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.
All work in the hospital serves to help the sick and suffering person. The design of this work depends on how deeply one is able to penetrate the understanding of illness and health. If illness is understood as an impairment of the sick person and the healing tendency as the struggle of individuality for self-realization, the guiding principle of medical and nursing action results from this: Support the sick person in realizing his individual possibilities and in the confrontation with his sick body, his fate and the environment, to invest new forms of realization. (Gerhard Kienle: Preamble of the Herdecke Community Hospital, 1975)