This article is only available in the PDF format. Download the PDF to view the article, as well as its associated figures and tables.
The Hufelands were a medical family, there being one or more physicians in each of at least four generations, of which Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland was the most prominent. He was born on Aug. 12, 1762, at Langensalza, in Thüringen, but from the age of 3, he lived in Weimar, which was then the cultural center of literary Germany, where he came to know Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Wieland and many other leading lights of the day. He studied medicine at the universities in Jena and Göttingen, and was graduated from the latter in 1783. He immediately returned to Weimar to help his father, whose health was failing, and there for ten years he practiced medicine. He described this period of his life in a most interesting manner in his "Selbstbiographie," which is printed in part in the continuation of C. W. Hufeland's Journal der praktischen Heilkunde, for January, 1837. The