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  • ITA WEGMAN

    and the Clinical-therapeutic Institute

    A Photographic Documentation

    Mirela Faldey and Peter Selg

    ITA WEGMAN

    “Ita Wegman is not only an inspiring genius of anthroposophy but a healing genius for the anthroposophical art of healing. Her very being harbors within it breath, courage, greatness.” —J. E. Zeylmans van Emmichoven

    Ita Wegman, MD, founded and directed the first anthroposophical medical clinic in the world—the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim near Basel, Switzerland. This photographic documentation was compiled to mark the centenary of the clinic, which began its work in June of 1921. The book offers a pictorial introduction to Wegman’s life and work.

    Photographs from her youth in Indonesia, her student days, her international travels, and her professional and educational activities in Switzerland, and other places, provide the reader with detailed and vivid insight into the various phases of her career. Timetables place the individual photographs, letters, and historical documents in the context of Ita Wegman’s biography and work.

    “Even today, much too little is known about how resolutely Ita Wegman conducted herself during the period of German fascism and during the Second World War, how early she saw through National Socialism, and the extent to which she provided escape and survival aid to endangered people, among them numerous Jewish colleagues; how she saved anthroposophical-curative education institutes in Germany and how, along with her co-workers, she carried on caring for the children and adolescents who had been entrusted to them.” (from the book)

    Mirela Faldey has been a freelance sculptor since 2000. From 2008 to 2014, she was curator of the models in the arts collection at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, including conserving and restoring the sculpture “Representative of Humanity,” as well as a full-size replica of that work. Since February 2020, Ms. Faldey has worked as research assistant at the Ita Wegman Archive.

    Peter Selg studied medicine in Witten-Herdecke, Zurich, and Berlin and, until 2000, worked as the head physician of the juvenile psychiatry department of Herdecke Hospital in Germany. Dr. Selg is director of the Ita Wegman Institute for Basic Research into Anthroposophy (Arlesheim, Switzerland), professor of medicine at the Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences (Germany), and co-leader of the General Anthroposophical Section at the Goetheanum. He is the author of numerous books on Rudolf Steiner, anthroposophy, medical ethics, and the development of culture and consciousness.

    26 June 2024; Trans. by Douglas E. Miller and Marguerite Miller; SB; 336pp; 25.5 x 19 cm; pb;

    £50.00  ISBN 9781621483182