Traditional European Medicine

TEM as a holistic healing system is an ideal complement to today’s modern medicine.

Traditional European Medicine (TEM) is a holistic system of medicine that encompasses every healing system, healing method, remedy, production method and form of application in diagnosis and therapy that has ever been used in Europe. TEM has been practised for thousands of years on the European continent, because illnesses and injuries have always existed. The remedies for this were sought and found in nature, especially in medicinal plants. However, medicine used to be more preventive, designed to prevent illness. Finding a cure was not always easy due to the living conditions at the time.

In the history of TEM there have always been two healing systems – folk medicine and scholarly medicine, which have existed side by side.
In folk medicine, a lot of knowledge was in the hands of women, who passed it on by word of mouth. They knew the places where medicinal plants could be found and knew their mode of action, preparation, dosage and application.
Knowledge of scholarly medicine is well documented and preserved. The representatives here were mostly men who had access to schools, universities or monasteries. They had easier access to knowledge. Some well-known representatives here are Hermes Trismegistus, Plato, Aristotle, Dioscorides, Galen, Avicenna and well-known representatives from monastic medicine such as Hildegard von Bingen, Kneipp, Weidinger etc. An exception among the scholars was Hildegard von Bingen, who at that time had combined knowledge from folk medicine with the knowledge of scholarly medicine and documented this.