By this definition, the orthodox or allopathic school was just as sectarian as the homeopathic and eclectic schools. Rothstein’s view was that these two nineteenth century sects disappeared because, beginning in the 1870s, the orthodox school grasped the European idea of “scientific medicine.” Based on the research of such men as Pasteur and Koch and the “germ theory,” this approach supposedly proved to be the medically proper view of valid therapy and gained public recognition because of its truth.

Another view was that the convergence of the needs of the three sects for professional medical recognition (which began in the 1870s and continued into the early 1900s) and the “progressive era” led to a political alliance in which the majority orthodox school was ultimately dominant by sheer weight of numbers and internal political authority. Starr ¹ noted the following:

Both the homeopaths and eclectics wanted to share in the legal privileges of the profession. Only afterward did they lose their popularity. When homeopathic and eclectic doctors were shunned and denounced by the regular profession, they thrived, but the more they gained an access to the privileges of regular physicians, the more their numbers declined. The turn of the century was both the point of acceptance and the moment of incipient disintegration …

In any event, this development was an integral part of the drive toward professional authority and autonomy established during the progressive era (1900–1917). It was acceptable to the homeopaths and the eclectics because they controlled medical schools that continued to teach and maintain their own professional authority and autonomy. However, it was after these professional goals were attained that the lesser schools of medical thought went into rapid decline.¹

The American Influence

From 1850 to 1900, the medical counterculture continued to establish itself in America. From its lay roots in the teachings of the hygienic movement grew professional medical recognition, albeit a small minority and “irregular” view, that hygiene and hydropathy were the basis of sound medical thought (much like the Thomsonian transition to botanic and eclectic medicine).

Trall

The earliest physician who had a significant impact on the later growth of naturopathy as a philosophical movement was Russell Trall, MD. As noted in James Whorton’s Crusaders for Fitness,⁴ he “passed like a meteor through the American hydropathic and hygienic movement”:

The exemplar of the physical educator-hydropath was Russell Thatcher Trall. Still another physician who had lost his faith in regular therapy, Trall opened the second water cure establishment in America, in New York City in 1844. Immediately he combined the full Preissnitzian armamentarium of baths with regulation of diet, air, exercise and sleep. He would eventually open and or direct any number of other hydropathic institutions around the country, as well as edit the Water-Cure Journal, the Hydropathic Review, and a temperance journal. He authored several books, including popular sex manuals which perpetuated Graham-like concepts into the 1890’s, sold Graham crackers and physiology texts at his New York office, was a charter member (and officer) of the American Vegetarian Society, presided over a short-lived World Health Association, and so on. His crowning accomplishment was the Hygeian Home, a “model Health Institution [which] is beautifully situated on the Delaware River between Trenton and Philadelphia.” A drawing presents it as a palatial establishment with expansive grounds for walking and riding, facilities for rowing, sailing, and swimming, and even a grove for open-air “dancing gymnastics.” It was the grandest of water cures, and lived beyond the Civil War period, which saw the demise of most hydropathic hospitals. True, Trall had to struggle to keep his head above water during the 1860’s, but by the 1870’s he had a firm financial footing (being stabilized by tuition fees from the attached Hygeio-therapeutic College). With Trall’s death in 1877, however, the hydropathic phase of health reform passed.

As evident later in this chapter, this plethora of activity was similar to that engaged in by Benedict Lust between 1896 and his death in 1945, when he worked to establish naturopathy. The Hygeian Home and later “Yungborn” establishments at Butler, New Jersey, and Tangerine, Florida, were similar to European nature cure sanitariums, such as the original Yungborn founded by Adolph Just and the spa/sanitarium facilities of Preissnitz, Kneipp, and Just.

Trall gave a famous address to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, in 1862, under the sponsorship of the Washington Lecture Association. “The true healing art: or hygienic vs drug medication,” a 2.5-hour lecture purported to have received rapt attention, was devoted to Trall’s belief in the hygienic system and in hydropathy as the true healing art. The address was reprinted by Fowler and Wells (New York, 1880) with an introduction written by Trall, before his death in 1877.

