A new herball

Chiefly thanks to the studies by Lester King and Karl Eduard Rothschuh, historians have been broadly informed about the iatromechanical system of Friedrich Hoffmann. More recently, Ingo W Muller has examined the influential Halle professor's main work Medicina rationalis systematica (1718-40), including its parts on therapeutics, in greater detail, critically comparing it with examples of modem Galenism. Almut Lanz, in her Braunschweig inaugural dissertation under Erika Hickel, adds to this research by asking whether and how Hoffmann's pharmacology, materia medica, and actual therapeutic practice were influenced by his iatromechanics. Based on her reading of his Fundamenta medicinae (1695), she concludes that his theoretical, corpuscular pharmacology followed logically from his physiology and pathology. Differently shaped particles of the remedies were thought to act on the "particles" of the blood and "nervous juice", improving their flow and thus the all-important "tone" of the muscular fibres. In accordance with his mechanical ideas, Hoffmann distinguished four large groups of remedies: evacuants, alterants, roborants, and sedatives. Moreover, Lanz has scrutinized 54 of Hoffmann's case histories from the first three parts of his Medicina consultatoria (1721-39) and provides a pharmaceutical historical analysis of the 286 different remedies prescribed or recommended by him in these cases. Compared to an average materia medica of eighteenth-century German pharmacies (worked out in 1962 by Herbert Wietschoreck), Hoffmann used proportionally more simples for his recipes-in line with Hermann Boerhaave's motto "the simple is the seal of truth". Many of the medicines could be prepared in the patient's house. If the Halle professor prescribed composita, he preferred his own proprietary remedies, such as his Balsamum Vitae and his Liquor anodynus mineralis, the famous "Hoffmann's drops" still known today. As Lanz further shows, both the Hippocratic-Galenic and the Paracelsianchemiatric tradition were represented in Hoffmann's materia medica. What was new was his interpretation of the medicines' mode of action. Evacuants were still very prominent in his pharmacotherapy, although he apparently refrained from using cantharides and emetics. Some characteristics of his prescribing habits, such as a preference for fluid medicines, for balsams, and ethereal oils, seem to have stemmed more directly from his corpuscular pharmacology. And his Liquor anodynus mineralis was supposed to have antispasmodic properties, reducing the tone of the fibres. On the whole, Lanz's results suggest that Hoffmann's iatromechanical ideas did guide his choice of remedies and pharmacotherapeutic practice, though rather in terms of adjustment, modification, and addition, than in the form of a radical change of conventional treatment. Her careful study contributes to our understanding of the difficult relationship between new theories and actual practice in eighteenth-century medicine. It would gain in comparative value, if researchers were stimulated to conduct similar analyses of the therapeutics of other, differently oriented "innovators" of this period. Without doubt, the prime candidate for such an investigation would be Hoffmann's colleague and intellectual "rival" at Halle, Georg Ernst Stahl.