Chapter 4 The History of Naturopathic Medicine
The Emergence and Evolution of an American School of Healing
Introduction
We believe in strong, pure, beautiful bodies thrilling perpetually with the glorious power of radiating health. We want every man, woman and child in this great land to know and embody and feel the truths of right living that mean conscious mastery. We plead for the renouncing of poisons from the coffee, white flour, glucose, lard, and like venom of the American table to patent medicines, tobacco, liquor and the other inevitable recourse of perverted appetite. We long for the time when an eight-hour day may enable every worker to stop existing long enough to live; when the spirit of universal brotherhood shall animate business and society and the church; when every American may have a little cottage of his own, and a bit of ground where he may combine Aerotherapy, Heliotherapy, Geotherapy, Aristophagy and nature’s other forces with home and peace and happiness and things forbidden to flat-dwellers; when people may stop doing and thinking and being for others and be for themselves; when true love and divine marriage and pre-natal culture and controlled parenthood may fill this world with germ-gods instead of humanized animals.
A Brief History of Early American Medicine with an Emphasis on Natural Healing
Medicine in America: 1800–1875
In the America of 1800, although a professional medical class existed, medicine was primarily domestically oriented. An individual who fell ill was commonly nursed by a friend or family member who relied upon William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine (1769), John Wesley’s Primitive Physic (1747), or John Gunn’s Domestic Medicine (1830).1
Professional Medicine
Professional medicine transferred from England and Scotland to America in pre-revolutionary days. However, eighteenth and early nineteenth century America considered the concept of creating a small, elite, learned profession to run counter to the political and institutional concepts of early American democracy.1
• Knowledge of Latin and natural and experimental philosophy
• Three years of serving an apprenticeship under practicing physicians
• Attending two terms of lectures and passing of attendant examinations
Graduating students had to be at least 21 years of age.1
The rise of any professional class is gradual and marked by difficulties, and varying concepts existed as to the demarcation of a “professional” physician. Contrasts included graduates of medical school versus nongraduates, medical society members versus nonmembers, and licensed physicians versus unlicensed “doctors.” Licensing statutes came into existence between 1830 and 1850, but were soon repealed, as they were considered “undemocratic” during the apex of Jacksonian democracy.1
Thomsonianism
In 1822 the rise in popularity of Samuel Thomson and his publication of New Guide to Health helped to frustrate the creation of a professional medical class. Thomson’s work was a compilation of his personal view of medical theory and American Indian herbal and medical botanical lore. Thomson espoused the belief that disease had one general cause—“cold” influences on the human body—and that disease had therefore one general remedy—“heat.” Unlike the followers of Benjamin Rush and the American “heroic” medical tradition who advocated blood-letting, leeching, and the substantial use of mineral-based purgatives such as antimony and mercury, Thomson believed that minerals were sources of “cold” because they came from the ground and that vegetation, which grew toward the sun, represented “heat.”1
As noted in Griggs’ Green Pharmacy (the best history of herbal medicine to date), Thomson’s theory developed as follows2:
The Eclectic School of Medicine
Beach was another of medical history’s fascinating characters. From a well-established New England family, he started his medical studies at an early age, apprenticing under an old German herbal doctor, Jacob Tidd. After Tidd died, Beach enrolled in the Barclay Street Medical University in New York. Griggs2 described the following:
To Beach this was a bitter blow, but he soon founded his own school in New York, calling the clinic and educational facility “The United States Infirmary.” However, due to continued pressure from the medical society, he was unable to obtain charter authority to issue legitimate diplomas. He then located a financially ailing but legally chartered school, Worthington College, in Ohio. He opened a full-scale medical college; out of its classrooms he launched what became known as the Eclectic School of Medical Theory. Griggs related the following2:
Cincinnati subsequently became the focal point of the eclectic movement, and the E. M. Institute medical school remained until 1938 (the last eclectic school to exist in America).3 The concepts of this sect helped to form some of the theoretical underpinnings of Lust’s naturopathy. Lust himself graduated from the Eclectic Medical College of the City of New York in the first decade of the 1900s.
The Hygienic School of Thought
One other forerunner of American naturopathy, also originating as a lay movement, grew into existence at this time. This was the “hygienic” school, which had its genesis in the popular teachings of Sylvester Graham and William Alcott.
Alcott dominated the scene in Boston during this same period and, together with Graham, saw that the American hygienic movement—at least as a lay doctrine—was well established.4
Homeopathy
• The “law of similars” (that like cures like)
• That the effect of a medication could be heightened by its administration in minute doses (the more diluted the dose, the greater the “dynamic” effect)
• That nearly all diseases were the result of a suppressed itch, or “psora”
Originally, most homeopaths in this country were converted orthodox medical men, or “allopaths.” The high rate of conversion made this particular medical sect the archenemy of the rising orthodox medical profession. (For a more detailed discussion of homeopathy, see Chapter 39.)
