DIFFERENT TYPES OF
ILLNESS
Berlin, 10th November 1908
Those of you who have
been attending these group lectures for years will perhaps have
noticed that the themes have not been haphazardly chosen but have a
certain continuity. In the course of each winter, too, the lectures
have always had a certain inner connection, even if, on the surface,
this has not been immediately apparent. Therefore it will obviously
be of the utmost importance to follow up the various courses that are
being held here alongside the actual group evenings, and which are
intended for the purpose of bringing newer members up to the level,
as it were, of these group lectures; for various things said here
cannot be immediately understood by every newcomer. But there is
something else we should note as well, which will gradually have to
be taken into consideration in the various groups of our German
section. As there is a certain inner thread in the lectures, it is
incumbent upon men to form each lecture so that it is part of a
whole. Therefore it is not possible to say the things that can be
presented to advanced participants in that kind of single lecture in
such a way that they are equally suitable for newcomers. We could
speak about the same theme in a very elementary way, of course, but
that would not do in face of the progressive path we are planning to
take in the anthroposophical life of this particular group. This
again is connected with the fact that the further we progress the
more we can anticipate in the way of wide-spread lecture publications
and reporting of lectures from one group to another. For with regard
to these lectures I give in the groups it is becoming less and less
immaterial whether you hear the one on one Monday and the next the
following Monday. It may not be immediately apparent to the audience
why the one lecture succeeds the other, yet it is important
nevertheless; and when you lend lectures to one another you cannot
take this into account at all. One lecture might get read before the
other, and then it unavoidably gets misunderstood and causes
confusion. I want to make a special point of this, as it is an
essential part of our anthroposophical life. Even the inserting of a
phrase here or there, or the over or under emphasising of a word
depends on the whole development of the life of the group. Only when
the publication of the lectures can be strictly supervised so that
nothing is published unless it has been submitted to me, can any good
come of this duplicating and publishing of lectures.
This
is also a kind of introduction to the lectures about to be held in
this group. There will be a certain inner connection in the course of
this winter's lectures and all the preparatory material will
eventually be directed towards a definite culmination with which the
course will then close. Last week's lecture was a small beginning,
and today's lecture will be a kind of continuation. But it will not
continue like a newspaper serial, where the thirty-eighth installment
follows on after the thirty-seventh. There will be an inner
connection, even though the subject matter will appear to differ, and
the connection will consist in the fact that the whole series will
culminate in the final lectures. So, with these concluding lectures
in view, we will start today by sketching the nature of illnesses,
and next Monday we will talk about the origin, historic importance
and meaning of the
“Ten Commandments”.
These could well appear to have nothing in common; however, you will
eventually see that it all has an inner connection, and that these lectures
should not be taken as separate ones, as is often the case with those given
for a wider public.
We
would like to speak today about the nature of illness from the point
of view of spiritual science. As a rule people are not concerned
about illness, or one or another type of illness at least, until they
themselves fall sick with it, and even then their interest does not
go much beyond the cure. That is, they are only concerned about their
recovery. How this cure is effected is sometimes a matter of complete
indifference, and the pleasantest thing is not to have any further
responsibility for the “how”. Most of our contemporaries
content themselves with the thought that the people who carry out the
job have been appointed to do so by the authorities. In our time
there exists in this sphere a much more rabid belief in authority
than has ever existed in the religious sphere. The papacy of
medicine, irrespective of its various forms, still makes itself felt
with great intensity and will do so to an even greater extent in the
future. Laymen are in no way to blame for the fact that this can and
will be like this. For they do not think about these matters or care
in the least about them unless it affects them personally and they
suffer from an acute case that requires treatment. Thus a large
section of the population calmly looks on whilst the papacy of
medicine assumes greater and greater dimensions and insinuates itself
into things in all manner of ways, like the way it is now speaking
out and interfering so horribly in the education of children and the
life of the schools, and claiming its right to a particular therapy.
