Pierre Carita

Pierre Carita (born October 13, 1676 in Metz , † August 16, 1756 in or near Berlin ) was a doctor in Berlin.

Life

The Protestant pharmacist Jean Carita (* 1649 Metz, † August 16, 1701 Berlin) gave his son Pierre a thorough school education, initially in the mission convent in Metz, then in the Jesuit monastery Pont-à-Mousson , but then took him as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV was ordered to return to himself for a few years. 1692 fled the young Pierre Carita to Rinteln , where he attended the local university took up the study of medicine and in 1698 with a dissertation on the rabies completed.

Rinteln had a Reformed community with its own church. Because of the favorable career opportunities and in view of the French colony established in Berlin (→ Huguenots in Berlin ), which had formed through the settlement of numerous Huguenots, he moved to there. As early as 1701 he was accepted into the Collegium medicum founded by Elector Friedrich Wilhelm in 1685 , which was active in improving medical care in Brandenburg. After the establishment of further collegia in the provinces and the establishment of the upper college in 1725, he was temporarily, in 1740, its vice-president. For more than half a century, from 1701 until his death, he worked as a doctor for the French community, which had formed through the settlement of numerous Huguenots. In 1722 he was unanimously elected a member of the physical-medical class of the Royal Society of Sciences in Berlin, to which he belonged until his death.

Pierre Carita was married to a Berliner who came from Champagne and whose parents had also been attracted to the tolerant spirit of the up-and-coming Prussian capital. He died at the age of 80 while returning from a trip to Frankfurt (Oder).

Act

Its outstanding importance lies in its assessment of medicine, which was unusual for its time. As far as his duties allowed him, he occupied himself with exotic and native medicinal plants , which he grew in his small garden and whose effects he studied in detail. The stay there and this occupation had a magic for him, whose fascination did not dull, is reported. He rather trusted the natural healing power and was very reluctant to prescribe medication. In contrast to other doctors of his time, he openly refused to prescribe drugs that would only have cost the patient without helping him.

His prescriptions, as one contemporary remarked, differed from the magical junk with which a medical practitioner completely consumes the pharmacy, the wallet and the patient's body. This assessment of only assigning a role to medicine supporting nature and allowing the natural forces inherent in man to have an effect, as well as his intensive study of medicinal plants and their experience-based application as natural remedies show elements of modern natural healing art and leave Carita as one of its pioneers appear.

This happened long before this healing practice began to establish itself, and then initially not by medical students, but by lay users such as Vincenz Prießnitz and Johann Schroth . It was only later that natural healing was understood as a science. Carita's attitude was based on the appreciation of medicine in antiquity (→ medicine of antiquity ), the authors of which he revered. In his day, his, in truth, forward-looking attitude was simply out of fashion and was certainly a factor in the fact that his colleagues in the academy viewed him as an eccentric and sometimes ridiculed him. Its general appreciation as a forerunner of modern naturopathy is still pending.

literature

• Anonymous: Bibliothèque germanique ou Histoire littéraire de l'Allemagne de la Suisse et des Pays du Nord, Vol. 5: 1738–1741 . Slatkine Reprint, Geneva 1969, (unchanged reprint of the Amsterdam 1740 edition)
• Jean Henri Samuel Formey : Éloge de Mr. Carita . In: Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences et des Belles-Lettres de Berlin. 1756 , Haude & Spener, Berlin 1758, pp. 515-518.
• Jean Henri Samuel Formey: La France littéraire ou Dictionnaire des auteurs françois vivans . Haude & Spener, Berlin 1757, p. 323.
• Jean Pierre Erman , Peter C. Reclam: Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des réfugiés françois dans les États du Roi, vol. 6 . Publishing house Jean Jasperd, Berlin 1755.
• Carlo Giovanni Maria Denina : La Prusse littéraire sous Fréderic II. Ou Histoire abrégée de la plupart des auteurs, des académiciens et des artistes qui sont nés ou qui ont vécu dans les états prussiens depuis MDCCXL jusqu'a MDCCLXXXVI, vol. 1 . Rottmann Publishing House, Berlin 1790.
• Eugène Haag, Émile Haag: La France protestante ou vies des protestants français qui se sont fait un nom dans l'histoire, vol. 3 . Slatkine Reprint, Geneva 1966, p. 215 (unaltered reprint Paris 1852)
• Charles Weiss: Histoire des réfugiés protestants de France depuis le révocation de l'édit de Nantes jusqu'à nos jours . Charpentier, Paris 1853.
• Jean Olry: La persécution de l'Église de Metz . Édition Franck, Paris 1859.
  • “As the dying and see we live!” The notary Olry's experiences during the time of horror in the Metz Evangelical Church after the edict of Nantes was repealed (history sheets of the German Huguenot Association; vol. 14). Heinrichshofen publishing house, Magdeburg 1914.
• Adolf von Harnack : History of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin . Olms, Hildesheim 1970 (3 vols., Unchanged reprint of the Berlin 1900 edition).
• Gerhard Schormann: Academia Ernestina . The University of Schaumburg in Rinteln on the Weser (1610 / 21-1810) . Elwert Verlag, Marburg 1982, ISBN 3-7708-0752-9 (plus habilitation thesis, University of Düsseldorf 1980).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ also vol. 5 , p. 145.