Ernst Freiherr (Baron) von Feuchtersleben is anything but a household name in literature, yet he was an important figure in Austrian intellectual life before 1848. He was a talented poet, a respected literary critic, a major force for progress in education, a political figure of stature in the revolutionary year 1848, and above all a great physician and a writer of both scientific and popular publications in the field of psychosomatic medicine, or what today would be termed psychiatry. His most successful book, with many editions throughout the nineteenth century and translations into several languages, was Zur Diätetik der Seele (1838; translated as The Dietetics of the Soul, 1852). Feuchtersleben has been called a "Populärphilosoph" (popular philosopher); the term was used in the eighteenth century for writers who tried to spread the ideas of the Enlightenment, but it assumed a pejorative meaning in the nineteenth century during the...