People do not care about the deeper significance that is actually
behind all this. They look on whilst one or another law is
instituted. People do not want to have any insight into these
matters. On the other hand there will always be people who are
personally affected and cannot manage with ordinary materialistic
medicine, the basis of which does not concern them, but only the fact
of whether they can be cured or not, and then they will apply to the
people who work out of occultism — and there again they only
care about whether they can be cured or not. But they do not care
whether public life as a whole, with its methods and its way of
understanding things, completely undermines a deeper method arising
out of the spirit. Who cares whether the public prevents any cures
being effected in the method based on occultism, or cares whether the
one who applies the method is put in prison? These things are not
taken seriously enough except when people are personally affected.
However it is just the task of a really spiritual movement to awaken
a consciousness of the fact that there has to be more than an
egoistic desire for recovery; in fact there has to be knowledge of
the deeper foundations in these matters, and this knowledge has to be
made known.
In
our age of materialism it appears to anyone who can see to the bottom
of these matters as only too obvious why just the theory of illness
in particular comes under the strongest influence of materialistic
thinking. However, if we follow this or that slogan, or give special
credit to this or that method, merely criticising what is trimmed
with materialistic theories, despite the fact that it arises out of a
scientific basis and is useful in many respects, we shall be making
just as much of a mistake as if we were to go to the other extreme
and put everything under the heading of psychological cures and
suchlike, and fall victim in this way to all manner of one-sidedness.
Present-day mankind must, above all, realise more and more that man
is a complicated being and that everything to do with man is
connected with this complexity of his being. If there is a kind of
science holding the opinion that man consists merely of a physical
body, it cannot possibly work beneficially with the healthy or the
sick human being. For health and sickness, have a relationship to man
as a whole and not to one part of him only, namely the physical body.
Nor
must the matter be taken superficially. You can find plenty of
doctors nowadays, properly recognised members of the medical
profession, who would never admit to being sworn materialists; they
profess to one or another religious faith, and they would staunchly
deny the accusation of being materialistic. But this is not the
point. Life does not depend on what a man says or believes. That is
his personal concern. To be effective it is necessary to know how to
apply and make valuable use in life of those facts that are not
limited to the sense world but have an existence in the spiritual
world. So that however pious a doctor is and however many ideas he
has regarding this or the other spiritual world, if he nevertheless
works according to the rules that arise entirely out of our
materialistic world conception, that is, he treats people as though
they only had a body, then however spiritually minded he believes
himself to be, he is nevertheless a materialist. For it does not
depend on what a person says or believes but on his ability to set in
living motion the forces behind the external world of the senses. Nor
is it sufficient for anthroposophy to spread the knowledge of man's
fourfold nature and for everybody to go repeating that man consists
of a physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, even if people
can define and describe them in a certain way. The essential thing is
not just to know this, but to understand more and more clearly the
living interplay of these members of man's being and the part the
physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego play in the healthy
and in the sick human being and what their interrelationship implies.
Unless you make it your business to know what spiritual science can
tell you about the nature of the fourth member of man's being, the
ego, then however much you study anatomy and physiology you would not
know anything about the nature of blood. That would be quite
impossible. And you would never be able to say anything of any value
about the illnesses connected with the nature of the blood. For the
blood is the expression of the ego nature of man. And if Goethe's
words in Faust: “Blood is a very special fluid”
[see the lecture:
Occult Significance of the Blood, e.Ed]
are still quoted today, they do in fact say a very great deal. Present-day
science has no inkling of the fact that scientists ought to treat
blood, even physical blood, in an entirely different manner from any
other organ of man's physical body, because these other organs are
the expression of entirely different things. If the glands are the
expression, the physical counterpart, of the etheric body, then even
physically we have to look for something quite different in the
composition of a gland, be it liver or spleen, than we have to look
for in the blood that is the expression of a much higher member of
man's being, namely the ego. And scientific methods must be
guided by this if they are to show us how to work with these things.
Now I want to say something which will really only be understood by
advanced anthroposophists, yet it is important that it is said.
