Laughter is the most healthful exertion.
~ Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland ~

- Medicine aims at achieving health, macrobiotics aims at chieving a long life;

- The methods of medicine are calculated for the present state and its change, the methods of macrobiotics are calculated for wholeness;

- There it is sufficient, if the physician can recover lost health, but the physician does not consider, if by the means of recovery, life is prolonged or shortened on the whole, and with some of the methods of medicine the last is the case;

- Medicine has to treat any illness as an evil, that should disappear as fast as possible, macrobiotics shows, that there are illnesses that can prolong life;

- Medicine attempts, by strengthening and other means, to bring every human being to physical perfection and strength, macrobiotics shows, that there is a maximum, and that too much strengthening can be the means to fasten life and therefore shorten;

- Practical medinine is in relation to macrobiotics a minor science, that teaches how some of the ennemies of life, the illnesses, can be diagnosed, prevented and cured, but medicine must be subordinate to the higher laws of macrobiotics.

- The history of the word macrobiotic begins with Hufeland because he coined the word and defined it's meaning.

- Hufeland said macrobiotics was a science and a medical art that is about prolongation of life. He based his teachings on Sir Francis Bacons, History Natural and Experimental of Life and Death or Of the Prolongation of Life. This book follows and is connected to Sylva Sylvarium or Forest of Forests.Here again we read the word history so it is really ignorant to think that macrobiotics can exclude history, science, medicine or philosophy.

- Hufeland was a philosophic physician and he explained what macrobiotics as a medical philosophy was about and what it was not about.

- What some people call macrobiotics these days is in fact the same type of occult trash that Hufeland denounced and that is sad because people think it is Voodoo or Shamanism when in fact it is a modern science and a medical art.

Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland (August 12, 1762 - August 25, 1836), was a German physician. He is famous as the most eminent practical physician of his time in Germany and as the author of numerous works displaying extensive reading and cultivated a critical faculty.

He was born at Langensalza, Thuringia and educated at Weimar, where his father held the office of court physician to the grand duchess. In 1780 he entered the University of Jena, and in the following year went on to Göttingen, where in 1783 he graduated in medicine. After assisting his father for some years at Weimar, he was called in 1793 to the chair of medicine at Jena, receiving at the same time the positions of court physician and professor of Pathology at Weimar.

In 1798 Frederick William III of Prussia granted him the position director of the medical college and generally of state medical affairs at the Charité, in Berlin. He filled the chair of pathology and therapeutics in the Humboldt University,Prussia founded in 1809, and in 1810 became councillor of state.

In time he became as famous as Goethe, Herder, Schiller, and Wieland in his homeland.

The most widely known of his many writings is the treatise entitled "Makrobiotik oder Die Kunst, des Menschliche Leben zu verlangern" in (1796), which was translated into many languages. Of his practical works, the System of Practical Medicine (System der praktischen Heilkunde, 1818-1828) is the most elaborate. From 1795 to 1835 he published a Journal der praktischen Arznei und Wundarzneikunde. His autobiography was published in 1863.