15,697
edits
Changes
no edit summary
{{Mediawiki:Kindleoasis}}
[[File:Cayleff.jpg|thumbnail|275px|left|Nature's Path]]
__NOTOC__
Before 1870, medicine in the United States was completely unregulated. The lack of regulation and the limited effectiveness of 19th century regular medicine encouraged the development of multiple competing medical sects during the century. The three largest medical sects were regulars(traditional physicians), homeopaths, and eclectics. Even though these three sects were the most prominent, numerous other medical systems were created and survived on the margins. Eclecticism, osteopathy, chiropractic medicine, and hydrotherapy are just a few of the medical sects born during this era of United States history. At the very end of the 19th Century, a new medical system called naturopathy was created by Benedict and Louisa Stroebel Lust. Unlike many of the 19th Century medical systems sects created, naturopathy has persevered to this day. Naturopathic healing was founded and based on number of influences including botanics, hydrotherapy, eclecticism, temperance and vegetarianism.
[https://www.press.jhu.edu/ John Hopkins University press Press] has published a new book by Susan E. Cayleff about the history of naturopathic healing entitled <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1421419033/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1421419033&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=cca3095a2c9ae902342f3af1f4cf34c9 Nature's Path: A History of Naturopathic Healing in America]</i>. Her book is a comprehensive account of both the origins of the naturopathy and examination of the controversial views by held naturopathic practitioners such as anti-vivisection, anti-vaccination, and the dangers of processed foods, pharmaceuticals and environmental toxins. Interestingly, women played a role not just in the creation of naturopathy, but have been were critical to its development and survival into 21st century. Cayleff's book is important an intriguing addition to the medical and social history of the United States.
Susan E. Cayleff is a professor in the Department of Women's Studies at San Diego State University. She has written <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0877228590/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0877228590&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=3cbee3aa8f8c42723903f48763ee72ee Wash and Be Healed: the Water Cure Movement and Women's Health]</i>, <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0814323022/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0814323022&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=28b9ca1a27db42504c59af37e0777f32 Wings of Gauze: women Women of Color and he Experience of Health and Illness]</i>, <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/025206593X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=025206593X&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=7c6b8831c9c85e86f266dbaced94ac43 Babe: The Life and Legend of Babe Didrikson Zaharis]</i>, and co-authored with Susan Stamberg - <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/061327718X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=061327718X&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=d15d74cc7ccb1aae639a6f411bfb7fe8 Babe Didrikson: The Greatest All-Sport Athlete of All Time]</i>.
Here is our interview with Susan E. Cayleff.
Naturopathy is a comprehensive healing system that was introduced into the United States in the 1890s primarily by Benedict (1872-1945) and Louisa Stroebele Lust (1865-1925), both German born. It draws from a long and rich history of natural medicine that utilizes plants, cold water therapies (not mineral waters, but cold water applications), exercise, vegetarianism, nutrition, temperance in ways of living and food consumption, psychological wellbeing practices, and sunlight and air cures. Over time it has embraced--then sometimes rejected--affiliations with homeopathy, chiropractic, osteopathy and acupuncture.
Naturopathic authors assert asserted through their numerous texts that the body has the ability to heal itself when healthy, natural, vitality-building (immunity strengthening) measures are followed. It’s They believed it was through the ingestion of toxins, animal meat, processed foods, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, environmental degradation and so on that our bodies become toxic to us and lose lost the ability to effectively eliminate waste and toxins and to combat disease. In the early years they believed in Toxemia Theory (toxins introduced into our bodies cause disease); Vital Force (the body’s innate ability to fight off disease if one does not impede normal, healthy nerve, circulatory and organ functions); the Law of Crises (that the body works to expel toxic matter (e.g., through fever, blisters, etc.) and that expulsion should be facilitated, not suppressed with therapeutics) and Conscious Living (each person must take responsibility for maintaining their health to prevent illness). This is an individualistic approach to health, but naturopaths have always embedded it within a scathing critique of capitalist monopoly, poor treatment of ethnic minorities and urban poverty and called for a healthy environment to support individual health. '''How does it differ from Eclecticism, Hydrotherapy or Botanics?''' Naturopathy differed from the 19th medical sects of eclecticism, hydropathy, botanics (plant-based medicinals) and chiropractic in many ways. It is not a single cause/cure premise. Bodily wellbeing cannot be attained through any one healing system like these, most especially not through regular medicine. The best methods must be combined from many practices to create a healthy world and body. Naturopathy does have in common with these named sects an insistence that the individual cannot be a passive recipient of expert-driven health care. Rather, health is predicated on personal responsibility. Naturopathy also relied and still relies heavily on women’s knowledge and expertise as both professional practitioners and domestic healers.