A
materialistically-minded scholar of today takes it as a matter of
course that when he makes a prick in the body blood will flow out
that can be examined in all the known ways. And blood is described
according to the method of investigating its chemical composition in
exactly the same way as is done with any other substance, such as an
acid. One thing, however, is left out of account, although, needless
to say, it is not only bound to be unknown to materialistic science,
but it is sure to be considered sheer folly and madness, and yet it
is true: the blood flowing in the arteries, and sustaining the living
body, is not what flows out when I make the prick and take out a
drop. For the moment blood comes out of the body it changes to such
an extent that we have to admit it is something quite different; and
what flows out as coagulating blood, however fresh it is, is no proof
of the living essence within the organism. Blood is the expression of
the ego, a member of the human being that is at a high level. Even as
physical substance blood is something that you cannot examine
physically in its totality at all, because when you are able to see
it, it is no longer the blood it was when it flowed in the body. It
cannot be looked at physically, for the moment it is exposed to view
and can be examined by some method similar to X-ray, you are no
longer examining blood but something that is the external image of
blood on the physical plane. These things will only gradually be
understood. There have always been scientists in the world working
out of occultism who have said this, but they have been called things
like madmen or philosophers.
Everything
to do with man's health or sickness really is bound up with man's
manifold nature, with the complicity of his being; hence it is only
through a knowledge of man arising out of spiritual science that we
can arrive at a conception of man in health and in sickness. There
are certain ailments in man's organism which can only be
understood when we realise their connection with the nature of the
ego, and these ailments also appear in a way — but in a limited
way — in the expression of the ego, the blood. Then there are
certain ailments in man's organism that point to an illness of the
astral body and which therefore affect the external expression of the
astral body, the nervous system. Now whilst mentioning this second
case I shall have to ask you to be somewhat aware of the subtlety of
thought necessary here. When man's astral body has an irregularity
that comes to expression in the nervous system, the external image of
the astral body, the first thing we notice physically is a certain
disability in the functioning of the nervous system. Now when the
nervous system cannot do its job in a certain area all kind of
symptoms can result, affecting the stomach, head or heart. However,
an illness that shows symptoms in the stomach does not necessarily
point to a disability of the nervous system in a certain area and
originate therefore in the astral body, it can come from something
entirely different.
Those
types of illnesses connected with the ego itself and therefore also
connected with its external expression, the blood, appear as a rule —
but only as a rule, for things are not so clear cut in the world,
even though you can draw clear lines when you want to make
observations — these illnesses appear as chronic illnesses.
Various other disturbances appearing to begin with are usually
symptoms. One or another symptom may appear, which nevertheless
originates in a disturbance in the blood, and that has its origin in
an irregularity of that part of the human being that we call the
bearer of the ego. I could speak to you for hours about the types of
illness that are chronic and which originate from the physical point
of view in the blood and from the spiritual point of view in the ego.
Those are chiefly the illnesses that are in the proper sense
hereditary, and these are the illnesses that can only be understood
by those people who look at the being of man from a spiritual point
of view. Here and there are people who are chronically ill, who are,
in other words, never really fit; they always have one or another
thing the matter with them. To get to the bottom of this, we must ask
ourselves what the actual basic character of the ego is like. What
kind of a person is he? If you understand what life really is, then
you will know that definite forms of chronic illnesses are connected
with one or another basic soul character of the ego. Certain chronic
illnesses will never occur in people who have a serious and dignified
attitude to life but only in those of a frivolous nature. This can
merely be an indication, to show the way these lectures are leading.
