.

Take a very specific case. In the case of a severe physical insult, say to the mammary gland, the impact continues inwards in such a way that it shows, roughly speaking, a line of action within the skin that originates from the outside – in other words, a mechanical insult that continues inwards. In most cases of breast cancer, this will be the real origin. It could only be a prolonged process of overheating or burning. In the sense I am describing here, it will always be an insult that brings this about, speaking externally. Now, in this case, something occurs that strongly suggests the astral body at this point, which is otherwise absorbed by the etheric body. When the astral body suddenly appears at this point, it shows itself in, I would say, dim light; it appears as if it were burning. When it becomes so noticeable, then there is a tendency at this point towards the formation of a sensory effect, a carcinoma develops. There it is not a question of at least starting with the first seven vaccinations.

The connections there become particularly interesting when you see how one is connected with the other. Suppose you have someone who is no longer quite young. You are obliged to remove the carcinoma. But the thing that is present in a fairly strongly developed carcinoma manifests itself in such a way that actually in the whole body, because the organism is one entity, there is a tendency to allow non-human processes to take place. The carcinoma changes in its course in a very strange way. After a while, the localized carcinoma becomes a valve for concentrating the carcinomatous development. If you cut out the carcinoma, the valve is suddenly gone. But if you are dealing with an older person, this tendency to have something non-human in the person leads to the valve being in the lungs, which is the organ that most absorbs the inorganic, non-human. Therefore, especially in the case of carcinoma present in old age, you will dissolve the process into pneumonia. If the organism is sclerotic, the process in old age ends in pneumonia. This is because the old organism takes in the extra-human even more and more easily than the younger one. The organ that most easily takes in extra-human processes is the lung; it is damaged in the process. There is an organ that can easily absorb extra-human processes and is not damaged by them; that is the liver. It is very thick-skinned against extra-human processes. The lungs absorb them, but are damaged by them. That is the essential thing, that the lungs absorb easily and are damaged by it.

Question about the heritability of the predisposition to carcinomas.

This is connected with acquired ideas. In itself, there is no inclination in humans to fear carcinoma. This can be seen from the fact that this fear actually only exists among civilized people of educated classes. Country folk have no fear. They carry the carcinoma, die of it, without having had any knowledge of it. This is something that depends on education, and one must work against it.

To what extent is supersensible vision necessary in these two cases, and how is it applied?

The processes must be as follows: First of all, in order to get started at all, one must have complete mastery of spiritual scientific observation – this becomes apparent over time – and see how what can be established spiritually is connected with outward symptoms. If nothing else is indicated, then the purely spiritual finding is always apparent.

How does it express itself outwardly?

On the other hand, one could just as well say that it should, of course, be meditative. You can meditate on rheumatoid arthritis, you can meditate on diabetes. But that would only drive you back. Meditating on a disease process according to the symptoms is a very good way to arrive at spiritual scientific observation. It is just not easy to go the other way around. You can even do it like the homeopaths, who put together the symptom complex and then do the therapy. Only there it happens – I don't even say it can, I know it is so – again and again that symptoms are overestimated and underestimated, that they are put together wrongly, so that sometimes a symptom complex put together by homeopaths is a caricature of reality. When you meditate on this, you meditate on caricatures. If you have a real spiritual cause, that is decisive for the complex of symptoms, then you do not overestimate or underestimate any of the symptoms. You will have noticed that the symptoms we have presented are not caricatures, but well-formed complexes of symptoms. When you meditate, you come to the impossibility of making spiritual findings. And if someone says that is not possible, I must say: try it, but not with a randomly composed complex of symptoms, but with one that has been established by spiritual science.

What is eurythmy based on?

In the human organism everything is based on the fact that a conscious element goes back to an unconscious one. Eurythmy is based on the fact that when a human being comes into the world and wants to express himself, he does not lack a language as such, but the expression in the use of the movements of the limbs. This is rejected, he is not allowed to do it and cannot do it. Today this is not noticed, because it has already been beaten back by inheritance. All this integrates itself, metamorphoses itself, comes out bound to the air and lives itself into language. If one knows how this has lived itself into language, one knows that this is the origin of language, then one goes back from the movements to the language, in reverse order of consciousness. Here too it is the same: spiritual scientific diagnosis illuminates the symptom complex. If one forms it and meditates on it, one comes back to spiritual scientific diagnosis. I have to leave it at these three hours; I hope that we will meet again. But if you come more often, the little social being will become the key to future work.

