Marketplace of the Marvelous

Apple: A Global History

Madison: History of a Model City

A Short History of Wisconsin

Odd Wisconsin: Amusing, Perplexing, and Unlikely Stories from Wisconsin's Past

For Matt

        

The doctor of the future will give no medicine but will interest his
patients in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and
prevention of disease
.

THOMAS EDISON

Prevention is preferable to cure
.

HIPPOCRATES

INTRODUCTION
Medicine at the Crossroads

 

CHAPTER ONE
     Every Man His Own Physician: Thomson's Botanic Medicine

CHAPTER TWO
     The Only True Science of the Mind: Phrenology

CHAPTER THREE
  Quenching Thirst, Healing Pain: Hydropathy

CHAPTER FOUR
    Dilutions of Health: Homeopathy

CHAPTER FIVE
     Hypnotized: Mesmer and His Mental Magic

CHAPTER SIX
       Selling Snake Oil: Patent Medicine

CHAPTER SEVEN
  Manual Medicine: Osteopathy and Chiropractic

CHAPTER EIGHT
  The Fall and Rise of Alternative Medicine

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Medical knowledge was limited in the nineteenth century, so both regular and irregular doctors used methods often dangerous and of dubious scientific validity. Bloodletting was among the most common regular treatments, and venesection its most extreme form, in which doctors would slit open a patient's vein and catch blood in a bowl. (The Burns Archive, New York)

 

Riffling through a box of family photos and letters, I found a small cardboard tube enclosing a tightly rolled sheet of paper with lightly stained edges. I carefully pulled it from the tube and began to gently unroll the paper. Swirls began to appear along the border as well as an official-looking seal, a certificate of some sort. “The Kellberg Institute for Hygiene, Massage, and Medical Gymnastics” it read across the top. Medical gymnastics? An image of a woman in a blue hospital gown vaulting over a hospital bed, her gown flapping open immodestly in the back, popped into my head. Who did gymnastics for medical reasons?

Below the school name it read Corinne Newmann, the date, May 12, 1916, and her apparent specialty: water therapeutics. It seems my great-grandmother did.

I soon learned that medical gymnastics is still around—we just call it exercising today. Swedish immigrants in Chicago founded the Kellberg Institute and offered instruction in the Swedish gymnastics system developed in the early nineteenth century by Swede Per Henrik Ling to promote health and healing. Ling developed a method of medical calisthenics after noticing how his own daily exercises had healed the joint injuries sustained from his strenuous fencing hobby. His regimen also incorporated massage; Ling is the Swede behind Swedish massage.
¹

The mainstream medical community did not exactly welcome Ling's system with open arms—outright disdain for his presumption
of medical knowledge might be more accurate—yet his system found widespread approval among the general public and a vast group of independent healers with their own divergent ideas of disease, health, and wellness. And yet we now take it for granted that exercise is fundamental to good health.

How did that happen? What other now widely accepted ideas began on the margins of medicine?

These questions led me deep into the history of what we would now call alternative medicine but what was often known in the nineteenth century as unorthodox or irregular medicine, and at less kind times, quackery. But the more I read, the more difficult it became to determine what was quackery and what was simply a bold innovation.

Take hydropathy, or the water cure, which advocated the importance of water to health. Patients did all kinds of odd things like taking cold baths outdoors and wrapping themselves in cold wet bandages as a means of washing away disease. But hydropaths also advised drinking eight or more glasses of water a day. I tried to remember the last time I didn't fill my own water bottle several times a day with the vague notion that I did it to keep healthy. This idea, too, came from a quack?

Wading still deeper, I found nineteenth-century irregulars advocating cleanliness and diets of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, prescribing medications with few side effects and made of natural ingredients, and hypothesizing on the connection of both the mind and body to one's overall well-being—nothing that would seem out of place in modern discussions of health and wellness.

At the same time, the more I read about mainstream, or regular, medicine—as it was known at the time—the less regular it seemed. Many of the therapies practiced by these doctors seemed at best odd, and at worst more quackish than the quacks. Bleeding, induced vomiting, blistering, and sweating, often to painful and sometimes deadly degrees, were the primary tools in the doctor's bag. The reasons for prescribing bleeding over vomiting for any given patient seemed to depend more on the doctor's inclination, training, or mood than anything we would recognize as sound evidence today. At the same time, regular doctors lampooned hydropathy's concern for daily baths and regular water consumption, just as they had disdained Ling's exercise regimen.

