The prevailing image of Justinus Kerner has been gleaned chiefly from autobiographical sources and from family memoirs. Kerner's letters and childhood autobiography, the biography written by his daughter Marie Niethammer, and his son Theobald's reliable but anecdotal account of goings-on in the Kerner house in Weinsberg present an innocuous picture of jovial eccentricity while suppressing Kerner's nearly pathological depressive tendency. At the same time, they trivialize his psychic research, which, he continually insisted, he undertook strictly as a natural scientist (he was a physician). It has been only recently that the dark side of Kerner, as well as his importance in the history of medicine, has received due scholarly attention. Outside of his native Swabian region in southwestern Germany, where he is still honored as a kind of genius loci and patriotic bard, Kerner is less remembered as a romantic poet than as an "occultist," that is, an...