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Abstract

The discovery of the diseases endometriosis and adenomyosis in 1860 by Carl Freiherr von Rokitansky (1804–1878) was preceded by a momentous change in scientific perception inspired by the German poet-scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe perceived science with the holistic eye of the artist.2 Indeed, many who associate Goethe’s greatness with his poetry lament that a lengthy immersion in science diverted him from poetry.3 He coined the word “morphology” for the study of the structure of plants and animals, and in this scientific pursuit favored the memorialization of careful observation by precise sketching instead of verbal explanation.4

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ronold King, “Goethe and the Challenge of Science in Western Civilization,” in Goethe on Human Creativeness and other Goethe Essays, ed. Rolf King [Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1950], 231. King quoted Goethe from the preface to Goethe’s study “On the Theory of Color.”

  2. 2.

    I choose to begin the history of endometriosis with Goethe to capture the initial intellectual heights of the sources of several streams of research that flowed into the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a tribute to nineteenth-century German, Austrian, English, and American scholarship in the history of disease. Stephen Jay Gould, “More light on leaves,” in Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History [New York: WW Norton & Company, 1993], 157. “In the case of Goethe and science, I advance his second claim of special insight for two reasons. First, I feel that characteristic ways of thinking in the arts – the role of the imagination, holistic vs. reductionistic approaches, for example – might enlighten science (not because scientists never think in this ‘artful way’ manner, but because the unpopularity of these styles among professionals greatly limits their fruitful use, and an infusion from outside might therefore help). Second, Goethe himself viewed his treatment of biologic problems as different from that of most full time scientists, and he attributed his unconventional approach to his training and practice in the arts. In particular, Goethe argued that his artist’s perspective led him to view nature as a unity, to search for integration among disparate parts, to find some law of inherent concord.” In this view of the unity of nature Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt were of one mind. See also: Stephen Jay Gould, “A reflective prologue,” in Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History [New York: WW Norton & Company, 1993], 19. “Goethe’s oracular reduction of all plant form to a leaf archetype needs to be read for its unconventional form of scientific excellence.”

  3. 3.

    John George Robertson, The Life and Work of Goethe: 1749–1832 [New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1973], 312.

  4. 4.

    Stephen Jay Gould, “A tale of three pictures,” in Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History [New York: WW Norton & Company, 1993], 427. Goethe: “We should talk less and draw more. I personally would like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches.” For a contrary observation see John George Robertson, The Life and Work of Goethe: 1749–1832 [New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1973], 307–8. Robertson cited evidence from Goethe’s friend Schiller that Goethe proceeded from idea not experience. As Robertson put it: “In all his scientific speculation Goethe went out from the idea; observation and experiment were directed to a degree that would not be countenanced by modern science to supporting and establishing the hypothesis.” See also: John George Robertson, The Life and Work of Goethe: 1749–1832 [New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1973], 306. Robertson, Professor of German Language and Literature at the University of London opined that Goethe’s treatise, Essay in Comparative Osteology, showing that the Intermaxillary Bone of the Upper Jaw is common to Man and the other Animals, “may well be regarded as a foundation-stone of the new science of comparative anatomy.” David L. Hull, Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 41. Goethe is ranked among the Continental idealists – along with Lorenz Oken (1779–1851) and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844) – who “were partial to explaining natural phenomenon in terms of timeless general patterns or ‘archetypes.’” See also Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998], 249. Lorenz Oken suggested “that nature embodied a transcendental unity of plan, built upon elemental structural archetypes or anatomical building-blocks; this paved the way for philosophical morphology.” Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002], 284. Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998], 249. Porter noted that Casper Friedrich Wolff (1734–1794) anticipated Goethe. “Comparative studies led by Casper Friedrich Wolff [concluded] that ‘all parts of the plant except the stem are modified leaves.’” Goethe’s botanical theory of the leaf as an archetypal form probably constitutes his most important contribution to science. Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002], 284. Scientists like Geoffroy and Oken would apply the same vision to “reduce the great complexity and diversity of [vertebrate] animal … form to the single generating pattern of an archetypal vertebra.” See also Gould, page 1101. “Vertebrate homologs in structure and function. So far, the formalist or archetypal content of this discussion has been largely limited to the Goethian theme of common bases for the generation of differentiated serial homologs in a single organism - in other words, to internal constraints and channels in the evolutionary history of particular forms and lineages. But the more radical archetypal theories - including both of Geoffroy’s derided arguments about vertebral formations and dorso-ventral inversions-postulate the maintenance of such constraints in phyla of distant taxonomic separation and immensely long periods of independent evolution.” David L. Hull, Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 41. “E. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in turn explained all the various parts of the skeleton on vertebrates as modifications of a single structure – the vertebra.” Hull also referred to the idealist “Oken.”

