HUFELAND, Christoph Wilhelm (1762-1836), a distinguished physician and writer on medical subjects, was born at Langensalza, 12th August 1762. His early education was carried on at Weimar, where his father held the office of court physician to the grand duchess. In 1780 he entered the university at Jena, and in the following year proceeded to Göttingen, where in 1783 he graduated in the faculty of 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 dignities of court physician and councillor at Weimar. In 1793 he was placed at the head of the medical college and generally of state medical affairs in Berlin, with the title of privy councillor. He filled the chair of pathology and therapeutics in the university of Berlin, founded in 1809, and in 1810 became councillor of state. He died at Berlin in 1836.
Hufeland is celebrated as the most eminent practical physician of his time in Germany, and as the author of numerous works displaying extensive reading and cultivated and critical faculty. The most widely known of his many writings is the treatise entitled Makrobiotik, oder die Kunst das menschliche Leben zu verlängern, 1796. Of his practical works, all of the kind which cannot long retain their place in the literature of special science, the System of Practical. Medicine (“System der praktischen Heilkunde,” 3 vols., 1828) is the most elaborate. By medical writers Hufeland’s services in promoting and elevating the study of the art of medicine are highly extolled. His autobiography was published in 1863. Sketches of his life and labours apυeared shortly after his death by Augustin and Stourdza, 1837....
HUFELAND, Gottlieb (1760-1817), a distinguished writer on political economy and law, was born at Dantzic on 19th October 1760. He was educated at the gymnasium of his native town, and completed his university studies at Leipsic and Göttingen. He graduated at Jena, andin 1788 was there appointed to an extraordinary professorship. Five years later he was made ordinary professor. His lectures on natural law, in which he developed with great acuteness and skill the formal principles of the Kantian theory of legislation, attracted a large audience, and contributed to raise to its height the fame of the university of Jena, then unusually rich in able teachers. In 1803, after the secession of many of his colleagues from Jena, Hufeland accepted a call to Würzburg, from which, after but a brief tenure of a professorial chair, he proceeded to Landshut. From 1808 to 1812 he acted as burgomaster in his native town of Dantzic. Returning to Landshut, he lived there till 1816, when he was invited to Halle, where he died in February 1817.
Hufeland’s works on the theory of legislation— Essay upon the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Law (“Versuch über die Grundsatz Naturrechts,” 1785), Handbook of Natural Law (“Lehrbuch des Naturrechts,” 1790), Institutes of Positive Law (“Institutionen des gesammten positiven Rechts,” 1798), and History and System of German Positive Law (“Lehrbuch der Geschichte und Encyclopädie aller in Deutschland geltenden positiven Rechte,” 1790)— are distinguished by precision of statement and clearness of deduction. They form on the whole the best commentary upon Kant’s Rechtslehre, the principles of which they carry out in detail, and apply to the discussion of positive laws. In political economy Hufeland’s chief work is the New Foundation of National Economy (“Neue Grundlegung der Staatswirtbschaftskunst,” 2 vols., 1807 and 1813), the second volume of which has the special title, Theory of Money and Circulation (“Lehre vom Gelde und Geldumläufe”). The principles of this work are for the most part those of the Wealth of Nations, which were then beginning to be accepted and developed in Germany; but both in his treatment of fundamental notions, such as economic good and value, and in details, such as the theory of money, Hufeland’s treatment has a certain originality. Two points in particular seem deserving of notice. Hufeland was the first among German economists to point out the profit of the entrepreneur as a distinct species of revenue with laws peculiar to itself. He also tends towards, though he does not explicitly state, the view that rent is a general term applicable to all payments resulting from differences of degree among productive forces of the same order. Thus the superior gain of a specially gifted workman or specially skilled employer is in time assimilated to the payment for a natural agency of more than the minimum efficiency. See Roscher, Geschichte der Nationalökonomik in Deutschland, pp. 654-662.
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