Marketplace of the Marvelous (19 page)

Hydropathy was not a complete failure: that Americans bathe regularly, drink lots of water, aspire to regular exercise, praise a low-fat and high-fiber diet, and wear nonconstricting clothing all reflect hydropathy's early influence. These preventative health measures theorized
and practiced by hydropaths in the nineteenth century became the foundation of modern healthy living still practiced and advocated by many nutritionists and doctors today. Few gyms, health and beauty spas, or athletic training rooms fail to provide users with some form of hydropathic therapy, be it a whirlpool, steam room, sauna, or swimming pool. The entire industry that exists in spas, Jacuzzis, hot tubs, and swimming facilities hearkens back to hydropathy's insistence on the importance of water to human health. Water resorts, while no longer hydropathic, still promise vacationers relaxation and renewal, the same promises made by water cures. These destinations continue to attract visitors with their beautiful views, entertainment options, and flowing water.
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Perhaps hydropathy's most visible legacy is in the popularly held belief in drinking eight glasses of water a day. This notion was appropriated and echoed with increasing fervor in the late nineteenth century by the temperance movement. By the 1910s and 1920s, American newspapers and magazines were filled with exhortations to consume eight glasses of water for health on a daily basis. Although scientists and doctors continue to disagree over how much water is enough, the idea of drinking fluids regularly for health remains undisputed.
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Although hydropaths appear not to have called disease “toxins,” their theory of using water to remove a disease-causing agent expressed this concept still very present in modern conversations about health. Today, many irregular therapies promise to flush toxins from the body through various methods, including water, in detox and cleansing diets and also advocate whole foods and exercise. The idea of flushing toxins likely predates hydropathy, but the system nonetheless provided a very clear articulation of an idea that became wildly popular and influential in irregular health.

Hydropathy also informed the reform movements that fought to clean up cities in the late nineteenth century. The emphasis of hydropaths on the importance of nature and fresh air in their treatments, and of renewal and possible perfection in the beautiful natural areas where they located their water cures, influenced the drive to create parks and green spaces in major cities. A visit to a park, like a stay at a water cure, was seen as the antidote to the ills of modern life. Efforts to improve city services for hygiene and to curb disease, particularly sewers and indoor plumbing, also have their antecedents in hydropathy.

Hydropathy lives on today as hydrotherapy and consists primarily
of therapies performed in water, hot and cold packings for injuries, steam baths, foot baths, and wet compresses. Sebastian Kneipp, a German priest, is largely credited with reviving hydropathy in the late nineteenth century and transforming it into its modern form. Building on Priessnitz's work, Kneipp added various water temperatures and pressures to the therapy regimen. Kneipp water baths, mineral bath salts, and other bathing products are still sold today. Hydropathy also plays a large part in modern sports medicine, which emphasizes the importance of water as an anesthetic, sedative, energizer, and aid to muscular exertion. Athletes often soak in ice-filled tubs after exertion to improve recovery, though some studies have questioned the efficacy of this practice, while other people use hot baths to ease sore muscles.
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What has changed between hydropathy then and now is the value attached to diet, exercise, and water. Today, these practices are less of a universal social good and more of a personal choice. None of the current rhetoric around spas, exercise, and drinking water offers to perfect humanity in the process, but it remains a primary means of self-improvement. Both today and in the nineteenth century, Americans' near obsessive concern with physical fitness and health corresponded with a highly competitive, industrial life where fitness represented yet another asset with the potential to improve performance and individual advancement. This pursuit of fulfillment and meaning through health may represent an attempt at order and control in the midst of forces that seem large and unmanageable.
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So hydropathy's decline did not mean the end of its principles and ideas. Much of what had once seemed strange and highly irregular advice—to exercise, drink water, bathe regularly, to breathe in fresh air—had become more widely accepted as common sense by the late nineteenth century among a broad swath of Americans, including regular doctors. Some hydropaths continued to practice while still others became homeopaths, joining what had become an increasingly powerful and organized challenge to regular medicine by the time the Civil War broke out. Both hydropaths and homeopaths condemned heroic therapies and believed in more natural remedies and clean living, but homeopaths would take their system to more mystical ends. They also became more powerful. Homeopaths converted untold numbers of regular doctors, opened dozens of medical schools,
formed local and national associations, and published journals that rivaled and even bested much of what regular medicine had to offer, earning homeopathy regular medicine's most vitriolic condemnation and the best chance of vanquishing heroic medicine.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton first learned about homeopathy in the 1830s, and she quickly became an enthusiastic convert and practitioner of the system, hailing the power it gave women over their health care and their bodies. (Wikimedia Commons)

 

For Elizabeth Cady Stanton, homeopathy felt like nothing less than liberation. Even better: this freedom could be purchased through the mail. “Dear me, how much cruel bondage of mind and suffering of body poor woman will escape,” wrote Stanton to her friend and fellow women's rights advocate Lucretia Mott, “when she takes the liberty of being her own physician of both body and soul.”
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Stanton had first heard about homeopathy from her brother-in-law Edward Bayard in the 1830s. Diagnosed with heart disease, Bayard had received a discouraging prognosis from his New York City doctor. Dismayed by the news, Bayard tried homeopathy at the urging of his wife. Bayard's recovery under the care of homeopath Augustus P. Biegler, using concoctions of diluted drug treatments, so astonished Bayard that he gave up his law practice to devote himself to the study of homeopathy.

