Topic: Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller - The Suffering Patient
Speaker: Dr. Friedrich Meier, Uhlstädt-Kirchhasel
Time: Friday, March 6, 2026, 3:00 pm
Place: TU Ilmenau, Faraday lecture hall, Weimarer Straße 32, access Prof. Schmidt-Straße
Admission: 5 euros
The poet and philosopher went down in history under the name Friedrich Schiller - he was born on November 10, 1759 as Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller and was allowed to call himself Friedrich von Schiller from 1802, when he was awarded the nobility diploma by Emperor Franz II. In his lecture at the TU Ilmenau Citizens' Campus, Dr. Friedrich Meier traces not so much the poet and philosopher, but the man and also the doctor Friedrich Schiller with his habits and in his environment - and the development of his illness. Because: "He was a delicate child from an early age, the usual childhood illnesses attacked his body hard", as Friedrich Schiller's older sister Christophine reported. Dr. Friedrich Meier, former head physician at the Thuringia Clinics in Rudolstadt, has made it his mission to trace the lifestyles and medical characteristics of historical personalities.
Hardly anyone else created his immortal work with such great physical impairments as Friedrich Schiller. Especially after 1791, it was a victory of the mind over a chronically ill body - his great dramas of the last five years of his life, "Mary Stuart", "The Maid of Orleans", "The Bride of Messina" and "William Tell", were also written by a sick Friedrich Schiller. When Schiller died at the early age of 45, the last sentence of the autopsy report, which was kept secret for a long time, reads: "Under these circumstances, one must wonder how the poor man could have lived so long."
