Kneipp’s Herbs, Diet and the Five Pillars

Table of Contents

1. The Village Priest’s Home Pharmacy
2. Teas, Tinctures, Powders and Oils
3. Sixty Remedies from Field and Garden
4. Nettle, Chamomile, Sage and Other Familiar Plants
5. Hay-Flowers and Herbal Baths
6. Plain Food: Bran Bread and Strength-Giving Soup
7. Exercise and Hardening as Daily Habit
8. Order of Life and Balance
9. How the Five Pillars Took Shape
10. Key Research Papers
11. Connections

1. The Village Priest’s Home Pharmacy

My Water-Cure is divided into three parts: the applications of water, the “Apotheca”, and an alphabetical list of diseases with the treatments Kneipp used for each. Part II opens with a verse of the Benedicite — “Let every herb of the earth praise the Lord!” — and then with an attack on the patent-medicine trade of his day. “Among all the things which I abhor and hate,” he wrote, “the proprietary drugs, the trading with remedies which are kept as a secret by their inventors, hold a prominent place.” His answer was to publish everything: “in this second part, I open all the drawers and cases of my apotheca, and let every one look into them, even to the last little tea-box and the smallest oil-bottle.”

There was one exception, and he explained it in a footnote. The recipe for a single external oil, which he called his “secretive oil”, was held back “to prevent misuse”, because a chemist could only dispense it against a written prescription and, as he put it, “I myself cannot and dare not forward it, as I am neither a physician nor a chemist.” Kneipp knew where the legal line between a priest and a doctor ran, and he had been prosecuted for crossing it.

“Every chemist’s shop contains a great many expensive things; but in mine, there is not much of the extraordinary to be found,” he wrote, and he counted that “a great recommendation”. Nearly all of his remedies came from “medicinal herbs, which were formerly esteemed, but are now very often despised”, plants that grew in gardens, fields and waste places and could be gathered “free of cost”. He wrote that “there is not one little herb, or powder, which I have not myself tried and found good.”

He also explained why a water-cure book carried a herbal at all. He had hesitated, he said, in case the herbs looked like “a vote of mistrust in the water”. But some patients had an “unconquerable fear of water”, and an inner cure with plants could shorten and soften the outer cure with water. Both, in his scheme, served the same “threefold aim” that ran through all his work: “to dissolve morbid matters in the interior, to evacuate them, and then to strengthen the organism.” His rule for both was the same too: “the gentlest application, be it exterior or interior, is the best.”

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2. Teas, Tinctures, Powders and Oils

Kneipp organised his pharmacy like a well-kept cupboard. It had “four chief divisions”: tinctures in the first, teas in the second and largest, powders in the third and oils in the fourth, with smaller compartments for everything else, including clean linen for bandages. Boxes were to stand ranked “like soldiers”, labelled and in alphabetical order, with not “even an atom” of dust on any of them. He suggested that the mother, “a diligent son, or the most cleanly and orderly daughter” take charge of it.

Tinctures

For a tincture, or “extract” as he also called it, the best and ripest herbs or berries were dried on a wooden board in the open air “always in the shade, never in the sun”, cut small and steeped in spirit — his own preference was “real corn-brandy” — in a sealed bottle kept somewhere moderately warm. He wrote that he had sometimes left such bottles standing for a year or more before pouring off the extract.

Teas

Teas were the heart of the cupboard. He described the household way of making them, with the herbs gathered on a dry day, preferably from dry ground or a sunny hillside and at full flower, and renewed every year. He added that in his own apotheca the herbs were “really decocted for a longer time, thoroughly stewed so that not a particle of the healing power is lost”, so his teas were stronger than an ordinary kitchen brew.

Powders and oils

Powders were made by grinding dried roots, leaves, seeds or berries in a mortar. Many patients, he observed, found a powder easier to take than a tea, since it could be strewn on food “like a spice (pepper, cinnamon)” or stirred into a drink. Fennel seed, for example, was roasted and ground “in an ordinary coffee mill”.

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3. Sixty Remedies from Field and Garden

The remedies themselves follow in alphabetical order, numbered from 1 (almond-oil) to 60 (wormwood). The 1892 English edition gives each plant with its Latin name and, for many, a botanical drawing with lettered parts.

