Gerhard Kienle
Gerhard Kienle (* November 22, 1923 in Madrid; † June 2, 1983 in Herdecke) was a German anthroposophical physician, neurologist, health policy expert, and science theorist. He was the main founder of the Herdecke Community Hospital and the University of Witten-Herdecke. The Gerhard Kienle Chair of Medical Theory, Integrative and Anthroposophic Medicine at the University of Witten/Herdecke is named after him.
Life
The son of a diplomatic family, he grew up in Madrid and moved to Berlin in 1940. From 1945 to 1948 he studied medicine at the University of Tübingen, where he received his doctorate. There he founded an anthroposophical student group and an anthroposophical student union and dormitory, the Fichte House. In 1953 he became an assistant at the Nervenklinik of the University of Tübingen. From 1963 to 1968 he was neurological senior physician under Duus at the Northwest Hospital in Frankfurt am Main. During this time he wrote a free postdoctoral thesis on the non-Euclidean visual space of man, the question of which, according to Bernardo J. Gut, was inspired by Rudolf Steiner's recommendation that non-Euclidean geometry be applied to biological problems. In 1968 he participated in the laying of the foundation stone of the Herdecke Community Hospital, which was inaugurated in 1969. He was concerned with nursing as a personal approach to people, which led to the founding of a nursing school at the Herdecke Community Hospital, now the Dörthe Krause Institute.