Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland was the physician of such famous individuals as Christoph Martin Wieland, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller. The list of his writings contains more than 400 titles. Hufeland was the head physician of the Berlin Charité Hospital and the publisher of a number of medical journals. During his lifetime, Hufeland, who was born in Bad Langensalza, did much for the development of public health care.

His primary interest was prenatal care, but he also devoted considerable attention to issues related to population statistics. In the discipline of theoretical medicine, he developed the vitalism concept, which proceeded from the assumption that a vital force is the intrinsic reason for all bodily processes, the organism's underlying self-preservation principle. Hufeland's writings provided fundamental impulses for advocates of naturopathy in the 19th century.

Until the end of the 19th century, wound infections were the mortal enemies of surgery patients and surgeons alike. No one could explain how they originated and spread. The first person to shed light on the subject was Robert Koch, a physician who had pursued intensive medical research alongside his daily practice from the time he started out as a country doctor. His discovery of anthrax spores - and thus the cause of anthrax - was a sensation. For the first time, a living mircroorganism could be identified as the specific cause of an infectious disease. Yet another success of Robert Koch's work: at the German Health Office in Berlin the native of Clausthal-Zellerfeld discovered the tuberculosis pathogen and the cholera bacillus. The discovery of the tubercle bacillus represented the turning point in the battle against tuberculosis, a disease that was widespread until well into the 20th century. In 1905 Koch's pioneering accomplishments were honored with the Nobel Prize.