Iron Radiations in the Blood – Reading 1

“Why does the blood need iron?

This is one of the crucial questions of the whole science of medicine. The blood actually needs iron (we shall sift and collect the material evidence for the facts I have sketched today). Blood is that substance of the human organism, which is diseased through its own nature, and must be continuously healed by iron. This is not the case with milk. Were it so, milk could not be a formative medium for mankind, as it actually is; a formative medium administered from outside.

When we study the human blood, we study something that is constantly sick, from the very nature of our constitution and organism. Blood by its very nature is sick and needs to be continuously cured by the addition of iron. This means that a continuous healing process is carried on within us, in the essential process of our blood. If the medical man is “a candidate for Nature’s examination,” he must study first of all, not an abnormal but a normal process of nature. And the process essential to the blood is certainly “normal,” and at the same time a process in which nature itself must continually heal, and must heal by means of the administration of the requisite mineral, iron. To depict what happens to our blood by means of a graph, we must show the inherent constitution of blood itself, without any admixture of iron, as a curve or line sloping downwards, and finally arriving at the point of complete dissolution of the blood, whereas the effect of iron in the blood is to raise the line continuously upwards as it heals.”

R. Steiner, Spiritual Science and Medicine, Lecture 3, 23 March 1920, CW312