And then there was Missouri physician John Sappington, who
manufactured and sold his own brand of pills for fever in the 1830s. “Doctor John Sappington's Anti-Fever & Ague Pills” bore all the marks of the classic patent medicine, and Sappington of the snake oil salesman: he kept the ingredients secret, he advertised in newspapers and magazines, and he made a fortune off of its sale. But Sappington's pills also proved quite effective, particularly against malaria, as one of its secret ingredients was quinine, the first effective treatment for the disease. His regular colleagues denounced him as a quack, but Sappington's pills made him one of the first people in the United States to use quinine to successfully treat malarial fever.
²
How could he be a quack? Or was he a regular doctor who also sold patent medicines, making him what—an irregular regular?

The more I read, the more confused about these distinctions I became. These weren't the stories I was used to hearing. Most accounts of early American medicine focus tightly on embattled doctors valiantly protecting the public from harmful—and even deadly—medical charlatans and quacks. The nineteenth century was not called the “golden age of the quack remedy” for nothing, right? But here were quacks advising patients to drink water and prescribing patent remedies with active ingredients that really worked. Calling one group regular and everyone else irregular seemed far too simplistic and even misleading.

The contest between regular and irregular medicine brought me into nineteenth-century America, where I found a medical landscape both contentious and wildly hopeful. It was a time when healers of all kinds—regular, irregular, quacks, and everything in between—vied for public favor as the criteria for practicing medicine seemed to be no criteria at all. Phrenologists read character on the topography of human skulls, mesmerists transferred animal magnetism through a hypnotic stare, and Thomsonians found all the drugs they needed growing just outside their doors. These healers fought to win the right to heal the bodies and minds of a people in a new country with their own ideas of who to trust. In an era when reformers banded together to try to remake religion, abolish slavery, outlaw liquor, open free schools, and grant women rights, it seemed only natural to me that some would focus on improving the quality of health care. So why hadn't I heard these stories before?

Many of the nineteenth century's healing claims seemed just as ridiculous and unbelievable as I'd always supposed. Why would people
think that the shape of their heads revealed anything about their character? Or that sickness resulted from a lack of internal heat? But millions of Americans, educated and not, rich and poor, did believe, or at least hoped these cures would work. And as the contradictions stacked up before me, I wondered where some of these irregular medical systems had even come from in the first place. Which caught on and why? What made them believable? And how did modern medicine, which appears to be a conglomeration of regular and irregular therapies, emerge from this nineteenth-century maelstrom of competing claims?

My own feelings of incredulity fit the tenor of the times. Hard-eyed skepticism and zealous belief ran hand in hand throughout much of the nineteenth century. The era fairly throbbed with new ideas, technologies, and sciences, each seemingly more novel, unbelievable, and glimmering with possibility than the last. Few could resist giving at least some of these novelties a try.

On a fall afternoon in 1873, writer and humorist Mark Twain arrived at the London offices of a fellow American. In town for a series of lectures, Twain had seen an advertisement for Lorenzo Niles Fowler, “practical phrenologist” and decided to investigate.

Phrenology wasn't new to Twain. He remembered the itinerant phrenologists from his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, giving demonstrations and offering advice. These travelers were “popular and always welcome,” satisfying the townspeople with “translations of their characters,” he recalled. Nearly everyone received positive readings. “I still remember that no phrenologist ever came across a skull in our town that fell much short of the [George] Washington standard,” wrote Twain.
³

Phrenology wasn't new either, but by the 1870s, its massive wave of popularity had long since crested in the United States. Devoted phrenologists could still be found, though, courting true believers and those who perhaps just ardently wished to believe that character could be scientifically “read” on the skull and possibly even improved.

Entering Fowler's Ludgate Circus office, Twain “found Fowler on duty, amidst the impressive symbols of his trade … all about the room stood marble-white busts, hairless, every inch of the skull occupied by a shallow bump, and every bump labeled with its imposing name, in black letters.”

Twain paid Fowler for a reading. It's not clear whether he attempted to disguise his physical appearance. Well known by this time for his short stories, lectures, and best-selling travelogue
The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims' Progress
, Twain cut a fairly recognizable figure. Either way, Fowler gave no indication that he recognized Twain. In fact, Twain complained that Fowler “fingered my head in an uninterested way and named and estimated my qualities in a bored and monotonous voice.”