At this period of time Germany was still living under deplorable conditions. The after-effects of the Thirty Years’ War still lingered. Those Germans who wished to lay some claim to culture were obliged to think, speak and write in French. The great mass of the people, however, were still bound hand and foot under the dominion of their spiritual and state tyrants. The learned classes still cultivated a barbaric Latin in their university lectures and in their writings. They considered it beneath their dignity to cultivate their own tongue. In the schools and universities the teaching had reached a decidedly low ebb. “The humanistic spirit” had vanished; the teaching was directed to the acquisition of the science of bread-winning. The Roman Catholic Church at this time was entirely in the hands of the Jesuits; the Protestant Church was no longer guided by the high ideals of its founder. A hollow dogmatism had put a stop to all further search for the truth; the one important thing was orthodoxy. There had developed a Protestant hierarchy that exerted as stupefying an influence upon the great mass of the people as did the Jesuits in the Roman Catholic Church. Superstition and charlatanry permeated the medical profession. These superstitious beliefs found lodgment in the minds of even such otherwise great physicians as Friedrich Hoffmann, Georg Ernst Stahl and Anton de Haen, one of Boerhaave’s distinguished pupils and a celebrated clinical teacher. After the lapse of a few years—that is, in 1842—there was founded a new German periodical, the _Archiv für Physiologische Heilkunde_, under the management of Wunderlich and Roser. According to the Prospectus it was to be devoted to physiological medicine, or—to be more precise—to the cultivation of physiological methods in the treatment of disease. The introductory article in the first number of this new periodical bore the title: “The Defects of German Medicine as Taught to-day and the Importance of Giving it a Decidedly Scientific Tendency.” From the convincing style in which the article is written there can be no mistake, says Petersen, in ascribing its authorship to Karl August Wunderlich (1815–1877), a member of the Tübingen Faculty of Medicine. The following brief extracts from this article will suffice to give the reader a fair idea of this writer’s views on the subject of which he treats:—