Trall also founded the first school of natural healing arts in this country to have a 4-year curriculum and the authorization to confer the degree of MD. It was founded in 1852 as a “hydropathic and physiological school” and was chartered by the New York State Legislature in 1857 under the name “New York Hygio-Therapeutic College,” with the legislature’s authorization to confer the MD degree.

In 1862, Trall went to Europe to attend the International Temperance Convention. He took a prominent part at this meeting of reformers, specifically related to the use of alcohol as a beverage and as a medicine. He eventually published more than 25 books on the subjects of physiology, hydropathy, hygiene, vegetarianism, and temperance, among many others.

The most valuable and enduring of these was his Hydropathic Encyclopedia, a volume of nearly 1000 pages that covered the theory and practice of hydropathy and the philosophy and treatment of diseases advanced by older schools of medicine. At the time of his death, according to the December 1877 Phrenological Journal cover article featuring a lengthy obituary of Trall, this encyclopedia had sold more than 40,000 copies since its original publication in 1851.

For more than 15 years, Trall was editor of the Water-Cure Journal (also published by Fowler and Wells). During this period, the journal went through several name changes, including the Hygienic Teacher and The Herald of Health. When Lust originally opened the American School of Naturopathy, an English-language version of Kneipp’s Water-cure (or in German Meine Wasser-kurr) being unavailable, he used only the works and writings of Trall as his texts.

By 1871, Trall moved from New York to the Hygeian Home on the Delaware River. His water-cure establishment in New York became The New Hygienic Institute. One of its co-proprietors was Martin Luther Holbrook, who later replaced Trall as the editor of The Herald of Health. Professor Whorton noted the following ⁴:

But Holbrook’s greatest service to the cause was as an editor. In 1866 he replaced Trall at the head of The Herald of Health, which had descended from the Water-Cure Journal and Herald of Reforms (1845-1861) by the way of the Hygienic Teacher and Water-Cure Journal (1862). Under Holbrook’s direction the periodical would pass through two more name changes (Journal of Hygiene Herald of Health, 1893-1897, and Omega, 1898-1900) before merging with Physical Culture.

Trall and Holbrook both advanced the idea that physicians should teach the maintenance of health rather than simply provide a last resort in times of health crisis. Besides providing a strong editorial voice espousing vegetarianism, the evils of tobacco and drugs, and the value of bathing and exercise, dietetics and nutrition, along with personal hygiene, were strongly advanced by Holbrook and others of the hygienic movement during this era. Whorton described the idea as follows ⁴:

The orthodox hygienists of the progressive years were equally enthused by the recent progress of nutrition, of course, and exploited it for their own ends, but their utilization of science hardly stopped with dietetics. Medical bacteriology was another area of remarkable discovery, bacteriologists having provided, in the short space of the last quarter of the 19th century, an understanding, at long last, of the nature of infection. This new science’s implications for hygienic ideology were profound—when Holbrook locked horns with female fashion, for example, he did not attack the bulky, ground-length skirts still in style with the crude Grahamite objection that the skirt was too heavy. Rather he forced a gasp from his readers with an account of watching a smartly dressed lady unwittingly drag her skirt “over some virulent, revolting looking sputum, which some unfortunate consumptive had expectorated.”

Holbrook expanded on the work of Graham, Alcott, and Trall and, working with an awareness of the European concepts developed by Preissnitz and Kneipp, laid further groundwork for the concepts later advanced by Lust, Lindlahr, and others ⁴:

For disease to result, the latter had to provide a suitable culture medium, had to be susceptible. As yet, most physicians were still so excited at having discovered the causative agents of infection that they were paying less than adequate notice to the host. Radical hygienists, however, were bent just as far in the other direction. They were inclined to see bacteria as merely impotent organisms that throve only in individuals whose hygienic carelessness had made their body compost heaps. Tuberculosis is contagious, Holbrook acknowledged, but “the degree of vital resistance is the real element of protection. When there is no preparation of the soil by heredity, predisposition or lowered health standard, the individual is amply guarded against the attack.” A theory favored by many others was that germs were the effect of disease rather than its cause; tissues corrupted by poor hygiene offered microbes, all harmless, an environment in which they could thrive.