The first homeopathic medical school was founded in 1850 in Cleveland; the last purely homeopathic medical school, based in Philadelphia, survived into the early 1930s.1
The Rise and Fall of the Sects
Views differ as to what caused the homeopathic and eclectic schools to disappear from the medical scene in the 50 years after 1875. One view defined a sect as follows5:
By this definition, the orthodox or allopathic school was just as sectarian as the homeopathic and eclectic schools. Rothstein’s view was that these two nineteenth century sects disappeared because, beginning in the 1870s, the orthodox school grasped the European idea of “scientific medicine.” Based on the research of such men as Pasteur and Koch and the “germ theory,” this approach supposedly proved to be the medically proper view of valid therapy and gained public recognition because of its truth.
Another view was that the convergence of the needs of the three sects for professional medical recognition (which began in the 1870s and continued into the early 1900s) and the “progressive era” led to a political alliance in which the majority orthodox school was ultimately dominant by sheer weight of numbers and internal political authority. Starr1 noted the following:
In any event, this development was an integral part of the drive toward professional authority and autonomy established during the progressive era (1900–1917). It was acceptable to the homeopaths and the eclectics because they controlled medical schools that continued to teach and maintain their own professional authority and autonomy. However, it was after these professional goals were attained that the lesser schools of medical thought went into rapid decline.1
The American Influence
Trall
The earliest physician who had a significant impact on the later growth of naturopathy as a philosophical movement was Russell Trall, MD. As noted in James Whorton’s Crusaders for Fitness,4 he “passed like a meteor through the American hydropathic and hygienic movement”:
The exemplar of the physical educator-hydropath was Russell Thatcher Trall. Still another physician who had lost his faith in regular therapy, Trall opened the second water cure establishment in America, in New York City in 1844. Immediately he combined the full Preissnitzian armamentarium of baths with regulation of diet, air, exercise and sleep. He would eventually open and or direct any number of other hydropathic institutions around the country, as well as edit the Water-Cure Journal, the Hydropathic Review, and a temperance journal. He authored several books, including popular sex manuals which perpetuated Graham-like concepts into the 1890’s, sold Graham crackers and physiology texts at his New York office, was a charter member (and officer) of the American Vegetarian Society, presided over a short-lived World Health Association, and so on. His crowning accomplishment was the Hygeian Home, a “model Health Institution [which] is beautifully situated on the Delaware River between Trenton and Philadelphia.” A drawing presents it as a palatial establishment with expansive grounds for walking and riding, facilities for rowing, sailing, and swimming, and even a grove for open-air “dancing gymnastics.” It was the grandest of water cures, and lived beyond the Civil War period, which saw the demise of most hydropathic hospitals. True, Trall had to struggle to keep his head above water during the 1860’s, but by the 1870’s he had a firm financial footing (being stabilized by tuition fees from the attached Hygeio-therapeutic College). With Trall’s death in 1877, however, the hydropathic phase of health reform passed.
By 1871, Trall moved from New York to the Hygeian Home on the Delaware River. His water-cure establishment in New York became The New Hygienic Institute. One of its co-proprietors was Martin Luther Holbrook, who later replaced Trall as the editor of The Herald of Health. Professor Whorton noted the following4:
Trall and Holbrook both advanced the idea that physicians should teach the maintenance of health rather than simply provide a last resort in times of health crisis. Besides providing a strong editorial voice espousing vegetarianism, the evils of tobacco and drugs, and the value of bathing and exercise, dietetics and nutrition, along with personal hygiene, were strongly advanced by Holbrook and others of the hygienic movement during this era. Whorton described the idea as follows4:
Holbrook expanded on the work of Graham, Alcott, and Trall and, working with an awareness of the European concepts developed by Preissnitz and Kneipp, laid further groundwork for the concepts later advanced by Lust, Lindlahr, and others4:
In addition to introducing the works of Kneipp and his teachings to the American hygienic health care movement, Holbrook was a leader of the fight against vivisection and vaccination4:
Vivisection and vaccination were but two of the practices of medicine criticized in the late 19th century. Therapy also continued to be an object of protest. Although the heroism of standard treatment had declined markedly since mid-century, a prescription was still the reward of any visit to the doctor, and drugless alternatives to healing were appearing in protest. Holbrook published frequent favorable commentaries on the revised water cure system of Germany’s Kneipp. A combination of baths, herbal teas, and hardening exercises, the system had some vogue in the 1890’s before flowering into naturopathy. Holbrook’s journal also gave positive notices to osteopathy and “chiropathy” [chiropractic], commending them for not going to the “drugstore or ransack[ing] creation for remedies nor load[ing] the blood with poison.” But though bathing and musculoskeletal manipulation were natural and nonpoisonous, Holbrook preferred to give the body complete responsibility for healing itself. Rest and proper diet were the medicines of this doctor who billed himself as a “hygienic physician” and censured ordinary physicians for being engrossed with disease rather than health.