As
you see, the first thing you have to ask yourself when somebody comes
and says he has been suffering from this or that for years, is what
kind of person is he fundamentally? You have to know what basic
character type his ego is, otherwise you are bound to go wrong with
ordinary medicine, unless you are lucky. The important thing in
curing people of these, illnesses which are mainly the really
hereditary ones, is to consider their whole surroundings, in so far
as they can have a direct or indirect influence on the ego. When you
have really got to know this aspect of a person, you may have to
advise that he is sent to another natural surrounding, perhaps for
the winter, if possible; or, if he has a certain job, to change it
and encounter a different aspect of life. The essential thing will be
to try to find the setting that will have just the right effect on
the character of the ego. To find the right cure, you need, in
particular, a wide experience of life, so that you can enter into the
person's character and can say: For this person to recover, he must
change his job. It is a matter of pinpointing what is necessary from
the point of view of his soul nature. Sometimes, perhaps, just in
this sphere, no recovery can be achieved at all, because it is
impossible to effect a change; in many instances it can be effected,
however, if people only know of it. A lot can be done for some
people, for example, if they simply live in the mountains instead of
the lowlands. These are the things that apply to the kind of
illnesses that appear externally as chronic illnesses, and that are
connected physically with the blood and spiritually with the ego.
Now
we come to those illnesses that have their spiritual origin mainly in
irregularities of the astral body and that appear in certain
disabilities of the nervous system in one or another direction. Now a
large part of the common acute illnesses are connected with what we
have just mentioned, in fact most of them. For it is sheer
superstition to believe that when someone has a stomach or heart
complaint or even a clearly perceptible irregularity somewhere, the
right treatment is to deal directly with the symptom. The essential
thing could be that the symptom is there because the nervous system
is incapable of functioning. Thus the heart can be affected simply
because the nervous system has become incapable of functioning in the
area where it ought to support the movement of the heart. It is quite
unnecessary to maltreat the heart or, as the case may be, the
stomach, for they may, in principle, have nothing directly the matter
with them, for it is only the nerves that provide for them which are
incapable of carrying out their job. If in a case like this the
stomach complaint is treated with hydrochloric acid, it would be a
mistake comparable to tinkering with an engine that is always running
late because you think something is the matter with it — yet it
still runs late. For you would find, on closer examination, that the
engine-driver always gets drunk before driving; so you would do
better to deal with the engine-driver, for the train would be
punctual otherwise. So it could well be that with stomach complaints
we have to treat the nerves that provide for the stomach instead of
the stomach itself. In the domain of materialistic medicine, too, you
may perhaps hear various remarks to this effect. But it is not just a
matter of saying that with stomach symptoms you have to deal with the
nerves first. This achieves nothing. You only achieve something when
you know that the nerve is the expression of the astral body and seek
for the causes in the irregularities to be found there. The question
is, what is the main thing?
The
first thing to consider in the treatment of this sort of complaint is
diet and finding the right balance between what a person enjoys and
what is good for him. What matters is his way of life, not with
regard to externalities but regarding what has to be digested and
worked through by him, and in this respect nobody can possibly know
anything on the basis of purely materialistic science. We need to
realise that everything around us in the wide world of the macrocosm
has a relationship with our complicated inner world of the microcosm,
and every kind of food there is has a definite connection with what
is within our organism. We have heard often enough that man has
passed through a long evolution, and how the whole of outside nature
has been built up out of what has been thrust forth from man. Time
and again in our studies we have gone back to the ancient Saturn
period, where we found that there was nothing in existence apart from
man, who, as it were, thrust forth the other kingdoms of nature: the
plants, the animals, and so on. In that evolution man built up his
organs in accordance with what they thrust forth. Even when the
mineral kingdom was pushed out, certain specific inner organs arose.
The heart could not have arisen if certain plants, minerals and
mineral possibilities had not arisen externally in the course of
time. Now what arose externally has a certain connection with what
arose within. And only the person who knows of this connection can
prescribe in individual cases how the macrocosmic element outside can
be used in the microcosm, otherwise man will experience in a certain
way that he is taking in something that is not right for him. So we
have to turn to spiritual science for the actual basis of our
judgment. It is always superficial to follow purely external laws
taken from statistics or chemistry when prescribing dietary
treatment. We need quite a different basis, for spiritual knowledge
has to be active when we deal with man in health or sickness.
