Susan E. Cayleff. Nature’s Path: A History of Naturopathic Healing in America.

Abstract

Mainstream medicine in the nineteenth century was a pretty brutal affair. When doctors were not opening patients’ veins (to “let” blood), they were applying leeches, blistering skin, and dosing patients with emetics and purgatives to induce them to vomit and excrete toxins out of their systems. Few patients benefited from these “heroic” treatments, and more than a few died. George Washington’s demise, for example, was most probably due to the three cups of blood that doctors pulled from his veins in the twenty-four hours preceding his death. It is no wonder, then, that the nineteenth century saw natural healing movements that rejected these harsh and unhelpful therapies and substituted, instead, clear mountain water, whole grains, outdoor living, loose clothing, and reduced use of tobacco and alcohol. To our twentieth-century ears, these prescriptions sound more than reasonable and certainly better than regular doses of emetics and purgatives. To nineteenth-century doctors, however, these naturopathic approaches threatened to undermine the established medical order and needed to be fiercely resisted lest quacks take control.