In any case, it was nice to be able to talk about things again.

This is the 1st of 15 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at Dornach in 1920. The series of lectures is entitled: Physiological Therapy Based on Spiritual Science. Another name of this lecture is: Health Care as a Social Issue.

It is never doubted that the Social Question is one of the problems that is looming largest in the thought of the present age. Wherever there is any understanding at all of the events that occur in the course of the evolution of human history, of the sinister or incipiently fruitful impulses for the future—all these matters are included under the “Social Question.” It must, however, be said that the point of view from which these social problems are regarded and the way in which they are handled at the present time, suffers from the basic evil inherent in so many spheres of our mental and moral life—I mean the intellectualism obtaining in our age. For these problems are indeed so often limited by the angle of intellectualistic study. No matter whether the social question is approached from the “left” or “right” wing, the purely intellectualistic nature of the different conceptions is revealed in the fact that people start from certain theories: this or that ought to be done, this or that ought to be stamped out.

Little account is taken of the human being himself. Human beings are treated just as if there were one generality—“Man.” No attention is paid to the personal and distinctive qualities of individual human beings. And this is why our whole conception of the social question has become abstract, so seldom grasping the social feelings and sentiments playing between man and man. This lack of social observation becomes most clearly evident when we turn to a special domain like that of hygiene—a domain which possibly is more prone than many others to be the subject of sociological study, inasmuch as it is a public affair, concerning not the individual human being alone but the whole of society.

True, there is no lack of advice on the subject of hygiene, no lack of treatises and writings on the subject of the care of health as a public concern. Yet one cannot help asking: What is the real attitude of social life to all these injunctions and regulations about hygiene? And the answer is, that when the conclusions reached by medical or physiological science on this matter are made public either by the written or by the spoken word, it is the trust reposed by man in a “profession,” the inner nature of which he is not able to put to the test, which is supposed to be the basis upon which such precepts may be accepted. Wide circles of people whose concern it is—as indeed it is the concern of everyone—accept simply on authority all that finds its way on the subject of hygiene, from medical laboratories to the outside world. But those who are convinced that in the course of modern history during the last four centuries a longing has arisen among mankind for a democratic ordering of affairs, find themselves faced with the entirely undemocratic nature of this “trust in authority” that is demanded in the sphere of hygiene. In short, this undemocratic attitude confronts the longing for democracy which has reached its height to-day, although frequently in a highly contradictory form.

I know that what I have just said may seem paradoxical, for people do not place the unquestioning acceptance of everything related to the care of health side by side with the democratic demand that affairs of public interest concerning every mature man and woman shall be arbitrated by the people in general, either directly or indirectly through their representatives. True, it may be impossible to apply essentially democratic principles in the sphere of public hygiene, because these things depend on the judgment of specialists. But on the other hand one cannot help asking: ought not an attempt be made to apply such democratic principles as are possible in modern conditions to a sphere like that of public health which so intimately concerns both the individual and the community?