Most of the sixty are plants a nineteenth-century Swabian farm family would have known by sight: anise, bilberry, blackthorn blossom, bog-bean, brier (rose hips), camomile, centaury, colt’s-foot, common elder and dwarf elder, common nettle, cowslips, eyebright, fennel, fenugreek, gentian, juniper, knot-grass, linseed, mallow, mint, mistletoe, mullein, oats, ribwort plantain, rosemary, rue, sage, shave-grass (horsetail), silver-weed, St John’s-wort, wild strawberry, chicory, valerian, violet, wild angelica and wormwood.

The rest of the list is a reminder that this was a farmhouse medicine chest rather than a botanical garden. It includes honey, bran, sauerkraut, cod-liver oil, salad-oil (by which he meant olive or rape oil), alum, camphor, cloves, resin or incense grains, and three “dusts” — bone-dust, chalk-dust and coal-dust. At the end of Part II he printed a short inventory of what “a little home-apotheca” ought to hold, divided again into tinctures, teas, powders and oils.

Just as telling is what he left out. Plants of “doubtful effect”, such as liquorice wood, plants with unfavourable effects on the stomach, “like senna-leaves, hops, etc.”, and “above all, poisonous plants” he said he had “put aside on principle”. He also had no patience with patients who believed that many medicines must cure them, and he told the story of a physician who gave such patients pills of bread “simply to give them the smell of chemistry” — an early description, in a priest’s herbal, of what would later be called the placebo effect.

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4. Nettle, Chamomile, Sage and Other Familiar Plants

The entries are short, practical and often personal. The claims in them are Kneipp’s own, drawn from his experience in Wörishofen in the 1880s; they are reported here as he made them, not as tested findings, and the herb pages linked below describe what later research has looked at for each plant.

Common nettle

The longest praise goes to the stinging nettle. “The common nettle is the most despised among the plants,” he began, and then argued the opposite: “Nettles are indeed for the connoisseur of the greatest value.” He wrote that nettle tea loosened phlegm in the chest and cleansed the stomach, acting “chiefly by means of the kidneys”; that the root worked “even more powerfully than the leaves”; and that nettle-root tea could cure dropsy “in its first stages”.

Chamomile, fennel and the stomach herbs

Camomile needed almost no introduction. He listed its tea for colds with fever, gripes and cramps, and said the little bags of warmed camomile were “so well known and liked in every house” that nothing more needed saying. Fennel seed, which “must not be wanting in any home-dispensary”, he described boiled in milk for colic and spasms, sprinkled as a powder on food against wind, and used as an eye-wash, adding that anise and caraway had similar effects.

A cluster of bitter and aromatic plants served the stomach. He called yellow gentian extract “one of the best stomachics”. Wormwood “ranks among the best known stomachics”, he wrote, improving appetite and digestion as tea or powder. Rosemary was “an excellent stomachic” as a tea, and rosemary steeped in white wine he described as a remedy for heart complaints and dropsy. Sage he valued for cleansing: he had seen passers-by rub their teeth with a leaf, and he used sage washes on old wounds and sage tea for phlegm in the throat, sometimes mixed with wormwood.

Juniper, angelica and the “bad matters”

Juniper berries he praised for fumigating sickrooms and, chewed, for “fumigating” the mouth and stomach of nurses caring for patients with infectious diseases; he also reported them as an old remedy for gravel, stone and kidney complaints. Wild angelica, the hollow-stemmed plant of damp meadows that village boys made into whistles, he described as a tea for clearing “unwholesome or half-poisonous food” from the body and for warming a cold stomach. Its entry also carries the book’s clearest safety warning: he cautioned people with little knowledge of plants against gathering angelica, “lest they should carry home hemlock (poisonous plant) instead”, because such “most dangerous mistakes have repeatedly occurred.”

Shave-grass, St John’s-wort and valerian

“Shave-grass” was his name for field horsetail (Equisetum arvense), the silica-rich plant housewives used to scour pewter. He wrote that its “manifold and excellent effects” could not “be too highly estimated”: as washes and compresses on old wounds and ulcers, as a tea for gravel and difficulty passing urine, for which it “stands alone”, and for bleeding. St John’s-wort, which he noted had once been called “witch’s-herb” and was “now-a-days … quite forgotten”, he used mainly for the liver, for head complaints and for children’s bed-wetting, naming common yarrow as a substitute. Of valerian he observed that cats roll in it, used only the root, and described it, taken “in small quantities only”, for head complaints and spasms.

