Health and Illness, Volume I gathers the first cycle of Rudolf Steiner's talks to the workmen who were building the Goetheanum at Dornach, Switzerland, beginning on 24 October 1922. Catalogued in the collected works as GA 348, it belongs to a distinctive body of lectures given not to physicians or initiates but to carpenters, masons, and laborers during their morning break. The volume collects a series of improvised sessions on the human body in health and sickness, and its guiding subject is practical: how the organism forms itself, why children fall ill differently from adults, and how nutrition, breathing, and the circulation of the blood govern well-being. This study guide surveys the volume so you can understand its place, its method, and its recurring themes before reading Steiner's own text.
The setting matters as much as the content. These were talks delivered after the morning coffee break, at a time the workmen themselves requested because they wanted to be alert and receptive. The audience had grown out of earlier evening courses, first led by Dr. Roman Boos when the day's construction was done and later by other members of the Anthroposophical Society. When the laborers asked whether Steiner himself might spare them an hour, the workmen's lectures were born. A few staff from the construction office and one or two of Steiner's close associates also attended, but the room's character was set by the men who built the hall. Because the workmen chose the themes and asked the questions, no two sessions unfold quite alike, and the reader hears Steiner thinking aloud in response to genuine curiosity.
Place in Steiner's Work
By 1922 Steiner had spent two decades developing anthroposophy as a spiritual science, and he had already begun applying it to medicine in his 1920 course for doctors. The workmen's lectures represent a different register of that same effort. Here he was answering questions the laborers themselves posed, translating ideas he had presented to trained physicians into plain speech shaped by the mood and curiosity of the room. The editor's preface, signed by Marie Steiner, stresses that these were dialogues rather than prepared addresses: the workmen set the themes, and Steiner responded on the spot. That origin gives GA 348 a directness rarely found in his more formal cycles.
Within the wider anthroposophical medicine that grew after Steiner's death, this volume functions as a bridge. It carries the same picture of the human being as body, soul, and spirit that underlies the physicians' courses, yet it states that picture without technical vocabulary. For a modern reader it offers an accessible doorway into how Steiner thought illness should be understood, and it sits alongside the later workmen's cycles that continued the conversation into 1923 and beyond.
It is worth reading the volume as a record of a particular relationship rather than as a textbook. Marie Steiner's preface notes that the talks were never intended for publication; they were improvised for a special audience and shaped by the circumstances and mood of the men present. When the decision was later made to print them, the editor chose to leave the transcripts almost unaltered, preferring the vitality of the spoken exchange to polished prose. That editorial choice tells us how to approach GA 348 today. Its authority rests not on systematic completeness but on the immediacy of a teacher meeting ordinary working people where their real concerns lay: their own health, their families, and the illnesses of their children.
Themes and Structure
The lectures do not proceed as a tidy system. They follow the workmen's questions, so a session may open with the inner organs and move toward heredity, digestion, or the relationship of the head to the whole cosmos. Several threads run through the collection and reward attention.
- The forming forces of the body. Steiner returns again and again to the idea that the head guides the building up of the organism in early life, and that the head itself is shaped, in his account, as an image of the surrounding universe.
- The rhythm of the seven-year periods. He describes infancy as the time of greatest vulnerability, the years from the change of teeth to puberty as the healthiest, and puberty as a threshold where new illnesses can arise.
- Nutrition and elimination. Much of the discussion concerns what happens when a child takes in too little or too much nourishment, and how the body attempts to discharge what it cannot use.
- Childhood illnesses and heredity. Scarlet fever, measles, pneumonia, and related conditions are treated as expressions of the organism's own effort to right itself, and Steiner discusses how what parents carry can appear in children as different conditions.
On the character of children's diseases he is characteristically blunt:
"Scarlet fever and measles are specifically childhood illnesses, though adults, too, can contract the latter."
Two examples show how Steiner develops these threads. When he discusses why the very young are so vulnerable, he points out that the mortality rate is highest in infancy and falls once the child has built up its own body and cut its second teeth. In his account the newborn has, in a sense, inherited its first body and must labor to produce a second one of its own, and that labor is where the danger lies. When he turns to eruptive illnesses of the skin, he frames them as the body's attempt to expel what it has taken in but cannot properly use, so that a rash becomes, in his reading, a sign of the organism defending itself rather than simply a foreign attack. Whether or not a modern reader shares these conclusions, the pattern of reasoning is consistent throughout the cycle.
A further recurring motif is the link Steiner draws between the head and the wider cosmos. He compares the way the forming forces work in the child to the way a compass needle turns north, arguing that just as no one locates the needle's direction inside the needle alone, the shaping of the human head should be understood as an answer to the whole surrounding world rather than to heredity by itself. This cosmological framing runs beneath the more practical talk of nutrition and illness and marks the lectures as unmistakably anthroposophical.
Read as history rather than medical guidance, these passages show a way of thinking that ties every symptom back to the whole human being. Steiner insists that a physician facing one inflamed organ should examine the entire body, because in his view no illness is confined to the part where it first appears. The value of the volume for a contemporary student lies in that holistic method and its plain-spoken presentation, not in any specific clinical claim. Nothing here should be taken as advice for treating illness today; it is a window onto a historical way of thought, and questions of health belong with a qualified physician.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
The Thalira glossary draws on GA 348 for the following entry. Follow the link to see how the term is defined and where else it appears across Steiner's corpus:
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of GA 348 at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translation published by Anthroposophic Press. To find print editions of the English volume, search the publisher directly at SteinerBooks. Because these talks were transcribed from improvised sessions, small differences in phrasing appear between translations, so comparing the archive text with a printed edition can be useful.
Continue Your Study
To go further with the ideas raised in this volume, explore these paths:
- Browse the full Thalira glossary to trace how terms like childhood illnesses connect to Steiner's larger vocabulary of body, soul, and spirit.
- Return to the GA Work Library to find neighboring workmen's lecture cycles and the medical courses that inform them.
- Read the glossary entry on Childhood Illnesses as an entry point into Steiner's account of development across the seven-year periods.