  5. 5.

    Karl Sudhoff, “Goethe and Johannes Müller,” in Essays in the History of Medicine trans. by various hands and ed. Fielding H. Garrison [New York: Medical Life Press, 1926], 371. See also Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity [New York: Zone Books, 2007], 69–70. “The typical is rarely, if ever, embodied in a single individual; nonetheless, the astute observer can intuit it from cumulative experience, as Goethe ‘saw’ the Urpflanze. Goethe wrote of his archetype of the animal skeleton: ‘Hence, an anatomical archetype [Typus] will be suggested here, a general picture containing the forms of all animals as potential, one which will guide us to an orderly description of each animal… The mere idea of an archetype in general implies that no particular animal can be used as our point of comparison; the particular can never serve as a pattern [Muster] for the whole.’ This is not to say that the archetype wholly transcended experience, for Goethe claimed that it was derived from and tested by observation. However, observations in search of the typical must always be made in series, because single observations made by one individual can be highly misleading: ‘For the observer never sees the pure phenomenon [das reine Phanomen] with his own eyes; rather, much depends on his mood, the state of his senses, the light, air, weather, the physical object, how it is handled, and a thousand different circumstances.’”

  6. 6.

    Erna Lesky, The Vienna Medical School of the 19th Century [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976], 80. See also Karl Sudhoff, “Goethe and Johannes Müller,” in Essays in the History of Medicine trans. by various hands and ed. Fielding H. Garrison [New York: Medical Life Press, 1926], 371. “As if lost in dreams, the medicine and natural history of those days rested quietly in the shadow of the system of Nature Philosophy expounded by the gifted Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. This system evolved all natural phenomena from the idea of the absolute and endeavored to spiritualize all natural laws and turn them into laws of perception and cogitation, in consequence of which all natural phenomena seemed to disappear. Even the greatest investigators had fallen before the power of this theory and research came to a standstill, as people were chiefly concerned with bringing everything into line with this system. In this confused era, Goethe, the scientist, had kept himself free from all such philosophic fragments of imagination. Upon him fell the task of saving the great principle of observation.” Goethe was never a metaphysician treating from first principles; however, the aging Goethe found the thinking of Schelling harmonious with his deepening pantheism. See: John George Robertson, The Life and Work of Goethe: 1749–1832 [New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1973], 280, 311.

  7. 7.

    Karl Sudhoff, “Goethe and Johannes Müller,” in Essays in the History of Medicine trans. by various hands and ed. Fielding H. Garrison [New York: Medical Life Press, 1926], 371.

  8. 8.

    Goethe, quoted in Johannes Müller, “Von dem Bedürfnis der Physiologie nach einer philosophischen Naturbetrachtung.” Reprinted in Adolf Meyer-Abich, Biologie der Goethezeit [Stuttgart: Hippokrates Verlag, 1949], 256–81. Goethe, quoted by Johannes Müller in Owsei Temkin, “Basic Science, Medicine, and the Romantic Era,” in The Double Face of Janus and Other Essays in the History of Medicine [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977], 366.

  9. 9.

    Ronold King, “Goethe and the Challenge of Science in Western Civilization,” in Goethe on Human Creativeness and other Goethe Essays, ed. Rolf King [Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1950], 223–252:236.

  10. 10.

    Ronold King, 223–252:240–241. Goethe searched for archetypical phenomena with his unaided eye.

  11. 11.

    Ronold King, 223–252:243, 247.

  12. 12.

    Ronold King, 223–252:247.

  13. 13.

    Ronold King, 223–252:237.

  14. 14.

    Alexander von Humboldt, “Journey to the equinoctial regions of the new continent,” in The German Mind of the Nineteenth Century: A Literary & Historical Anthology ed. Hermann Glaser [New York: Continuum, 1981], 273–274.

  15. 15.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Fragment of an autobiography,” in The German Mind of the Nineteenth Century: A Literary & Historical Anthology ed. Hermann Glaser [New York: Continuum, 1981], 44–47.

