Alternative Medicine, Alternative Politics

Abstract

Until recently, the dominant account of Western medicine in the twentieth century was the story of the rise of a monolithic creature called scientific medicine or biomedicine. In this story, mainstream medicine became more and more reductive in outlook and dominated by laboratory research and technology. One of the results of this process was that by the early decades of the century, alternative, holistic healing traditions had largely been sidelined by conventional medicine. Only in the 1960s, the standard narrative goes, did a major challenge to this trend emerge. Critics attacked conventional medicine for its reductionism and its tendency to offer standardized, dehumanized forms of care. In its place they promised a return to more humanistic traditions, focused on the whole individual and the economic, social, psychological, and sometimes spiritual conditions that promoted illness or encouraged healing. Thus, in this account there were two distinct traditions: the reductive one of mainstream medicine, and the holistic one of its alternatives. In the past few years historians have increasingly come to question such a narrative. First, they have begun to trace the flourishing of a variety of holistic movements within mainstream medicine in the early part of the twentieth century—the very moment when reductive, scientific medicine allegedly achieved some of its greatest triumphs. In this newer account, holistic traditions thrived in modern medicine well before the 1960s, including constitutional, social, and psychological medicine, as well as neo-humoralism and neo-Hippocratism. Second, historians have also begun to complicate the story of the marginalization of alternative traditions in the early part of the century. Alternative medicine may have been sidelined by some mainstream practitioners, but this was not true of all. On the contrary, many interwar clinical holists began to take an interest in alternative traditions such as homeopathy and naturopathy, despite hostility from some of their medical colleagues toward traditions they branded as “quackery.” Thus, recent attempts to integrate “complementary” and “orthodox” medicine have their roots in older efforts to marry “alternative” and “orthodox” traditions in the 1920s and 1930s. The Politics of Healing provides an excellent introduction to some of the best work being undertaken in the history of “alternative” medicine. In the first place, it adds to a growing literature that explores the flourishing of alternative traditions before the 1960s. In the traditional account, orthodox medicine was supposed to have secured the allegiance of most Americans by the early twentieth century, and hence the leverage necessary for a state-sponsored monopoly of health care in the United States. Yet as the essays in the first half of the book document, alternative traditions routinely contested such dominance and succeeded in attracting major public support. Some of the essays examine distinct schools of practice (such as homoeopathy or Native American healing); others explore single-issue B o o k R e v i e w s