Bayard's miraculous turnaround also convinced Stanton to give homeopathy a try. “I have seen wonders in Homeopathy,” she reported to her cousin Elizabeth Smith (she of hydropathic wet-dress fame), and “I intend to commence life on Homeopathic principles.”
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She purchased a home homeopathy kit and began doctoring her family, friends, and neighbors in Seneca Falls, New York. Stanton found taking charge of her health incredibly powerful, and she expressed great pride in her self-reliance. She nursed her children through malaria, whooping cough, mumps, and broken limbs with homeopathic therapies. She described the 1852 homeopathic birth of her daughter as an “easy” fifteen-minute labor with a quick recovery. Practicing
do-it-yourself homeopathy, Stanton joined the tens of thousands of lay practitioners who, along with formally trained homeopaths, made homeopathy a real and formidable contender to radically reform the practice of medicine.
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Despite its egalitarian leanings, homeopathy did not share the populist origins of Thomsonism and hydropathy. Instead, like phrenology, it began with a regular doctor. Homeopathy developed from the experimental pharmacology of disillusioned German physician and scholar Samuel Christian Frederick Hahnemann. Born in Meissen, Germany, in 1755, Hahnemann exhibited a remarkable aptitude for languages from a young age, mastering eight foreign tongues by the age of twenty-four. He used his language skills to finance his medical education in Leipzig, Vienna, and Erlangen, teaching German and French and translating medical, historical, and philosophical works. But by the time of his graduation from the University of Erlangen in 1779, Hahnemann had begun to question the effectiveness of the existing medical system. The medicine he had learned seemed to lack the scientific rigor found in other fields, founded more on superstition than reason.
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A doctor trying to find a cure for intermittent fever, explained Hahnemann, would logically “turn his attention solely to learn what medicines the experience of bygone ages has discovered.” He searches “and to his amazement discovers that an immense number of medicines have been celebrated in intermittent fever. Where is he to begin? Which medicine is he to give first; which next, and which last? He looks round for aid, but no directing angel appears.” And even if one remedy did emerge as the clear favorite, Hahnemann complained that the same prescription sent to ten pharmacies resulted in ten different preparations. So the doctor “must hope for the best, and trust to good luck!” He examined common medical treatments for arsenic poisoning and psychiatric disorders and found them far from adequate. Contemporary medicine, declared an exasperated Hahnemann, was far too uncertain to be scientific, “founded upon
perhapses
and blind chance” rather than anything demonstrably provable.
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Hahnemann became so appalled by the practice of medicine that he abandoned it completely in 1782 and turned to writing and translating scientific texts full-time. He also studied botany, pharmacology, and chemistry, searching for the answers that regular medicine had failed to provide him.
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One book seemed to offer a possibility. While translating Scottish physician William Cullen's
A Treatise on the Materia Medica
into German in 1790, Hahnemann became intrigued by Cullen's explanation of how cinchona bark healed malaria. The dried bark of a South American tree, cinchona contained quinine and had been used in Europe since the sixteenth century. It also had the rare distinction of being one of few drugs in common usage with an unquestioned and demonstrative therapeutic value. Cullen claimed that cinchona also strengthened the digestive system, but Hahnemann's own experiences taking cinchona had left him nauseated and sick. Skeptical of Cullen's claim and curious by nature, Hahnemann decided to experiment on himself. Hahnemann hoped his experiments might provide a scientific and rational explanation for how and why this particular drug worked for malaria, which he believed regular medicine sorely lacked.
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For several days, Hahnemann ingested large doses of cinchona, taking careful note of its effects on his stomach. The cinchona left him feeling chilled, feverish, weak, and without appetite. He reported that his “feet, finger ends, etc., at first became cold. I grew languid and drowsy; then my heart began to palpitate and my pulse grew hard and small, intolerable anxiety, trembling (but without cold rigour), prostration through all my limbs.”
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The once healthy Hahnemann now appeared to have all the symptoms of malaria. When he stopped his daily dose, the symptoms disappeared. His observations soon led him to conclude that “substances which excite a kind of fever . . . extinguish the types of intermittent fever.”
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Cure a fever with a fever, or like cures like. This epiphany led Hahnemann to articulate what he called the law of similars, or
Similia similibus curantur
. It became the first law of his new system, one that he and later his followers hoped would revolutionize medicine.
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An approach to healing based on similars was not new. Hahnemann himself likely knew about it already. Ancient Romans advised the consumption of a raw liver from a rabid dog to cure rabies, and colonial Americans used yellow mustard seeds to ward off yellow fever and jaundice. Even today, the “hair of the dog” after a night of hard drinking could be construed as a homeopathic remedy for a hangover.
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Heroic medicine, however, saw no necessary correlation between disease and treatment. Most regulars treated fevers
with bloodletting and laxatives that produced strong bouts of nausea. Rather than reproducing symptoms, regular therapy sought to eliminate—or, more often, change—the symptoms. Hahnemann argued that this “heterogenous” method attacked healthy organs and weakened the whole system rather than directly targeting and extinguishing the original disease with a similar one “in a prompt and rapid manner.”
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Mimicking the symptoms would cause the body to push out the original disease and substitute the artificial one.
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Although Hahnemann had first discovered his theory by swallowing large amounts of cinchona, he wondered if a smaller dose might actually be better. He worried that standard doses magnified a sick person's symptoms to a potentially life-threatening degree. “In illness the body is enormously more sensitive to drugs than in health,” asserted Hahnemann.
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Hahnemann began testing smaller and smaller doses and found that he could still emulate the disease but without aggravating symptoms. In fact, it seemed that the less he gave—even doses as small as a millionth of a gram—the better he could produce an artificial disease with curative effects.
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