Carl Gustav Carus

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Carl Gustav Carus by Julius Hübner (1844)

Carl Gustav Carus (3 January 1789 – 28 July 1869) was a German physician (gynecologist, anatomist and pathologist), painter, natural philosopher, and psychologist.

In his philosophy, he conceived of the cosmos as a whole permeated with life; his paintings combined the life of the soul accessible in dreams with landscape art according to Goethe's ideal. He is considered one of the most versatile polymaths of 19th century Germany. Carus was the 13th president of the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina, founded in 1652 in the imperial city of Schweinfurt, which became the National Academy of Sciences in 2008.

His complete works were comprehensively honored in 2009/2010 in two exhibitions accompanied by scholarly publications in Dresden (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Galerie Neue Meister) and Berlin (Berlin State Museums, Alte Nationalgalerie).

Biography

Carl Gustav Carus was born at Ranstadt, Leipzig, Electorate of Saxony, the son of Gottlob Ehrenfried Carus (1763–1842), a dyer from Mühlhausen in Thuringia, and his wife, Christiana Elisabeth née Jäger (1763–1846), a master dyer's daughter. He spent his childhood in Mühlhausen and Leipzig, his youth in Leipzig. As an extern he attended the St. Thomas School from 1801 to 1804. From April 1804 to 1806, he studied physics, botany and chemistry at the University of Leipzig, and from 1806 medicine. Among his teachers was the physician and philosopher Ernst Platner, whose scientific work, which included aesthetics, influenced Carus. At the same time, he took classes at the Academy of Fine Arts. After working at the Jacob's Hospital in Leipzig from 1809, receiving his doctorate in philosophy in 1811, and his habilitation (with Dissertatio sistens specimen biologiae generalis), he was awarded a doctorate in medicine in Leipzig (with De uteri rheumatismo), also in 1811.

At the age of 22, the highly gifted Carus thus possessed two doctoral degrees and, as a novelty, lectured on comparative anatomy, in Germany for the first time as an independent subject at a university.

Carus was a personality of Goethe's time and belonged to the Romantic generation. His friends included Caspar David Friedrich, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Alexander von Humboldt, Ludwig Tieck, Ida von Lüttichau and King John I of Saxony. Together with Novalis, he is counted among the philosophical school of "magical idealism", which belongs to the entourage of German idealism.

He was married since 1811 to Caroline née Carus (1784–1859), the daughter of his grandfather Johann Gottlob Ehrenfried Carus. The couple had 6 sons (including the physician Albert Gustav Carus) and 5 daughters; their daughter Charlotte (1810–1838) was the wife of the sculptor Ernst Rietschel and mother of the physician Wolfgang Rietschel.

Carl Gustav Carus was buried in the Trinity Cemetery in Dresden.

Works

Physician

Carl Gustav Carus by
Johann Carl Rößler

After Carus had been an assistant to Johann Christian Jörg at the Trier Institute since 1811, the French authorities entrusted him in 1813, during the time of Battle of Leipzig, with the management of the lazaretto provisionally set up in the Pfaffendorf suburb. He contracted typhoid fever during the epidemic in Leipzig and narrowly escaped death. After his recovery, he moved to the royal midwifery school in Dresden in 1814. He directed the school and, from 1815, also worked as a professor of obstetrics. In the same year he was co-founder of the Surgical-Medical Academy in Dresden (housed in the [[Kurländer Pa Councillor. In 1828, Carus handed over the direction of the midwifery school to the physician Carl Friedrich Haase (1788–1865). In 1827, King Anthony of Saxony appointed Carus as one of his three personal physicians and awarded him the title of Court and Medical Councillor. In 1828 Carus handed over the direction of the midwifery school to the physician Carl Friedrich Haase (1788–1865). In 1839, Carus became a member of the Dante Committee under Prince John. In 1853, he became the first personal physician to King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony. In the same year he coined the term "unconsciousness" (see consciousness). In 1862, he was elected the 13th president of the Leopoldina Academy of Natural Scientists, of which he had been a member since 1818.

