Background
Johann Christian Reil was born on February 20, 1759, in Rhaude, Germany. Reil was the son of a Lutheran pastor in the small East Friesland town of Rhaude.
Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany
After Reil received his medical degree on 9 November 1782, he went to Berlin to complete a year-long clinical course at the College of Medicine and Surgery, a course required of all physicians wanting to practice medicine in Prussia.
1812
Dissection of the human brain, Johann Christian Reil.
Johann Christian Reil, a German physician, physiologist, anatomist, and psychiatrist.
Johann Christian Reil
Reilstr, 18 06114 Halle Saale, Duitsland
Bust of Johann Christian Reil by Max Lange (bronze, reproduction cast from 1947). Photograph reproduced by permission of the Photographic Service, University Hospital Halle.
University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany
Reil began his medical studies at Göttingen in April 1779.
Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany
Reil studied anatomy and surgery under Phillip Meckel (1755-1803) and medicine under Johann Goldhagen (1742-88) at the University of Halle.
Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany
After Reil received his medical degree on 9 November 1782, he went to Berlin to complete a year-long clinical course at the College of Medicine and Surgery, a course required of all physicians wanting to practice medicine in Prussia.
anatomist physician psychiatrist scientist
Johann Christian Reil was born on February 20, 1759, in Rhaude, Germany. Reil was the son of a Lutheran pastor in the small East Friesland town of Rhaude.
Reil began his medical studies at Göttingen in April 1779, transferring after three semesters to Halle (matriculating on 14 October 1780), where he studied anatomy and surgery under Phillip Meckel (1755-1803) and medicine under Johann Goldhagen (1742-88).
Reil received his medical degree on 9 November 1782 with a dissertation on biliary disease and moved to Berlin to complete a year-long clinical course at the College of Medicine and Surgery, a course required of all physicians wanting to practice medicine in Prussia. This College, originally founded in 1725 as a training facility for army physicians and surgeons, was unattached to any university (Humboldt’s new university would not open until 1810) but along with its associated hospital, the Charité, it was the largest and best-equipped medical facility in Prussia.
After graduation, Reil returned to Norden to practice medicine and published a highly popular manual of dietary instructions.
In 1787 Reil went to Halle as a clinical instructor, and then assistant professor, under the auspices of his former teacher Goldhagen. Following Goldhagen’s death a year later, Reil was appointed clinical professor and director of the clinical institute. He also became Halle's municipal physician (Stadtphysikus) in 1789, a post which he retained throughout the difficult years of the Napoleonic occupation.
Reil witnessed the economic collapse of Halle in 1806 and the closing of its university. He spent much time caring for the wounded soldiers who crowded into the city's lazaretto. By 1807 he was involved in reorganizing Halle's institution of higher learning, which reopened in 1808 with Reil as dean of the medical school. He also promoted Halle as a center for balneotherapy.
In 1810 Reil was invited by Wilhelm von Humboldt to participate in the organization of the medical school at the University of Berlin. With the support of the clinician Christoph W. Hufeland (1762-1836), some of Reil’s proposals were adopted and he himself was placed in charge of the university’s medical clinic. Soon, however, he experienced difficulties because of his growing personal conflict with both Hufeland and Karl F. von Graefe (1787-1840), his former student who headed the surgical division, as well as with the Prussian bureaucracy.
With the renewal of hostilities against Napoleon in 1813, Reil volunteered for military duty and attempted to organize a private hospital in Berlin for the wounded, which would be controlled and staffed by a number of prominent citizens, including Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia. He strongly criticized the conditions prevailing in the larger military hospitals, advocating instead the creation of smaller and more manageable units. His pleas were, however, largely ignored by the established bureaucracy and actively opposed by von Graefe.
When Reil returned to Halle in 1787, he was primarily concerned with clinical subjects. The four parts of his Memorabilium clinicorum, published between 1790 and 1795, portray a shrewd observer of human sickness, a keen diagnostician as well as a resourceful medical and surgical healer. Reil rejected the idea of a perennially beneficial healing force in nature, insisting that the physician take charge of the situation.
In 1795 Reil founded the first journal dealing with physiology in Germany, Archiv fur die Physiologic, which was to present works in physics, chemistry, histology, biology, and comparative anatomy. One of the initial articles was a short monograph by Reil concerning the vital force of the organism. This subject was attracting great attention in contemporary medical circles since the elucidation of the Lebenskraft was expected to provide the foundations for medical theory and practice.
In April 1813, Reil appealed directly to the Prussian monarch, Friedrich Wilhelm III, and was appointed chief inspector of all lazarettos west of the Elbe. By September of the same year, sanitary conditions had deteriorated alarmingly because of a tremendous increase in the number of casualties in Bliicher’s army; an epidemic of typhus among the poorly treated soldiers compounded the difficulties. Reil's efforts to halt the disease were greatly hindered by the battle of Leipzig. Reil was untiring in his efforts to evacuate these victims, organizing makeshift hospitals for them in Leipzig, Halle, and the surrounding villages. In the process, he contracted typhus and died in his sister’s house in Halle, a victim of his final humanitarian efforts.