Advocates and practitioners of naturopathy came from a wide swath of alternative natural healers--this was at once a strength and a weakness for the movement. Benedict Lust welcomed all to claim the title of naturopath at first, but this diluted a stable definition and set of practices from emerging. Regular MDs, whose personal or professional “conversion experiences” inspired them, also joined the movement. Leaders in the anti-vivisection and anti-vaccination movements also embraced naturopathic philosophy and therapeutics.
'''Did women play a large role in both practicing and advocating for naturopathic healing?''' Women co-created, co-led and benefitted immensely from the Naturopathic Movement. This has been true since its inception through the present day. Louisa Stroebele Lust embodied this most fully: she owned the Bellevue Sanatorium health retreat in New Jersey (1892) that offered natural healing methods; she authored the pivotal cook book <i>The Practical Naturopathic Vegetarian Cook Book </i> (1907), that charted nutritional advice so central to naturopathic living; she taught at the College, and wrote regular columns for the Naturopath and Herald of Health and other publications detailing women’s rights, responsibilities and unique powers to lead the movement—and their families.
Louisa Stroebele, prior to her marriage to Benedict, had served as the personal assistant to Tennessee Claflin on three world tours. Claflin, along with her sister Victoria Woodhull were advocates of Free Love ideology and radical positions on women’s rights that they addressed regularly in their <i>Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly </i> (published intermittently, 1870-1876).
Tennessee’s views on women’s rights, women’s sexual self-determination, ambivalence towards monogamous marriage, and the male sexual double standard that weakened and demoralized women all tremendously impacted her young protégée who had been raised in a conservative Catholic environment. The notorious sister’s financial tutelage at the hands of Cornelius Vanderbilt (who set the sisters up in the first female-owned stockbrokerage company on Wall Street) gave Louisa significant monies and savvy that she then invested in Bellevue, various movement endeavors, and ultimately used to spring from prison the dozens of naturopaths who had been arrested for “practicing medicine without a license.”
Publicly, naturopaths’ writing condemned the sexual double standard of sexual morality, advocated for women’s suffrage, asserted women’s health should be the family’s first priority and counseled men to give women the power to control reproduction.
In addition to Louisa , dozens of women, some trained and licensed naturopaths, others complementary sectarian healers, authored texts, wrote advice columns for female readers, served as faculty, and led the movement as officers in state, national and international organizations. In the present day (since the 1990s) female students constitute more than half of all Naturopathic medical school students; women are also ever-present in strong numbers as faculty, administrators and national, state and local leaders of the profession. '''By 1905, medical licensing (at least some of form it) had basically been implemented in almost every state. Did this force naturopathic healers to describe themselves as something besides doctors to avoid regulation?'''
[[File:BenedictLust.jpg|thumbnail|250px|Benedict Lust and Louisa Stroebele Lust founded naturopathy]]
One of the central themes of <i>Nature’s Path </i> was the “culture wars” that raged between regular physicians (who became the American Medical Association in 1847) and the numerous alternative healing sects who opposed their methods and political heavy handedness. The centralized power of the AMA meant that they controlled medical licensing, pharmaceuticals, public health authorities, police enforcement and military medicine. The government and major philanthropic foundations, through the AMA’s powerful lobby, deemed only the allopathic (regular/AMA) physicians as credible and skilled. All others, regardless of their credentials and acquired knowledge could be, and were frequently, arrested for “practicing medicine without a license” under the plethora of medical license acts.
