The Politics of Healing: Histories of Alternative Medicine in Twentieth-Century North America

389 Pages·2004·3.43 MB·English

by  Robert D. Johnston

THE POLITICS OF HEALING
THE POLITICS OF HEALING
Histories of Alternative Medicine in Twentieth-
Century North America
Robert D.Johnston
Editor
Routledge
New York & London
Published in 2004 by
Routledge
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New York, NY 10001
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Published in Great Britain by
Routledge
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Copyright © 2004 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The politics of healing: histories of alternative medicine in
twentieth-century North America/[edited by] Robert D.Johnston.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-415-93338-2 (Print Edition) (hardcover: alk. paper)—ISBN 0-415-93339-0 (Print Edition)
(pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Alternative medicine—North America—History—20th century. 2.
Alternative medicine—North America—Political aspects—20th century.
I. Johnston, Robert D.
R733.P65 2003
615.5'097'0904–dc21
2003011930
ISBN 0-203-50607-3 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-57521-0 (Adobe eReader Format)
FOR ISAAC
who, with his infectious laughter,
has always provided the most wonderful healing
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
INTRODUCTION 1
The Politics of Healing
Robert D.Johnston
PRECURSORS: THE YEARS IN THE WILDERNESS
NEGOTIATING DISSENT 9
Homeopathy and Anti-Vaccinationism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Nadav Davidovitch
MAKING FRIENDS FOR “PURE” HOMEOPATHY 27
Hahnemannians and the Twentieth-Century Preservation and Transformation of
Homeopathy
Anne Taylor Kirschmann
REVISITING THE “GOLDEN AGE” OF REGULAR MEDICINE 41
The Politics of Alternative Cancer Care in Canada, 1900–1950
Barbara Clow
SCIENCE AND THE SHADOW OF IDEOLOGY IN THE AMERICAN HEALTH 52
FOODS MOVEMENT, 1930S–1960S
Michael Ackerman
INTERSECTIONS: ALLOPATHIC MEDICINE MEETS ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE
“VOODOO DEATH” 66
Fantasy, Excitement, and the Untenable Boundaries of Biomedical Science
Otniel E.Dror
WESTERN MEDICINE AND NAVAJO HEALING 77
Conflict and Compromise
Wade Davies
CONTESTING THE COLD WAR MEDICAL MONOPOLY
SISTER KENNY GOES TO WASHINGTON 90
Polio, Populism, and Medical Politics in Postwar America
Naomi Rogers
vi
THE LUNATIC FRINGE STRIKES BACK 110
Conservative Opposition to the Alaska Mental Health Bill of 1956
Michelle M.Nickerson
“NOT A SO-CALLED DEMOCRACY” 124
Anti-Fluoridationists and the Fight over Drinking Water
Gretchen Ann Reilly
CONTEMPORARY PRACTICES/CONTEMPORARY LEGACIES
ENGENDERING ALTERNATIVES Women’s 144
Health Care Choices and Feminist Medical Rebellions
Amy Sue Bix
INSIDE-OUT 171
Holism and History in Toronto’s Women’s Health Movements
Georgina Feldberg
A QUIET MOVEMENT 185
Orisha and the Healing of People, Spirit, History, and Community
Velana Huntington
THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF “MAGAZINE MEDICINE” 196
New Age Ayurveda in the Print Media
Sita Reddy
CAM CANCER THERAPIES IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY NORTH AMERICA 218
The Emergence and Growth of a Social Movement
David J.Hess
BEYOND THE CULTURE WARS 231
The Politics of Alternative Health
Matthew SchneirovJonathan David Geczik
CONCLUSIONS
CONTEMPORARY ANTI-VACCINATION MOVEMENTS IN HISTORICAL 244
PERSPECTIVE
Robert D.Johnston
FROM CULTISM TO CAM 272
Alternative Medicine in the Twentieth Century
James C.Whorton
Contributors 290
Notes 293
Index 364
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK, above all, my family for being willing to take a trip of personal as
well as intellectual adventure through some of the worlds of alternative medicine. Thank you,
Isaac, Sandy, and my dearest Anne!
Karen Wolny and Brendan O’Malley were critical to shepherding this project at Routledge,
while Jaclyn Bergeron has made sure that the book stayed on track even when it seemed that it
might derail. Matt Guglielmi, Bethany Moreton, Jay Nelson, and Amy Nickel provided terrific
research and logistical support for the volume.
My former colleagues in the History of Medicine section at the Yale Medical School provided me
with considerable courage and intellectual inspiration to continue with this project, and I want to
thank, in particular, Sue Lederer, Naomi Rogers, and John Warner. Also, Nadav Davidovitch has
been my mentor in many of these matters, whether in a seminar room in New Haven or on a
motorbike in the streets of Tel Aviv.
The authors deserve great credit, not just for their excellent contributions to the volume but for
their good cheer amid many uncertainties. And for helping find the authors, I very much
appreciate the efforts especially of Norman Gevitz and Charles Rosenberg.
Finally, my foremost thanks go to Greg Field. We conceived of this book together, and he
deserves credit for many of the ideas here. In the end, the pull of family, as well as the politics of
healing, drew him away from this project. But his thoughtfulness and intelligence are reflected
throughout.
INTRODUCTION
The Politics of Healing
Robert D.Johnston
OVER THE PAST DECADE, alternative medical therapies have played an increasingly prominent
role in American health care. In the nation’s grocery stores, homeopathic treatments and over-the-
counter herbal remedies crowd aisles that were once largely devoted to analgesics, sore throat
lozenges, and fruit-flavored, animal-shaped children’s vitamins. Eager to fill their beds and their
coffers, hospitals advertise—even celebrate—the inclusion of nontraditional medical practices.
Medical schools, too, embrace this development with curricular reforms aimed at teaching
prospective physicians about alternative forms of healing. With attention turning toward a range
of mind-body and holistic treatments, health care in the United States seems more full of variety
than has been the case since the establishment of modern medical authority in the early 1900s.
Indeed, the emergence in the medical lexicon of a well-recognized acronym, CAM (for
“complementary and alternative medicine”), is suggestive of how these alternatives are becoming
