To assuage the imaginings of a sick person and reassure him, at least, that he does not have to suffer as before more from his thoughts about his illness than from the illness itself—I think that really is something! And it is not a mere trifle.2
Friedrich Nietzsche
In a book intriguingly entitled The Mysteries Within: A Surgeon Explores Myth, Medicine, and the Human Body,3 a well-known American surgeon and medical historian describes his experience over decades in dealing with certain organs whose organic ‘intelligence’ and relationship to soul life are still a great mystery to us, although, in purely technical terms, we can control their functions and even replace them. Why, for instance, does a liver that has had part of it removed, grow again to a considerable extent, and why does this not happen with lungs or the heart, let alone with the brain? Why, despite all technical progress, do we still know so little about the task of the spleen, an organ that one can even entirely remove leaving the body relatively undamaged? It was not for nothing that the great Roman doctor, Galen, called the spleen the ‘organum plenum mysterii’, the ‘mysterious organ’. And what makes our heart into such a special organ that, for thousands of years, humanity has not tired of writing paeans and poems of praise to it, although it is still regarded more or less as a ‘pump’ and is even transplanted?
In the course of his observations of organs, with simultaneous references to the past history of medicine, the above-mentioned author, Sherwin Nuland, describes a meeting with a Chinese colleague during a medical conference. Naturally this conversation was primarily about the different views of western and eastern medicine. Eastern traditional medicine is based on a worldview of wholeness and quality, whilst the western-oriented view of science is dominated by a quantitative, analytic view. At present they are irreconcilably opposed to each another, and therefore need to be reconciled in a way that takes the physically perceptible side of life just as seriously as the invisible and immeasurable nature of the soul-spiritual realm.
In the course of their professional discussion, the Chinese doctor who was also knowledgeable about western medicine said of traditional Chinese healers: ‘When they talk about the liver or the thyroid, for instance, they don’t mean the organ itself. What they are referring to is the idea of the organ. That’s a very different thing. For that, anatomy is not needed.’4
If therefore we do not regard specific physical phenomena and activities within the organs as the fundamental expression of a living and ensouled whole that finds its visible expression in bodily symptomatology, and if this whole is not rediscovered in every single organic structure — if you like, ‘heaven’ on and within the ‘earth’ — then it is scarcely possible to build a bridge between them. That, incidentally, was also Goethe’s wish for medicine when he jokingly but aptly said: ‘A doctor must be fit for anything. We began with the stars and ended with chicken’s eyes.’
We think that a reconciliation of these two opposing attitudes can only succeed when separate things, which for scientific reasons have to be isolated, are again connected up with the superordinate whole, and on the other hand the comprehensive idea, as ‘spiritual bond’, also makes the distinct and separate parts explicable. In other words we must be able to trace the ‘idea of the human being’ right into organ functions of the liver, gall bladder, heart and kidney, otherwise the liver is just a liver, the kidney just a kidney, apparently the same as the organs of the same names in cows or pigs.
A great many details of the anatomy and physiology of individual organs are taught in medical studies, but has anyone ever understood from their training anything about the essence of the liver—which the Chinese doctor calls ‘the general’, the Russians speak of as ‘pechen’, from ‘pech’ meaning an oven, or which ancient Greek and medieval physicians connected with the planet Jupiter? But once we gain a holistic, overall idea, this cannot become or remain vaguely mystical, but we must endeavour to make the various details of the organs qualitatively comprehensible: the position, colour, form, embryonic development of each. Then the living biography and physiognomy of an organ or even of an illness can be understood in far greater detail. Only then will we really have a holistic medicine worthy of the name!
So we must at least adopt the view of ‘The Little Prince’ of St. Exupéry and not always see only the outer side of something, see ‘the hat’ and theorize into it everything we possibly can, but also see everything that is really hidden in the hat-shaped snake — the ‘elephant’ that is to begin with invisible to the physical eye, the parable-like nature behind all that is transitory.
It seems to us that the bridge we seek can be built by the method that we call the phenomenological imagination. This tries to understand the physical appearance of something as the perceived ‘exterior’ of a superordinate spiritual dynamic. For without underlying ideas, nothing whatever can arise in the visible world. We need only think here of technology. Why should it be different in the realm of life? In this way organs can become individual ‘destiny portraits’ with their own past, present and future, as is true of individual people and of humanity itself as it changes over the ages. The exclusively brain-oriented attitude of people is the result of recent development. For instance in earlier times the heart was seen as an organ of destiny and of memory. This can be clearly seen in the English or the French language, when being able to remember something is brought into connection with the heart: ‘to learn by heart’ or ‘apprendre par cœur’. In the Chinese language the sign for ‘thinking’ is the picture of the heart.
This book was written for the kind of people who, as laymen interested in medicine, want to extend their knowledge, and do not always want to be told what to think by ‘experts’. At a time of increasing uncertainty in healthcare policy, driven also by a pharmaceutical industry founded on perpetuating illness,5 it is more necessary than ever for people to exercise their healthy human reason. Thus the more people know about their organism, the better they can preserve their health and cope with crises, suffering, fear and pain.