  16. 16.

    Rothstein, Edward. Emblems of Mind: The Inner Life of Music and Mathematics [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006], 150. Rothstein quotes Poincare, a quotation apropos to Goethe: “The Scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it; and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful.”

  17. 17.

    Andreas W. Daum, “Wissenschaft and knowledge,” in The Short Oxford History of Germany: Germany 1800–1870 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 137–161:140–143.

  18. 18.

    Andreas W. Daum, “Wissenschaft and knowledge,” in The Short Oxford History of Germany: Germany 1800–1870 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 137–161:137. Daum equated the German term Wissenschaft with scholarship and research which included “the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.” For the evolution of the meaning of Wissenschaft in the nineteenth century, see Arleen Marcia Tuchman, Science, Medicine, and the State of Germany: The Case of Baden, 1815–1871 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 14–15. “Wissenschaft [is] a difficult term to define not least because its meaning underwent several changes through the years. Once identified closely with another nebulous term, Bildung, Wissenschaft originally signified the search for a holistic understanding of all knowledge aimed at cultivating the individual’s personality by developing one’s moral and intellectual sensitivities. In this earlier formulation, Wissenschaft had an inward focus, but as the century progressed, the focus turned outward and Wissenschaft came to refer to the production of new knowledge through in-depth scholarly work in a specialized area of research. Accompanying this transition was an increased appreciation of the importance of acquiring practical experience; by the late nineteenth century, at least in the sciences and medicine, the revered Wissenschaftler was one who could manipulate sophisticated instrumental apparatus and gain in this way control over laboratory conditions and, presumably, over nature.”

  19. 19.

    Leopold von Ranke, “How the concept of progress is to be understood in history,” in The German Mind of the Nineteenth Century: A Literary & Historical Anthology ed. Hermann Glaser [New York: Continuum, 1981], 149–151.

  20. 20.

    Walter Wadepuhl, Goethe’s Interest in the New World [New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1973], 7.

  21. 21.

    Walter Wadepuhl, 77–83. John George Robertson, The Life and Work of Goethe: 1749–1832 [New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1973], 304. “In his official concern for the development of the University of Jena [Goethe] always showed a greater interest in the professors of science than in those of the humanities.” Goethe similarly was concerned with science in his Jena Circle with the von Humboldt brothers.

  22. 22.

    Walter Wadepuhl, 77–83. Goethe held many of Alexander von Humboldt’s books in his private library, now the Goethe National Museum. Two of Humboldt’s books are filed under “Botany,” four under “Geography,” and two under “Geology.” Additionally, Goethe had drawn five of Humboldt’s books from the “Grand-Ducal Library, now the Landesbibliothek.”

  23. 23.

    Gerard Helferich, Humboldt’s Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Latin American Journey That Changed the Way We See the World [New York: Gotham Books, 2004], 232, 332.

  24. 24.

    Sudhoff, Karl. In Memory of Johannes Müller. Essays in the History of Medicine. Translated by various hands and edited, with foreword and biographical sketch, by Fielding H. Garrison. New York: Medical Life Press, 1926:363–367:364.

  25. 25.

    Karl Sudhoff, “Goethe and Johannes Müller,” in Essays in the History of Medicine trans. by various hands and ed. Fielding H. Garrison [New York: Medical Life Press, 1926], 371–3. Laura Otis, Müller’s Lab [New York: Oxford University Press, 2007], 38.

  26. 26.

    Karl Sudhoff, “Goethe and Johannes Müller,” in Essays in the History of Medicine trans. by various hands and ed. Fielding H. Garrison [New York: Medical Life Press, 1926], 372.

  27. 27.

    Karl Sudhoff, “Goethe and Johannes Müller,” in Essays in the History of Medicine trans. by various hands and ed. Fielding H. Garrison [New York: Medical Life Press, 1926], 374.

  28. 28.

    Johannes Müller, Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen. 3rd ed. 2 vols. [Koblenz: J. Holscher, 1838–1840].

  29. 29.

    Laura Otis, Müller’s Lab [New York: Oxford University Press, 2007], 9, 11.

  30. 30.

    Laura Otis, 13–14. While Müller argued for his own candidacy, he did suggest the elder Johann Friedrich Meckel (1781–1833) for the chair.

  31. 31.