Later pharmacology has added findings that Kneipp could not have known. St John’s-wort, for example, is now known to interact with many prescription drugs by speeding up the liver enzymes that break them down, and the site’s herb pages set out what is currently known about each plant’s safety.

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5. Hay-Flowers and Herbal Baths

No plant material appears more often in My Water-Cure than hay-flowers, and Kneipp defined the term himself in a footnote: “What I call hay-flowers are all the remains of hay such as stalks, leaves, blossoms and seeds, even the hay itself” — in practice, the seed-rich sweepings from the floor of a hayloft. They were the point where his herbal and his water cure met.

He used them in foot baths, sitting baths, whole baths, vapours and wraps. For the hay-flower bath, a bag of hay-flowers was boiled in a kettle and the brown decoction poured into the warm bath water. He called it “the easiest to prepare and the most frequently used” of his herbal baths, “indeed the most harmless, the normal bath for the warming of the body”, and wrote that “the coffee-brown water thoroughly opens the pores, and dissolves materials shut up in the body.”

Two other herbal baths stood beside it. The oat-straw bath, made the same way from boiled oat straw, he rated especially for the feet and for the kidneys and bladder; the pine-sprig bath, made from fresh sprigs, small branches and resinous cones, he said acted chiefly on the skin. Decoctions of hay-flowers, shave-grass and oat-straw could also replace plain water for wetting the sheets and cloths of his wraps. His reason was social as much as medical: rather than send readers to expensive spa towns or to buy “the expensive black little bottles with extract of pine sprigs”, he pointed out that “even the very poorest” could prepare these baths with “only a walk to the hay-rick, or barn, or at the utmost, to the neighbouring wood.”

The hay-flower sack, a linen bag of moist, heated hay-flowers laid on the body, became one of the emblems of the Kneipp cure; a German centenary article on him in 1997 was titled “Cold shower and hay flower”. In 1975 two German researchers, Fröhlich and Müller-Limmroth, measured the sack’s physical properties. They reported that, compared with a hot-water bottle, a kaolin poultice and a mud pack, the hay-flower sack gave off an intensely moist heat better and for longer. The details of his water applications themselves are on the hydrotherapy page of this wing.

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6. Plain Food: Bran Bread and Strength-Giving Soup

Kneipp’s food teaching started from the bran that millers removed and farmers fed to animals. In the Apotheca entry for bran he wrote: “Every servant girl gives the bran to the pigs, the bran, which … is more wholesome and nourishing than the flour itself.” He described a drink made from bran boiled in water and sweetened with honey as food for children, old people and convalescents, and closed the entry with a line that sums up his outlook: “Would that all of us tried to become more simple, more natural and more easily satisfied!”

Bran bread

At the end of Part II, under “Several kinds of strength-giving food”, he gave a recipe for bran bread. The wheat was to be ground together with its bran, made into dough with hot water, left overnight in a warm place, and baked without leaven, salt or any spice. After baking, the loaves were plunged for a few seconds into boiling water and returned briefly to the oven, a step he said he had learned from a Trappist prior. People who first found the bread “remarkably insipid”, he wrote, came to eat it “with an almost passionate liking”, and he reported it as serving well for stomach, digestive and haemorrhoidal complaints. The whole-meal loaf has remained part of the Kneipp tradition; the site’s page on whole grain versus refined wheat covers what modern studies have looked at.

The strength-giving soup

“Of this I am convinced,” he wrote: “if the soup is known and used, a great number of miserable people can be made happy.” His strength-giving soup was made from farmhouse black bread — rye bread, which he noted was ground so carefully in the country that little of the bran was lost — sliced, dried hard on the hearth and pounded to a coarse powder. A few spoonfuls stirred into boiling broth, milk or water made a soup in two minutes. He preferred the milk version, “because milk contains more nourishing substances than even broth”, and described mixing in powder from spelt bread to make several variations.

Milk, oats and the case against dainties

In Thus Shalt Thou Live he set out a fuller view of diet. Milk, he wrote, “is and will remain the first and best food from childhood to old age”, though he thought the weak, the sick and the sedentary did better with small amounts at a time. He praised oats and barley, writing that he owed “most of my present strength and endurance to the diet of my childhood and youth”, in which they “stood in great honour”. On meat he was moderate rather than vegetarian: he argued that a mainly vegetable diet carried advantages, but concluded that “as meat is nevertheless a good food, it is best to use both vegetables and meat.” He believed people erred “much more in the way they prepare their food than in the selection of the same”, and that a little food, well digested, nourished better than a great deal eaten in excess.

