Speculative Medicine — The System Builders

Another central idea of Hoffmann s was that certain organs are linked to one another, he called it sympathy, and that through this sympathy they could influence each other. For instance, there was sympathy between the stomach and the brain. The stomach often became the seat of inflammations, and because of the existing sympathy between the organs this inflammation, could spread to the brain. One is undeniably reminded of van Helmont s irascible Archeus that ruled the human body from his headquarters in the stomach. 

As a consequence of his dualistic view of diseases being either spastic or paralytic in nature, Hoffmann managed with a very limited number of drugs, a blessing for his patients no doubt, compared to the involved prescriptions of his colleagues. His medicines were either what he called tonica, which supposedly increased the tension in the fibers, or spasmolytic preparations to counteract the effects of excessive tension. To this should of course be added the indispensable bloodletting. 

Hoffmann and Stahl had been successful enough in their efforts to propose all-embracing medical theories, but their Dutch colleague, Hermann Boerhaave (1668-1738), who was active in Leyden, far surpassed them. He was the leading 

He was somewhat vague when he tried to explain the reason for the thickening of the blood, but he emphasized the importance of the diet that could obviously influence the character of the blood. Since Boerhaave was of the opinion that fever made the blood thicker and therefore worsened the inflammation, which he saw as not only a local but also a general process and a major cause of disease, Boerhaave unlike Stahl favored medicines like quinine that lowered the fever. To prove his point, he made an experiment and placed a cat and a dog in an oven maintained at 63°C and sure enough both animals died within half an hour. 

The Batavian Hippocrates, as he was sometimes called, certainly had an extremely broad education, including also the humanities and theology, and a remarkable grasp not only of medicine but also of botany and chemistry. In fact, he held chairs in all these three subjects at Leyden University. His international reputation was the main reason for the fame of its medical school, which attracted students from all over Europe, among them men such as Carolus Linnaeus and Albrecht von Haller, who would later become world famous in botany and physiology. Even the czar of all Russians, Peter the Great, attended Boerhaave s lectures during his stay in the Netherlands. 

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