Health and suggestion : the dialectics of the mind / by Ernst von Feudhtersleben ; translated and edited by Ludwig Lewisohn.

  • Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben
Date:
1919, ©1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Health and suggestion : the dialectics of the mind / by Ernst von Feudhtersleben ; translated and edited by Ludwig Lewisohn. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    47/174 (page 45)
    to be more and more recognized that the feebleness and the diseases of our children are rooted far more deeply in moral than in physical causes. Not cold baths will guard them, not bare throats, not experiments of this sort or that, but a culture of a quite dif- ferent kind —a culture whose origin must be in ourselves. Physicians have often had to bear — nor always unjustly —the reproach of a crass materialism, of regarding man as a mere bundle of bones, muscles, viscera, and skins, set in motion by the action of the air’s oxygen upon the blood. In this treatise we may repel that imputation. From our point of view the physician sees and proclaims heal- ing in that quarter whence priest and moralist assert it to arise. ‘‘ Who can fail to under- stand,” wrote Schiller in his youth, ‘ that a constitution able to draw pleasure from every event and to sink every personal sorrow in the perfection of the universe must also be most profitable to this bodily machine?”’? And such a constitution is virtue. | [45 ]