Lecture Six: Alternative Medicine in the 1800's

While we view traditional medical care as the norm, it was not always that way.  Throughout most of the 1800's Americans chose alternative providers more frequently than orthodox doctors; their outcomes were better, their ideas based on common sense, their focus patient oriented, and even their fees lower.  One of the primary goals of the AMA was to snuff out alternative philosophies, especially homeopathy.  We will discuss these alternative ideas and how they impacted the medical landscape.

Transcript

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So I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about alternative medicines that were contested with Orthodox physicians uh during most of the eighteen hundreds. And even after the AMA uh reached its uh uh zenith in the late 1800s, these fields of medicine were still very popular. Um and and you know the funny thing is that a lot of uh people who disputed the uh proliferation of medical schools, etc., were actually seeing homeopaths who are probably the most respected and reviled uh uh critics of orthodox medicine. In fact, we'll learn later. Um, one of the guys who created our medical system, uh John D. Rockefeller, and tied corporate interest into what became our new medical system uh of orthodoxy, always saw a homeopath. I mean, uh the homeopaths were were visiting presidents and dignitaries all the time. So, what is homeopathy? Homeopathy is actually probably the most popular um medical field in America during the late 1800s. Uh, the salaries of homeopaths were higher than the salaries of orthodox doctors, their outcomes tended to be better, their acceptance generalized. Schools were created in America to teach the homeopathic philosophy. Uh, Hahnemann being the biggest one and the only one that survived, uh, the Flexner Axe in 1911, only because it transformed itself into an orthodox medical school. It's still around today. Um, but uh homeopathy was was something that we don't hear a lot about. So Dr. Samuel Hahnemann from Germany uh is the one who came up with this idea, and he did it empirically because his own experiences with medicine were not good, and he discovered other ways to treat things. There are two basic philosophies of homeopathy. One is the law of similars, which means that uh you give something similar to the disease with which a person's inflicted. For instance, if someone has a fever, you give them something hot. If someone's in pain, you give them something that causes pain. Um, weird, right? Weird to our modern sensibilities, but back then it was very widely accepted. They also believed in microdosing. They weren't against the use of herbs, but they believed in tiny, tiny quantities that the body itself should be the one that does the healing, and the job of the doctor is simply to enhance the body's job. So they were big on nutrition, big on personal hygiene and exercise, and they were, as doctors, just guides to the body. The other big difference, and something they shared with galanic philosophy before the French changed everything, and orthodoxy became much more of a examine the patient, don't listen to the patient philosophy was that these guys changed the vector back to the patient first. The patient is what orchestrated the entire doctor-patient encounter, um, meaning that these people were concerned with people's symptoms. They didn't use stethoscopes, they didn't examine people other than in a cursory way, they listened to people. In fact, uh homeopaths uh would spend at least an hour with each patient, learning about their lives and symptoms and choices, and they used everything they learned about patients to uh orchestrate a treatment. And the treatment, again, was often microdosing or similars or dietary. Um, and it's very possible that their outcomes were better just because they did so little to the patient and let the body heal itself, which is something that doctors have a hard time with even today. Um, one of the biographers of the homeopathy movement writes, quote, what gave homeopathy its perceived strength during these tumultuous years was its image of heightening patient distinctiveness through symptomatology and highly individualized therapy and focusing on patient care and professional judgment. So if Orthodox medicine created laws of dogmatic certitude and scripted cures based on singular dogma, um this was very much the opposite of what homeopathy was doing. Uh, homeopathy was patient-centered, it was flexible, it discredited aggressive treatments and tidy categories of diseases that were uh touted by regular doctors. Um another biographer writes quote, the most striking characteristics of the relations between homeopathy and orthodox medicine was the high degree of mutual antagonism. They hated each other, but they both worked independently of each other. And of course, all the laws that the AMA and the Orthodox doctors were trying to promulgate with licensing and education were designed to discredit and ultimately to dismantle the homeopathy movement, who they labeled as the primary quacks. As we see, as we read through the transactions of the AMA during these years, especially in the uh later 1800s, there are many times during these meetings where uh the discussion was whether to kick out or uh significantly um punish orthodox doctors who worked with homeopaths. And it became very difficult not to. In fact, the AMA actually kicked out the entire