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)

In the 1970s, he campaigned for the legal anchoring and economic reimbursability of homeopathic, naturopathic, and anthroposophic medicine in the German health care system. He questioned the claim to absoluteness of the controlled randomized study as proof of efficacy and placed a focus on the individual knowledge of the treating physician. In his role as scientific expert of the Pharmaceutical Committee of the German Parliament, he was largely responsible for the methodologically pluralistic version of the Pharmaceutical Law of 1976.

In 1982, he was a key co-founder of the University of Witten/Herdecke, the first private university in the Federal Republic of Germany. Its founding was preceded by various networking efforts with international scientists. On September 24, 1973, Gerhard Kienle's association with Karl-Ernst Schäfer led to a symposium entitled "Man-centered Physiological Science and Medicine". The lectures were published in the volumes "Toward a man-centered science" (1977), "Basis of an Individual Physiology" (1979) and "Individuation Process and Biographical Aspects of Disease" (1979).

This was followed by the establishment of a "Foundation Free European Academy of Sciences (FEAW)" in the summer of 1976, which brought together more than 60 international university teachers with anthroposophical-anthropological concerns. Among them were anthroposophically motivated university teachers such as Herbert Hensel, Gunther Hildebrandt, Wolfgang Blankenburg and Bernard Lievegoed as well as international scientists such as the computer specialist Joseph Weizenbaum and the physiologist Paul Weiss. In the invitation letter of the FEAW Diether Lauenstein formulated:

It [the FEAW] brings together scholars who seek the common intellectual basis of their sciences, work against mere positivism, and connect their fields of expertise in an interdisciplinary way, not only retrospectively. While the inviters regard Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy as a fruitful interpretation of the world, they wish to connect in the Academy with all such scholars who pose the question of truth in their science philosophically.

The FEAW organized eleven conferences and symposia from 1976 to the end of 1996.

In his books, Gerhard Kienle criticized, for example, the prevailing belief in the transferability of results from animal experiments with drugs to humans by pointing out differences in principle between humans and animals and trying to expose inadmissible argumentation in favor of animal experiments, although he was not opposed to these experiments in principle.

Works

• Die Chorea Huntington -Fälle von 1900 bis Februar 1947 aus der Universitätsklinik für Nerven- und Gemütskrankheiten der Eberhard-Karl-Universität Tübingen. Diss. 1948
• Notfalltherapie neurologischer und psychiatrischer Erkrankungen. Thieme, Stuttgart 1964; 3. erw. A. 1978
• Kienle, Gerhard (1968). Die optischen Wahrnehmungsstörungen und die nichteuklidische Struktur des Sehraumes [The optical perceptual disorders and the non-Euclidean structure of the visual space.] (in Deutsch). Thieme.
• Arzneimittelsicherheit und Gesellschaft. Eine kritische Untersuchung. Schattauer, Stuttgart/New York 1974
• Die Zulassung von Arzneimitteln und der Widerruf von Zulassungen nach dem Arzneimittelgesetz von 1976 (mit Rainer Burkhardt). Urachhaus, Stuttgart 1982
• Der Wirksamkeitsnachweis für Arzneimittel. Analyse einer Illusion (mit Rainer Burkhardt). Urachhaus, Stuttgart 1983
• Die ungeschriebene Philosophie Jesu. Urachhaus, Stuttgart 1983
• Christentum und Medizin. Vier Vorträge. Urachhaus, Stuttgart 1986
• Wissenschaft und Anthroposophie. Impulse für neue Wege der Forschung (Mitverfasser). Urachhaus, Stuttgart 1989