Volume 1 offers the most comprehensive account and interpretation of German Romantic medicine currently available. Dietrich von Engelhardt shows how philosophers, natural scientists and physicians from Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Goethe, Novalis to Carus, Heinroth, Eschenmayer, Kerner, Reil and Schubert to Müller and Purkyne sought to combine empiricism and philosophy, practice and theory, science, art and life as well as history and the future, what they understood by health, illness and therapy, doctor and patient, nature and culture. Historical and philosophical preconditions are taken into account, different orientations and emphases are described, the contemporary reception at home and abroad is traced, and their after-effects and suggestions for the present are addressed.