New York medical branch for almost 10 years because the people in there were working with homeopaths. And they were working with homeopaths because homeopaths ran several of the hospitals. They also ran the Board of Health in New York, and it was impossible not to work with them, and these doctors believed they could work with them. And this became especially true later in the century when homeopaths also went to orthodox medical schools and homeopathic medical schools. They were dual-degreed to the AMA. The very nature of homeopathy meant that you couldn't get trained in both of them. Once you got trained in homeopathy, it erased your orthodox training. This view changed, uh we'll see that later. In fact, one of the engineers of the AMA's resurgence in the early 1900s was a former homeopath. So at certain point, the AMA realized that to fight these people in a direct assault was a big mistake. That they would they would first um co-opt some of them and then destroy them, which is what they did. And we'll get to that later. But it's just important to know that homeopathy as a field is still around today. It's not very popular, but there are people trained in it. Um, and it, you know, to some extent, it is still adhering to the same values it adhered to then, when it was incredibly popular. Again, because it was effective. Because not because it necessarily helped people, but because it didn't kill them. Um, a similar uh uh field to the homeopathy uh field was that of Thomsonianism, named after a guy named Thomsonian who was from New England. This is a very short-lived uh field of medicine, but one that was incredibly popular while it existed, and it kind of died off when Thomson died. But he was a guy who practiced in New England. He was not an orthodox doctor at all. In fact, it was questionable whether he was a doctor, which again, back then, you just had to call yourself a doctor, and you were. But he preached that every person could be his or home doctor by following herbal formulas of health. They could grow their own herbs or buy herbs, they could treat themselves based on their symptoms. And he came up with a prescription based on a lot of experience over time. He truly studied uh herbal medicine, which included African American medicine and Native American medicine, and came up with kind of a cookbook of what to do when certain conditions hit you. You didn't have to go see a doctor. He believed going to see a doctor was the worst thing you could do, that you should take care of yourself. Kind of the doctor is in your garden attitude. And again, people who followed this philosophy, who who seized their own health, who were not bled and purged and filled with leeches, um lived better, lived longer. They they survived their illness. Maybe it had nothing to do with the herbs they took. Maybe it was just because they stayed away from harm. But these doctors were overall cheaper and they were much more popular. And in fact, they made more money than Orthodox doctors who were, again, uh largely discredited during this time. There were there were a couple other philosophies of care, it's worth mentioning. We already talked about phrenology, which was in a lot of ways adapted by the Orthodox medical movement because one of the great Orthodox doctors, uh guy named Samuel Morton, uh, was the leader of phrenology in America and had an international following as well. And phrenology basically believed that you could determine someone's health from their skull. So, Morton, who um very much in tune with the medical racial script, believed that the skulls of African Americans were smaller than the skulls of white people, and he had a whole um uh grouping of skulls that went from African American, which he believed were the same as the apes, to white people who he believed were the most um advanced. And in between were groups like Asians and Native Americans who had moderate sized skulls. Now, Morton is well known to have picked his skulls based on what he wanted people to believe, and his skull collections were clearly plucked with the smaller skulls he found being African American and the larger ones being white, because that's what he picked. I mean, we we know for a fact, especially today, that the skulls are the same size. But this was truly a philosophy that was embraced by orthodoxy. Um, Thomas Jefferson had a skull collection. Uh, there were skull collections in nearly every Orthodox medical school in the country. Um, Yale was well known to have a very um extensive skull collection, and Morton's ideas were taught in orthodox medical circles. But this was also an alternative philosophy that was followed outside of the realm of orthodoxy and picked up by other fringe groups who believed that you didn't need doctors, who you just had to look at the skull. And similar to that is a very popular philosophy of the time called physiogamy. And there's a great book uh written by Rachel Walker called The Beauty in the Brain that really goes into the history of this profession because, again, no one's heard of this, but it was incredibly popular. It was something followed by a lot of people outside of the medical realm, never embraced by orthodoxy completely. Um, it came later in the century, but uh many Orthodox doctors uh professed to follow this philosophy. What was it? It was the study of the face. And the people who did the most work on this, who were non-orthodox doctors generally, believed that everything you