Andreas Röschlaub

[1] The main reason for the neglect of Röschlaub's place in history is likely his acceptance of the ideas of Dr. John Brown while a medical student and their enthusiastic promotion, including making it the basis of a doctoral dissertation.

He then further advanced Brown's ideas on graduation, making Germany the main centre for the implementation of the Brunonian system of medicine.

Subsequently, a medical student at the university of Bamberg sent a copy of Brown's text to Professor Adam M. Weikard (1742-1803), who was sufficiently impressed to arrange the first German printing in 1794, and then to follow this with the publication the following year of his translation into German (Johann Brown's Grundsätze der Arzneilehre aus dem Lateinischen übersetzt, Frankfurt).

Schelling's main contribution to the theory of excitability was to explain that there was a receptive and active antithetical function, which involved the generative power (Blumenbach's Bildungstrieb and Dr, Samuel Hahnemann's Lebenserzeugungskraft).

Röschlaub also refined Brown's idea that disorders resulted from an excess (hypersthenia) or deficit (hyposthenia) of stimuli by adding that this involved a disporoportion between the receptive and pro-active sides of excitability.

In this regard, Brown's central idea that pathology was simply a sub-set of physiology, a stretching of normal healthy dynamic rhythms or functions beyond a certain supportable degree, was central to then allowing German medicine to consider that "pathology, nosology and clinical practice could be linked to physiology" which seemed the way to establish a solid foundation for medicine in natural science.

[1] Röschlaub's explanation of excitability (Erregbarkeit) as a dynamic, polarity between two antithetical functions - receptivity and pro-activity - made Brown's principle acceptable and also verifiable "and as such applicable to practical medical diagnosis and therapy.

The healthcare implications were that a dynamic view considered therapeutic measures affecting the interior milieu important considerations for the physician.Röschlaub entered the debate on this issue arguing for the role of the physician in "social medicine" or hygiene, and the importance of hygiene itself to a scientific medicine, a position that was largely taken up later by Virchow, whose views on this in 1849 could have been word-for-word those of Röschlaub.

This was an idea that was largely forgotten until revived by Hans Buchner in 1896 in a lecture on Biology and Health Doctrine, which caused quite a stir in German medical circles,[1] but which also raises the question as to the goal of therapy, a question answered several decades later by the work of Wilhelm Reich and his function of the orgasm (special theory) and the more overarching theory of 'super-imposition.'

As the major historian of Röschlaub's contribution states, German medicine was shifted from the mechanism of the 1700s to a more dynamic conception of life and illness.

Röschlaub's championing of the new views of man and environment from Fichte and Schelling, stemming from Locke, and integrating these into the Brunonian system provided a scientific basis for considering Healthcare, one that continues to find echoes in medicine, such as expressed half a century later in the works of Claude Bernard.