Physiognomische Ferndiagnosen: Ernst Müllers Cäsaren-Porträts und ihre Rezeption in der Weimarer Zeit

Meister, Jan B. (2020). Physiognomische Ferndiagnosen: Ernst Müllers Cäsaren-Porträts und ihre Rezeption in der Weimarer Zeit. In: Gangloff, Anne; Maire, Brigitte (eds.) La santé du prince. Corps, vertus et politique dans l’Antiquité Romaine. Horos (pp. 223-243). Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon

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Between 1914 and 1927 Ernst Müller, a German doctor and psychiatrist,
published three small volumes entitled Cäsaren-Porträts, in which he tried
to infer medical diagnoses from Roman portraits. While this approach may
seem bizarre to the modern viewer, Müller’s work was taken seriously in his
own day, even though his methodological flaws as a historian were evident to
his contemporaries. In analysing reactions to Müller’s works in the numerous
reviews of them, this article aims to reconstruct the ‘knowledge-culture’ that
produced this curious oeuvre. In making use of physiognomy and presenting
Roman Caesars along with photographs of his patients, Müller adopted a
supposedly innovative and promising method applied in medicine and
psychiatry-he was thus deemed to promote a new, ‘scientific’ way of doing
history. This view was promoted by the high esteem in which the Weimar
Republic held doctors as experts of whom one expected new explanations
in fields traditionally belonging to the social sciences.

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