This involved constant entrapments authorized by AMA leaders with paid spies who visited practitioners with fake ailments and were “prescribed” salves, teas, massage or hygienic regimens. If this sounds like cloak-and- dagger high drama, it was. One such informant, Frances Benzacry, worked for the New York County Medical Society. She was so infamous that she sold her story to the Ladies Home Journal in 1915. In it she chronicled the various “cases” against naturopaths and other sectarians she brought to court and admitted, with surprising candor, that none of the therapies she witnessed had brought harm to patients. Benedict Lust himself was arrested sixteen times on state and federal charges, despite his M.D., D.O. and, N.D. degrees, and degrees in homeopathy and eclecticism. Always at the ready was Louisa’s commitment to bailing out the accused. Some refused bail as a publicity ploy to rally attention to the unfair persecutions.
<dh-ad/>
So yes, naturopaths, to avoid accusations of using the label doctor, physician, etc., first chose the word “naturopath” to distinguish themselves. But this was insufficient to stop the hounding by the politico-medical establishment.
This political, legal, and financial harassment helps explain why seeking licensure became so critical for naturopaths and the profession. After tireless lobbying and planning, in 1929 and 1931 naturopaths joyfully embraced the passage of two Acts in the US House of Representatives legalizing Naturopathy in the District of Columbia. The Acts made naturopathy a distinct healing profession on par with osteopathy, chiropractic, and allopathy in Washington, D.C. There had also been some success in the Pacific Northwest. These precedents offered a foundation for other states, but provoked increased allopathic backlash.
Naturopathy’s root practices (botanics, eclecticism, water-cure, sun and air cures) were used nationwide. Naturopathy first grew popular along the east and west coasts and in Chicago, but it spread rapidly through national meetings, conventions, and Lust’s state-by-state lobbying for licensure. Naturopathy was first and foremost part of a nationwide populist movement. The desire for choice in medical practitioners and the relentless critique of invasive allopathic methods went hand-in-hand with the Progressive Era’s push back to industrialization, monopolies, and condemnation of capitalist greed, overbearing enforcement of expert-driven laws, governmental enforcement tactics of public health policies (forced vaccination) that removed agency from individuals. Naturopathy was part of the response to anti-immigrant sentiments and anti-Black racism that produced notoriously unhealthy slums and poverty.
'''What made it appealing?'''
It appealed to critics of the status quo and the two-tiered hierarchy of the haves and have-nots and also to the myriad alternative healers excluded from the right to earn degrees and practice medicine in disciplines of their choice. Socialists and other anti-capitalists joined a nationwide movement for, as they called it, medical liberty rights, advocating for bodily self-determination and practitioner choice. Naturopathy also appealed to those who rejected all drugs, including botanics, union activists, antivivisectionists who believed with naturopaths that animal life was sacred and not fodder for medical experimentation, anti-vaccinationists and so on.
Naturopathy grew again in the 1960s and ‘70s during the counterculture revolution. The biases and shortcomings of organized medicine were critiqued by the holistic health movement, anti-nuclear activists, feminist consciousness-raising groups, and health food industries.