A great deal is said to-day about the necessity for proper air, light, nourishment, sanitation, and so forth, but the regulations laid down in regard to these things cannot, as a rule, be tested by those to whom they apply. Now please do not misunderstand me. I do not want to be accused in this lecture of taking any particular side. I have no desire to uphold ancient superstitions of devils and demons passing in and out of human beings in the form of disease, nor to support the modern superstitions that bacilli and bacteria cause the different diseases. We need not consider to-day whether we are really faced with the results of the spiritualistic superstitions of earlier times, or with the superstitions of materialism. I want rather to consider something that permeates the whole culture of our age, especially in so far as this culture is determined by the convictions of modern science. We are assured to-day that the materialism of the middle and last third of the nineteenth century has been overcome, but this statement does not pass muster with those who really know the nature of materialism and of its opposite. The most one can say is that materialism has been overcome by a few people here and there. These people realise that the facts of modern science no longer justify the general explanation that everything in existence is merely a mechanical, physical or chemical process taking place in matter. But the fact that a few people here or there have come to this conclusion does not mean that materialism has been overcome, for it is equally true that when it is a question of concrete explanation or concrete thought, even these people—and the others as a matter of course--still reveal a materialistic tendency. True, it is said that atoms and molecules are only convenient units of calculation (and here what is implied is that atoms and molecules are made of the substance of thought)—but the mode of observation is nevertheless atomistic and molecular in character. When we are explaining world-phenomena from the behaviour and relations of atomic and molecular processes, the point is not whether we conceive any thought, feeling or activity to be inseparable from material processes in atoms or molecules. The point is the orientation of the attitude of our soul and Spirit when our explanation is based upon the atomic theory—the theory of smallest entities. The point is not whether verbally or mentally a man is convinced that there is something more than the material action of atoms, but whether his mind and spirit can give explanations other than the atomic basis of phenomena. In short, the essential thing is not what we believe, but how we explain—in a word, our attitude of soul. And here it must be said that only a true Anthroposophical Spiritual Science can help to get rid of the evil of which I have spoken.

I want to prove concretely that this is so. There is hardly anything more confusing than the distinctions which are so often emphasised to-day between man's bodily nature and his nature of soul and Spirit, between physical diseases and so-called psychical or mental diseases. The concrete distinctions and relations between such facts of human life as a diseased body and an apparently diseased soul, suffer from the materialistic, atomistic mode of thought. For what is the real essence of the materialism that has gradually come to be the world-conception of so many modern men, and that far from being overcome, is to-day in its prime? The essence of this materialism is not that people observe the material processes in the body and reverently study the marvellous structure and functions of the nerves and other organs, but that the Spirit has departed from the study of these material processes. People look into the world of matter and see only matter and material processes.

What Spiritual Science must emphasise, however, is briefly this: Wherever material processes are presented to the senses—and these are the only processes which modern science will admit as valid and exact—they are but the outer manifestation, the outer revelation of active spiritual forces lying behind and within them. Now it is not typical of Spiritual Science to observe a human being and say: “There is his physical body—a sum-total of material processes—but he does not consist of this alone. Independently of this he has an immortal soul.” It is far from being characteristic of a spiritual conception of the world to speak like this and then build up all manner of abstract, mystical theories about this immortal soul that is independent of the body.

We can only be spiritual scientists in the true sense when we realise that this material body, with its material processes, is a creation of the Spirit and soul. We must learn to understand in every detail the way in which the soul and Spirit—which were there before birth, or rather, before conception—are fashioning and moulding the structure and the “material” processes of the human body. We must be able to perceive the immediate unity of the body and the soul-and-Spirit, and realise that through the working of these principles the body as such is gradually destroyed. The body undergoes a partial death with every moment that passes, but it is only at actual death that there is a radical expression of what has been happening to the body all the time, as a result of the working of the soul-and-Spirit. We are not spiritual scientists in the true sense until we have concrete realisation of this living interplay, this living interaction between the soul and every single part of the body, and are able to say: The soul and Spirit descend into concrete processes, into the functions of liver, breathing, the action of heart, brain and so forth. In short, when we are describing the material part of man, we must know how to portray the body as the direct offspring of Spirit. Spiritual Science is able to place a true value on matter because, in the different concrete processes, it does not merely observe what is there before the eye or conjectured by the abstract concepts of modern science, but because it shows how the Spirit works in matter, and it looks with reverence at the material workings of the Spirit.

That is one essential point. The other is that such a conception guards man against all the abstract tittle-tattle about a soul independent of the bodily nature—for so far as the life between birth and death is concerned, man can only spin fantasies about this. Between birth and death (with the exception of the time of sleep), the being of soul and Spirit is so utterly given up to the bodily activities that it lives in them, manifests in them. We must be able to observe the being of soul and Spirit outside the range of earthly life, realising that existence between birth and death is but the outcome of the soul and Spirit. Then we can behold the actual unity of the soul and Spirit with the physical elements of the body. This is Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, for we know in very truth that the human being as we perceive him with all his organs and structures has been created by the soul and Spirit. Mystical and theosophical ideas may evolve all manner of high-sounding theories about a spirituality that is free of the body, but such ideas can never serve the concrete sciences of life. They can only pander to an intellectualistic or psychic craving which would like to be rid of outer life and then weave fantasies about the soul and Spirit in order to induce a state of inner satisfaction.

