The Politics of Healing

Histories of Alternative Medicine in Twentieth-Century North America

Robert D. Johnston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135953904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Alternative & Complementary Medicine

From grocery store to doctor's office, alternative medicine is everywhere. A recent survey found that more than two in five Americans uses some form of alternative medicine. The Politics of Healing brings together top scholars in the fields of American history, history of medicine, anthropology, sociology, and politics to counter the view that alternative medical therapies fell into disrepute in the decades after physicians established their institutional authority during the Progressive Era. From homeopathy to Navajo healing, this volume explores a variety of alternative therapies and political movements that have set the terms of debate over North American healing methods.

NOTES

Introduction

My thanks to Nadav Davidovitch, David Hess, Michelle Nickerson, and Naomi Rogers for their helpful comments.

1. Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 127.

2. Just one sign that scholars are starting to recognize alternative medicine’s contested chronology is Rennie B.Schoepflin’s excellent Christian Science on Trial: Religious Healing in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). Schoepflin seeks to “challenge the sunny assumptions made by many historians regarding the confidence of the medical profession about who would control the future of American health care” during the early twentieth century. He argues that rather than a “death struggle,” “a relationship of complexity or convergence had evolved between spiritual healing and medical practice.” Overall, Schoepflin observes, “American physicians lacked a strong position of cultural authority over health care until after the 1920s” (2–3). An earlier statement of this perspective came from James Cassedy, who highlighted “[t]he flourishing of medical diversity between 1865 and 1940.” Noting “the remarkable…failure of the regular medical establishment, despite its new strength, to prevent the emergence of new sects,” Cassedy argues that these “came to play far more than token roles in fostering a continuing skepticisim of, if not actual resistance to, orthodox medical authority.” See James H.Cassedy, Medicine in America: A Short History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 96, 99. On the other hand, Hans Baer, while emphasizing pluralism in the overall history of American medicine, still adopts Starr’s chronology, as well as his assumptions about the “dominance” of orthodox medicine. See Hans A.Baer, Biomedicine and Alternative Healing Systems in America: Issues of Class, Race, Ethnicity, and Gender (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), esp. 31–49.

3. Although the other primary works in the history of American alternative medicine have not completely neglected politics, neither have they explored the political realm as much as they might have. See Norman Gevitz, ed., Other Healers: Unorthodox Medicine in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) and James C.Whorton, Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

4. David M.Eisenberg et al., “Unconventional Medicine in the United States: Prevalence, Costs, and Patterns of Use,” New England Journal of Medicine 328 (1993):246–52; David M. Eisenberg et al., “Trends in Alternative Medicine Use in the United States, 1990–1997,” Journal of the American Medical Association 280 (1998):1569–75. For Harvard Medical School faculty member Eisenberg’s effective canonization in the popular media as the authority on alternative medicine, see the special report “The Science of Alternative Medicine” in Newsweek, December 2, 2002, 45–75.

5. Louis S.Reed, The Healing Cults: A Study of Sectarian Medical Practice: Its Extent, Causes, and Control (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), 1.

6. Reed, Healing Cults, 3, 61, 106, 117; Annie Riley Hale, “These Cults”: An Analysis of the Foiblies of Dr. Morris Fishbein’s “Medical Follies” (New York: National Health Foundation, 1926), 16, 14, 15, 19; E.C. Levy, “Reciprocity Between the Health Officials and the Medical Profession,” American Journal of Public Health 13 (December 1923):994; Edwards J.G.Beardsley, “Why the Public Consult the Pseudo Medical Cults,” Journal of the Medical Society of New Jersey 21 (September 1924): 277; Irvin Arthur, “The Medical Profession and the People,” Journal of the Indiana State Medical Association 16 (November 1923): 369. The results of the Chicago study appeared originally in the Illinois Medical Journal and received prominent public play in “What People Think of Their Doctors,” Literary Digest September 22, 1923, 25–26.