Then
there are those types of illness, partly chronic and partly acute,
which are connected with the human etheric body, and which therefore
come to expression in man's glands. As a rule these illnesses have
nothing to do with heredity, but a great deal to do with nationality
and race. So that in the case of the illnesses originating in the
etheric body and appearing as glandular complaints, we must always
ask whether the illness is occurring in a Russian, an Italian, a
Norwegian or a Frenchman. For these illnesses are connected with the
national character and therefore take quite different forms. Thus for
example a great mistake is being made in the field of medicine, for
over the whole of Western Europe they have a completely wrong view of
spinal consumption. Although they have the right judgment of it for
the West [Europeans, they are quite wrong about it where the East
European population is concerned, because it has quite a different
origin there, as even these things still vary considerably nowadays.
Now you will realise that the mixture of peoples affords us a certain
survey. Only the person who can distinguish differences in human
nature can make any judgment at all. These illnesses are simply
treated externally today and lumped together with acute illnesses,
whilst they really belong to quite a different field. Above all we
must know that the human organs that come under the influence of the
etheric body, and which can fall sick as a result of irregularities
of the etheric body, have quite definite relationships with one
another. There is for instance a certain relationship between a man's
heart and his brain which can be described in a somewhat pictorial
way by saying that this mutual relationship of the heart and the
brain corresponds to the relationship of the sun and the moon —
the heart being the sun and the brain the moon. So we have to know,
if a disturbance occurs in the heart for instance, that in so far as
this is rooted in the etheric body it is bound to have an effect on
the brain. Just as when something happens on the sun, an eclipse for
instance, the moon is bound to be affected. It is no different, for
these things have a direct connection.
In
occult medicine these things are also described by applying the
images of the planets to the constellation of man's organs. Thus the
heart is the sun, the brain the moon, the spleen saturn, the liver
jupiter, the gall mars, the kidneys venus and the lungs mercury. If
you study the mutual relationships of the planets you have an image
of the mutual relationships of man's organs in so far as they
are in the etheric body. The gall could not possibly ail — and
this would show spiritually in the etheric body — without the
illness having its effect on the other organs mentioned, in fact if
the gall is described as mars, its effect would be similar to the
effect of mars in our planetary system. You have to know the
interconnections of the organs when there is an etheric illness, and
yet these are principally those illnesses — and from this you
will see that any form of one-sidedness must be avoided in the field
of occultism — for which specific remedies are to be used. This
is the place to use the remedies you find in the plants and minerals.
For everything belonging to the plants and minerals has a profound
importance for everything to do with the human etheric body. So when
we know an illness has arisen in the etheric body, and it appears in
a certain way in the glandular system, we must find the remedy that
can correctly repair the complex of interconnections. Particularly
with those illnesses where the first thing you have to look for is
obviously whether they originate in the etheric body, and secondly
whether they are connected with the national character, and all the
organs are interconnected in a regular way, these illnesses are the
first ones for which specific remedies can be used.
Now
perhaps what you are imagining is that if it is necessary to send a
person to another place, you will not be able to help him as a rule
if he is tied to a job and cannot move. The psychological method is
indeed always effective. What is called the psychological method
works best of all when the Illness is actually in a person's ego
being. Thus when a chronic illness of this type occurs, one that is
in the blood, psychological remedies are justified. And if they are
carried out in the right way, their effect on the ego will entirely
compensate for what impinges on him from outside. Wherever you look
you will be able to see the subtle connection between what a man
experiences in his soul when he is habitually working behind a work
bench and when he gets the chance to enjoy country air for a short
while. The joy that lends wings to his soul can be called a
psychological method in the widest sense. Then, if the therapist is
carrying out his method properly, he can gradually exercise his own
influence in place of this, and psychological methods have their
strongest justification for this form of illness and should not be
overlooked, because most of the illnesses came from an irregularity
of the ego being of man.
