Air cure

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Climatic sanatorium Falkenstein, open-air lounge around 1886
Hermann Brehmer

The climatic health resort (also Freiluftkur , Luftliegekur , Freiluftliegekur or outdoor rest cure ) is a form of air treatment , which since the 19th century longer than standard treatment for tuberculosis was. The patients lay on deck chairs outdoors or in open halls for several hours a day. The air cure was carried out in special lung healing facilities . The name climatic health resort goes back to this form of cure , which in Germany may be used by health resorts whose climate is particularly beneficial for health.

history

The idea that special climatic conditions can have a healing effect was already known in ancient times . So-called air baths were recommended in the Age of Enlightenment as a suitable means of physical hardening . In the 19th century, at about the same time, several German-speaking doctors propagated the effectiveness of the air cure, especially for tuberculosis, with the high altitude climate being considered particularly beneficial. The rest cure is probably the most impressive example of successful psychosomatic treatment of an organic disease. Until the introduction of effective drugs after World War II, it remained the most important measure of treatment for tuberculosis.

Hermann Brehmer

According to the sources, the doctor Hermann Brehmer (1826–1889) was the first in Germany to describe the previously incurable disease tuberculosis as curable with the help of an air cure. In 1856 he wrote his dissertation with the title The laws and the curability of chronic tuberculosis of the lungs . He assumed that there are “immune places” which on the one hand protect the residents effectively against the occurrence of tuberculosis due to their climate and on the other hand have a healing effect after the outbreak of the disease. In 1863 he had a sanatorium for lung patients built in Görbersdorf in Silesia , where he introduced the recumbent cure in the open. It became a prototype for lung sanatoriums.

As a botany student, Brehmer had tuberculosis and his doctor recommended that he seek out a climate that was more conducive to him. He traveled to the mountains of the Himalayas, carried out botanical studies there and returned home cured. He started to study medicine. Brehmer and Alexander Spengler, who was working as a landscape doctor in Davos at the same time, were convinced that the climate in villages where there were no tuberculosis cases should cure tuberculosis. However, Brehmer did not trust the healing properties of the climate alone. His tuberculosis sufferers had to undergo outdoor reclining cures on the balconies in the midst of fir forests with good nutrition.

Privy Councilor Peter Dettweiler

Peter Dettweiler

Brehmer's student Peter Dettweiler (1837–1904) extended the air cure to seven hours a day. In 1876 Dettweiler took over the management of the new sanatorium in Falkenberg im Taunus. In Falkenstein, in 1891, he set up the first German sanatorium for poor people with lung disease and triggered the wave of the “sanatorium movement”. The only activities allowed during this time were reading, writing, and quiet conversation. Dettweiler did not believe in a healing climate, but in healing through a regulated, disciplined lifestyle: “There is no specific treatment for tuberculosis and an immune climate. The phthise can be cured in any climate free from extremes. "

He decisively expanded the reclining cure established by Brehmer and created the term “closed sanatorium” with regulated, strict regulations. The disciplined open-air reclining cure he founded remained the main therapeutic agent available to sanatoriums against tuberculosis for almost a century. The reclining cure is intended to bring about a lifestyle that is adapted to the respective performance through personal hygiene and a disciplined lifestyle, through diet and instruction, and thus contribute to healing. It aimed at improving the overall constitution in order to heal the "local" disease. Peter Dettweiler also invented the typical deck chair and the Blauer Heinrich pocket spittoon . All decisive measures of the strictly regulated disciplined cure in a closed institution go back to Brehmer and his student Dettweiler.

Alexander Spengler

Alexander Spengler

In Switzerland, the German-born doctor Alexander Spengler (1827–1901) was a pioneer of the air cure. He began to practice as a country doctor in Davos in 1853 and soon came to the conviction that the residents of the area did not get sick with tuberculosis, which he explained with the high mountain climate. He published this theory. In 1860 the first spa guests were admitted to a Davos guesthouse, who underwent the outdoor spa treatment here. Together with Willem Jan Holsboer , Spengler founded the Spengler-Holsboer spa in 1868. In the following decades, several lung sanatoriums opened in Davos, and the place was called a climatic health resort. Patients came here from all over Europe, including celebrities. Another representative of the air cure was the Swiss Arnold Rikli , who had already established a sanatorium in Slovenia in 1855 .