In addition to introducing the works of Kneipp and his teachings to the American hygienic health care movement, Holbrook was a leader of the fight against vivisection and vaccination ⁴:

Vivisection and vaccination were but two of the practices of medicine criticized in the late 19th century. Therapy also continued to be an object of protest. Although the heroism of standard treatment had declined markedly since mid-century, a prescription was still the reward of any visit to the doctor, and drugless alternatives to healing were appearing in protest. Holbrook published frequent favorable commentaries on the revised water cure system of Germany’s Kneipp. A combination of baths, herbal teas, and hardening exercises, the system had some vogue in the 1890’s before flowering into naturopathy. Holbrook’s journal also gave positive notices to osteopathy and “chiropathy” [chiropractic], commending them for not going to the “drugstore or ransack[ing] creation for remedies nor load[ing] the blood with poison.” But though bathing and musculoskeletal manipulation were natural and nonpoisonous, Holbrook preferred to give the body complete responsibility for healing itself. Rest and proper diet were the medicines of this doctor who billed himself as a “hygienic physician” and censured ordinary physicians for being engrossed with disease rather than health.

The Beginnings of “Scientific Medicine”

While the hygienic movement was making its impact, the orthodox medical profession, in alliance with the homeopaths and eclectics, was making significant advances. The orthodox profession, through the political efforts of the American Medical Association (AMA), first tried to remove sectarian and irregular practitioners by segregating them from the medical profession altogether. It did so by formulating and publishing its first national medical code of ethics in 1847. (In 1846 the orthodox profession formed the AMA to represent their professional views.) The code condemned proprietary patents (even carrying over into a physician’s development of surgical or other medical implements, which led to its greatest criticism); encouraged the adoption of uniform rules for payment in geographic areas; condemned the practice of contract work; prohibited advertising and fee-sharing even among specialists and general practitioners; eliminated blacks and women; and, most significantly, prohibited any consultation or contact with irregulars or sectarian practitioners. The code stated the following ⁶:

No one can be considered as a regular practitioner, or a fit associate in consultation, whose practice is based on an exclusive dogma, to the rejection of the accumulated experience of the profession, and of the aids actually furnished by anatomy, physiology, pathology, and organic chemistry.

In the late 1870s and into the 1880s, the major sects—the orthodox or allopathic school, the homeopaths, and the eclectics—began to find more reason to cooperate to obtain common professional goals. These included the enactment of new licensing laws and the creation of a “respectable” medical educational system. Also at this time, the concept of “scientific medicine” was brought to America. (Although Starr differed from Rothstein regarding the causes of the decline of the homeopathic and eclectic sectarian schools, he noted that Rothstein clearly documented the nineteenth century transition of medicine into a recognized professional class composed of both the minority sects and the orthodox school.)

This transition from conflict between the major sects resulted in the erosion of the implementation of the code of ethics, the cooperation among the sects to revive medical licensing standards, the admission of sectarian physicians to regular medical societies, and, ultimately, a structural reorganization of the AMA, which occurred between 1875 and 1903.^1,⁵

Once the cooperation among the three medical views began, the medical class dominated by the regular school came fully into power. The homeopathic and eclectic schools of thought met their demise finally due to two significant events: (1) the rapid creation of new medical educational standards between 1900 and 1910, culminating in the publication of the famous “Flexner Report” (1910), and (2) the effective infusion of millions of dollars into selected allopathic medical schools by the newly created capitalistic philanthropic foundations, principally the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations.

The Foundations

The impact of the monies from the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations was clearly documented ⁷ and described in detail in Brown’s Rockefeller Medicine Men.⁸ The impact of the monies from these foundations, contributed to medical schools that met the AMA’s views on medical education and philosophy, cannot be underestimated.

This process has been well documented.^1,^7,^9,¹⁰ As discussed by Burrows,¹⁰ these educational reforms allowed the AMA to forge a new alliance with state legislators and push quickly for medical licensing designed to reward the educational and medical expertise of the newly orthodox “scientific medicine” and to the exclusion of all others.

