Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Off with Their Heads? { 21

would take on a key function in the new medical discourse. Whereas the classi-

cal doctor had striven to transcend the suspect temporality of concrete patho-

logical symptoms, now diseases came to be perceived in terms of an organic

process. The doctor’s task was no longer to assign a disease its proper place

in an established nosographical table, but rather to observe the course of indi-

vidual cases.

As Volker Roelcke argues, the conjunction between the temporalization—or,

indeed, narrativization—of illness and medical discourse, on the one hand, and

the modern concept of history as organic development, on the other hand, made

diagnostic cultural criticism possible. At the same time that illnesses began to tell

stories, history came to be seen as the cause of particular diseases. Toward the

end of the eighteenth century, a certain class of illness (Zivilisationskrankheiten)

came to be seen as the product of specifically historical development.^19 Since

illness and history were now understood as operating according to basically

analogous logics (temporalized causality), medicine was able to provide a po-

tent vocabulary with which to plot the course of history. Medicine, especially

psychology and psychiatry, emerged as a privileged locus of cultural critique

precisely as the diagnosis of cultural illness came to imply a certain philosophy

of history, and, conversely, as philosophies of history came to be articulated in

terms of the movement of history toward health or illness.^20

As diseases acquired a temporal and quasi-narrative structure, the stories they

told were naturally recorded. New medical or quasi-medical genres emerged in

the eighteenth century. A new medical historiography self-consciously broke

with an older form of medical chronology and stressed the importance of identi-

fying causal connections in the progress of medical history. New genres emerged,

such as the individual pathography and—most importantly for Bendavid—the

psychological case study. The most important periodical for the publication of

case studies in the late Enlightenment was Gnothi Sauton, oder Magazin zur

Erfahrungsseelenkunde als ein Lesebuch für Gelehrte und Ungelehrte (Know

yourself, or journal of empirical psychology: a reader for scholars and laymen),

a pioneering psychological journal that appeared from 1783 to 1793 under the

editorship of Karl Philipp Moritz, sometimes assisted by coeditors Karl Fried-

rich Pockels and, in the journal’s final years, Salomon Maimon.

As Martin Davies has noted, it was Moritz who first “advanced the notion of

the ‘case-study’ as means of self-knowledge” by generalizing his own pietistic

introspectiveness.^21 In programmatic essays launching the Magazin zur Erfah-

rungsseelenkunde Moritz called for accounts based on self-observation as well as

case histories of others by “moralische Ärzte” (moral doctors). In one 1782 essay

he underscored the need to complement conventional medicine with a science