["Haemorrhoidal colic", "strong pills of stahl", and "quacks". Johann Gottwerth Müller, writer of the enlightenment, critic of medicine and his evils in letters and books].

Abstract

Johann Gottwerth Müller, a so called "independent author", was one of the most successful novelists in the German Enlightenment around 1800. Educated as a scholar and trained as a physician, although not a practicing physician, Müller was sick throughout his life and constantly reflects on his diseases, and on what he considered to be an insufficient "medical system" and a socially "sick" society. This outlook is revealed by his library (in 1828: about 13300 volumes, of which 254 volumes of medical publications), his correspondence and his novels. Letters he exchanged with the publisher Friedrich Nicolai (74 letters between 1777 and 1796) about private and business affairs show that Miller uses statements about his sickness in order to win sympathy, to document his sufferings as part of an "independent" writer's identity, as a metaphor for social health, and as a means for excuses and compulsions in business connections. The didactic novels serve the author's transformation of individual suffering into the perspective of an enlightened humanitarian development of the government, the society, and the medical system within the structured society of his day.