After the Holocaust, many felt that Western civilization was forever tainted. Even its most noble enterprises, such as medicine, were contaminated by their own crimes and by Nazism. A strong craving for purification and renewal led artists away from the quotidian practice of medicine and toward the very sources of life and healing. Ironically, the escape into holism reminded many of the holistic, antirational, and even mystical trends so prevalent in Germany - particularly from the birth of homeopathy in the first half of the 19th century until the Nazi era.

Wolfgang Laib (b.1948) studied medicine but opted for a career as an artist. Laib wrote his doctoral dissertation on the purity of drinking water, and eventually abandoned medicine in order to lead a life of simplicity in the German countryside. In an interview with Klauss Ottmann (2001), Laib explains his change of career in personal terms: "The more I knew about the natural science, the more I saw that they were too narrow for me and it's just not what this body, what all these things are all about."

Laib's self-proclaimed departure from Western tradition in favor of Indian-inspired vegetarian and meditative life was strongly influenced by Beuys and is arguably associated with the despair of post-Holocaust cold-war Europe. Laib's departure from modern medicine was only one step in his escape from his "Germanness".

Laib's work invokes pristine limpidity and wholesomeness; it aspires to crosmic healing through a return to austere and non-anthropocentric ecological humility. The restlessness of contermporary culture finds expression in the medical culture in the form of an unremitting pursuit of the latest study, guideline, and publication, as well as in the mounting pressure for economizing the staggering growth of biomedicine. Laib offers a counterpoint to this culture by his meditative sifting and patient spreading of pollen on a simple floor in an undecorated empty warehouse. Thomas McEvilly, who views Laib's art as the practice of medicine in an alternative context, compares such works to a Tantric therapeutic ritual in which the patient is put inside a geometrical space of a certain color, which is selected according to the diagnosis. Max Beckmann, possibly the most influential German artist of the first half of the 20th century, painted the midwife in his "Birth" (1937, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, not shown) as a self-portrait, thus invoking both the Socratic metaphor of the teacher as a midwife, and the artist as a teacher and healer.

Laib seems also to follow Erick Heckel, who associated flowers with healing in his 1912 painting "Convalescence of a Woman" (Busch Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, not shown), in the oriental spirit of submission to nature. But while Heckel used the traditional tryptich format and the highly durable medium of oil on canvas, Laib creates with real pollen. A gust of wind, a sneeze, can alter and even dispel the extremely fragile sculpture before natural decay makes it disappear. The visitors know this and tiptoe in the gallery, creating an atmosphere of sublimity thus turning the work of art and the shabby warehouse in which it was placed into a shrine dedicated to the vulnerability of nature and health.

Notwithstanding Laib's proclaimed departure from European culture, Margit Rowell traces his dept to German Romanticism: "Returning to a state of "Urspruenglichkeit", or origins, people would reconnect with their instincts and intuitions and gain visionary awareness of the universe in its primitive clarity and sublime unity." Laib's escape is possibly a rekindled interest in the Indian roots of Aryanism. His obsession with purity and nonhuman (although not inhumane) ecologism requires close critical evaluation as well. Whatever the final judgment in that question might be, Laib's art has turned its back on contemporary medicine an dmedical problems, and thus can say nothing about them.