FOLK MEDICINE, HEALTH FADS, AND FAITH HEALING

Jonathon Erlen

Today we will discuss a widespread answer to the public's active distrust of the community doctors during the 19 th century. This 3-prong effort can best be summarized as "medicine without physicians", and is comprised of 3 distinct elements: folk medicine, also known as domestic medicine; various types of health fads, and different forms of faith healing. In our short time today I will try to summarize the general nature and wide spread impact of these major l9th century health movements in America, many of which have their current counterparts.

Americans have always practiced do-it-yourself medicine. You have seen it, I'm sure, in your own families and probably tried your hand at it occasionally without realizing that you are practicing some form of folk medicine. There are several basic reasons why Americans have, and still, to a certain extent, currently rely on folk home cures. First, pioneer Americans had strong beliefs in their own abilities in almost all areas, including health care. This self-calling on a physician for assistance as a sign of personal weakness and failure.

Secondly, throughout the 19th century, and even today in some states, large segments of the populace have no or very limited access to doctors and professional forms of health care. Rural America, then and now, was forced to be self-reliant in the area of medicine. Now we have to add to this number the over 40 million Americans without adequate health insurance.A third factor favoring folk home medicine was the sincere belief by some individuals that they possessed actual knowledge of how to best treat certain health care

Finally, as we have described in detail, there was considerable distrust of the regular physician by much of the American citizenry, particularly in the 19th century, thus forcing this part of the general public to seek alternative ways to handle their health problems. These individuals could turn to 5 major sources for home folk medical practices. First, as we have just mentioned, were the family or local oral folklore traditions.Secondly, the 19th and the early 20th centuries have abounded with a ready supply of patent medicines and foodstuffs, which anyone could easily procure and use to conjure up their own forms of home cures, from the local grocery stories to GNC today.

When we look at the history of self-help folk medicine in the U.S., we find that probably the first major self-help medical manual came from Great Britain during the colonial period. This work, entitled Domestic Medicine, was written by William Buchan in Edinburgh, with the 1st. edition appearing in 1769. This small volume was readily accepted by the colonists. Buchan stressed the preventative aspects of health care for children's diseases, while for adults he suggested moderate changes in diet, exercise, the virtues of fresh air, temperance, and abstinence from excessive passions. His less harsh, inexpensive cures were very popular in late colonial and Revolutionary America.

Following the Revolutionary War various American authors published revised editions of Buchan's book, adding additional chapters covering supposed unique American diseases, such as yellow fever. These home medical manuals were particularly popular in rural America, as many of their herbal remedies were readily available out in the fields. These books warned about the hazards of consulting quacks, and, by the 1830's, also warned the public against the use of strong drugs, such as calomel, and excessive bleeding, which were the main therapeutics of the traditional physicians of that era.

Besides these offshoots of Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, there was another type of self-help medical text which received great public support. This work, instead of being only a substitute for the doctor’s assistance, totally rejected the value of all physicians and their supposed medical wisdom and told the readers to be their own doctors. In the colonial era probably the best known of these types of works was entitled Primitive Physick, written in 1747 by a man better known in religious than medical circles, John Wesley. should avoid all doctors and their harsh cures, and should return to earlier folk cures for common ailments.

This type of self-help medical manual appealed to the anti-intellectualism and anti-professional attitudes sweeping the U.S. during the Jacksonian era, 1828 into the 1840's. This was an era when Americans proudly bragged about being self-sufficient, so that everyone could in fact be their own doctor. Throughout the rest of the 19th century a more powerful national movement fostered the growth of self‑help folk medicine. The rapid physical growth of the U.S., with various new frontiers being opened by farmers, cattle and sheep ranchers, and gold and silver prospectors, created a situation where much of the expanding West was forced to be self-reliant because of a lack of physicians willing to leave the eastern cities, not unlike today with the lack of physicians to practice in some parts of rural America.

By the turn of the 20th century, self-help medical manuals had changed their format, now focusing on personal hygiene and the handling of emergencies, rather than providing recipes for cures. There are 4 main reasons for this altered function of traditional folk medicine. First was the rise of the patent medicine business, which will be the focus of our next class. Generally, we can say that these patent medicines replaced the older-type self-help books in the minds of the public, who came to rely on these medicines instead of their own home brewed cures.