Licensed naturopathy is thriving. The American Association of Naturopathic Physicians, long housed in the Pacific Northwest, a regional stronghold for the movement, relocated to Washington, DC to facilitate lobbying efforts. It is licensed in 17 states (AK, AR,CA, CO, CT, HI,ID,KS,ME,MN, MT, NH, ND, OR, UT VT, WA, Washington, DC., Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands). Its seven accredited educational institutions are Bastyr in WA, National College of Naturopathic Medicine, Portland, OR, Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine and Health Sciences, Tempe, AZ, University of Bridgeport College of Naturopathic Medicine, CT, National University of Health Sciences in Lombard, IL, Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine, Toronto, Ontario and Boucher Institute of Naturopathic Medicine in New Westminster, British Columbia. They offer the same basic sciences training as traditional medical schools, along with instruction in integrative medicine, botanical medicine, clinical counseling, homeopathy, laboratory and clinical diagnosis, minor surgery, naturopathic physical medicine and nutritional science. There are also dual degree programs in which students study for an additional period to obtain a Master’s in an area of specialization, such as acupuncture and Chinese medicine, midwifery, or counseling psychology.
The national office provides guides and lobby kits, along with an annual “DC Federal Legislative Initiative” to bring workshops on political leadership and lobbying tutorials to increase the reach of the profession. These efforts resulted in the federally-sanctioned national Naturopathic Medicine Awareness Week celebrated for the first time in 2013. The Affordable Care Act holds promise for naturopathy and other complementary and alternative medicines. Insurance reimbursement remains a key concern: without it, only those able to afford the services out of pocket can consult a practitioner. The irony of this for a movement that has labored for inclusivity is evident.
But naturopaths wanted the freedom to practice, and that meant finding legitimacy in an already-established system of expert-based medicine. They also realized they needed standards so as not to be confused with the charlatans. This set the stage for ongoing disputes between various factions of licensed naturopaths, self-proclaimed natural healers and old-time nature doctors. The arguments and infighting almost destroyed the profession a few times. Despite these tensions and ironies, I do think the migration to credentialed expertise was necessary precisely because of the countless charlatans and under-schooled (perhaps well meaning) “practitioners” who called themselves naturopaths.
Early naturopathy heralded agrarian living as ideal. This made it inaccessible to most urban dwellers--the precise population most in need of the therapeutics. Just basics of a clean environment, clean air, sunshine, and clean water would have made an immense difference to those in the crowded cities, and these were the essentials of long-term naturopathic health strategies. So authors, teachers, correspondents and practitioners modified that agrarian utopian vision to be in sync with real life possibilities—cooking, exercise, etc. This served to make women’s involvement and leadership even more critical: domestic knowledge, applied to familial health and wellbeing, became the first line of approach.
And professionalization itself can shift the focus from the political to the personal--again, antithetical to early philosophical leanings. Making a profitable living can be in conflict with an ethos of community betterment, which was so much the core of the original creatorsthinking.
'''What surprised you the most when you were researching this topic?'''
I have been blown away by the scope and vision of early and current day naturopaths and naturopathic medicine. It has been from its inception a radical vision advanced by a devoted band of eclectic firebrands who view health, life, self-determination and environmental integrity as interwoven. They have dared to critique (and outright condemn) cultural “givens” such as animal experimentation, professionalization, vaccination (at a time when it was highly imperfect and unregulated for safety and effectiveness), AMA authority and profit-driven capitalists making decisions that affect the masses. Gender equity and social class consciousness is a continuous theme: women have not merely contributed to naturopathy, they have co-created it at all levels and their labors, ideas, analysis and skills have been openly recruited and deemed assets. Working people have the most to benefit-and lose-from accessibility to health care prevention and affordability. Few other healing systems keep these factors in the forefront as naturopathy does.
While I wasn’t surprised by this, I was delighted to learn of recent initiatives to tailor health care for LGBTQ+ people, address environmental toxins, especially in low income and communities of color; links with Green initiatives and a continued critique of dominant “truths” that so often injure so many. '''If there was one thing that you wanted people to know about the history of Naturopathy what would it be?'''
The history of Naturopathy teaches us that a shared radical vision can bring about significant and lasting positive disruptions to power relations that can benefit human health and women’s empowerment. It teaches us that the causes of ill health--and of wellbeing--are integrally interwoven with how we live physically, mentally, and spiritually, and that what we value and how we function as individuals impacts the global community.
