Patient und Arzt: Fritz Hartmann (1920-2007) und seine arztliche Anthropologie

Text in German. Along with Rudolf Schoen, Fritz Hartmann is regarded as the spiritual father of the Hannover Medical School (MHH), which opened in 1965; he was its first elected rector and the longtime director of its rheumatology department. He retired in 1988. His colleagues saw him as the philosopher among internists . In a lifelong engagement with the tremendous work of Viktor von Weizsacker, he developed an expressly medical anthropology in close contact with the neurobiology and evolutionary epistemology of his time. For him, anthropology was the study of the comprehensive nature of man, not just of his biology, nor of his essence or a blurred whole. Medical anthropology focuses on the interaction between patient and doctor; she takes the doctor seriously as a subject who oscillates between factual objectification and passionate resonance. For the chronically ill (homo patiens) he proposes a conditionally successful health as a common treatment goal. So far there has been no monograph on this outstanding representative of a generation of internal medicine clinicians who began their scientific work immediately after the Second World War. The text introduces Hartmann’s life and the beginnings of the MHH. He explains the main features of his medical anthropology and discusses in detail its epistemological status. He ascribes a special scientific quality to his anthropology, the loss of which would deprive clinical medicine of essential opportunities for knowledge and endanger its human substance. The reprint of 14 of his texts from the years 1949 to 2006 provides direct access to Hartmann’s thinking and writing. Eight reproduce previously unpublished lectures; six reprint outlying older publications.