While self-help folk medicine appealed to the largest percentage of the public trying to avoid traditional doctors, another form of alternative health care became and has remained intensely popular among segments of the American public. We cannot open a newspaper or watch TV without seeing an advertisement for 1 or more types of health fads, such as diet control pills or health spas for physical fitness. Nearly all the current health fads have their roots firmly planted in the 19th century. What I propose to do now is to outline some basic principles common to most of the health fads begun in the 19th century, and then examine in-depth a few of the most wide-spread, some of which are still with us today.

Let me begin by defining what I mean by the concept of “health fad”. This term is usually applied to a relatively simplistic, 1-step measure promoted to improve and/or insure one’s health. Therefore, if you follow the 1 prescribed practice, whatever its nature, you not only will be free of whatever diseases currently afflict you, but you will also remain in good health as long as you continue to practice the particular health care fad.

While various types of health fads have always appealed to mankind, we find that health fads tended to flourish during periods of general reform ferment or social optimism. Thus in America, interest in health fads was at its height during the Jacksonian era, 1830's and 1840's, and the Progressive Era, 1890's to 1920. Closer to our own time, much of the renewed interest in natural foods, diets, and physical fitness can be directly traced to the turmoil of the Vietnam War era in the 1960’s. Conversely, public interest in and support for health fads diminished during the Civil War period and the years of the Gilded Age, 1875 to 1895, and the Great Depression, when the public's attention was narrowly focused on goals other than health.

What general principles can we apply to the diverse number of health fads, particularly during the 19th century? We can begin by stating that at that time Americans had a great need for hygienic reform. We will spend several sessions examining American public health concerns later in this course, but, for now we can generalize and say that 19th century Americans, perhaps because of their frontier nature of living, did tend to overeat, excessively drink, and smoke heavily, all factors which lead to poor health.

Support for health fads was generated by, as we have noted, the widespread distrust of traditional doctors and their treatments by the general public. Surely it was preferable to follow a simple, relatively painless regime promoted by 1 of the various health fad leaders, rather than subscribe to the tortuous prescriptions of the physicians of that day.Particularly with diseases medicine could not successfully treat, which were the vast majority, health fads found a ready audience. We see this point well illustrated today, with the popular interest in laetrile as a cure for both cancer and AIDS. Health fads in many cases, similarly to quackery, did and do appeal to the desperate and the uninformed.

Looking at more specific central themes involved with the acceptance of health fads during the first half of the 19th century, we can say that good health and hygiene was perceived by the general public, not only as a worthwhile goal for the individual, but, also, as a moral obligation that these people owed to both the American nation and to God. Americans believed that by creating a physically sound, if not superior population, this country would secure its rightful greatness in the world. Belief in the need for physical health among the populace would be altered by the end of the 19th century to the pre‑Eugenics concepts that opposed immigration from non‑Western European countries and opposed equal rights for the physically handicapped and the mentally retarded.

We really need to consider most 19th century American health fads as part of an American hygienic religion. Health reform ideology in the first half of the 19th century drew much of its inspiration from contemporary Christianity, which had broken away from the harsher Calvinistic views that had said disease was God's punishment to mankind for earthly sins. After the second Great Awakening in American Protestant religion in the early 19th century, God was now perceived as a loving father figure who wanted mankind to use their reasoning powers to perfect their health.

When we look at the variety of individuals who created and promoted health fads, we can see some marked similarities in these fascinating people. Many of these individuals were well educated and kept up with the limited scientific advances of their times. Yet these people were convinced that science alone could not lead to their end goal: namely, the perfectibility of the human race, and so they developed their own health regimes.Also, many of these so-called health reformers were actually former health sinners, who had abused their health to the point where traditional medicine was helpless. It was in their hour of desperate need that they discovered their miraculous cure-all health fads and went on to spread their discovery to the eager masses.

Now that we have outlined the general nature of health fads, let us look in more detail at a few of the more popular approaches to health care, some of which are still evident in today's society. Let's begin by discussing the wide spread acceptance of hydropathy, known during the 19th century as the "water-cure". Hydropathy as it was practiced in 19th century America, was based on 2 principles: the free administration of cold water taken in large doses, both internally and externally; and the excitation of perspiration, or sweating. The use of cold water in health practices can be traced back to the Hippocratic Corpus, and the Roman baths made frequent use of this supposed curative. The health records of 18th century England and Europe show that cold water was applied in various forms to heal the sick.