needed to know about a person was in the face. That there were, they they wrote books, the specific lines of the cheeks, of the head, all that kind of stuff, would spell out what the person's medical future is, what their intelligence was. So the words highbrow and lowbrow come from this philosophy. Um, highbrow is when the um when the eyebrow is is close to the hairline, so there's not much of a forehead, and lowbrow is when the forehead is prominent, so the eyebrows are lower. And it's felt that lowbrow people lacked intelligence. What is really striking about this movement is people would adjust their facial features to try to imitate what was considered good. So people um would let their hair, for instance, grow long to cover their um uh forehead. And a lot of portraits from this time showed this. In fact, Frederick Douglass, among other African-American leaders, did exactly this. They they believed this was a liberating medical ideology uh that demonstrated that there was no true racial difference, that African-American people could have the same brow size as white people. And this is part of the reason that this uh field fell apart, um, because it did start moving toward advocating uh racial equality and inclusion, which was not what the country wanted to hear. It much preferred the orthodoxy's view of their being strict and scientifically proved racial differences. Um, one more alternative one just to talk about is um is that preached by Sylvester Graham. Again, this was something incredibly popular. It trumped Orthodox medicine, it it bypassed doctors. In this time in America, people did not necessarily believe you had to see a doctor. You could do things yourself or go to these alternative healers. And Sylvester Graham was such a healer, he would give speeches all over the country. He was a minister, a Presbyterian minister, not a doctor, but he preached medical, uh medical uh philosophy. And wherever he went, packed crowds, people, followers, people writing books about what he's what he talked about. And and his he was the inventor of the graham cracker, if any of you guys heard of that. It was a big popular cracker when I was a kid, still around. You've heard of graham cracker crust, for instance. The graham cracker was a whole wheat cracker made with little, very little sugar. And Graham believed the diet was the key to longevity. He preached that dietary solutions to illness were what should be pushed. He also believed in um restraint, that people should avoid excessive pleasure. In fact, one of the biggest aspects of his movement was his anti-masturbation campaign. He believed that masturbation was the cause of mental illness and a lot of physical illness. And in this time in America, in the um early 1800s, uh it was embraced by a lot of uh reformers, but including women's rights reformers and even African-American reformers, um, again, became incredibly popular. And and while Graham didn't talk about whether you should see a doctor or not, he did believe that you didn't have to, that you just take care of yourself. You you restrain from these things that suck the energy out of you and you eat well, and then you'll take care of yourself. So, again, a philosophy that that came in deep um conflict with orthodox medicine that preached uh, you know, exams and and pills and uh purging and bleeding and all that stuff, and you know, that that was killing people. This seemed to be a much more reliable philosophy. Again, we've used this word before, but it was a wild west of medical ideas back then. People just assumed the AMA came in 1847, Orthodox doctors uh uh won the day in the end. So they assumed that Orthodox doctors always won the day, but that was not true in uh the Mid-Americas. And um, it was really a true challenge to Orthodoxy that these other disciplines existed because they were much more popular and um it was hard to compete against. So even a lot of Orthodox doctors adapted some of these ideas. They did so to stay in business, to make themselves viable and credible, um, which really got under the the skin of the AMA founders. And through again, through the transactions, you could see many doctors kicked out or or um or sanct or sanctioned because they either practiced some of these philosophies or even conferred with any people who practice these philosophies. These were forbidden in the Orthodox world, and that's why the Orthodox world stayed very small and very feckless during these years. One could argue that right up until 1900, Orthodox doctors were on the verge of extinction. There were very few of them, and even though there were proliferation of Orthodox medical schools, many of the people who graduated from those medical schools with barely a degree um went and and adhered to some of these other philosophies just to again keep in business. So next we're gonna just uh go back to the racial aspects of all this. It's really important to know what happened racially in the mid-1800s to the late 1800s because it would impact everything that happened subsequently. Um this next talk is gonna be a little longer because there's so much to cover, and I'm trying to put it all in one talk. And the readings are a little bit more, also. Though pick and choose, just read a few of them. I think they're all fascinating, and um I think you would enjoy all of them, but I understand time constraints, which is why I gave a little bit of reading for this part and a lot more reading for the next one.