In this Anthroposophical Movement of ours it behoves us to work earnestly and sincerely to develop a Spiritual Science which will be able to bring life into physics, mathematics, chemistry, physiology, biology, anthropology. No purpose is served by making statements in a religious or philosophical sense to the effect that man bears an immortal soul within him, and then working in the different branches of science just as if we were concerned merely with material processes. Knowledge of the soul and Spirit must be applied to the very details of life, to the marvellous structure of the body itself. You will come across many mystics and theosophists who love to chatter about man being composed of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. And yet they have no idea what a wonderful manifestation of soul-life it is when one blows one's nose! The point is that we must see in matter a manifestation of the Spiritual. Then we have healthy ideas of the Spirit—ideas that are full of content, and with them a Spiritual Science that may be fruitful for all the ordinary sciences of life.

This again will make it possible to overcome elements which, on account of the materialistic trend of scientific knowledge, have led to specialisation in the various branches of science. Now I have no desire whatever to deliver a philippic against specialisation, for I am well aware of its usefulness. Certain domains of life must be dealt with by specialists simply because they need a specialised technique. The point I would make is that a man who holds fast to the material can never reach a conception of the world applicable to the practical details of life when he becomes a specialist in the ordinary sense. For the range of material processes is infinite, both outside in Nature and within the human being. We may devote a long time—as long at any rate as professional people devote to their training to the study of the nervous system in man, for instance, but if material processes are all that we see in the working of the nervous system—processes which are then described according to the abstract concepts of modern science—we shall never be led to any universal principle or to anything upon which a conception of the world can be based. Directly we begin to study the nervous system in the sense of Spiritual Science we shall inevitably find that the Spirit we see active there, leads us to the soul and Spirit underlying the systems of muscles, bones and senses and so forth. For the Spirit does not “separate off” into single parts as does the material. Very briefly expressed, the Spirit unfolds like an organism. Just as we cannot truly study a human being if we merely look at his five fingers and cover the rest of him up, so in Spiritual Science we cannot observe a single detail without being led by the soul and Spirit within this detail, to a Whole. If we should happen to become brain or nerve specialists, we should then still be able, in observing the single part, to form a picture of the human being as a whole. We should reach a universal principle able to form part of a conception of the world, and then we could begin to speak of specialised subjects in a way intelligible to every healthy-minded, reasonable human being.

This is the great difference between the way in which Spiritual Science is able to speak about the human being and the way in which materialistic science is bound, by its very nature, to speak. If as men and women who in the ordinary course of things do not know very much about the nervous system, you try to read a scientific text-book on the subject, you will probably soon lay it aside. At all events you will not learn much that will help you to realise the worth and dignity of the being of man. If, however, you listen to what Spiritual Science has to say about the nervous system you are everywhere led to the whole being of man. Such illumination is cast on the nature of man that the idea arising within you suggests the worth, the essence and the dignity of the human being.

We realise the truth of this not so much when we are observing merely a single part of the healthy human being, but when we are observing the man who is ill—where there are so many deviations from the so-called normal condition. Now if we can observe the whole human being under the influence of some disease, all that Nature reveals to us in the sick man leads us deeply into cosmic connections. We understand the particular constitution of this human being, how the atmospheric and extra-earthly influences are working on him as the result of his particular constitution, and we are then able to relate his organisation to the various substances of Nature that will have a remedial effect. When we add to our understanding of the healthy man all we learn from observation of the sick man, profound insight into the deeper connections and meaning of life will arise.