Karl Turban

In 1889 Karl Turban (1856–1935) opened the first closed tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos, the “Sanatorium Turban”. He introduced the open-air reclining cure based on Dettweiler principles. Turban combined the effect of the high altitude climate with the strict lying cure treatment. Turban, had established himself as a general practitioner in Weinheim when he heard of the discovery of the tubercle bacillus. He went to Berlin to get to know the then new subject of bacteriology. There he fell ill with tuberculosis. Several stays on the Riviera followed. On recommendation he was given the medical management of the newly planned Davos sanatorium. Before starting his new job, he went to Falkenstein for two weeks to get to know Peter Dettweiler's treatment methods.

Turban's role model prevailed. In order to dispel the skepticism about the strict reclining cure and to persuade the patients to adhere to the cure in a disciplined manner, Turban lay with them in the reclining hall even in the afternoon in absolute peace. No one would have dared to read a newspaper, let alone talk to fellow patients.

Turban had undeniable successes, and patients from all over the world flocked to his sanatorium. With the opening of the private sanatorium Turban, the decisive change occurred in Davos. He managed to achieve a successful synthesis between a sanatorium treatment with a strict reclining cure and a high mountain cure.

Leopold Schrötter

Leopold Schrötter

In Austria, the aerial or reclining cure was mainly practiced in Leopold Schrötter's Alland Sanatorium and the sanatoriums in the Lower Austrian Alpine foothills. Based on the Wienerwald sanatorium founded in 1903 by the two doctors Hugo Kraus, a student of Leopold Schrötter, and Arthur Baer, ​​who had gained experience as an assistant doctor at Dettweiler in Falkenstein , the air cure - in addition to the mast cure - became the standard therapy in Austria in the early twentieth century applied. Crucial medical inventions such as the artificial pneumothorax, which was carried out for the first time in Austria by Hugo Kraus based on the Swiss model, or radiation using the cold quartz lamp did not make the reclining cure entirely superfluous. In the 1930s, air cure was the top form of therapy in the famous sanatoriums in the foothills of the Alps, such as the Wienerwald sanatorium, the Breitenstein sanatorium or the Felbring convalescent institution.

But as early as 1875, the Swiss doctor Emil Müller from Winterthur demonstrated that people who live permanently in a high altitude climate can contract tuberculosis and die from it, so that this climate does not make it "immune". Nevertheless, the lying cure in the open air was still prescribed as tuberculosis therapy until the middle of the 20th century and was considered to be promising. It was then replaced by other treatment methods, including chemotherapy .

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann set a literary monument to the air cure in his novel The Magic Mountain , which is set in a lung sanatorium in Davos. In doing so, Mann used his own experience, because in 1912 he visited his wife Katia Mann , who was in Davos for a cure for six months because of a lung disease. He kept her company during the reclining cure in the open air and caught a bad cold , whereupon the doctors diagnosed “dullness in the lungs” and recommended a stay of several months in the sanatorium. However, Mann preferred to leave after three weeks. Then in 1924 Der Zauberberg appeared .

Light baths

The idea of ​​the therapeutic air bath was combined with that of the light bath in the early 20th century , for example by Emanuel Felke . Such light baths were forms of light therapy with natural sunlight, i.e. sun baths .

literature

  • Petra Hofmann, Caroline Rolka: Light air baths - a phenomenon of leisure culture at the beginning of modernity . In: Die Gartenkunst  27 (2/2015), pp. 301–310.
  • Robert Jütte : History of Alternative Medicine. From folk medicine to today's unconventional therapies. CH Beck, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-406-40495-2 , pp. 135-143 (light, air and clay cures) .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Swiss Medical Journal: People's Sanatoriums in Switzerland (2000)
  2. ^ Article by the German Hygiene Museum on tuberculosis
  3. ↑ a b Deutsches Ärzteblatt on Alexander Spengler (2004)
  4. ^ Horst Prignitz: Water cure and bathing pleasure. Leipzig 1986, p. 200.