When Healing Becomes Educating, Vol. 6 - Waldorf Research Institute

e understood in terms of the periphery, and we shall never understand the
circulation if we start from the center, the heart. We know that hearts get
enlarged when an organ such as the musculature demands too much blood
during intense physical effort. The normal and not only the enlarged heart
is created from the periphery in the same way.” 8
A common objection is that we are simply replacing the pump with
another apparatus. But this merely shows that the issue has not been
thought through. Comparison with physical apparatus is not condemned
on principle, but methodologically it is of the utmost importance to find the
right comparisons and understand them. 9 Many other elements based on
principles found in the science of physics are to be found in the organism,
like the eye for example, and the buoyancy of the brain floating in fluid.
Moreover, inorganic substances are metamorphosed into organs, with
all the major metals represented by organs, having become organic metal
nature. The hydraulic ram presents the basic phenomena which in the
human organism embody periodicity, or the cosmic rhythm.
7: The sense organ, macula densa
(from H. Leonhardt, 1986)
Fig. 1: Renal glomerulus
With regard to the function of the heart as well as other organs it is
of considerable interest that in 1911 the anatomist Jacoby Sr. compared
the lumina of the afferent and efferent vessels in the renal glomerulus
with those “of a hydraulic ram,” where the bore of the feed pipe is larger
than that of the outlet pipe. Quoting Jacoby, Otfried Mueller showed that
the same applied to the hepatic veins. He provided an illustration of an
intralobular vein and the sinusoids arising from it which are like capillary
vessels. “One immediately thinks of a fruit tree.” 10 See Figure 1. The rhythm
of fluid dammed up in organs and then released would thus be the common
element, like tree trunk and branches, which has become a hydraulic ram
in the physical world outside the human organism and is particularly well
developed in the periodicity of the heart.
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