And such insight becomes in turn the foundation for a knowledge of man that is intelligible to everyone. True, we have not as yet accomplished very much in this direction, for Spiritual Science as we intend it, has only been in existence for a short time. The lectures given here therefore must only be thought of as a beginning.¹ But, by its very nature, Spiritual Science is able to work upon and develop what is contained in the several sciences in such a way that a knowledge which everyone ought to possess of the being of man, can really be offered to the world.

And now think what it will mean if Spiritual Science succeeds in transforming science in this way—succeeds in developing forms of knowledge relating to men in health and disease that are accessible to ordinary human consciousness. If Spiritual Science succeeds in this, how different will be the relations of one human being to another in social life! There will be far greater understanding in the relation of human beings to each other than there is to-day when men pass each other by without either having the slightest understanding of the individuality of the other. The social question will be lifted away from its intellectualistic character when the several branches of life are based upon objective knowledge and concrete experience. This applies very specially to the domain of health and the care of health. Think of the effect which a true understanding of health and disease in our fellow-men would have in social life. Think what it would mean if the care of health were taken in hand by the whole of humanity with understanding! Of course there must be no scientific or medical dilettantism—most emphatically not. But if understanding for the health and ill-health of our fellow-beings can be awakened—understanding that grows from a true conception of man think of the effect it would have in social life. Then indeed it would be realised that social reform and reconstruction must proceed in their different branches from real knowledge and not from Marxian theories and the like. Such theories lose sight of the human being as such, and want to organise the world on the basis of purely abstract concepts. Healing can never spring from abstract concepts, but only from a true knowledge of the different spheres of life. And hygiene, the care of health, is a very important domain, for it leads us immediately to all the joy that falls to the lot of our fellow-men when their mode of life is healthy and to their sufferings and limitations when the elements of disease lie within them.

When those who are concerned in developing a knowledge of man in health and disease, and those who actually become doctors, have this attitude towards social life, they will be able to shed light on its problems, for they will have true understanding. The position of the doctor nowadays is that those who are not his personal friends or relatives go to his surgery to fetch him when someone is in pain or has broken a leg. When men have knowledge of the kind I have described, the doctor will be a teacher who is continually giving instruction and indicating means for prophylactic hygiene. The doctor will not only be called in to heal when disease has reached a point where men realise they are ill, but he will always be working to keep them healthy—so far as this is possible. In short there will be a living, social relationship between the doctors and the rest of the community. And, moreover, this healthy influence will make itself felt in the domain of Medicine itself.

For the very reason that materialism has also spread into the medical conception of life, we have developed extraordinary ideas about illness. On the one side we are faced with all the physical diseases. They are investigated by observing the different organs, or the various processes which are thought to be of a physical nature and are to be found within the confines of the human skin. Then the goal is to seek to rectify what is wrong. In this case, thought about the body of men in its normal and abnormal conditions is wholly materialistic.

Then there are so-called psychical or mental diseases. As a result of materialistic thinking these are considered to be diseases of the brain or nervous system, although efforts have been made to find the causes in other organic systems of the human being. But because people are quite ignorant of the way in which the Spirit and soul work in the healthy body, they are unable to connect these diseases of the Spirit and soul in a rational way with what is actually taking place in the human organism.

Spiritual Science is able to show in every detail how all so-called mental and psychical disease has its source in disturbances of the organs, in enlargements and contractions of the organs in man. A so-called mental or psychical disease is always the result of some irregularity in an organ, in the heart, the liver, the lungs and so on. A Spiritual Science that has developed to the point of knowing how the Spirit acts in a normal heart, is also able to discover in the deterioration or irregularity of the heart, the cause of a diseased life of Spirit or soul.

The greatest fault of materialism is not that it denies the existence of the Spirit. Religion can see to it that due recognition is paid to the Spirit. The greatest sin of materialism is that it gives us no knowledge of matter because, in effect, it only observes the outer side of matter. What is lacking in materialism is that it has no insight into matter! Take, for instance, psycho-analytical treatments, where attention is wholly directed to something that has taken place in the soul and is described as a “complex”—a pure abstraction. Whereas the right way to proceed is to study how certain impressions which have been made on the soul of the human being at some period of his life and which are normally bound up with a healthy organism, have come into contact with defective organs, with a diseased instead of a healthy liver, for example. And it must be remembered that this may have happened a very long time before the moment when the defect becomes organically perceptible.