Reil’s career and achievements can be presented from three different viewpoints: as a famous physician with certain medical ideas and clinical competence; as an energetic medical educator and organizer of medical services; and as an innovator in psychiatric care.
(Volume 3)
1815Reil believed that the appearance and actions of the living organism were based on material and structural changes alone. For him, Lebenskraft was only a term designating the special and characteristic manifestations of living matter. Generation, growth, nutrition, and reproduction all occurred according to chemical laws. He concluded that the physicochemical approach would be the most successful in achieving a further understanding of living beings.
Reil published the first volume of his most important work on fevers in 1799. In the prologue he declared his opposition to the prevailing systems of medicine, stressing instead observation and experiment. In the organism, he distinguished between “mixture” - chemical composition - and “form” - the overall result of chemical affinities and combinations - a theme also treated by his student Johann F. Meckel. Therefore, disease ought to be viewed as a deviation from the normal bodily “mixture” and “form.” Such concepts led Reil to propose a “pathological chemistry” and to formulate plans for new pharmacology based on the same premises.
Originally a follower of Kantian philosophy and epistemology, Reil gradually approached Schelling’s philosophy of nature, especially after 1804. He had been concerned about the mind-body dualism, the uniqueness of the physicochemical reactions in living organisms, and the inadequacy of strictly mechanical modes of physiological explanation. In his final speech at the University of Halle, delivered on 8 September 1810, Reil revealed the transformation of his thought. He declared that his previous fondness for various explanations had finally given way to a “living perception of intuition.” Instead of dealing with mechanical principles, medicine was now to be guided by certain fundamental ideas, and observation had therefore reached a higher level from which all objects could be seen in their natural relationships. Reil concluded that natural events could be traced back to laws which coincided with those of the thinking mind.
At Berlin, Reil's philosophical speculations did not endear him to Hufeland, as shown in the latter’s critical remarks following the posthumous publication of Reil’s last works. Reil’s interpretation of cerebral anatomy in terms of polarity proved equally confusing, yet his pioneer anatomical research placed him at the forefront of contemporary neuroanatomy.
Reil was a visionary medical educator. Not only was he a stimulating teacher, but his emphasis on bedside teaching and research had a lasting impact. During his tenure at Halle, the medical school became the most prominent teaching center in Germany, boasting such firsts as clinical laboratories, better correlation between clinical findings and pathological anatomy, and instruction in psychology.
Reil attempted to close the gap between physicians and surgeons in Germany by proposing better educational standards for the latter. He was keenly interested in training paramedical personnel who could fill the unmet medical needs of the rural population; they would need to know only certain health regulations and procedures without possessing a thorough understanding of the bodily functions. By contrast, he insisted that the physician be properly educated and acquainted with the prevailing anatomical and physiological knowledge. Reil viewed physicians as individuals who apply certain known theoretical principles rather than as mere empirical technicians who operate purely at random.
Reil’s philosophical orientation shifted towards Schelling’s Naturphilosophie in his 1803 book on insanity and its therapies (Rhapsodies on the Use of Psychological Therapies for the Mentally Disturbed). Here insanity is no longer seen as a straying of autonomous reason, but rather as a fragmentation of the rational self and its consequent inability to properly construct the non-ego. Sanity was now viewed as a proper balancing of one’s mental forces that themselves arise from an interplay of less complex forces within the nervous system. These mental forces were Selbstbewußtsein (the sense of oneself as a distinct, continuous, and integrated person), Besonnenheit (the sense of the relative importance of objects of awareness, allowing one to allocate attention appropriately), and Aufmerksamkeit (the ability to attend to what one chooses).
An imbalance of these forces could be corrected in various ways, ranging from ‘talking cures’ to various forms of shock treatment (such as plunging the patient into a tub of live eels). Reil’s shift away from a wholly mechanistic account of nature is most apparent in his 1807 study on pregnancy, where Reil claims that uterine behavior is inexplicable without positing something like Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb.
Reil’s Rhapsodies (1803) also pioneered reforms in the care and treatment of the mentally ill, such as housing the curable and incurable separately. His interests in hydrotherapy led to opening a spa during his last years in Halle - one of the first in Germany - and after moving to Berlin he continued to promote the building of public baths and saunas as a matter of public hygiene as well as for therapeutic uses. He also discussed euthanasia (1816), having witnessed killings of lingering patients, generally by suffocation. Here he argued for the relief of bodily and emotional unease, but not for the hastening of death.
Reil was made a member in 1793 of Germany’s oldest scientific society, the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina, although he was never invited into the Berlin Academy.
Reil was married to Johanna Willemina Leveaux, the daughter of a prominent family, and together they had two sons and four daughters.