Oil-Dispersion Bath Therapy
By Thomas Von Rottenberg
The Birth of Oil-Dispersion Bath Therapy
At the beginning of my studies, I was lucky to meet Werner and Franziska Junge, who, following indications of Rudolf Steiner, developed the oil-dispersion bath. They lived in Berlin in the 1930s and studied hydrotherapy at the University. They were approached by a patient, a woman who had a systemic fungal infection, which at that time was a fatal disease because they had no effective anti-fungal medication. As this disease progresses, it comes into the lungs, and people died because they suffocated. As they had no proper means to treat it, they suggested taking out all her teeth, in order to be able to better treat the fungus. But, of course, the opposite was the case, because with the whole mouth being a wound, the fungus would much more easily infiltrate.
The next thing they suggested was to open her jaw. She said, “I’ve seen what the first measure brought, and I’d rather die, than have my jaw broken.” So she was completely hopeless––well for her, life was over, she had no hope for any kind of healing, and she was a young mother of four children. Her husband was desperate, of course, and he went to Werner Junge and said “Do you have any idea what we can do?”
Junge went to his bookshelf and took out the freshly published medical course given by Steiner. It fell open to a certain page, and he was sensitive enough to read this page. So, he read the passage where Steiner refers to the disease of diabetes, and says that diabetes actually comes about through the ego-organization not being able anymore to penetrate the pancreas. He suggested that to bring the ego-organization to penetrate the pancreas again is to bring the patient into the relationship with the oil-forming process.
The oil-forming process is a dynamic that exists––it is the inner knowledge that the plant has in order to be able to build up an oil. So it’s not the oil itself which is needed; it is the dynamic that leads to the forming of the oil. And Steiner says we need to bring the patient into a relationship with that oil-forming process. He says this can be done by bathing in water with highly dispersed essential oils. For diabetes he recommended rosemary. And in fact with the rosemary the blood sugar goes down immediately.
Junge didn’t want to use an emulsifier, which weakens the therapeutic impact of the essential oil and instead had the idea to disperse the oils through a vortex. He calculated how to do that, went to a glass blower