13. The Relationships Between Spiritual Science and Individual Academic Subjects III

Let us consider, for example, what happens when we try to examine the medical sciences as they present themselves to us today from the point of view of what is unsatisfactory about them. I cannot go into the particularly significant details here, but I would like to point out something that is already a key question. How can we actually unite what is now our natural world view with what is called a disease process in the physical organism? Anyone who studies the disease process will have to say - and this is quite natural - that this disease process takes place according to natural laws. So in the disease process we have something that we have to understand according to natural laws. On the other hand, however, we also have something in the so-called healthy human organism that must be understood according to natural laws; at least we have a certain current of natural laws in the healthy human organism. We express what we recognize in this area of the natural organization of the human being in physiology. And we express what we can recognize in the disease process as a lawfulness, which must also be a natural lawfulness, in pathology. There must now be a bridge between physiology and pathology. It must be possible to gain some kind of insight into how one natural law behaves in relation to the other. And a natural science, or rather a natural scientific way of thinking, as we have it today, cannot lead to any understanding in this field, at least not to an understanding that can be put into practice. That is why we see how, today, the healing arts basically stand unsatisfactorily alongside pathology. I still look back to the time when, within the then Viennese school of medical science, what was then called 'medical nihilism' had taken hold. Celebrities in the field of medicine at that time actually lived in complete scepticism with regard to therapy. To a large extent, they claimed that one could only follow the processes of the diseases, that one could only speak of a more or less rational pathology, but that one could not actually speak of any connection between the intervention of the remedy and the processes of the organism. Therefore, such physicians limited themselves to observing the disease process for wide areas of disease, paying attention when it went into excess in one direction or the other, but basically they did not believe in a rational healing method. They spoke about this quite openly.