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| (1801-1887) |
At the fringes of philosophical schools there have always been solitary figures who do not neatly fit into any category. Gustave Fechner is one of those solitary figures, not the least because his works often lay somewhere between philosophy, psychology and physiology. One might broadly include him within the philosophical current of idealism, but Fechner was also highly critical of many of the more notable idealists. Furthermore, when reading Fechner’s books, one is never sure whether Fechner is serious in what he writes or is he just makig fun of things
Fechner’s Panegyrikus der jetzigen Medicin und Naturgeschichte is a good example. It seems like Fechner’s purpose was to raise the value of medicine. Yet, when one hears what he suggests as reasons for his panegyry, one gets the impression that perhaps we should take the whole text with a grain of salt. Firstly, he considers the advantage of the medicine of his time to lie in a specialisation - not just surgery demand a completely different education from pharmacy, but also each and every substance used for medication has its specialists, capable of using their favoured drug for every imaginable condition. Whether it is coincidental or not, Fechner appears to raise the irony by giving as exemplary drugs such substances as Prussic acid, which we know to be highly poisonous. He also comments on the practice of bloodletting by telling of his friend who continued using this treatment on a patient who had already died, just because it had already proven so effective against scrofula of the patient.
Fechner also has something to say about the so-called Brunonian medicine, which was highly appreciated in the Germany at the time, especially by natural philosophers of the Schellingian school. The main idea behind Brunonian medicine was to divide all diseases into two classes - sthenic and asthenic, which one might describe as over- and underexcited - and the cures for the diseases consisted of finding a healthy, balanced state between the two extremes. Fechner notes that the Brunonian terminology was just a ruse for using quite old methods under new names, in order to make people believe again cures, which they had already deemed to be worthless. Another fashionable school of medicine Fechner mention is that of Hahnemann, founder of homeopathy, just to note that pharmacists will definitely be able to make even teaching of this school profitable for themselves.
With current medicine suggesting such an extraordinary amount of medical treatments Fechner notes that he could simplify medical textbooks - he could just list what ailments are not cured by the treatments. Indeed, Fechner suggests an even more condensed text book, which would consist simply of two statements - all treatments work for all ailments and all ailments can be healed by all treatments.
Just to make the idea even more ridiculous, Fechner suggests that earlier medicine was undeveloped, because it relied on the idea that nature should provide all medical treatments. Fechner notes, on the other hand, that current medicine thinks quite oppositely that the quality of a drug is instigated by the amount of work used for creating medicine - instead of herbal treatments, one should prefer pills. Combining this suggestion with the principles mentioned in the previous paragraph, Fechner concludes with a wink in his eye that a simple drug combined out of all possible medical drugs would be the ultimate medical treatment. To prove his ironic point that this ultimate treatment should be preferred over all natural medical substances Fechner argues that no natural substance could ever be of such foul tasting nature as all proper medical substances are - indeed, a person suggesting that the purpose of medical substances is to make one feel better is, Fehchner jokingly states, a barbarian, since the proper aim of a drug is to taste bad, just like its Platonic opposite or cooking tries to make everything taste good.
As one cause of the state of current medicine Fechner mentions the connection to practice many medical writers of the day had - they had spent more time as barbers and had thus seen more veins than supposed professionals who had wasted their time on learning Latin names for members of body. Fechner goes even so far as to instruct students on how one is to act to become a proper physician - to awake an air of professionalism and profound learning one should ask about completely unrelated matters, when a patient tells of a condition, always sound certain on one’s diagnoses, and to assure that occurring deaths were inevitable and that treatment must have lengthened the remaining lifetime of the patient. Just to heighten the ridiculousness of the medical practice of the time, Fechner tells a story of a practitioner who accidentally amputated a wrong foot, then noticed the sick foot had started to heal by itself and declared the healing process as an effect of the amputation.
The main reason for the sorry state of medicine, according to Fechner, appears to be a tendency to make unnatural divisions and classifications that do not describe the richness of the living nature, but as it were, kill the living unity, just like anatomists have to kill an animal when they dissect it. As an example of a natural phenomenon that current theories of nature could not explain Fechner takes whales, which mostly resemble mammals, although they happen to live in water. In a parody of teleological explanations, Fechner tells a story of Jupiter designing all the animals and only at the last minute noticing that the limbs of whale were quite unsuitable walking and then just throwing it into an ocean. Fechner also notes that so many different classifications of animals had been suggested that a classification of all such classifications was soon required. His final word on the issue appears to be that nature is infinite in its variations and can therefore never be tied down by any classification.