The Beginnings of “Scientific Medicine”
While the hygienic movement was making its impact, the orthodox medical profession, in alliance with the homeopaths and eclectics, was making significant advances. The orthodox profession, through the political efforts of the American Medical Association (AMA), first tried to remove sectarian and irregular practitioners by segregating them from the medical profession altogether. It did so by formulating and publishing its first national medical code of ethics in 1847. (In 1846 the orthodox profession formed the AMA to represent their professional views.) The code condemned proprietary patents (even carrying over into a physician’s development of surgical or other medical implements, which led to its greatest criticism); encouraged the adoption of uniform rules for payment in geographic areas; condemned the practice of contract work; prohibited advertising and fee-sharing even among specialists and general practitioners; eliminated blacks and women; and, most significantly, prohibited any consultation or contact with irregulars or sectarian practitioners. The code stated the following6:
This transition from conflict between the major sects resulted in the erosion of the implementation of the code of ethics, the cooperation among the sects to revive medical licensing standards, the admission of sectarian physicians to regular medical societies, and, ultimately, a structural reorganization of the AMA, which occurred between 1875 and 1903.1,5
The Foundations
The impact of the monies from the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations was clearly documented7 and described in detail in Brown’s Rockefeller Medicine Men.8 The impact of the monies from these foundations, contributed to medical schools that met the AMA’s views on medical education and philosophy, cannot be underestimated.
This process has been well documented.1,7,9,10 As discussed by Burrows,10 these educational reforms allowed the AMA to forge a new alliance with state legislators and push quickly for medical licensing designed to reward the educational and medical expertise of the newly orthodox “scientific medicine” and to the exclusion of all others.
Medical Education in Transition
Based on the rising example of scientific medicine and its necessary connection to research, the educational laboratory, and a more thorough scientific education as a preamble to medical practice, Harvard University (under the presidency of Charles Elliott) created a 4-year medical educational program in 1871. The primal modern medical educational curriculum was devised and set in motion more than 20 years later at Johns Hopkins University under the leadership of William Osler and William Welch, using the resources from the original endowment of the hospital and university from the estate of Johns Hopkins.1
Flexner Report
The eclectic medical schools, in particular, were severely affected by the report. Griggs explained this effect as follows2:
Of the eight Eclectic schools, the Report declared that none had “anything remotely resembling the laboratory equipment which is claimed in their catalogs.” Three of them were under-equipped; the rest “are without exception filthy and almost bare. They have at best grimy little laboratories … a few microscopes, some bottles containing discolored and unlabeled pathological material, in an incubator out of commission, and a horrid dissecting room.” The Report found them more culpable than a regular school for these inadequacies: “… the Eclectics are drug-mad; yet, with the exception of the Cincinnati and New York schools, they are not equipped to teach the drugs or drug therapy which constitutes their sole reason for existence.”
The other regular schools that conducted homeopathic or eclectic programs had by that time phased them out in the name of “scientific medicine” (see also Haller3).
The New “Sects”
Although some of the following discussions are devoted to the schools of healing called osteopathy and chiropractic, only that portion of their histories related to the history of naturopathy is mentioned.12 (A full study of osteopathic medicine in America may be found in The D.O.’s by Gevitz,13 and a reasonable sketch of chiropractic medicine may be found in Kapling’s chapter in Alternative Medicine.12)
As noted by Starr,1 these new sects, including Christian Science, formulated by Mary Baker Eddy,14 either rose or fell on their own without ever completely allying with orthodox medicine. Starr theorized that these sects arose late enough that the orthodox profession and its political action arm, the AMA, had no need to ally with them and would rather battle with them publicly. This made these sectarian views separate and distinct from the homeopathic and eclectic schools.
The Founding of Naturopathic Medicine
Benedict Lust
He returned to Germany in 1907 to visit with Dr. Baumgarten, Kneipp’s medical successor at the Woerishofen facility, which was then run, in cooperation with Baumgarten, by the Reverend Prior Reily, the former secretary to Kneipp and his lay successor at Woerishofen. As directed by Kneipp, Reily had completed, after Kneipp’s death, Kneipp’s master work Das grosse Kneipp—Buch. Lust maintained contact with the partnership of Reily and Baumgarten throughout the early part of the twentieth century.
Introduction
The motto that IN UNITY THERE IS STRENGTH is the foundation of the present enterprise.
Not only will the book add to the prestige of the practitioner in the eyes of his patients, but when the scattered members of our profession in every State desire to obtain legislative action on behalf of their profession and themselves, the appeal of such a work as our directory will, in the eyes of legislators, gain for them a much more respectful hearing than could otherwise be obtained.
The principles, aim and program of the nature cure system
Away back in pre-historic times, disease was regarded as a demon to be exorcized from its victim, and the medicine man of his tribe belabored the body of his patient with a bag in which rattled bones and feathers, and no doubt in extreme cases the tremendous faith in this process of cure that was engendered in the mind of the patient really cured some ailments for which mental science and not the bag of bones and feathers should be given credit.
In Sweden, Ling and others developed various systems of mechano-therapy and curative gymnastics.