Erika Janik - Marketplace of the Marvelous: The Strange Origins of Modern Medicine

Apple: A Global History

Madison: History of a Model City

A Short History of Wisconsin

Odd Wisconsin: Amusing, Perplexing, and Unlikely Stories from Wisconsins 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

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 patients 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 aroundwe 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.

The mainstream medical community did not exactly welcome Lings system with open armsoutright disdain for his presumption of medical knowledge might be more accurateyet 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 didnt 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 ones overall well-beingnothing 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, medicineas it was known at the timethe 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 doctors bag. The reasons for prescribing bleeding over vomiting for any given patient seemed to depend more on the doctors inclination, training, or mood than anything we would recognize as sound evidence today. At the same time, regular doctors lampooned hydropathys concern for daily baths and regular water consumption, just as they had disdained Lings exercise regimen.

And then there was Missouri physician John Sappington, who How could he be a quack? Or was he a regular doctor who also sold patent medicines, making him whatan irregular regular?

The more I read, the more confused about these distinctions I became. These werent the stories I was used to hearing. Most accounts of early American medicine focus tightly on embattled doctors valiantly protecting the public from harmfuland even deadlymedical 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 kindsregular, irregular, quacks, and everything in betweenvied 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 hadnt I heard these stories before?

Many of the nineteenth centurys healing claims seemed just as ridiculous and unbelievable as Id 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?