Also worth noting is how concerned establishment officials were that “it seemed frequently to be the case that the more enlightened, in other knowledge than medical science, and apparently more progressive citizens of the various communities were the citizens who were consulting the representatives of the cults”; see Beardsley, “Why the Public,” 276. Finally although lacking quantitative evidence, the screeds of chief AMA publicist Morris Fishbein against “medical follies” can be read not just as partial declarations of victory against quackery, but also as exasperation at the continued popularity of healing cults. See, for just one example, Fishbein’s cataloguing of all the legislative attempts to legalize alternative medicine in 1931 alone in Morris Fishbein, Fads and Quackery in Healing: An Analysis of the Foibles of the Healing Cults, with Essays on Various Other Peculiar Notions in the Health Field (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1932), 200–2. In turn, Annie Riley Hale’s response to Fishbein, “These Cults” is an explicit and not necessarily fanciful celebration of “the medical world’s scared realization of its waning supremacy over the minds of the masses” as well as “an emphatic protest against State Medicine” (viii, 13).

7. A critical perspective on Harkin’s role in shaping the OAM comes in James Harvey Young, “The Development of the Office of Alternative Medicine in the National Institutes of Health, 1991–1996” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 72 (1998):279–98.

8. Tom Harkin, “The Third Approach,” Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine 1, 1 (1995): 71; Orrin G. Hatch, “Alternative Medicine: Who Decides?” Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine 1, 5 (1995): 96; Alex Stone, “Overtreated,” The New Republic, February 10, 2003; “Orrin Hatch: Presidential Candidate, Chiropratic Advocate,” http://www.chiroweb.com/archives/17/23/09.html; Stephanie Mencimer, “Scorin’ with Orrin,” Washington Monthly, September 2001; Paul Kurtz, “White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Is Biased,” Skeptical Inquirer, May/June 2001; Leon Jaroff, “Wasting Big Bucks on Alternative Medicine,” Time, May 15, 2002; Jaroff, “Save Us from Alternative Medicine,” Time, January 7, 2003. For a powerful account of Harkin’s farm politics, see Mary Summers, “From the Heartland to Seattle: The Family Farm Movement of the 1980s and the Legacy of Agrarian State Building,” in Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert D.Johnston, eds., The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State: Political Histories of Rural America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 304–5.

9. Michael S.Goldstein, Alternative Health Care: Medicine, Miracle, or Mirage? (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 10–11 (see also for the same point at greater length 146–59 and 173–74); David A. Horowitz, Beyond Left and Right: Insurgency and the Establishment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

10. Phyllis Schlafly, A Choice Not an Echo (Alton, Ill.: Pere Marquette Press, 1964). For an early account of Schlafly’s non-medical political activities, see Carol Felsenthal, The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority: The Biography of Phyllis Schlafly (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981).

11. See especially Schlafly, “Can Courts Order Kids to Take Drugs?” September 13, 2000, and “Is Ritalin Raising Kids to Be Drug Addicts?” June 21,2000, both available on Schlafly’s Ritalin Web page, http://www.eagleforum.org/topics/ritalin/ritalin.html; “Follow the Money on Vaccines,” September 5, 2001; “Conflicts of Interest About Vaccines,” February 2001; “Government Experiments on Humans?” February 2000; “Congressional Hearing Exposes Conflict of Interest,” June 28,2000; “No, We Can’t Trust the Government,” September 1999; all available at http://www.eagleforum.org/topics/vaccine/vaccine.html. For Roger Schlafly’s Web page, go to http://www.mindspring.com/~schlafly/vac/.

12. For a short biography, see the Beyt Tikkun Syngagogue Web site, http://www.beyttikkun.org/bios.htm . For Lerner’s perspective on the Clinton episode, see Michael Lerner, The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 309–21.

13. Lerner, Politics of Meaning, 4–6, 16.

14. Lerner, Politics of Meaning, 273–74, 277, 279.

15. Many of the essays in this volume make substantial contributions to the study of feminism and/or populism. See in particular the articles by Bix, Feldberg, Rogers, Nickerson, Schneirov and Geczik, and Johnston. For an excellent recent exploration of populism and alternative medicine, see Eric S.Juhnke, Quacks and Crusaders: The Fabulous Careers of John Brinkley, Norman Baker, and Harry Hoxsey (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002). Juhnke too notes the “left/right” political connections of alternative medicine, although his focus is more on the right side of the spectrum (see especially 150–52). I also trace the populist foundation of alternative medicine in Robert D.Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 177–220.

Negotiating Dissent

This research was partially funded by the Resident Research Fellowship of the Francis Clark Wood Institute...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Precursors: The Years in the Wilderness
• Intersections: Allopathic Medicine Meets Alternative Medicine
• Contesting the Cold War Medical Monopoly
• Contemporary Practices/Contemporary Legacies
• Conclusions
• Contributors
• Notes