    Laura Otis, 11. Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) had organized the founding of the University of Berlin in 1810. See also: Arleen Marcia Tuchman, Science, Medicine, and the State of Germany: The Case of Baden, 1815–1871 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 145. Humboldt was known for intervening on behalf of “talented young scientists.” See also Tuchman, page 151. Such an example was his letter on behalf of Hermann Helmholtz in March 1855.

  32. 32.

    Karl Sudhoff, “In memory of Johannes Müller,” in Essays in the History of Medicine trans. by various hands and ed. Fielding H. Garrison [New York: Medical Life Press, 1926], 365–366. “In 1833, he was called to Berlin, to become successor of Rudolphi in the chair of anatomy and physiology.” “In 1833, at the age of 32, he began his monumental ‘Handbook of Physiology,’ which he concluded 7 years later.”

  33. 33.

    Peter Gray, The Encyclopedia of the Biological Sciences 2nd ed. [New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1961], 581–582.

  34. 34.

    Knud Faber, Nosography in Modern Internal Medicine [New York: Paul B. Hoeber, Inc., 1923], 82. The Great Doctors: A Biographical History of Medicine. Trans. Eden and Cedar Paul [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1933], 309. Müller’s Manual of Human Physiology, which replaced Albrecht Haller’s Elementa physiologiae, was “distinguished by its method. As far as Germany was concerned, it denoted a turning away from natural philosophy and towards observation and experiment.”

  35. 35.

    Sudhoff, Karl. Medicine and Art. In Essays in the History of Medicine trans. by various hands and edited, with foreword and biographical sketch, by Fielding H. Garrison. New York: Medical Life Press, 1926:305–309:309.

  36. 36.

    Laura Otis, Müller’s Lab [New York: Oxford University Press, 2007], 35.

  37. 37.

    Laura Otis, 36.

  38. 38.

    Laura Otis, 36.

  39. 39.

    Laura Otis, Müller’s Lab [New York: Oxford University Press, 2007], 37.

  40. 40.

    Laura Otis, 36–7.

  41. 41.

    Gerard Helferich, Humboldt’s Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Latin American Journey That Changed the Way We See the World [New York: Gotham Books, 2004], 332.

  42. 42.

    Stephen Jay Gould, “Art meets science in The Heart of the Andes: Church paints, Humboldt dies, Darwin writes, and nature blinks in the fateful year of 1859,” in I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History [New York: Harmony Books, 2002], 93.

  43. 43.

    Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism [New York: Viking, 2006], 241.

  44. 44.

    Janet Browne, Darwin’s Origin of Species [New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007], 16. Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, the English translation of 1814–1829. Gerard Helferich, Humboldt’s Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Latin American Journey That Changed the Way We See the World [New York: Gotham Books, 2004], 306. This work was “packed with scientific data and technical digressions, the books were more a physical description of South America and an account of the social and political conditions that Humboldt had found there.” The work ultimately filled four volumes.

  45. 45.

    Stephen Jay Gould, “Art meets science in The Heart of the Andes: Church paints, Humboldt dies, Darwin writes, and nature blinks in the fateful year of 1859,” in I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History [New York: Harmony Books, 2002], 102.

  46. 46.

    Gerard Helferich, Humboldt’s Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Latin American Journey That Changed the Way We See the World [New York: Gotham Books, 2004], 318–9. Darwin recalled in his autobiography “I once met at breakfast at Sir Roderick Murchison’s house, the illustrious Humboldt, who honoured me by expressing a wish to see me. I was a little disappointed with the great man, but my anticipations were probably too high. I can remember nothing distinctly about our interview, except that Humboldt was very cheerful and talked much.”

  47. 47.

    Gerard Helferich, 234.

  48. 48.

    Stephen Jay Gould, “Art meets science in The Heart of the Andes: Church paints, Humboldt dies, Darwin writes, and nature blinks in the fateful year of 1859,” in I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History [New York: Harmony Books, 2002], 102.

  49. 49.

    Stephen Jay Gould, “Art meets science in The Heart of the Andes: Church paints, Humboldt dies, Darwin writes, and nature blinks in the fateful year of 1859,” in I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History [New York: Harmony Books, 2002], 102.

  50. 50.

    Janet Browne, Darwin’s Origin of Species [New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007], 38. “The great Alexander von Humboldt wrote to him to call it ‘happily inspired’, and ‘admirable book. … You have an excellent future ahead of you.’ Such words from the man whom Darwin had idolized in his Cambridge days, and whose writings were generally regarded as the height of literary style, were praise indeed.”

