Materia peccans
As Materia peccans ( lat. , The pathogenic substance of peccare = sin) is designated in the four humours theory to the 19th century generally an unnatural substance that causes a disease and needs to be completely eliminated. In order to enable the disease to be cured, doctors tried to remove the disease substance or matter from the body using suitable means . Today the term is only used in alternative medicine .
history
The term comes from the humoral pathology , which goes back to Hippocrates of Kos and partly represented the dominant medical theory until the 19th century. For the Hippocrats, this particularly meant abscess formation (in the sense of secretion) which, according to the theory, could be cooked in the body but not naturally excreted. Galen of Pergamon later used the terms harmful matter or bad juice for this . The noxia materia of Aulus Cornelius Celsus could be translated modern with pollutant.
In his Canon of Medicine took Avicenna this thinking, in the second book is found u. a .:
“And a medicament is poisonous which spoils the complexion (of a patient), not only by producing juices that are contrary to the patient and alien to his nature, but also by producing in abundance and inadmissible those juices that are suitable for him and are peculiar; as the monkshood ( napellus or aconitum ) does. "
Even with Hildegard von Bingen is always bad juices are mentioned, for example in the chapter on the turnip in their Physica :
"Once a person's bad juice piles up in ulcers, he should eat beets and the ulcer will be reduced in size."
In the Middle Ages, the disease matter that caused the plague or the Black Death (Middle High German materie ) was called materia pestis .
In the mid-18th century, the Zedler used the following definition:
“MATERIA PECCANS, in medicine, is that from which illnesses originate, and which a skilled medicus must endeavor to help. In surgery that whitish, viscous, greasy moisture is so called which appears on the third or fourth day of the wound. (...) The materia peccans arises in the human body when there is a severe stagnation of the blood or constipation which cannot easily be distributed, so finally the distended arteries are broken by the impulse and force of the blood Liquid parts pour themselves between the parts lying there, become lazy, sharp and stinking through the warmth, gnaw away the subtle parts lying there, which thereby change into liquid parts, and finally together into a thick, liquid matter: which, however, now thicker, soon thinner, sometimes white, sometimes yellow, sometimes greenish, or otherwise mixed in with red and other colors. "
Johann Christian Reil , pioneer of romantic medicine , pointed out problems of this theory in his draft of a general pathology published in 1815 :
“In conclusion, I mention the controversial question: whether an irritating, material cause in the body itself (a materia peccans) is necessary for the existence of every disease. According to humoral pathology, one generally assumes that disease is related to materia peccans almost as sight is related to light, is only posited and modified by it, and ceases with it, so that almost the whole essence of the Disease is based on the existence of these materia peccans and their boiling and emptying. In the case of fractures, dislocations, wounds, etc., it is now evident that they exist without materia peccans. But the more one has always been inclined to assume such a material cause in dynamic diseases, because here one finds no organic injury after death. One persuades oneself that the organ itself was not defective, but was merely pathologically irritated by something external. "
Even Samuel Hahnemann used the term, but disagreed with the prevailing practice:
"In general inflammatory fevers, in a heated stitch from the side, she [the" old medicine "] even looks at the coagulable lymph in the blood, the so-called fat skin for the materia peccans, which she tries to remove as much as possible through repeated vein openings, regardless of this not infrequently with renewed blood letting appears to be even tougher and thicker. "
With the replacement of humoral pathology by cellular pathology , the materia peccans disappeared from medical parlance, but is still used occasionally in homeopathy and other areas of alternative medicine.
Further use
This idiom is also used figuratively for possible reasons for other disorders. For example, in the course of a falling out between him and Ferdinand Lassalle , in which both had their share, Karl Marx wrote a letter to Lassalle on November 7, 1862: “So you are at least wrong in the way you interpret my letter ; I am wrong because I wrote it and delivered the materia peccans . "
literature
- Charles Lichtenthaeler: The magical background of the Hippocratic Materia peccans in the epidemic books III and I. In: Gerhard Baader , Rolf Winau (ed.) The Hippocratic Epidemics. Theory - Practice - Tradition. Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 1989, p. 109 ff.
Individual evidence
- ^ Friedrich Wilhelm HP son: Materia peccans. In: Journal for Classical Homeopathy , 1982, 26 (6), pp. 233–245
- ↑ Konrad Goehl : Avicenna and his presentation of the medicinal effects. Deutscher Wissenschafts-Verlag, Baden-Baden 2014, ISBN 978-3-86888-078-6 . P. 73
- ↑ Ortrun Riha (trans.): Healing Creation - The natural power of things: Physica. Beuroner Kunstverlag, Beuron 2012, ISBN 978-3-87071-271-6 . P. 86
- ^ Bernhard D. Haage: A new text testimony to the plague poem of Hans Andree. In: Specialized prose research - Crossing borders. Volume 8/9, 2012/2013, pp. 267–282, here: p. 279.
- ↑ Materia peccans. In: Johann Heinrich Zedler : Large complete universal lexicon of all sciences and arts . Volume 19, Leipzig 1739, column 2024 f.
- ^ Johann Christian Reil : Draft of a general pathology. Volume 1. Curt, 1816. p. 336
- ↑ Bernhard Luft (Ed.): Organon Synopsis: The 6 editions from 1810–1842 at a glance. Thieme, 2001, ISBN 9783830470083 . P. 69
- ↑ Marx-Engels Complete Edition (MEGA). Third Department, Correspondence, Volume 12, p. 716, mega.bbaw.de (PDF; p. 60).