Anthroposophical Spiritual Science and Medical Therapy (GA 313) is a course of eight lectures Rudolf Steiner delivered at Dornach, Switzerland, from 11 to 18 April 1921. Addressed to physicians and medical students, it is the second of his two foundational medical courses, following the twenty lectures of spring 1920 that later appeared as GA 312. Where the first course sketched the outer picture of the ill and healing human being, this course turns inward, asking how the members of the human constitution, the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the ego, are worked upon by substances drawn from the surrounding world. Its governing theme is therapeutics: how a remedy acts, and why a mineral, plant, or metallic substance can meet a specific process at work in the sick organism.
The course is not a manual of prescriptions. It is an attempt to give physicians a way of thinking that would let them see, behind the named diseases of the clinic, the shifting relations between the human being and the cosmos in which that being is set. Steiner takes as his starting point the claim that health and illness are not private events sealed inside the skin but stations in a continuous exchange between inner and outer processes. To read a remedy rightly, on this view, one has to know both what is happening in the patient and what the same activity looks like when it unfolds in the mineral kingdom, in the growth of plants, or in the formation of the earth itself.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 313 belongs to the practical medical stream of anthroposophy that Steiner opened only in the last years of his life. The 1920 course had introduced physicians to a way of reading illness as an imbalance among the four members of the human being. This 1921 course was conceived, in Steiner's own words, to supplement and complement that earlier work so that the two together would yield a crystallized set of therapeutic views. It stands beside the clinical collaboration with the physician Ita Wegman that would soon produce the book Fundamentals of Therapy, and it prepared the ground for the later courses of 1923 and 1924. Read in sequence, these volumes trace the emergence of anthroposophic medicine as a distinct discipline, one that does not reject natural science but seeks to extend it toward the super-sensible members of the human being.
The course also marks a methodological shift that recurs across Steiner's scientific lectures. He insists that the physician begin from processes rather than from finished substances, treating what appears as fixed matter as an activity that has come to rest. That orientation links GA 313 to his work on the natural world in the agriculture and natural-science courses, where the same conviction governs how he reads mineral, plant, and animal formation.
For students approaching anthroposophic medicine today, GA 313 occupies a particular niche. It is more technical than the introductory lectures and more concerned with method than the later clinical courses that pair specific remedies with specific conditions. Its lasting value lies less in any single recommendation than in the way of seeing it teaches: a habit of asking, of any substance offered as a remedy, what universal process it represents and where in the threefold human being that process finds its answering activity. Much of what became characteristic of anthroposophic pharmacy, the attention to potency, to the pole of the body at which a substance is introduced, and to the polarity between what heals and what harms, is already present here in embryo.
Themes and Structure
The opening lectures build a single guiding idea: that every substance is the outward face of a cosmic process. Steiner asks the listener not to picture a bounded object but the wide process that crystallizes into it and comes to rest. From this vantage he reads the human head as the meeting place of two opposed formative activities, and he locates their outer correlates in the mineral world. One he traces to the process that forms slate and quartz out of siliceous earth, which he describes as a de-vegetabilization of former plant life. The other he traces to the process that raises limestone and chalk, which he presents as a de-animalization of former animal substance. The human head, on this reading, carries the polar opposites of both.
From this foundation the course works outward through the threefold human being. The formative activity bound up with silica, Steiner argues, works most delicately in the head and most strongly in the metabolic-limb system, shifting from a substance-like character to a force-like one as it descends. The rhythmic middle system, breathing and circulation, has no ready mineral correlate, so he constructs one from the burning of plant matter and the settling of ash. The later lectures move from this physiology toward direct therapeutic application, examining how remedies are prepared and how a counter-reaction can be induced in the organism, and closing, in the final lecture given for physicians, with curative eurythmy as a movement therapy grounded in the same cosmic processes.
A recurring device in these lectures is the distinction between a substance acting as substance and the same substance acting as force. Silica, Steiner notes, is found in the hair, in the blood, and in the urine, yet its mere presence tells the investigator little. What matters is whether it is active from where it sits. The silica in the hair, he suggests, radiates delicate forces back into the organism; the silica in the urine is simply what the body has finished with and discharged. This attention to where and how an activity works, rather than to the bare chemical inventory of the body, is the analytic move he asks physicians to master, and it separates his approach sharply from the materialist physiology of his day.
Throughout, Steiner returns to a single practical principle: illness is a process that has crossed a boundary, and healing means introducing, at the right pole of the body, the substance whose process calls forth the needed inner counter-reaction. If a patient shows too intense a tendency toward one of these formative processes, the physician's task is to supply from outside the substance that provokes the answering activity, after which, as Steiner says, the counter-reaction comes about by itself. He states the underlying method plainly in the first lecture:
We must begin from processes, not substances, from events in progress, not finished products.
The summaries above compress a dense and technical text; the lectures themselves develop each relationship with far more anatomical and pharmaceutical detail than a study guide can hold. A reader new to Steiner will find the vocabulary demanding, and the glossary entries below are meant to serve as an entry point into it rather than a substitute for the lectures.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Two entries in the Thalira glossary draw directly on GA 313. Each gathers the passages where Steiner develops the idea and sets it in the wider frame of his work:
The silica and lime processes are the paired formative activities at the center of the course's physiology, and reading the two entries together shows how Steiner uses their polarity to read the whole human organism.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of GA 313 at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translation of the course lecture by lecture. For print editions and related titles in anthroposophic medicine, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks. Because the course was given to physicians and assumes familiarity with Steiner's account of the fourfold human being, most readers will find it easier to approach after the first medical course, GA 312.
Continue Your Study
- Browse the full Thalira glossary to see how the silica and lime processes connect to Steiner's wider vocabulary of formative forces.
- Return to the GA Work Library to place this medical course within the arc of Steiner's collected lectures.
- Follow the thread of process-thinking into Steiner's natural-science volumes, where the same conviction, that substance is activity come to rest, governs his reading of the mineral, plant, and animal worlds.