His dislikes were as firm. He condemned sweets and “dainties” outright, writing that “the stomach and other parts can be entirely ruined by them”, and he devoted a section of Thus Shalt Thou Live to coffee, which had spread through Swabia within his own lifetime and which he regarded as a poor substitute for real nourishment. These are his views of the 1880s and 1890s; the whole-food movement of the next century, from Bircher-Benner to Kollath, took up several of the same themes.

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7. Exercise and Hardening as Daily Habit

Kneipp opened My Water-Cure with a complaint about his age. “The weak and delicate, the poor of blood and nervous, the sick of heart or stomach, almost form the rule; the strong and vigorous are the exception,” he wrote, and he blamed “a want of hardening”. His remedy was a set of “means of hardening” built into ordinary life: walking barefoot, walking in wet grass, on wet stones, in newly fallen snow and in cold water, cold baths for arms and legs, and the knee-shower. These were not treatments for the sick alone; he described walking barefoot as “the most natural and most simple means of hardening” and urged it from infancy.

In Thus Shalt Thou Live he gave exercise and work a chapter of their own, “Work, Exercise and Rest”. It opens with a farmer’s image: “Stagnant water soon becomes putrid; a plough which is not used is soon rusty.” The body, he argued, was a machine that had to stay in use, and “by work strength increases”. He considered farm people, working “in bright sun-light” and the best air, the healthiest of all, and worried about students, clerks and others “chiefly engaged in mental work”.

He did not think a gentle stroll was enough. A walk, he wrote, refreshed the mind “by the sight of beautiful nature” but left most of the body’s organs “rather inactive”; stronger exertion of the kind found in “a regular heavy work” was needed, and the chapter goes on to physical work and indoor gymnastics. At the same time he warned against over-exertion, and the chapter’s title gives rest an equal place. Exercise in his teaching was thus a daily habit woven into work, not a sport, and it is this idea of regular movement that his followers later made the third of the five elements.

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8. Order of Life and Balance

In the introduction to My Water-Cure Kneipp wrote that “treatises, as important as that about hardening, could be written on food, clothing and airing; this will perhaps be done later on.” He did it in 1889 with So sollt ihr leben!, published in English in 1894 as Thus Shalt Thou Live: Hints and Advice for the Healthy and the Sick on a Simple and Rational Mode of Life and a Natural Method of Cure.

The book’s contents show how wide his idea of health had become. Its first part runs through light and its influence on body and mind, air, heat and cold, dress, work, exercise and rest, dwellings and the sickroom, food and drink, the timing and moderation of meals, the upbringing and hardening of children, school and the choice of a vocation, and even the rules of health for monks and nuns, with closing remarks on smoking and snuff.

This was the setting in which Kneipp’s cure worked. He was a priest, and for him the order of a well-kept house, a regular day, simple meals, fresh air, useful work and a quiet conscience belonged together with the water and the herbs. He did not, however, give this part of his teaching a technical name or turn it into a separate therapy. As the next section explains, the term “order therapy” (Ordnungstherapie) and the idea of it as a distinct pillar came later and from someone else.

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9. How the Five Pillars Took Shape

Today Kneipp therapy is usually described as resting on five elements. A 2014 paper by Locher and Pforr, written to introduce Kneipp to an international audience, lists them as “hydro- and phytotherapy, exercise, balanced nutrition, and regulative therapy”. A 2016 history by the Korean historian Ko gives them as hydrotherapy, exercise, nutrition, herbalism and “the balance of mind and body”. A 2022 German internal-medicine review by Ehnert and Geiser names water, exercise, nutrition, medicinal herbs and order of life (Lebensordnung). The wording varies; the five themes do not.

