Rudolf Steiner, by training a scientist, lectured and wrote, at different periods of his life, on medical subjects and advised physicians on their work. His view of medicine was both unconventional and precise. On the basis of his own highly developed powers of observation and his spiritual research, he could describe processes of health and disease that escape normal medical observation.
Throughout his lectures to doctors and in all of his explanations of anthroposophical medicine, Steiner emphasized that his medical concepts are not a replacement of conventional Western medicine, but an extension in which the practices involved in the diagnosis and healing of disease are expanded to include our soul and spirit.
In these broadly ranging talks collected here, Steiner introduces fundamental principles of anthroposophically extended medicine. Some of the most remarkable insights that Anthroposophy brings to medicine are in this volume; for example, that the heart is not a pump, that its motion is a consequence and not the cause of rhythmic movements in the human being. Other topics include hay fever, migraine, sclerosis, cancer, tuberculosis, typhoid, and childhood diseases; the polarity between nerve and liver cells; the functions of the spleen and the gallbladder; the three basic processes of sensory-nervous system, rhythmical system, and metabolic-limb system; regenerative and degenerative processes; the true nature of the nervous system; as well as many suggestions for the use of minerals, plants, and artistic therapies in healing.
This is a new vision of medicine that is at once practical, psychological, spiritual, and fully human.