There is no need for Spiritual Science to be afraid of showing how so-called mental or psychical disease is invariably connected with some organic phenomenon or other in the body of man. Spiritual Science must show with all emphasis that when a “soul-complex”—a deviation from the so-called “normal life of soul”—is studied, the most that can be achieved is a one-sided diagnosis. Psycho-analysis, therefore, can never lead to anything more than a diagnosis, never to a real therapy in this domain. In mental or spiritual diseases therapy must proceed to administer a cure for the body and for this reason there must be exact knowledge of the ramifications of the Spiritual in the material. We must know where to take hold of the material body (which is permeated with Spirit) in order to cure the disease of which abnormal conditions of soul are but the symptoms. Again and again it must be emphasised by Spiritual Science that the root of so-called mental or psychical diseases lies in the organic system of the human being. But it is only possible to understand abnormal organology when the Spirit can be traced in the most minute parts of matter.

And again: phenomena of life which seemingly affect or function in the element of soul, all that is expressed in the different temperaments, for instance, and the activity of the temperaments in the human being, in the way in which the tiny child acts, plays, walks—all this is to-day merely studied from a “psychological” point of view, but it also has its bodily aspect. Faulty education of the child may come to expression in later life in the form of some familiar physical disease. In certain cases of mental trouble we must often study the bodily constitution and look for the cause there, and again in certain cases of physical diseases, we must study the Spiritual before we can find the cause. The whole essence of Spiritual Science is that it does not speak in abstractions of a nebulous Spirit, like people of a mystical or theosophical turn of mind, but traces the Spirit right down into its material workings. Spiritual Science never conceives of the material in the sense of modern science but always presses on to the Spirit, and so it realises that an abnormal soul-life must inevitably express itself in an abnormal bodily life, although the abnormality may, to begin with, be hidden from external observation. On all sides to-day people form entirely false ideas of true Anthroposophical Spiritual Science and there may be a certain justification for this when they listen to speeches of those who do not seriously penetrate to the heart of the teaching but give utterance to abstract theories—man consists of such and such, there are repeated earthly lives, and so forth. All these things are of course full of significance and beauty, but the point is that we must penetrate to the heart of the particular subjects and the various spheres of life of which we speak.

In the very widest sense, the Spiritual-Scientific mode of thinking leads to a social, communal consciousness among men. For when people are able to perceive, on the one hand, how a soul that is sick sends its impulses into the organism, when they really understand the connection between the organism and the soul that is sick, and when they know how the general ordering of life affects the health of human beings—then the position of each individual in the community will be quite different. A true understanding of his fellow-creatures will arise in man and he will treat them quite differently. He will make allowances for the particular characters of those around him, knowing that the one possesses certain qualities and the other quite different qualities. He will learn how to respond to all the variations, how to make the best use of the different temperaments in human society and above all how to unfold and develop them in the true sense.

One domain of life in particular will be healthily influenced by such a knowledge of human nature—I refer to the domain of education. Without a comprehensive knowledge of the human being we simply cannot, for instance, measure the consequences of allowing our children to sit in school with bent backs so that they never breathe properly, or never teaching them to utter the vowel and consonant sounds clearly and definitely. As a matter of fact, the whole of later life depends on whether the child at school breathes in the right way and whether it is taught to articulate clearly and consciously. This is merely said by way of example, for the same thing applies in other domains. It is, however, an illustration of the application of general hygienic principles in the sphere of education. The whole social significance of hygiene is revealed in this example.

It is also apparent that instead of further specialisation, life is calling out for the specialised branches of knowledge to be brought together to form a comprehensive conception of life. We need something more than educational rules according to which the teacher is supposed to instruct the child. We need something that makes the teacher realise what it means if he helps the child to speak articulately and clearly, or the consequences that will ensue if he allows the child to catch its breath after only half a sentence or line has been spoken, and does not see to it that all the air is used up while the sentence is being uttered.

