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The author has considered some extant publications of Schreber's father on the healthy upbringing of children and attempted to correlate certain formations of Schreber's delusional system with experiences in his early life to arrive at the kernel of historical truth in their genesis, thus illuminating hitherto unintelligible aspects of the Memoirs. Scheber's childhood can have been characterized by early traumatization through exposure to experiences from mechanical contrivances originated by his father for the purpose of so-called healthy education. These included contraptions to restrain his head and body posture for long periods; bodily over-stimulation alternated with mechanical restraint and heightened kinaesthetic and contact perceptions and resulted in impairment of the body image. These were additional to the father's anti-masturbation campaign and childhood experiences in his father's orthopaedic institution with its sometimes terrifying clientèle. Through the investigation of these experiences, various hitherto obscure features of Schreber's pathology, particularly the so-called 'divine miracles' enacted on the patient's body throughout his illness, can be traced ontogenetically to their traumatic origin in his early father relation. An attempt is also made to connect one of Schreber's megalomanic fantasies about his family ('Margraves of Tuscany and Tasmania') with vestiges of his lost positive Oedipus complex.