So we will return here, once again, to the ancient ideas of Greek dietetics and hygiene, and the Arabian and medieval rules for health (regimen sanitatis); to the intentions of Hufelands as formulated in his ‘macrobiotics’ — or the ‘art of prolonging human life’; to Baron von Feuchtersleben’s inspired efforts in his work, On the Dietetics of the Soul. Chinese medicine, too, will be accorded its place; as will, not least, the aims of anthroposophically extended spiritual science. While ‘salutogenesis’ — the theory of health — is increasingly acknowledged today, we should be conscious of the fact that this outlook is by no means a modern invention but much more a rediscovery of ancient knowledge.
How topical an ancient holistic and cosmic knowledge of the human being really is in today’s health debate, is apparent from a statement in the Yellow Emperor, a Chinese textbook on medicine written around 3,000 years BC. This tells us, in particular, how we can learn what governs the universe and nature, so as to keep our lives healthy and to develop individually. Somewhat resignedly it also informs us that while the ‘Dao’, the universal cosmic law, was always obeyed by the wise, and even subscribed to by the ignorant, the latter usually did not follow it in practice. Everything opposed to the harmony of nature, it says, must lead to havoc of body and soul.
This was why the wise did not treat those who were already ill, but restricted themselves to instructing those who were still in good health. They wanted in fact only to teach those who did not offer any resistance to nature […]. To administer medicaments for illnesses that have already occurred and to suppress symptoms that have already broken out can be compared to the behaviour of people who only dig a hole for a well after they have become thirsty; such behaviour is comparable with not producing weapons until after the battle has already broken out.6
The author feels connected with and indebted to this attitude, one held for more than five thousand years, and hopes to find open-minded readers and perspicacious laymen for what is presented in the following pages.
It is not possible in this context to characterize the anatomical and physiological details and functions of the organs in greater detail. There is literature in the Appendix that leads both further and deeper into these matters. The concern here in the first place is to give a ‘picture’ of what is going on invisibly and visibly in our bodily nature, and of which, although we inhabit our bodies for many decades, we often have less of an idea about than we have about our car or washing machine.
In this respect we feel closely connected with a concern of the French novelist, Guy de Maupassant who, in the periodical Gaulois (1882), formulated it as follows:
What I want to find in a book is people of flesh and blood: they must be my neighbours, must be people I relate to, must feel the same joys and suffering I experience, and must have a little of myself about them; while I read of them, I want to be continually comparing them with myself.7
Heiner Geissler, previously a minister for Youth, Family and Health, recently published a book bearing the Latin title, Sapere aude! (Dare to know!) —Why we Need a New Enlightenment, which is chiefly concerned with factors underlying economic problems. He urges us to acquire knowledge about life and the contemporary situation, to think about things for ourselves and not accept everything people suggest or assert … an important theme raised as far back as the eighteenth century in the philosopher Kant’s article, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ His view was that individuals should endeavour, through reflection — that is, by activating their own reasoning powers — to overcome ‘their self-imposed immaturity’. The same applies equally in medicine. We might say: Endeavour individually, i.e. autonomously, to shape your life, your health and illness, even your death. In order to do this it is of course necessary to possess knowledge of one’s own organism and frame of mind, so that, as the ancient doctrine of dietetics proposed, we lead our life consciously, and, while still healthy, find the information we need to remain so. We find these same intentions again in modern ‘salutogenesis’, which is concerned with maintaining health and cultivating an individual balance of forces. In this respect the author feels himself connected with Baron von Feuchtersleben’s work On the Dietetics of the Soul and Hufeland’s Macrobiotics—or the Art of prolonging Life, two significant works from the nineteenth century that have perpetuated both the ancient Greek as well as the traditional Chinese tradition of active prophylaxis.
The author has, in the course of the years, received much positive response for offering a ‘missing link’ between textbooks for doctors and popular literature on maintaining health. ‘Know thyself’, the motto of the temple at Delphi, is something that can still be our ideal today, at every level of existence.
Berlin, January 2014
Following lectures or seminars people often ask me where this book’s unusual title came from. Originally I planned to use an expression by Nietzsche for the title — ‘Reading the Book of the Body’, but my publisher at the time thought this sounded too academic. After pondering long and hard, I woke up with the words, ‘If the organs could speak’ in my ear, and immediately had the sense that this phrase could not have been invented, that it had been sent to me! It seemed to me that my task, in all humility, was to act as a kind of translator of the secret workings of our organs.
I would here like to thank pioneering anthroposophic colleagues whose words and writings inspired me and enlarged my knowledge. I also want to thank my audiences and patients for their positive response and for sharing their own personal experiences, and for thus eliciting some unusual thoughts in me. My encounter with Asian physicians repeatedly confirmed for me that it is possible to have constructive dialogue between different worldviews and pictures of the human being if one is willing to let go of fixed schemas or dogmas.
The current edition has two additional chapters on the pancreas and on the thyroid and hormone glands. I have also expanded my descriptions of the spleen, heart and liver.
Ascona, May 2016