There are of course many such principles. A right appreciation and practice of them will only develop when we are able to measure their full significance for human life and social health—for only then will they give rise to a social impulse.

We need teachers who are able to educate children on the basis of a conception of the world that understands the true being of man. This was the thought underlying the Course I gave to the teachers when the Waldorf School at Stuttgart was founded. All the principles of the art of education as expounded in that Course strive in the direction of making men and women out of the children who are being educated—men and women in whom lungs, liver, heart, stomach, will be healthy in later life because, in childhood, they were helped to develop their life-functions in the right way, because, in effect, the soul worked in the right way. This conception of the world will never give a materialistic interpretation of the old saying, Mens sana in corpore sano. Interpreted in the materialistic sense this means: If the body is healthy, if it has been made healthy by all kinds of physical methods, then it will of itself be the bearer of a healthy soul. Now this is pure nonsense. The only real meaning of the phrase is this: a healthy body bears witness to the fact that the force of healthy soul has built it up, moulded it, made it healthy. A healthy body proves that a healthy soul has worked within it. That is the right interpretation of the phrase—and only in this sense can it be a principle of true hygiene.

In other words: it is not enough to have, as well as the school teachers who are working merely from an abstract science of education, a school doctor who turns up perhaps once a fortnight, goes through the school and has no idea how really to help. No, what we need is a living connection between medical science and the art of education. We need an art of education that teaches and instructs the children in a way conducive to real health. This is the element that makes hygiene a social question. For the social question is essentially an educational question, and this in turn a medical question—but only in the sense of a medicine, of a hygiene permeated with Spiritual Science.

These things lead us on to something else of extraordinary significance in our theme. For when we really enter Spiritual Science, when it becomes concrete in us, we know that we receive from it something more than the intellectualism of natural science, history or jurisprudence. (All sciences to-day are intellectualistic; even if they claim to be based on practical experience this simply means that they interpret intellectually the results of the experiences of the senses.) Now the content of Spiritual Science differs essentially from these intellectualistic results of natural science and other branches of modern culture. We should be in a sorry plight if all that lives in our intellectualistic culture were not merely a picture but an actual power working deeply into human beings. Intellectualism remains merely on the surface of man's being—and I use this phrase in its comprehensive sense. There are people who only study Spiritual Science intellectually, who make mental notes—there is a physical body, etheric body, astral body, Ego, reincarnation, karma and the like. They put it all into pigeon holes as is the custom in modern natural or social science but they are not sincerely devoting themselves to Spiritual Science when they think like this. They are simply carrying over their ordinary mode of thought to what they find in Spiritual Science. The essential thing about Spiritual Science is that it must be conceived, felt and experienced not in an intellectualistic way, but quite differently. It is for this reason that by its very nature Spiritual Science has a living, vital relation to the human being in health and disease, but a relation altogether different from what is often imagined.

People must by now have realised to their cost the powerlessness of purely intellectual culture to deal with those who are suffering from so-called mental disease. The sufferer will tell you, for instance, that he hears voices speaking to him. No matter what intellectual reasoning you use with him—it is all useless, for he will know how to make all manner of objections. You may be sure of that! Even this might be an indication that in such a case one has to do, not with a disease of the conscious or unconscious life of soul but with a disease of the organism. Spiritual Science teaches, moreover, that one cannot get to grips with these so-called mental and psychical diseases by the kinds of methods that have recourse, for instance, to hypnotism, suggestion and the like, but that one must approach mental disease by “physical” means—by healing the organs of man, and this is exactly where a spiritual knowledge of the human being is all-essential, Spiritual knowledge recognises that so-called mental diseases cannot be affected by methods that are of a “spiritual” or “psychical” nature, because, in effect, this kind of illness arises from the fact that the spiritual member of man's being has been pressed outwards (as is otherwise the case only in sleep). As a consequence, the spiritual member is weak and we must proceed to cure the bodily organ in order that the soul and Spirit may be received into it again in a healthy way.

Now Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition which proceed, not from the intellect alone but from the whole being of man as the outcome of Spiritual Science—penetrate into the whole organism. In short, true Spiritual Science penetrates with health-bringing force into the physical organisation of man.