All five themes run through Kneipp’s own books, as the sections above show: water in Part I of My Water-Cure, plants in its Apotheca, exercise and food and the order of daily life in Thus Shalt Thou Live. But the neat five-part scheme is a later arrangement made by his followers. A 2004 history by Melzer, Melchart and Saller traced the fifth element in detail. They reported that, although the term Ordnungstherapie is often linked with Kneipp, both the term and its definition were founded by the Swiss physician Maximilian Bircher-Benner, who in 1937 defined it as a complex concept of natural healing based on order and harmony in the body, the environment and the daily course of life. They also reported that the classification of order therapy as one of the five pillars of Kneipp therapy “was only done by Kneipp physicians in the middle of the 20th century”. Bircher-Benner’s own version is described on the site’s page on Ordnungstherapie.

So the five pillars are best read as the movement’s summary of a priest’s practice rather than a system Kneipp himself drew up. They have proved durable. Ehnert and Geiser wrote that exercise and nutrition therapy are already largely part of conventional medicine, while the clinical evidence for Kneipp hydrotherapy remains thin and uneven — a story told on the legacy and modern research page of this wing.

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Key Research Papers

1. Locher C, Pforr C. The legacy of Sebastian Kneipp: linking wellness, naturopathic, and allopathic medicine. J Altern Complement Med. 2014;20(7):521-6. PubMed PMID: 24773138
2. Ko Y. Sebastian Kneipp and the Natural Cure Movement of Germany: Between Naturalism and Modern Medicine. Uisahak. 2016;25(3):557-590. PubMed PMID: 28529304
3. Melzer J, Melchart D, Saller R. [Development of ‘Ordnungstherapie’ by Bircher-Benner in naturopathy of the 20th century]. Forsch Komplementarmed Klass Naturheilkd. 2004;11(5):293-303. PubMed PMID: 15572870
4. Ehnert L, Geiser C. [What is confirmed in Kneipp therapy? The perspective of internal medicine]. Inn Med (Heidelb). 2022;63(12):1229-1236. PubMed PMID: 36350357
5. Fröhlich HH, Müller-Limmroth W. [Physical investigations into the thermotherapeutic action of the Kneipp hay flower sack]. MMW Munch Med Wochenschr. 1975;117(11):443-8. PubMed PMID: 804621
6. Klaus J. [Cold shower and hay flower. Sebastian Kneipp died 100 years ago]. Pflege Z. 1997;50(6):312-3. PubMed PMID: 9277252
7. Czeranko S. Father Sebastian Kneipp (1821-1897). Integr Med (Encinitas). 2019;18(4):24. PubMed PMID: 32549826
8. Kierzek A. [Priest Sebastian Kneipp and his hydrotherapeutic method. Point of view after over one hundred years]. Przegl Lek. 2005;62(12):1583-5. PubMed PMID: 16786804
9. Stier-Jarmer M, Throner V, Kirschneck M, Frisch D, Schuh A. [Effekte der Kneipp-Therapie: Ein systematischer Review der aktuellen wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisse (2000-2019)]. Complement Med Res. 2021;28(2):146-159. PubMed PMID: 33049739
10. Uehleke B. Bad Wörishofen und Sebastian Kneipp vor 100 Jahren. Wurzbg Medizinhist Mitt. 1996;14:441-7. PubMed PMID: 11619152

PubMed Topic Searches

1. PubMed: Kneipp therapy
2. PubMed: Kneipp hay flower
3. PubMed: Ordnungstherapie (order therapy)
4. PubMed: Kneipp (title) history

Further Reading

• Kneipp S. My Water-Cure. Kempten: Jos. Kösel; 1892 (authorised English edition from the 36th German edition; German first edition 1886). Part II, “Apotheca”. Full text at archive.org
• Kneipp S. Thus Shalt Thou Live. Kempten: Jos. Kösel; 1894 (authorised English edition from the 19th German edition). Full text at archive.org
• Kneipp S. The Codicil to “My Will”. 1897 (includes chapters on medicinal plants and cooking recipes). Full text at archive.org
• Früchte J. “Kneipp, Sebastian”. Neue Deutsche Biographie 12 (1980), 174–175. deutsche-biographie.de

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Connections

• Sebastian Kneipp — The Water-Cure Priest of Wörishofen
• Sebastian Kneipp: Life and Times
• My Water Cure: Kneipp’s Hydrotherapy Methods
• Kneipp’s Legacy and Modern Research
• Nutrition and Orthomolecular Doctors
• Ordnungstherapie: Bircher-Benner’s Laws of Order for Health
• Hydrotherapy
• Stinging Nettle
• Chamomile
• Horsetail
• Oats
• Whole Grain vs Refined Wheat

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