Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Cahan is Associate Professor of History at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and author of An Institute for an Empire: The Physikalisch-Technische Reich-sanstalt, 1871-1918 (1990).

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Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science

University of California Press

1. Introduction

"Medicine," Helmholtz wrote in 1877, "was once my intellectual home, the one in which I grew up, and the wanderer best understands and is best understood in his native land."1 Yet only rarely does one think of Hermann von Helmholtz in a medical context. The traditional image of Helmholtz is rather of a scientist whose broad-ranging intellectual interests brought him into contact with physicists, physiologists, mathematicians, philosophers, and other learned individuals. Yet, as the above quotation indicates, Helmholtz began his intellectual wanderings within the nineteenth-century German medical community; he even practiced hospital medicine for five years before receiving his first academic appointment at the Berlin Akademie der Knste in 1848. From that point on Helmholtz never again practiced medicine, yet, as this essay seeks to demonstrate, his ties to the German medical community remained strong for most of his career. Not only did several of his discoveriesforemost among them his invention of the ophthalmoscope in 1850-51have a direct impact on medical practice; his methodological approach to the study of nature influenced the medical community as well. Medical reformers in particular praised

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank David Cahan for his advice and criticism. The research for this paper stemmed in part from two larger projects funded by the Fulbright Commission and the National Science Foundation.

"Das Denken in der Medizin," in VR 2:165-93, on 170.

the "new spirit of physiology," convinced that Helmholtz (and other experimental scientists) would help transform medicine into an exact science by teaching students new critical methods of analysis that would later be applicable to the study of disease.

The German medical community clearly benefited from Helmholtz's contributions, but, as this essay also aims to show, Helmholtz profited as well. Section 2 focuses on his early years in Berlin and Potsdam (1838-48), demonstrating that through his studies at the Knigliches medizinisch-chirurgische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Institut and at the University of Berlin, and through his tenure as a staff surgeon to the Royal Hussars in Potsdam, he received perhaps the best medical education and training then available in Germany. According to Helmholtz's own account, this medical training influenced his early work and career. Section 3 examines this claim, turning specifically to the events surrounding his invention of the ophthalmoscope and its reception by the medical community. The ophthalmoscope significantly altered medical diagnostics, having its greatest impact on a growing number of physicians with specialist interest in ophthalmology. Keenly aware of the ophthalmoscope's diagnostic importance, Helmholtz actively publicized his instrument. Indeed, he frequently announced to the medical community the potential practical applications of his scientific work. His reasons for doing so, as Section 3 further shows, derived from his appreciation of the ways in which physicians and physiologists could mutually benefit one another. New instruments and the experimental method would help establish medicine on a scientific basis, at the same time that physicians would help physiologists in their fight to establish an autonomous discipline of physiological science. Seeking institutional support in the university medical faculties, Helmholtz and other experimental physiologists realized that their success rested in part on their ability to convince university and state administrators that their work was of potential significance to the medical community.

The importance of this strategy becomes evident in Section 4, which focuses on the events surrounding the institutionalization of experimental physiology at the University of Heidelberg and Helmholtz's appointment to a newly created chair for this subject in 1858. This appointment, it is argued, occurred squarely within a medical context, with Helmholtz remaining the favored candidate during a protracted period of negotiation largely because of his perceived link to the medical community, a perception that Helmholtz deservedand cultivated.

This essay argues neither that Helmholtz is best understood within the nineteenth-century German medical community nor that his primary motivation in his early career was to improve medical practice.

Both claims are false. Throughout his years at Knigsberg, Bonn, and Heidelberg, Helmholtz's intellectual interests centered on discovering the chemical and physical laws underlying physiological processes, and on determining the physical and philosophical foundations of sensory perception. Nonetheless, Helmholtz seldom lost sight of the potential practical applications of the knowledge he produced. He may only occasionally have pursued such practical applications himself, yet he appreciated and publicized them when they occurred, both recognizing the support he could win from the medical community and appreciating, like most individuals involved in "pure" research, that nothing better demonstrated the legitimacy of a scientific theory than the ability to derive practical consequences from it. Thus Helmholtz's motives for maintaining strong ties to the German medical community were both professional and intellectual, and they were ties he actively encouraged during the twenty-two years he spent as a member of German university medical faculties.

2. Helmholtz's Medical Education in Berlin and Practice in Potsdam, 1838-48

During his early teenage years, Helmholtz developed an interest in the natural sciences, particularly in physics. In the 1830s, however, pursuit of a career in science was difficult. Although some hoped to forge a link between scientific research and industrial advance, the German economy gave but scant support to scientific careers, and only a few individuals received academic appointments in the natural sciences. Consequently, more than a few who wanted to study the natural sciences chose instead to pursue medicine. This, at least, was the path Helmholtz selected, and in 1838, at the age of seventeen, he moved from Potsdam to Berlin to begin his medical studies at the Knigliches medizinisch-chirurgische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Institut (formerly called the Pepinire), a medical school designed specifically for the training of military physicians.2

The Institut gave promising young men of insufficient financial means the opportunity to pursue a medical career. This arrangement greatly benefited Helmholtz, whose father, a Prussian Gymnasium teacher, reportedly did not earn enough to finance a university education for his son. Taking advantage of family connections to Christian

Biographical information on Helmholtz is taken from Koenigsberger 1 ; and R. Steven Turner, "Hermann von Helmholtz," DSB 6 :241-53. On the Institut, see Dr. Schickert, Die militrrztlichen Bildungsanstalten von ihrer Grndung his zur Gegenwart (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1895).

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