Gustave Fechner: Proof that the Moon consists of iodine (1821)

We have met Gustave Fechner before and we were not quite sure how seriously to take what he was saying. Similarly jesting appears to be his work Beweis, dass der Mond aus Iodine bestehe that actually appeared a year earlier than the panegyry to current medicine we have studied before. This time, it is not the whole of medicine that is the apparent topic of the writing, but the newly found habit of using iodine as a curative substance for almost any ailment. Fechner notes jestingly that even the most opposite medicinal schools use it, but just for opposite reasons: iodine has a tendency to lessen the fat of the people who eat it, thus, allopathics (those insisting that drugs should have opposite effects to the illnesses they are used for) can use iodine to cure obese people, while homeopathics (those insisting that drugs should have same effect to illnesses they are used for) can use it to cure the loss of body weight in tuberculosis.

If iodine is so useful a medicine, Fechner continues the joke, certainly it must be produced in great quantities, at least for the use of allopathic doctors (homeopathics require only very little of any medicine they use, he adds). Fechner makes the passing remark that if iodine is known to cure women who cannot menstruate, such women could be used to mine it, since they have an intrinsic ability to know where to find it. Then he notes that iodine was actually discovered by Bernard Courtois, when applying sulfuric acid to ashes of seaweed, which then let out a reddish cloud of iodine. This procedure did not produce that much of iodine, so certain practitioners of medicine had just assumed that anything with a similar reddish tinge might contain some iodine.

Fechner suggests going even further with this sort of deduction, and indeed, with a twinkle in his eye insists that the less a science is based on anything real, the more divine it certainly must be. With a clear reference to the Schellingian school of philosophy, he notes that any incompetent person can build a system empirically from what nature provides them, but only a genius can, as it were, construct the pyramid upside down, beginning from a single proposition and then working against the nature to show what the world must be really like in light of this proposition. Furthermore, Fechner emphasises, this axiomatic proposition need not even be proven, since it should be the basis of everything else.

Applying the hilarious suggestion how to construct systems to the question of iodine, Fechner begins with the known fact that iodine cures goitre and leaps to the conclusion that anything that cures goitre must contain iodine (surprisingly good conclusion of a joke, since goitre is effectively caused by a lack of iodine). Then he points out that often the same substances are used to cure both scrofula and goitre and deduces from this that iodine must also cure scrofula, and indeed, any substance used as a cure for scrofula must contain some iodine. Since the medicine of Fechner’s time applied many substances to either goitre or scrofula, they could be all lumped together as containing iodine – even the knives used for cutting the bumps caused by either goitre or scrofula.

Fechner isn’t satisfied with this, but wants to find an even bigger source of iodine and he discovers it in Moon, which, so the old wives tell us, can also cure goitre. Indeed, he adds, in this it resembles the seaweed, from which iodine was originally extracted, since the Moon is floating, as it were, in the ocean of universe. The old tales tell that the curative powers of the Moon are especially evident when it is waning, obviously because it is then spreading its iodine rays to Earth. 

Taking another stab at the Schellingian school, Fechner notes that the moon light cannot be proper light, which by the axiom of the philosophy of nature should also contain its opposite. According to Schellingians, this opposite is warmth, and with equally convincing analogies as Fechner, Schellingians had identified such things as egoism, lies, acidness, ganglias and plants as modifications of warmth, while virtue, truth, base, brains and animals corresponded then with light. Like these philosophers couldn't be virtuous without being somewhat vicious, Fechner jests, the proper light must also be warm, while the moon light must be something else, that is, iodine.

Fechner began by noting that people had tried to identify substances containing iodine through their reddish tinge. But isn't moon light yellow? Fechner borrows another phrase from Schellingians and suggests that the yellow colour is just another potency of the reddish iodine. Indeed, as a final quip, he notes that our skin can be coloured yellow with iodine and that the reddish tinge of the evening sky must be the effect of the iodine from the Moon.

Gustave Fechner: Panegyry of current medicine and natural history (1822)

(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.