It fell to a simple Silesian peasant, however, to originate the form of hydropathic therapy that proved so popular in 19th century America. Vincenz Priessnitz was born July 4, 1799, in Silesia and received a traditional agricultural education on his father's farm, including the folklore about cold water's curative properties. In 1816 he was thrown from a horse and injured so severely that the local physician gave up on his case. Priessnitz began treating himself with cold water, managed to cure himself, and by 1830 had developed his water-cure techniques. He opened a water-cure clinic in his home, and, by 1842, he was successfully touring Europe promoting his hydropathic health fad.

Although Americans had experimented since the 1700's with the use of cold water in healing, Priessnitz's ideas were readily adopted when they crossed the Atlantic to the U.S. in the 1840's. Several water-cure journals were established, along with 2 medical schools featuring hydropathic theory and practices. Hundreds of hydropathic practitioners emerged throughout America, and many health spas and mineral springs, usually located in rural locations, advertised their miraculous curative abilities. Testimonials of these miracle cures appeared in America’s leading newspapers.

There were several different methods to apply the water-cure. One method was the water girdle, which was made of 3 yards of towering that was soaked once every 3 hours in cold water. Besides this standard approach to the water‑cure practitioners made use of all manner of baths, many only immersing the supposed sick portion of the individual. Priessnitz instructed his patients to be careful of their diets, eating only cold foods, and to avoid liquor and stimulants such as coffee, tea, and spices. Patients were also to drink large amounts of cold water, from 5 to 40 tumblers/day.

Another extremely popular health fad in ante-bellum America illustrates the close connection between science and religion during this period. Christian physiology is the label we can apply to the health care teachings of 1 of the most prominent health reformers of that period, Sylvester Graham. Graham was born in Connecticut in 1794, and lost both his parents early in his life. By the age of 16 he showed symptoms of consumption, what we now call tuberculosis, but recovered, only to suffer a nervous breakdown at the age of 29. Following these years of poor health he became a Presbyterian minister and a lecturer for the Pennsylvania Temperance Society.

Graham now found his life's work as a health reformer. He read several of the accepted anatomy and physiology texts of that era and became convinced that various forms of over-stimulation directly caused all ill-health. This view nicely conformed to the Christian concerns over the perceived decadence in American society, so Graham combined the minister's push for Christian spiritual perfection with his own amateur physiological theories to create Christian physiology.

Graham was particularly adamant about the need to abstain from engaging in "excessive" sex, both in terms of the actions themselves and even the desire to have sex. In warning about the physiological dangers of sexual intercourse in his 1833 publication, Chastity, in a Course of Lectures to Young Men, Graham described these problems thusly: (quote Whorton p. 93). He recommended that married couples should limit these activities to not more than once/month, and should be even more limited as they aged least they harm their health.

While we do not see advocates of Sylvester Graham's physiological theories today, another ante-bellum American health fad still prospers today. Are any of you vegetarians in your dietary preferences? The belief in vegetarianism has been in existence since the earliest civilizations. Early Christian doctrines favored vegetarianism in order to promote humane treatment of animals, and because of Biblical passages outlawing the eating of flesh, such as Genesis 1:29. This belief in the inhumanness of eating animals became very popular during the 17th and 18th centuries, but by the 19th century advocates of vegetarianism sought sounder scientific rationales for their limited diets.

It is interesting to note here the response made by vegetarians and other health reformers when one of their leaders died at an early age. The explanation was usually put forward that the death was caused, not by the failure of the health faddist’s efforts, but from the inherited weaknesses of these individuals because their parents had failed to follow the proper health regime during their lives.

The 1850's saw a drastic decline in health reformers' activities and their ability to attract the public's interest and support, as the optimism of the Jacksonian era gave way to the harsh cynical concerns over slavery and the problems of national unity. The Civil War, the decade of Reconstruction, and the following 1 and one-half decades of blatant materialism, known as the Gilded Age, left little room for earlier health fads to flourish. The very gradual advances in medical therapeutics, with the end of many heroic treatment methods, also removed a major stimulus for the previous types of health fads.

With the Progressive Movement in American society, which we can date roughly from the early 1890’s to 1920, we find a new type of health reformer promoting altered forms of health fads. These new hygienic reformers sought now to meet the different needs of a rapidly industrializing American community that faced supposed new health hazards, particularly those created by the flood of immigrants from non‑western European nations. Health concerns fostered by Social Darwinian literature and American business's emphasis on efficiency at all costs, promoted new definitions of appropriate health and lifestyles in American society.

