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Abstract

The philosophical interpretation of nature around 1800 exercised a deep influence on the natural sciences and medical disciplines, especially in regard to organisms, diseases and the relationship between nature and culture. Natural scientists and speculative philosophers in the Romantic era, a special phase between the 18th and 19th century, criticized the science of their time, but they in no way challenged the value and justification of an empirical approach to nature, though they rejected the absolutizing aspect of its positivistic perspective and pleaded for the unity of natural phenomena, the responsibility of man for nature, the concept of medicine as science and art.