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 came to life and developed, becoming famous everywhere.
Crowds of sufferers came from every quarter to seek there a remedy for the most varied ailments; lodged in the various houses of the village, they were reviewed daily by K., assisted by four physicians in a large room of the parish; the visit, simply informative and by external inspection, was followed by the prescription of various hydrotherapeutic practices (jet shower, compresses with cloths of pure linen soaked in cold water, walks barefoot on wet ground or on snow) and of herbal decoctions (wormwood, fennel, juniper, mistletoe, meadowsweet, horsetail, etc.) for compresses or as a drink. In the parish there was furthermore an establishment for baths and showers and a hospice for children.
K. had arrived at his method from the study of the hydrotherapeutic system of Priessnitz, a farmer who in 1832 had founded on the Gräfenberg, 608 m. above the level of the Baltic, an establishment for the cure of diseases with water alone, for external and internal use; he himself, as he relates (Così dovete vivere [v. bibl.], p. VIII), having reached «the brink of the grave» in 1847, regained his health «with the help of water».
From the critical point of view, the examination of the works written by K., translated in their time into the principal languages and which enjoyed the widest diffusion, shows, particularly in the light of present-day knowledge, a scantiness of medical knowledge, erroneous pathogenetic explanations, diagnoses not based on serious objective examinations but put forward by intuition, presumptively. Therefore the results, at times undeniably good, must be ascribed, more than to the healing of the presumed organic lesions admitted by K., to the disappearance of functional disturbances linked to unnatural and unhygienic ways of living, obtained through the healthy diet, the hygienic life in the open air, the beneficial stimulating effect of the water applications, the purifying action of the herbal teas, the environment of serene tranquillity, the moral ascendancy exercised 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., Turin 1894; La mia cura idroterapica, Italian trans., ibid. 1894; Così dovete vivere, Italian trans., ibid. 1895. Studies: R. Pinali and others, Terapia fisica, Milan 1925, pp. 53-60; M. Mestini, Terapia clinica, I, Turin 1944, pp. 143-53.
Giuseppe de Ninno