a visible, and increasingly significant, current within the medical mainstream.
At first glance, it would appear that the burgeoning interest in alternative healing has appeared
almost phoenix-like, at the tail end of a century that started with the near-extinction of such
alternatives. Decades had passed, it seemed, since the mainstream medical practitioners drove out
the “irregulars,” tarnishing the alternatives as—at best—based on unsound science and—at worst
—fraudulent quackery. The standard narrative of the rise of allopathic medical care in the United
States suggests that the Progressive era was the crucial period, during which physicians successfully
established their institutional and therapeutic authority. For example, in his epic and influential
award-winning account, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982), Paul Starr described
the period from the 1890s to the 1920s as a time when M.D.’s were able to sway most Americans
to their cause, thereby gaining the hegemonic control necessary for the establishment of a state-
sponsored monopoly of health care in the United States. Lacking both institutional power and
scientific legitimacy, nonorthodox therapies retreated to the margins. Few people sought out
alternatives because people came to rely on the medical model, trusting their physicians’ claims to
a regime of expert knowledge, and becoming skeptical—if not outright disdainful—of different
voices. In this grand narrative, the central issues confronting American medicine by the late
twentieth century were administrative in scope: in particular, whether doctors would be able to
maintain their professional autonomy against incursions by corporate cost accountants. The
therapeutic authority of the mainstream apparently remained unchallenged, indeed monolithic. As
Starr himself puts it, by the end of the 1920s “[p]hysicians finally had medical practice pretty
much to themselves.”1
Yet the apparent renaissance of alternative therapies in recent years should instead lead us to
consider that the central assumptions of this narrative are inadequate. No longer can we simply
2 ROBERT D.JOHNSTON
assume a decades-long belief in the epistemological legitimacy of the medical model, to the
exclusion of therapeutic alternatives. Nor can we take for granted the marginality of non-
orthodox treatments as if their continued existence was for so many years merely a story of
vestigial curiosities, oddities to be pulled off the shelf and gawked at much like an exhibit from an
early natural history museum. These tenets now fail us, and our task no longer is to account for the
recent explosions of interest in CAM, but rather to explain unexpected continuities. Instead, only
a more complex rendering of American medical history in the twentieth century can shake off the
ahistorical surprise that accompanies so many accounts of alternative medicine’s “comeback.”2
The Politics of Healing has two main goals. First, this collection seeks to document a number of
the ways that practitioners and laypeople conceptualized and practiced alternative medicine
throughout the twentieth century, including during the midcentury so-called golden age of
regular medicine. Examination of a range of therapies and medical ideologies—from homeopathy
through irregular treatments for polio to anti-vaccinationism— can demonstrate how alternative
healing remained vital over the decades of supposed disestablishment. This range suggests as
well how older treatments changed and new systems developed, challenging the notion that the
entire regime of alternatives was frozen in social and intellectual disrepute.
The second primary purpose of the volume is to emphasize that the survival of alternative
medicine was not merely a matter of individual choice or professional competition, but at its heart
was also a matter of politics. These essays therefore represent a purposeful step beyond the
traditional boundaries within the historical profession that have separated the study of medicine
and the study of the political realm. To be sure, part of this story is a simple matter of interest-
group rivalry, with mainstream medicine using the powers of state licensure to legitimate its
practice and criminalize irregulars. We need, though, to greatly expand our conception of the
political in medical matters. As many of the articles in The Politics of Healing show, alternative
therapeutic regimes often forged integral connections to oppositional political cultures. The
history of homeopathy, for example, is inextricably linked to the fate of feminism. Anti-
fluoridationism has intimate ties to anti-communism, but also to the movement for consumer rights.
The ferment of black nationalism nurtured Afrocentric healing methods. And we cannot separate
those who have opposed orthodox medicine over the past two decades either from radical social
movements spawned by the New Left or from conservative movements inspired by the growth of
evangelical Christianity. When ordinary people take to the streets or to the halls of Congress, they
take their bodies—and complex accompanying reflections on healing—with them.3
Some rough and basic numbers that place the last decade in historical context should be enough
to establish the chronological fluidity of twentieth-century alternative medicine. The work of
Harvard Medical School researcher David Eisenberg and his associates has become commonplace
both in the popular media and in the scholarly literature. An initial study in the New England
Journal of Medicine jolted the medical profession to attention by reporting that a full one-third of
adult Americans used at least one alternative therapy in 1990. Eisenberg and his colleagues found
that “the estimated number of visits made in 1990 to providers of unconventional therapy was
greater than the number of total visits to primary care medical doctors nationwide, and the
amount spent out of pocket on unconventional therapy was comparable to the amount spent out
of pocket by Americans for all hospitalizations.” A follow-up study was even more dramatic,
providing evidence of a substantial increase in the number of Americans using alternative healing
methods and visiting non-allopathic practitioners between 1990 and 1997. By the latter date, an