Essentials of. Complementary and. Alternative. Medicine eBook-een

the theoretical principle that followed was that the therapy in question worked by eliminating some 

obstacle to the free functioning of the body's innate healing power. Ultimately, it was nature that did the 

curing, not the manipulation or the 

 

 

infinitesimal similar or the cayenne in the enema. Thos e original theoretical formulations would eventually 

be recognized by adherents as unfounded and confining, and during the twentieth century they have been 

steadily abandoned for more sophisticated and demonstrable arguments (although nature remains the 

fundamental healing power). But the initial dedication of  many alternative systems to a simple, all-inclusive 

theory gave alternative medicine the appearance of sectarian fanaticism in allopaths' eyes. 

HOLISTIC MEDICINE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

The Thomsonian in Figure 1.1 is extending a fraternal helping hand to the weak and harried patient, 

whereas the MD appears to be restraining him, even pushing the struggling man deeper into the slough of 

sickness and death. The Thomsonian practitioner's show of caring for his patient as a person is an 

expression of a holistic orientation—treat the whole patient and treat him as a unique human being. This 

cartoon shows holistic orientation nearly a century and a half before the word holistic came into vogue. 

Homeopathy went even farther, giving consideration to a patient's every little complaint, mental as well as 

physical, in the search for just the right drug to dup licate the sick person's full array of symptoms. Holism 

was exhibited in the teachings of other alternative schools of practice as well. From the beginning, 

practitioners of complementary medicine have claimed superior relations with patients, sometimes 

offending conventional physicians with an air of “holisticer than thou” condescension. 

The holism of nineteenth-century alter native medicine, however, went well beyond the basic principle of 

paying heed to the emotional and spiritual side of patients. Today's definition of holistic has been 

expanded from “treatment of the whole patient” to include an emphasis on motivating patients to assume 

some responsibility for and participation in their care and recovery. Likewise, from its inception, alternative 

medicine aimed to give patients the power to help themselves. Thomsonianism took self-help most 

seriously, actually selling Family Right Certificates that gave purchasers the legal right to prescribe for 

and treat themselves botanically: “Every man his own physician” was the Thomsonian motto. But 

homeopaths encouraged people to be their own physicians, too, selling domestic kits of the most useful 

remedies, complete with instructions on how to use them for self-care; hydropaths published manuals of 

health advice and home water treatments; and in the early twentieth century, naturopaths also produced 

an extensive body of popular literature promoting a wide array of natural remedies for home use (28). 

Our contemporary interpretation of holism has also embraced lifestyle regulation and the promotion of 

wellness as a major element of complementary care. This orientation, it can be argued, stems from 

American hydropathy in the 1850s, which drew on an ea rlier popular health reform movement to graft 

behaviors, such as abstinence from alcohol and tobacco, vegetarianism, regular exercise, fresh air, and 

sexual restraint, onto the original system of various cold water baths (29). The resulting hybrid was known 

as hygeio-therapy,  a method that “restores the sick to health by the means which preserve health in well 

persons” (30). The hygeio-therapeutic tradition was preserved and carried on to the present by 

naturopathic medicine. 

Other features of nineteenth-century alternative medicine have persisted to the present, such as objection 

to the medicalization of pregnancy and labor. Enough has been said, however, to make it clear that 

nineteenth-century alternative practitioners looked upon the allopaths as the true irregulars in medicine 

(31, 32). 

ALLOPATHIC MEDICINE'S CRITICISM OF ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE 

The first generation of allopathic doctors hardly turned the other cheek to such criticism. They gave as 

good as they got, putting forward a range of objections to alternative medicine. In the orthodox analysis, 

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alternative practitioners were not simply ignoramuses and incompetents; 

 

 

they were zealots, medical cultists obsessed with a single theoretical and therapeutic tenet, blind and deaf 

to the merits of any conflicting belief or practice, and determined to bend every case to their 

fundamentalist faith. The alternative doctor, a Balt imore medico declared, “circumscribes himself and 

practises a… one-idea system only , and is so tied down and limited to that… that he denies the usefulness 

of all known and honorable means of aiding the sick.” Regular doctors resented the label  allopathy 

because it was implied their medicine was just another -pathy, merely one more sect instead of open-

minded science. “The title ‘Allopathy’,” it was objected, was an “insignificant misno-mer… applied to us 

opprobriously… with sinister motives…. [I]t is both untrue and offensiv e.” Hence, “when people ask you 

‘what school you practise,’ you may very properly answer that you are simply a PHYSICIAN, that you 

belong to no sect,” that you, “like the bee, take the honey of truth wherever you find it” (33). 

Insinuation and derision were a game two could play. Homeopathy, Oliver Wendell Holmes declared, was 

“a mingled mass of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, of imbecile credulity” (34). Another doctor 

characterized it as “a confused mass of rubbish” (35). Other unorthodox schools of practice were accorded 

comparable respect. For example, osteopathy was denounced by an end-of-the-century physician as “a 

complete system of charlatanism… and quackery, calculated and designed to impose upon the credulous, 

superstitious, and ignorant” (36). Soon after, the editor of  JAMA described naturopathy as “a medical 

cesspool” (37). Irregulars might protest all they wanted  that their methods had empirical foundations, and 

therefore were scientific. However, allopaths believed  that enslavement to simplistic “one-idea systems” 

resulted in biased interpretations of clinical experience. Hence, “this subterfuge cannot avail. Call himself 

by what name he will, a quack is still a quack—and even if the prince of darkness should assume the garb 

of heavenly innocence, the cloven hoof would still betray the real personage”(38). 

Cloven-hooved or not, alternative practitioners did see most of their patients return to health. But those 

successes, mainstream physicians argued, could be accounted for entirely by the operations of nature. By 

the mid-1800s, allopathic philosophy acknowledged that  most diseases are self-limited, and will resolve 

themselves under anyone's care. However, that explanation was much more frequently applied to 

alternative patients than to mainstream ones. Homeopathy in particular, with its immaterial doses of drugs, 

seemed to be explainable in no other way than as “placeboism etherealized” (39). Homeopaths, one 

physician laughed, would be just as successful “were the similars left out, and atoms of taffy or sawdust… 

substituted, to give their patients room to exercise their faith, and nature time and opportunity to do the 

work” (40). 

MEDICAL LICENSING 

The mutual hostility between allopathic and alternativ e practitioners was played out at both the political 

and the philosophical level. The context for the Thomsonian cartoon was that movement's assault on the 

state medical licensing laws that had been enacted throughout the country in the early 1800s. Although the 

laws were only casually enforced, they did confer  the blessing of government on allopathic medicine. 

Alternative healers regarded this legislation as undemocratic violations of both their right to pursue the 

calling of their choice and the public's right to select whom they wanted as their doctors; they also 

regarded this legislation as transparent attempts by allopaths to corner the medical market. Denouncing 

the laws as elitist and monopolistic, alternative practitioners (Thomsonians, particularly) succeeded in 

getting virtually every state licensing law wiped from the statute books by mid-century. Licensing 

provisions for allopaths would be revived, however, in the 1880s and 1890s, as the impact of the germ 

theory renewed public respect for the power of allopathic medicine. Alternative physicians would then 

campaign for the passage of separate licensing laws to govern their systems too, and although they were 

generally successful 

 

 

in their quest, licensing was obtained only very gradually , and painfully, through vicious political struggles 

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