Form, Life, and Consciousness: An Introduction to Anthroposophic Medicine and Study of the Human Being

Product Description

“You take all of Nature together to shed light on individual details; in the totality of her phenomena, you seek to explain the individual. From simple levels of organization, you ascend to the more complex, ultimately assembling the most complex of all―the human being.” ―Friedrich Schiller (in a letter to Goethe)
Dr. Armin Husemann outlines―for doctors, therapists, students, and other interested readers―the basics and essential aspects of anthroposophic medicine. He takes the reader on an exciting journey of discovery through the realms of minerals, plants, animals, and humankind. In doing so, diverse, unfamiliar perspectives open up for the practice of medicine and other forms of healthcare and therapy.
Dr. Husemann provides an abundance of scientific details that look at the whole person today. He shows ways to recapture the human being within the context of life, nature, and its spiritual origin. This is the essence and basis of anthroposophically extended medicine. The author uses numerous examples to illustrate how a phenomenological encounter with nature leads to a fuller understanding of the human organism and its various clinical pictures, opening new ways toward a more holistic practice of therapies and the healing process.
Form, Life, and Consciousness is one of those rare resources that serve as a guide for the professional while also remaining accessible to those who are interested in gaining a better understanding of the whole human being and a spiritual–scientific approach to medicine and therapy.
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C O N T E N T S:
Foreword: “From Reductionist Science to Living Thinking in Medicine”Preface
1. Form and life2. Life and Consciousness: From Amphibians to Reptiles3. Humans and Animals4. The Human Being and the Processes of Nature5. Clinical Pictures and Disease Patterns6. Working Principles of Therapeutic Eurythmy7. Medical Thinking and Moral Practice
Afterword: “Goethe’s Thinking Applied to the Physician’s Path of Training”

Review

“Anthroposophy begs to be lived out in confidence and beauty. Where it does, it convinces, and becomes a force of healing and new creation. Form, Life, and Consciousness is such an example. It expresses the harvest of a lifetime, illustration by illustration, and discovery after discovery. An imminently readable book, it will fascinate anyone interested in the riddles of the human mind, body, and spirit. It is a must-read for anthroposophic doctors, and a copy belongs in every Steiner School library for science classes. Indeed. The world would be a very different place if it were a resource tool in general education.” ―C. T. Roszell (
from his review of the book in “Being Human,” winter–spring 2020 (quarterly journal of the Anthroposophical Society in America))

“Medical études” is the title Armin Husemann would have preferred for the studies published here, and rightly so. In this book, Husemann―an anthroposophic physician, Goethean researcher, teacher, and head of the Eugen Kolisko Academy at the Filder Clinic in Filderstadt (near Stuttgart)―develops a medical perspective on the human being that infuses the often highly abstract scientific foundations of medicine with artistic sensibility. The result is a new, supple form of medical thinking that might be called “medical science through art,” to use an expression previously coined by Husemann himself….
Armin Husemann’s art-imbued study of the human being and the natural world is constantly growing, differentiating, metamorphosing, and developing, as this book also testifies. His “human science” has assumed something of an organismic form itself; it is not a schematic system that can ever be “finalized.” In Dr. Husemann, we experience an exemplary enlivening and humanizing of science and teaching. In my view, science and education need to be adapted to conform to the human and natural worlds on a deeper level. The need for evolution in this direction is all too obvious in undesirable developments of the p