KNEIPP, SEBASTIAN. – Physician and priest, b. at Stefansried (Bavaria) on 17 May 1891, d. at Wörishofen on 17 June 1897. He was parish priest of this Bavarian locality, situated 600 m above sea level, from the age of 31; there the hydrotherapeutic method that took its name from him originated and developed, becoming famous everywhere.
Crowds of sufferers came there from every quarter seeking remedies for the most varied ailments; lodged in the various houses of the village, they were inspected daily by K., assisted by four physicians in a large parish building. The simply informative examination and external inspection were followed by prescriptions for various hydrotherapeutic practices (jet showers, compresses with pure linen cloths soaked in cold water, walking barefoot on wet ground or on snow) and herbal decoctions (wormwood, fennel, juniper, mistletoe, hay flowers, horsetail, etc.) for compresses or drinking. The parish also contained an establishment for baths and showers and a hospice for children.
K. had arrived at his method through the study of the hydrotherapeutic system of Priessnitz, a farmer who in 1832 had founded at Gräfenberg, 608 m above the level of the Baltic Sea, an establishment for treating illnesses solely with water, for external and internal use. He himself, as he recounts (Così dovete vivere [V. BIBLICA.], p. VIII), having reached “the brink of the grave” in 1847, regained his health “with the help of water.”
From a critical point of view, an examination of the works written by K., translated in their time into the principal languages and enjoying the widest circulation, reveals, particularly in the light of present-day knowledge, a paucity of medical knowledge, erroneous pathogenetic explanations, and diagnoses not based on serious objective examinations but offered intuitively and presumptively. Consequently, the results, at times undeniably good, should be attributed less to the healing of the supposed organic lesions acknowledged by K. than to the disappearance of functional disorders associated with unnatural and unhygienic ways of life. This was achieved through a healthy diet, hygienic life in the open air, the beneficial stimulating effect of water applications, the depurative action of herbal teas, the atmosphere of serene tranquillity, and the moral influence exerted by the paternal concern of the good parish priest.
BBL.: Works: Consigliere per sani e malati, Italian trans., Bressanone 1892; Il mio testamento per sani e ammalati, Italian trans., Torino 1894; La mia cura idroterapica, Italian trans., there 1894; Così dovete vivere, Italian trans., there 1895. Studies: R. Pinali et al., Terapia fisica, Milano 1925, pp. 53–60; M. Mestini, Terapia clinica, I, Torino 1944, pp. 143–53. Giuseppe de Ninno