  51. 51.

    Stephen Jay Gould, “Art meets science in The Heart of the Andes: Church paints, Humboldt dies, Darwin writes, and nature blinks in the fateful year of 1859,” in I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History [New York: Harmony Books, 2002], 102.

  52. 52.

    Stephen Jay Gould, 96. See also: Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002], 161–2. “All major evolutionary theories before Darwin, and nearly all important versions that followed his enunciation of natural selection as well, retained fealty to an ancient Western tradition, dating to Plato and other classical authors, by presenting a fundamentally ‘internalist’ account, based upon intrinsic and predictable patterns set by the nature of living systems, for development or ‘unfolding’ through time.” This is why Darwin used the phrase “descent with modification” instead of “evolution.” “Darwin’s theory, in strong and revolutionary contrast, presents a first ‘externalist’ account of evolution, in which contingent change (the summation of unpredictable local adaptations rather than a deterministic unfolding of inherent potential under internal, biological principles) proceeds by an interaction between organic raw material (undirected variation) and environmental guidance (natural selection). Darwin overturned all previous traditions by thus granting the external environment a causal and controlling role in the direction of evolutionary change (with ‘environment’ construed as the ensemble of biotic and abiotic factors of course, but still external to the organism, however intrinsically locked to, and even largely defined by, the presence of the organism itself). Thus, and finally, in considering the validity of extrapolation to complete the roster of essential Darwinian claims, the role of the geological stage becomes an appropriate focus as a surrogate for more overtly biological discussion. If the uniqueness of Darwinism, and its revolutionary character as well, inheres largely to the formulation of natural selection as a theory of interaction between biological insides and environmental outsides – and not as a theory of evolution, or intrinsic unfolding – then ‘outsides’ must receive explicit discussion as well, a need best fulfilled within this treatment of extrapolation.” Gould’s insight into Darwin’s “externalist” view of evolution by natural selection came after the resolution of the antithesis of heredity and environment into the synthesis of heredity and environment achieved by the movement termed EVO–DEVO or evolutionary developmental biology.

  53. 53.

    Stephen Jay Gould, “Darwin and the munchkins of Kansas,” in I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History [New York: Harmony Books, 2002], 215.

  54. 54.

    Stephen Jay Gould, 214. “No scientific theory, including evolution, can pose any threat to religion – for these two great tools of human understanding operate in complementary (not contrary) fashion in their totally separate realms: science as an inquiry about the factual state of the natural world, religion as a search for spiritual meaning and ethical values.”

  55. 55.

    Janet Browne, Darwin’s Origin of Species [New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007], 1. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species “became the first truly international scientific debate in history.” See also: Erna Lesky, The Vienna Medical School of the 19th Century [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976], 471. “When at the beginning of the sixties [1860s], embryology had a stormy period of development under the influence of Darwin and Haeckel, there were young scientists also at Brücke’s Institute who made this branch of the sciences their special field of research…In 1873, the Vienna Medical Faculty became the only one in Austria with a separate chair and also a separate institute for embryology.” A temporary embryology laboratory was established in the Old Rifle Factory.

  56. 56.

    Janet Browne, 143. “The centenary of publication of the Origin of Species, which was coincidently also the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s birth [was the occasion when] evolutionary biology was a last a recognizable scientific discipline. Darwin was elevated into its founding father.”

  57. 57.

    Sean B. Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005], 7–9.The first stirring of the synthesis that would become evolutionary developmental biology [Evo–Devo] occurred in the 1970s with the “reunion” of embryology and evolutionary biology. In the 1980s geneticists determined that genes controlled the development of the fly. These studies “revealed a logic and order underlying the generation of animal form… The comparison of developmental genes between species became a new discipline at the interface of embryology and evolutionary biology-evolutionary developmental biology, or ‘Evo–Devo’ for short.” See also: John Maynard Smith, Genes, Embryos and Evolution [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999]. Manfred D. Laubichler and Jane Maienschein eds. From Embryology to Evo-Devo: A History of Developmental Evolution [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007].

  58. 58.

    Gerd B. Müller, “Six Memos for Evo-Devo.” In From Embryology to Evo-Devo: A History of Developmental Evolution, eds. Manfred D. Laubichler and Jane Maienschein. [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007], 499–524:501–2.