Health reformers were swept up in the Progressive era's concerns over promulgating a healthy American race, and in their literature we can see the background for the Eugenics movement that swept over the U.S. and Western Europe prior to W.W.II. There was a generally perceived need to promulgate the solid Christian Anglo-Saxon White stock that had supposedly made America great. Various health reformers warned about the dangers of allowing invalids to have children, least they breed inferior Americans.

Horace Fletcher was born in Lawrence, MA in 1849. His cure-all health technique was dubbed Flecherism, and called for the individual to slowly chew each bite of food until all of the flavor was gone. For an onion, this might require several minutes of constant chewing to render each bite tasteless. As farcical as this concept sounds, Fletcher achieved a fair amount of success in winning converts to this idea because he was such a physiological marvel. He was tested, time and again, by America’s leading scientists and, even in his 50’s, tests at Yale University showed him to have greater endurance than Yale's best athletes.

A more recognizable name, particularly to those of us who eat cereal, is that of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who was born in 1852. Kellogg was a sickly child who suffered with tuberculosis, recovering to become a follower of the teaching of Sylvester Graham and espousing staunch support for the vegetarian cause. He became an M.D., though always practicing on the fringes of the regular medical community. Kellogg developed his system of "biological living" at his Battle Creek, Michigan Sanitarium, which had previously been a 7th Day Adventist center for healing.

I want to mention one final health fad from this period, since it is still very present today, namely, the tremendous interest in physical fitness. Weight lifting became a popular health fad in the last third of the 19th century, spurred on by the renown of George Windship, the 19th century Charles Atlas, who built himself up from a frail Harvard freshman to be known as "the Roxbury, Hercules". Tell the story of Bernarr McFadden and the origins of the aroebics movement-followed by Jack LaLane, etc.] The drive to promote physical fitness in the U.S. lead to over 270 colleges instituting exercise courses as part of their curriculums.

The final segment of the public’s 3-prong effort to avoid traditional physicians and handle their own health problems was faith healing, a concept still very evident today. Those of you who know about Katherine Koulman here in Pittsburgh, or have read Elmer Gantry, or watch Sunday morning or the Christian Broadcasting System TV programming, can readily see the enduring impact of this non-scientific approach to health care. While various religions, as we have seen, have played a major role in different societies’ health practices, the end of the 19th century in the U.S. saw a new role being played by religion in its relationship to health care.

By the end of the 19th and the start of the 20th century there were a number of religious sects that claimed to have the power to spiritually heal the physical problems of the human body. We can group these various religious sects under the general heading of "mind-cure" and say that they appealed primarily to white, native‑born Americans of Protestant, middle class socio-economic background, who were sufficiently educated so that they could read the books which comprised the basis for these different mind cure sects.

There were 3 major reasons why mind‑cure became so widely popular in America of that era. First, for many people, the traditional Protestant churches were loosing much of their dynamic appeal and did not seem to meet the needs of modern, industrializing America. Mental healing religious cults appealed to these disillusioned individuals, providing them with a religion that appeared more in-tune with their times.

We can summarize the general nature of mind-cure by saying that it refers to a faith in and the practice of the belief that the human mind has control over the body to the point that it can prevent and even cure diseases and disabilities through the techniques of right or positive thinking. One of the earliest leading proponents of this self‑help approach to medicine was the pseudo‑healer Franz Anton Mesmer, who lived in Europe from 1734 to 1815. His techniques using a form of “animal magnetism” to rid the body of illness. His teachings were extremely popular throughout 19th century Europe and the U.S.

This belief in the power of suggestion and auto-suggestion was widely lectured upon in America, inspiring the likes of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, an itinerant clockmaker, to take up the art of mental healing. Quimby's importance in mind-cure is that he was first the healer, and then the teacher of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Eddy had lived a sickly, unhappy life until she met Quimby. At the age of 41, she wrote a note to Quimby, employing his assistance.

After 2 weeks with Quimby, Eddy, for the first time in her life, declared that she was fully healthy. She briefly studied under Quimby, copying entire sections of his writings, and these plagiarized sections became the foundation for her 1875 publication, Science and Health, which is the still the bible today for Christian Scientists.