title: [Health pedagogy instead of consolation. Theological adjustment to illness by Philipp Melanchthon and Caspar Peucer].
abstract: Subject of this paper is the interpretation of disease as physical evil (malum physicum) by the university professors Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560) and Caspar Peucer (1525-1602) at Protestant Wittenberg. Melanchthon and Peucer settled the problem of theodicy principally by theological strategies of moralization and compensation. In most cases, therefore, disease resulted from inadequate health behavior, especially drunkenness, furthermore from disdain for medicine and obstruction of divine healing. As a rule, natural factors (e.g. celestial bodies or human affections) only contributed to disease. In general it was caused by free will. In consequence the strategies of depotentiation and functionalization of disease became insignificant resulting in the accentuation of its evil nature. By way of compensation Melanchthon and Peucer stressed the Divine healing of disease. God created the natural remedies and later He created the medical arts by granting heroic virtue to the greatest doctors (Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna). Moreover the divine Trinity could directly harmonize affections. Thus, God incited a psychosomatical healing within the human organism. As far as physical evil is concerned Lutheran pathology substituted medieval pessimism for therapeutical optimism. Melanchthon and Peucer strived to discipline the patients' behavior and to legitimate the medical arts by God. In this sense their pathology formed part of a program of social and religious stabilization. The academic medicine profited greatly from that program in later years.
authors.affiliation: Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg Institut für Geschichte der Medizin Im Neuenheimer Feld 327 D-69120 Heidelberg.
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Bröer
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hofheinz
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D002835:Christianity / Q000266:history*; D005858:Germany; D006266:Health Education / Q000266:history*; D049668:History, 15th Century; D049669:History, 16th Century; D006801:Humans; D008602:Mental Healing / Q000266:history*; D011602:Psychophysiologic Disorders / Q000266:history*; D012069:Religion and Psychology
vernacular_title: Gesundheitspädagogik statt Tröstung Die theologische Bewältigung von Krankheit bei Philipp Melanchthon und Caspar Peucer.