Carus is considered the philosophical predecessor of depth psychology. In his medical work, Carus, like Rudolf Virchow, stood for a science-based medicine. In contrast to Virchow, however, he did not want to rely solely on the objectifiable laws of mechanics, physics and chemistry, but wanted to secure the spirit (Spiritus) effective in nature and in man as a part of medicine. He is therefore often regarded as a romantic forerunner of that medicine which today is called holistic medicine.

File:Logo des Universitätsklinikums Dresden.svg
Emblem of the Dresden University Hospital

On the occasion of his 50th anniversary of service, the Carus Foundation was established on November 2, 1864 with a capital of 2,000 talers. In 1896, the first prize winner was awarded the Carus Prize, which is still awarded by the city of Schweinfurt today.

At the suggestion of Albert Fromme, the city of Dresden honored Carus in 1954 by bestowing his name on the Dresden Medical Academy, from which the present Carl Gustav Carus Dresden University Hospital of the TU Dresden emerged. In February 1993, the Reichpietschufer in Dresden's Inner Neustadt was renamed Carusufer. Also after Carl Gustav Carus, the new science park in the former Ledward Barracks in Schweinfurt was named Carus-Park in 2017 and its new main axis Carl-Gustav-Carus-Allee. In addition, the anthroposophical medical institutions Carl Gustav Carus Academy in Hamburg and the Carl Gustav Carus Institute Niefern-Öschelbronn in Baden-Württemberg were named after him.

Natural philosopher

In Von der deliberlichen Erregung ungewöhnlicher Zustände der Nachtseite des Lebens ("On the deliberate excitation of unusual states of the night side of life in general and on the mesmeric method in particular"), Carus examines mesmerism or animal magnetism as "life magnetism" and assumes that humans are connected to the whole world by means of "life magnetism".[1]

Just as intensively, on the basis of his knowledge of the medicine of the time and out of philosophical-speculative research urge, he dealt with magical movements such as pendulum, divining rod and table-turning, researched predictive dreams, sleep waking and clairvoyance, second sight and rapture. He also wrote three texts on "Magical Effects in Life, in Science and in Poetry and Art".

In his 1849 paper Über die uneleiche Befähigung der verschiedenen Menschenstämme für höhere geistige Entwicklung ("On the Unequal Capability of the Different Human Tribes for Higher Intellectual Development"), Carus sketched out a racial-theoretically determined image of man. There is a "well-born" descent, distinguished by unity of body and soul, as in Goethe, and there is the opposite. There is likewise a born elite among the peoples, who are therefore to be separated into "day peoples", that are Europeans and Arabs (e.g. Romans, Teutons, Greeks, Persians, Celts, Semites); "night peoples", that are Africans; and "peoples of dawn and dusk", that are East Asians and Indians. The day peoples alone are "culture-bearing"; the twilight peoples may produce a shadow of culture, but it has mostly been produced by the day peoples; the night peoples simply vegetate. Arthur de Gobineau took over this threefold division and the hierarchical classification of innate characteristics of the peoples, which are to be classified thereby more highly or less highly, directly from Carus. Both authors saw a nature-given upper world against the lower people, and they place an elite against the common people in each individual society, that is, the individual seen in his social environment.[2]

Painter

Already as a teenager Carus was interested in painting. His landscapes reflect the Romantic era's attitude to life. Carus' friend Goethe appreciated him as a thinker and creative person. The painter Caspar David Friedrich influenced him above all others. He also persuaded Carus to travel with him to the island of Rügen in 1819. He walked through the island and was strongly impressed by the "primal nature". Motifs such as The moonlit night at Rügen, Oaks by the sea and A mound grave with a resting hiker bear witness to the impressions that the island had left on him. He wrote these down in his report Eine Rügenreise im Jahre 1819 ("A journey to Rügen in 1819"). Later he also traveled to France (1835), Italy, England and Scotland (1844).

His pictorial themes were primarily ideal compositions depicting moonlit nights, mountains, forests, Gothic architecture and ruins, whereby he often took up Friedrich's motifs. Carus combined a romantic view of nature with the classical ideal of beauty: "The uniform interpenetration of reason and nature" constitutes the essence of a painting. He understood beauty in the Goethean sense as a triad of God, nature, and man. His paintings are often populated by figures in old German garb. He also painted views of Dresden and its surroundings. Furthermore, his small-format landscape cutouts and cloud paintings, spontaneously created outdoors, deserve attention. The trip to Italy in 1828 gave rise to the typical German longing for the "land where the lemons bloom" (Goethe) to be translated into Romantic sentimental painting, exemplified, for example, by his Memories of Sorrento.

