Book Review : “Alkühmisten” und “decoctores”: Grimmelshausen und die Medizin seiner Zeit

This is a study that relates to issues of medical “intertextuality” (defined in the broad sense of textual influence and allusion) in the work of the German Baroque author Hans Jacob von Grimmelshausen (1621/22–1676), best known to English readers as the creator of the satirical Simplicius simplicissimus. The main questions are these: how far do the concepts of health, sickness, prophylaxis and therapy expressed by Grimmelshausen through the figures and narrative voices within his writings correspond to medical understanding and debate in his own day? And do the episodes and satirical comments related to his characters indicate personal criticisms of medical theory and/or practice? The book thus takes a place among other efforts to explore the relation between literature and medicine. In many of these the focus is upon establishing the meaning of illness within a specific time and place or upon determining the role that medicine plays in constructing particular themes and structures. Doms, however, selects another, more specific, task—to determine the most likely sources for the medical elements in Grimmelshausen's writings and to ascertain something of his own medical-critical views. While some light is shed in relation to the first undertaking, the second, Doms admits, remains obscure. Although careful not to assume too much about Grimmelshausen's personal knowledge of individual medical texts, Doms maintains that there is enough evidence to suggest connections, directly or indirectly, to a variety of medical sources. These include more or less contemporary German language texts and translations, especially those falling into the genre of advice literature, as well larger, more encyclopaedic medical accounts. Grimmelshausen must also have been aware of older, well-established texts such as the Regimen of health (his source, Doms thinks, for information about the six non-naturals and diet), and earlier sixteenth-century works, especially the pharmaceutical texts of writers like Christof Wirsung, Hieronymus Bock, Johann Coler, Walther Ryff, Lorenz Fries, and Hieronymus Brunschwig. References to Paracelsian medicines stem most likely from Oswald Croll's Basilica chymica (1609). A passage from Grimmelshausen's Satyrischer Pilgram indicates that he viewed medicine as divided into five parts: physiologica (human anatomy, physiology including the theory of humours and temperaments), hygiaena (the six non-naturals), aethiologica (causes of illness and concepts of disease), simiotica (symptoms and courses of illness, also diagnostic practice), and trapestica (methods of treatment, including diet, medicaments, and surgery), and the main part of Doms's study follows these divisions. In none of Grimmelshausen's writings are there descriptions of medical proceedings that contradict the medical practices of his time, although there are instances in which he uses satire to illustrate contemporary controversies regarding medical opinion and procedure. Yet, even here, Doms is hesitant to draw any clear conclusions, and simply acknowledges the difficulties in determining the focus (for example, treatments themselves or the persons and/or professions offering them) of satirical attacks. Nevertheless, while unable to make absolute judgements concerning Grimmelshausen's evaluation of Galenism, Paracelsianism, and learned medicine, it is clear that he regarded a balance of humours and attention to the six non-naturals as fundamental to health. His characters also reveal a mistrust of iatromagic and sometimes relate Paracelsian approaches to avarice and deceit. Most interesting are the instances in Grimmelshausen's stories in which health and illness are related to a person's moral situation. This pertains as much to the treatment of one's own body as to the relation between the physician and the sick. Anabaptists, for instance, reach a more advanced age because their moral commitments help shape a healthy body. Given the varieties of causes of illness, including miasmas, contagions, an imbalance of humours, immoderation as well as divine affliction, Grimmelshausen seems to have concluded that diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy required a lot from the physician making healing as much a disciplinary as an ethical challenge.