Introduction: Alternative Approaches to Health and Wellness in the Nineteenth Century

Alternative medicine is never more topical than during a pandemic. Since it began, Covid-19 has brought forth anti-vaxxers, Covid-deniers, and questionable remedies in ways that parallel responses to earlier disease crises. “Intravenous drips, ozone therapy and immunity-boosting music” are among the more benign unproven Covid cures advertised recently.¹

Alternative remedies—both dubious and more respectable—proliferate in situations where orthodox medicine provides few satisfying answers.² Of course, this was true long before Covid-19. Allopathic medicine has historically proven ineffective against chronic pain, degenerative illnesses, migraines, insomnia, and psychological complaints, leading unsatisfied patients to seek care from chiropractors, osteopaths, mesmerists, and Christian Science healers.³ Such unorthodox therapies have disproportionately appealed to women, who have a harder time getting doctors to take their pain seriously and who were, until the 1990s, seldom included in clinical trials of new medications and treatments.⁴ Today, “Americans now consult their homeopaths, naturopaths, herbalists, acupuncturists, chiropractors, and Reiki workers more often than they see their primary care physicians,” as Steve Silberman wrote in 2015.⁵ A similar situation prevails in Britain, where “dozens of . . . creative, sensory, mind-body and manual therapies” vie for prominence with traditional medicine.⁶

How did we get here? As modern biomedicine develops ever more sophisticated treatments and cures, one would expect heterodox remedies to become less popular, not more so. In fact, though, both the idea of scientific medicine and the distinction between orthodox and alternative medicine are relatively new. To have a “properly” regarded alternative medicine, one must first have a sufficiently stable “orthodoxy” to oppose. As medical historian Roberta Bivins explains, “such an orthodoxy only emerged in the western medical marketplace in the nineteenth century,” the period covered by this theme issue.⁷ Until the late eighteenth century, there were no medical licensing bodies and practitioners competed for patients in an unregulated market, largely following the humoral theories of Galen and Hippocrates.⁸

This issue looks at America and Britain in the nineteenth century, when allopathic medicine emerged on a scientific footing and alternative therapies proliferated in response. This period witnessed watershed medical discoveries such as advances in surgical techniques, the emergence of the germ theory of disease, and the application of experimental research methods. Late-Victorian researchers conducted clinical studies on human patients and controversial experiments on live animals. The founding of university- and state-sponsored laboratories and the development of medical specialties with their own journals and jargons also proceeded apace.

To cite only one example of such disciplinary specialization, consider the study of the brain and nervous system over the course of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of this period, research on this topic was conducted by gentlemen amateurs, philosophers, and generalist physicians such as Herbert Spencer, George Henry Lewes, and William Benjamin Carpenter. Non-specialists, including literary authors like George Eliot and Wilkie Collins, also wrote with authority about the mind and brain in their fiction and in generalist periodicals like The Cornhill Magazine (1860–1975) and The Nineteenth Century (1877–1972). By the 1870s, however, neuroscience gravitated toward clinical and animal experiments conducted by specialists like David Ferrier, John Hughlings Jackson, and Santiago Ramón y Cajal. For instance, Ferrier’s cerebral localization experiments on live monkeys led to accurate human cortical maps that enabled surgeons to locate tumors or hemorrhages before opening the skull, an innovation that saved many human lives. The latter half of the century also witnessed the founding of the specialist journals Mind (1876–present) and Brain (1878–present) and the establishment of the first European professorship in neurology in 1882 (for Jean-Martin Charcot in France), an event that historians of science sometimes identify as the beginning of neurology as an independent field.⁹

Parallel advances occurred across all medical fields in the nineteenth century. Despite this scientific progress, however, great numbers of people in Britain and America preferred heterodox health care practices marginalized by the increasingly powerful and state-aligned mainstream medicine of the period. The motives for adopting heterodox methods varied as widely as...