Then
we come to the illnesses arising out of irregularities of the astral
body. Although purely psychological methods can be used, they
certainly lose their greatest value, therefore they are seldom used
for these. Dietary remedies apply here. The type of illness we
described in third place are actually the first in which we are
justified in using external medicines to assist the course of
recovery. If we see man as the complicated being he is, the treatment
of illnesses will also be a broad-minded one, and one-sidedness will
be avoided.
The
only illnesses left now are those that actually originate in the
physical body itself, having to do with the physical body, and these
are the actual infectious diseases. This is an important chapter and
will be considered in greater detail in one of the coming lectures,
after we have first of all dealt with the real origin of
“Ten Commandments”.
For you will see that this really has a
connection. Today, therefore, I can only just mention that there is
this fourth type of illness, and that a deeper understanding of these
involves knowing the nature of everything connected with the human
physical body. The basis of these illnesses is not physical but very
much of a spiritual nature. When we have looked at the fourth type we
shall still not have finished with all the important illnesses, for
we shall see that human karma also plays in. That is a fifth category
to be considered.
Let
us say, then, that we shall gradually attain an understanding of the
five different forms of human illness, that stem from the ego, the
astral body, the etheric body and the physical body, and also from
karmic causes. The sphere of medicine will not improve until this
whole sphere includes a knowledge of the higher members of man's
being. Up to now we have not had a medical practice that has really
come to grips with what is at stake. Although, as with many another
occult insight, these things have to be brought up to date and put in
a modern form, you must realise that this wisdom is, in some
respects, not new.
Medicine
arose from spiritual knowledge and has become more and more
materialistic. And perhaps in no other science can we see so clearly
how materialism has overtaken mankind. In earlier times people were
at least conscious of the fact that they had to have a knowledge of
man's fourfold being in order to understand it. There have been
instances of materialism before, of course, and even earlier than
four hundred years ago clairvoyants observed materialistic thinking
arising all around them in this sphere. Paracelsus, for instance, who
is taken for a madman or dreamer and not understood at all today,
drew full attention to the increasing materialism of medical science
centred in Salerno, Montpellier, Paris and also certain parts of
Germany. And just because of his responsible position in the world,
Paracelsus felt compelled — as we do today — to draw
attention to the difference between medicine based on spiritual
knowledge or on materialism. Perhaps it is even more difficult
nowadays to achieve anything with paracelsian thinking. For in those
days the materialistic approach to medicine was not so rigidly
opposed to the paracelsian approach as materialistic science is today
to any insight into the real, spiritual nature of man. What
Paracelsus said about this, therefore, still applies today, though
its significance would be less readily recognised. If we look at the
opinions held today by the people working at the dissecting benches
and in laboratories, and at the way research is applied to the
understanding of man in health and in sickness, we could, to a
certain extent, react similarly to the way Paracelsus did. It might
not be appropriate, though, to add a plea for understanding and
forgiveness, too, perhaps, as Paracelsus did to his local
contemporaries in the medical sphere — that is, with any real
hope of forgiveness. For Paracelsus himself said he was not a man of
good breeding, nor had he moved in high circles; he lacked grace and
refinement, therefore he would be forgiven if what he said was not
always couched in the best language. Whilst discoursing on the nature
of the different illnesses Paracelsus said the following about the
foreign and also the German medical doctors: “It is a bad
business, all those foreign doctors, to name those in Montpellier,
Salerno and Paris, who want to have all the credit and pour scorn on
everybody else, yet they themselves know nothing and can do nothing,
and it is common knowledge that it is nothing but talk and show. They
are not ashamed of their enemas and purgatives, and rely on them even
if the patient is dying. They boast about all the anatomy they know,
and they cannot even see the tartar on people's teeth, let alone
anything else. Fine doctors they are, even without spectacles on
their noses. What kind of eyesight and anatomy have you got? You can
do no earthly good with them, and see no further than your own noses.
They work so hard, too, those German swindlers and thieves of doctors
and newly-hatched fools, that when they have seen everything, they
know less than they did before. So they choke in filth and corpses
and afterwards put on holy airs — they ought to be thrown to
the rabble!”
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