Healing Traditions: Alternative Medicine and the Health Professions, and: Nature Doctors: Pioneers in Naturopathic Medicine, and: Home Medicine: The Newfoundland Experience (review)

The “immediate message” of Healing Traditions, O’Connor states in her concluding chapter, “is that nonbiomedical health belief systems are alive and well” (p. 161), and need to be taken into account by practitioners of the biomedical model of therapy. That message, of course, has become virtually a mantra in the last two years, in the aftermath of the article by David Eisenberg et al. in the New England Journal of Medicine pointing out the “enormous presence” of unconventional medicine in the United States. ¹ These books all add to that renewed awareness of the pervasiveness of healing subcultures: two through tightly confined discussions, and O’Connor’s through an analysis directed at alternative medicine in general.

Nature Doctors is intended as the first book-length English history of naturopathy. As the subtitle indicates, however, it presents that history in the form of biographical sketches. Beginning with Priessnitz, and proceeding through Kneipp, Lust, and more than a dozen other figures down to John Bastyr, the recently deceased American “father of modern naturopathic medicine” (p. vi), Kirchfeld outlines the lives and work of the most important European and New World contributors to the philosophy and practice of nature cure, quoting liberally from the works of each. The outlines are uncritically reverential, to be sure: the “restless pilgrim for truth” and the “man of great compassion, keen intellect, and towering moral strength” (pp. 4, 29) are the only nature physicians inhabiting these pages. Their inspirational stories are valuable nonetheless for including a considerable quantity of factual data on ideas, therapies, and publications that allow the reader to piece together a chronology of the major stages of development of naturopathy, and even to discern an evolution of the philosophy of natural healing. The analytical limitations of the book notwithstanding, this will be a highly useful reference for historians interested in the past of alternative medicine, and, as Kirchfeld hopes, it can provide the foundation for a badly needed interpretive history of naturopathy’s development.

A dominant theme in naturopathy, as well as in other alternative medical philosophies, is “patient, heal thyself.” Crellin’s encyclopedic survey of self-care traditions in Newfoundland, narrow as its focus appears to be, offers broadly applicable insight into the core of folk medical beliefs and practices that forms the historical basis for patients’ assumption of responsibility for their own recovery. Part 1 of the book is a narrative exploration of the course of domestic medicine in Newfoundland, set within the context of the province’s twentieth-century social history. The much lengthier part 2 presents the substance of domestic practice in the format of an alphabetical list and explanation of specific ailments, beliefs, practices, and remedies (herbs, minerals, patent medicines) gleaned from both folklore archives and interviews. There are well over one hundred entries between Abortion and Zam-Buk Ointment—many of them common to the rest of the hemisphere, some (“seal finger,” for example) not likely to be met with outside Newfoundland. Yet taken as a body, all these items document the historical persistence of lay confidence that effective medical decisions can often be made without the intervention of a professional.

The significance of patient autonomy for the present flourishing of alternative medicine, and its implications for the training and clinical behavior of physicians and other health workers, is one of the larger themes of O’Connor...