  59. 59.

    Janet Browne, Darwin’s Origin of Species [New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007], 153. “The new millennium has consequently begun with Westerners as divided as ever over the implications of a natural origin of species. Despite these challenges, the modern synthesis stands firm at the heart of biological science. No biologist would dream of disregarding the evidence. As Theodore Dobzhansky said in the 1960s, ‘nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’”

  60. 60.

    John W. O’Malley, Four Cultures of the West [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004], 117.

  61. 61.

    John W. O’Malley, 118–119.

  62. 62.

    John W. O’Malley, 117. Bildung. See Andreas W. Daum, “Wissenschaft and knowledge,” in The Short Oxford History of Germany: Germany 1800–1870 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 137–161:145. “The 9-year-long Gymnasium with an emphasis on training in classical studies and then the university with its philosophical faculty, complemented by faculties for medicine, theology, and jurisprudence, became the places to devote oneself seriously to Bildung. Academic scholarship in all fields was expected to serve the higher moral aims laid out by idealism and neo-humanism. Professors therefore had to be more than simply purveyors of knowledge. They were seen as moral models and agents of creativity, restlessly aiming at expanding the limits of knowledge, disregarding any utilitarian purpose or social constraints, and guided only by their free will.” See also: Arleen Marcia Tuchman, Science, Medicine, and the State of Germany: The Case of Baden, 1815–1871 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 41. The Gymnasia “were meant to create environments where students would learn, through active participation to think for themselves and develop new ideas. The focus on the individual’s creative potential, and more so, on the importance of providing an educational environment aimed at stimulating this potential, is fully consistent with the humanistic conception of Bildung.”

  63. 63.

    Laura Otis, Müller’s Lab [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], 6.

  64. 64.

    Thomas H. Broman, The transformation of German academic medicine 1750–1820 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 168.

  65. 65.

    John W. O’Malley, 121.

  66. 66.

    Thomas H. Broman, The transformation of German academic medicine 1750–1820 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 168. W. Haberling, “German Medicine in the Eighteenth Century: Friedrich Hoffmann, Stahl, Haller, van Swieten,” in German Medicine translated by Jules Freund Clio Medica [New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1934], 46. The medical school at Halle was founded in 1694.

  67. 67.

    Thomas H. Broman, 168–70.

  68. 68.

    Thomas H. Broman, 170–173:173. Arleen Marcia Tuchman, Science, Medicine, and the State of Germany: The Case of Baden, 1815–1871 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 4. For Humboldt, “the personal search for knowledge took precedence over the mere acquisition of information. This led ultimately, to a higher estimation of the value of research, and expectations soon arose that a professor should be not only a good teacher but a renowned scholar as well.”

  69. 69.

    Arleen Marcia Tuchman, Science, Medicine, and the State of Germany: The Case of Baden, 1815–1871 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 18.

  70. 70.

    Laura Otis, Müller’s Lab [New York: Oxford University Press, 2007], 16.

  71. 71.

    John W. O’Malley, Four Cultures of the West [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004], 121.

  72. 72.

    Hans H. Simmer, “Principles and Problems of Medical Undergraduate education in Germany during the Nineteenth and Early twentieth Centuries.” In The History of Medical Education, ed. C. D. O’Malley, No. 12 UCLA Forum in Medical Series [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970], 180–181.

  73. 73.

    Hans H. Simmer, “Principles and Problems of Medical Undergraduate education in Germany during the Nineteenth and Early twentieth Centuries.” In The History of Medical Education, ed. C. D. O’Malley, No. 12 UCLA Forum in Medical Series [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970], 190.

  74. 74.

    Thomas H. Broman, The transformation of German academic medicine 1750–1820 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 170–173:173.

  75. 75.

    Arleen Marcia Tuchman, Science, Medicine, and the State of Germany: The Case of Baden, 1815–1871 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 176. This writer believes Tuchman was referring to the era of Johann Peter Frank and his successor, Ludwig Baron von Türkheim of Vienna.

  76. 76.

    Arleen Marcia Tuchman, 6.

  77. 77.

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  1. State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, USA

    Ronald E. Batt M.D., Ph.D. (Professor of Gynecology)

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Goethe, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, and Johannes Müller

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Batt, R.E. (2011). Prelude. In: A History of Endometriosis. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-85729-585-9_1

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