Health Care between Medicine and Religion: The Case of Catholic Western Germany around 1800

Abstract

he relationship between medicine and religion belongs to the classical topics of medical history, in the studies of the so called early civilizations, mainly Egypt and Babylonia, of Greek and Roman antiquity, of the occidental and oriental Middle Ages and of the European early modern period. Yet about a century ago, preformed by enlightenment ideas on linear progress of humankind and often explicitly following Auguste Comte’s cultural evolution theory of human development from magic via religion to science, many historians and sociologists dismissed any important role of religion in and for modern society. This was especially true for the view of health, illness and healing and has influenced the writing of medical history until today. Hence the period since the eighteenth century has been almost exclusively treated as an era with obvious characteristics: by that time science seemed to have excluded religion from medicine. T