In his Preface to the Yearbooks of Medicine as Science (published from 1805–1808), which he coedited with the physician Adalbert Marcus (1753–1816), F. W. J Schelling makes medicine the summit of “the natural sciences,” just as the organism and particularly “The human organism […] is the crown and blossom of the world.” But what did Schelling mean by “medicine,” on which he ostensibly wrote little? In the Romantic period, when many fields were being organized as “sciences” (Wissenschaft in the older sense of certain, systematized knowledge), Germany saw a branching of medicine into therapeutics and physiology. Physiology, in the context of Naturphilosophie, was not just human physiology but “a theory of organic nature” or, as the Germano-Coleridgean Joseph Henry Green develops it, the very forces of life: natura naturans, as Spinoza put it, meaning “nature naturing” or nature as productive. The distinction between medicine as the science or art of healing and as a broader physiology follows Schelling’s post-Kantian program, in his Lectures on the Method of Academic Studies, published in English as On University Studies, of not limiting philosophy to a lower faculty like Immanuel Kant, but also engaging the higher (professional) disciplines, including medicine. Schelling further distinguishes “positive sciences” which operate “within the state” from philosophical or absolute knowledge and argues against a “pseudoenlightenment” valorizing of “practical” over “theoretical” knowledge, which is “happy” in its “freedom from Ideas.” Natural science is “‘positive’” only insofar as medicine includes “public duties.” So, it is in the broader sense of speculative physiology that we approach medicine as a way Schelling explores the very nature of life: a problem that becomes disturbingly entangled with medicine’s ramifications in its narrower, but still philosophical, sense of a confrontation with disease.