An icebreaker
Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian philosopher, founded anthroposophy and in 1912 the Anthroposophical Society, later starting the first Waldorf school in 1919 and a complementary medical practice with a physician colleague. His movement still runs schools worldwide, alongside documented controversy over some of its claims.
He held that a trained faculty of spiritual perception, developed through disciplined inner exercises, could reveal a spiritual reality behind the physical world, and built an entire philosophy, art, and education system on that claim.
As director of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, he asked Steiner in 1919 to design and lead a new school for his employees' children, which opened that September as the first Waldorf school.
A doctor trained in Zurich, she worked with Steiner from 1920 to combine his spiritual framework with clinical practice, founding the first anthroposophic hospital in 1921 and co-authoring its foundational text shortly after his death.
As a former professor of complementary medicine, he has characterized anthroposophic medicine as lacking a scientific basis and grouped it among alternative practices whose therapeutic claims are not supported by reliable evidence.