In his choice of motifs, Carus often leaned on his friend Caspar David Friedrich in his early years, but ever since his second trip to Italy in 1828, he increasingly arrived at his own, less iconography-heavy pictorial inventions. He also became important and influential for Romantic art through his art-theoretical Briefe über Landschaftsmalerei ("Letters on landscape painting"), which he published in 1831.

Botanical Reference

The standard author abbreviation Carus is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.[3]

Publications

Memory of a Wooded Island in the Baltic Sea (Oak trees by the Sea)
Zoology, entomology, comparative anatomy, evolution
  • Lehrbuch der Zootomie (1818, 1834).
  • Erläuterungstafeln zur vergleichenden Anatomie (1826–1855).
  • Von den äusseren Lebensbedingungen der weiss- und kaltblütigen Tiere (1824).
  • Über den Blutkreislauf der Insekten (1827).
  • Grundzüge der vergleichenden Anatomie und Physiologie (1828).
  • Lehrbuch der Physiologie für Naturforscher und Aerzte (1838)- also medical
  • Zwölf Briefe über das Erdleben (1841).
  • Natur und Idee oder das Werdende und sein Gesetz. 1861.
Medical
  • Lehrbuch der Gynekologie (1820, 1838).
  • Grundzüge einer neuen Kranioskopie (1841).
  • System der Physiologie (1847–1849).
  • Erfahrungsresultate aus ärztlichen Studien und ärztlichen Wirken (1859).
  • Neuer Atlas der Kranioskopie (1864).
Psychology, metaphysics, race, physiognomy
  • Vorlesungen über Psychologie (1831).
  • Psyche; zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Seele (1846, 1851).
  • Über Grund und Bedeutung der verschiedenen Formen der Hand in veschiedenen Personen (About the reason and significance of the various forms of hand in different persons) (1846).
  • Physis. Zur Geschichte des leiblichen Lebens (1851).
  • Denkschrift zum 100jährigen Geburtstagsfeste Goethes. Über ungleiche Befähigung der verschiedenen Symbolik der menschlichen Gestalt (1852, 1858).
  • Über Lebensmagnetismus und über die magischen Wirkungen überhaupt (1857).
  • Über die typisch gewordenen Abbildungen menschlicher Kopfformen (1863).
  • Goethe dessen seine Bedeutung für unsere und die kommende Zeit (1863).
  • Lebenserinnerungen und Denkwürdigkeiten – 4 volumes (1865–1866).
  • Vergleichende Psychologie oder Geschichte der Seele in der Reihenfolge der Tierwelt (1866).
Art
  • Neun Briefe über Landschaftsmalerei. Zuvor ein Brief von Goethe als Einleitung (1819–1831).
  • Die Lebenskunst nach den Inschriften des Tempels zu Delphi ( 1863).
  • Betrachtungen und Gedanken vor auserwählten Bildern der Dresdener Galerie (1867).
Travel
Translations
  • Carus' translation of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, Paradise, Canto I. at academia.edu

Art gallery

  • The Colosseum in Moonlight

  • The Imperial Castle

  • In Memory of Sorrento

  • View of Dresden at Sunset

  • Barge Trip on the Elbe near Dresden

  • Balcony Room with a View of the Bay of Naples , 1829 or 1830.

  • Italian Moonshine (Rome, St. Peter's in Moonshine)

  • Tintern Abbey

  • Italian Fishermen in Port

  • Sailboat

  • Full Moon near Pillnitz

  • Woman on the Balcony

  • Stoane Age Mound

  • Carl Gustav Carus - Das Atelierfenster.jpg

    The Studio Window

See also

Citations

  1. ↑ Kleine, Sabine (1995). "Der Rapport zwischen tierischem Magnetismus und Hypnotismus". In: Würzburger medizinhistorische Mitteilungen 13, pp. 312–14.
  2. ↑ Mühlen, Patrik von Zur (1979). Rassenideologien: Geschichte und Hintergrunde. Berlin: Dietz.
  3. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

References

External links

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