The fact that certain dreamy people feel ill or showsigns of the reverse of health in their spiritual-scientificactivities is no proof that this statement is false. There are so many who are not really spiritual scientists at all but who simply amass with their intellects collectionsof notes upon the results of Spiritual Science. The promulgation of the real substance of Spiritual Science is in itself a social hygiene, for it works upon the whole being of man and regularises his organic functions when they show signs of deviating from the normal either to the side of morbid dreaming or the reverse. Here we have the essential difference between the content of Spiritual Science and that of merely intellectualistic science. The concepts arising in the domain of intellectualism are muchtoo “bloodless”—because they are merely analogies to get to grips with the being of man and work healthily upon him. The concepts of Spiritual Science, on the other hand, have themselves arisen from a knowledge of the whole being of man. Lungs, heart, liver the whole being and not the brain alone—have collaborated in the building up of spiritual-scientific concepts. Inherentwithin them, penetrating them with a plastic formativeforce, are elements which proceed from the whole beingof man. And this is the sense in which Spiritual Sciencecan enter and give direction to hygiene as a social concern.

In many other ways too—for I can only indicate certain examples—Spiritual Science will be able, when it gains a firm footing in the world, to lay down guiding lines for the life of humanity in the sphere of health.

Let me here give just one brief indication. The great difference between the human organisation in waking and sleeping life is one of the subjects to which Spiritual Science has again and again to return. Howthe Spirit and soul act in waking life, how and when they permeate each other in the body, soul and Spirit of man—how they act when they are temporarily separated fromeach other in sleep—all these things are conscientiously studied by Spiritual Science. Here I can do no more than refer to a certain principle, but it is nevertheless a well-founded deduction of Spiritual Science.

Certain epidemics appear in life—illnesses that affect whole masses of the population and are therefore essentially a social concern. Ordinary materialistic science studies these illnesses by examining the physical organism of man. It knows nothing of the tremendous effect which the abnormal attitude of human beings to waking and sleeping life has upon epidemics and the susceptibility to epidemic diseases. Certain things take place in the organism during sleep and if they run to excess, they strongly predispose the human being to so-called epidemic diseases. Men and women who set organic processes in action as the result of too much sleep—I mean processes that ought not to take place, because waking life must not be broken up by such lengthy periods of sleep—these people have a much stronger predisposition to epidemic diseases and are less able to resist them.

Now you can well realise what it would mean to explain the right proportions of sleeping and waking life. These things cannot be dictated. You can of course tell people that they must not send children with scarlatina to school, but you cannot tell them in the same way that they ought to get, say, seven hours of sleep. And yet it is much more important than any prescription, that people who need it should have seven hours of sleep and others for whom this is not necessary, should sleep much less—and so forth.

These matters, which are so intimately connected with the personal life of human beings, have a very great bearing and effect upon social life. How the social effects come about, whether a larger or smaller number of people are obliged owing to illness to be absent from their work, whether or not a whole region is affected—all these things depend upon the most intimate details of man's life. Hygiene here plays an immeasurably important part in social life. No matter what people may think about infection or non-infection—this element is none the less a factor in epidemics. And here external regulations are of no avail; the only thing that will avail is to educate, within human society, men and women who are able to meet the doctors who are trying to explain prophylactic measures, with understanding. This can give rise to an active co-operation for the preservation of health between the doctors who understand the technique of their profession, and the laity who understand the nature of the human being. ... It is, of course, not the laity nor the amateurs who will do the healing, but reasonable human beings will bring understanding to meet the professional medical men who tell them this or that. If he understands the human being—and this understanding can be developed in social life in collaboration with the doctor—the layman can form an intelligent idea of technical science and then, in democratic Parliaments he can say “Aye” with a certain understanding and not because of the pressure of authority. The sphere of hygiene can become a social concern in the true sense if it is made fruitful by a science of medicine enriched by Spiritual Science. In short, hygiene can become in the real sense, and to a high degree, an affair of the people, of the democracy.

• 1. Dr. Steiner is referring to a number of lectures given by various scientists during the Medical Course at the Goetheanum.