Medical Education in Transition

Based on the rising example of scientific medicine and its necessary connection to research, the educational laboratory, and a more thorough scientific education as a preamble to medical practice, Harvard University (under the presidency of Charles Elliott) created a 4-year medical educational program in 1871. The primal modern medical educational curriculum was devised and set in motion more than 20 years later at Johns Hopkins University under the leadership of William Osler and William Welch, using the resources from the original endowment of the hospital and university from the estate of Johns Hopkins.¹

Other schools followed suit. By the time the AMA set up its Council on Medical Education in 1904, it was made up of five members from the faculties of schools modeled on the Johns Hopkins prototype. This committee set out to visit and rate each of the 160 medical schools then in operation in the country. The ratings used were class “A” (acceptable), class “B” (doubtful), and class “C” (unacceptable).

Eighty-two schools received a class “A” rating, led by Harvard, Rush (Chicago), Western Reserve, the University of California and, notably, Johns Hopkins. Forty-six schools received a class “B” rating, and thirty-two a class “C” rating. The class “C” schools were mostly in rural areas, and many of them were proprietary in nature.

Flexner Report

Subsequent to the AMA ratings, the Council on Medical Education applied to the Carnegie Foundation to commission an independent report to verify its work. Abraham Flexner, a young, energetic, and noted educator, was chosen for this task by the Carnegie Foundation and accompanied by the secretary (Nathan Colwell, MD) of the Council on Medical Education, who participated in all of the committee site visits.

Flexner visited each of the 162 operating U.S. medical schools. The widely publicized Flexner Report put the nails in the coffins of all schools with class “C” ratings and many with class “B” ratings. Significantly, the educational programs of all but one eclectic school (in Cincinnati) and one homeopathic school (in Philadelphia) were eliminated by 1918.

The eclectic medical schools, in particular, were severely affected by the report. Griggs explained this effect as follows ²:

Of the eight Eclectic schools, the Report declared that none had “anything remotely resembling the laboratory equipment which is claimed in their catalogs.” Three of them were under-equipped; the rest “are without exception filthy and almost bare. They have at best grimy little laboratories … a few microscopes, some bottles containing discolored and unlabeled pathological material, in an incubator out of commission, and a horrid dissecting room.” The Report found them more culpable than a regular school for these inadequacies: “… the Eclectics are drug-mad; yet, with the exception of the Cincinnati and New York schools, they are not equipped to teach the drugs or drug therapy which constitutes their sole reason for existence.”

The other regular schools that conducted homeopathic or eclectic programs had by that time phased them out in the name of “scientific medicine” (see also Haller ³).

Pharmaceutical Industry

During this same time, the AMA, through several of its efforts, began a significant alliance with the organized pharmaceutical industry of the United States, shaping it in a manner acceptable to the allopathic profession.^1,^9,¹¹

The New “Sects”

The period from 1890 to 1905 saw the rise of three new medical sects and several other smaller “irregular” schools that replaced those soon to pass from the scene. In Missouri, Andrew Taylor Still, originally trained as an orthodox practitioner, founded the school of medical thought known as “osteopathy” and in 1892 opened the American School of Osteopathy in Kirksville, Missouri. In 1895, Daniel David Palmer, originally a magnetic healer from Davenport, Iowa, performed the first spinal manipulation, which gave rise to the school he termed “chiropractic.” He formally published his findings in 1910, after having founded a chiropractic school in Davenport, Iowa. In 1902, Lust founded the American School of Naturopathy in New York.

Although some of the following discussions are devoted to the schools of healing called osteopathy and chiropractic, only that portion of their histories related to the history of naturopathy is mentioned.¹² (A full study of osteopathic medicine in America may be found in The D.O.’s by Gevitz,¹³ and a reasonable sketch of chiropractic medicine may be found in Kapling’s chapter in Alternative Medicine.¹²)

As noted by Starr,¹ these new sects, including Christian Science, formulated by Mary Baker Eddy,¹⁴ either rose or fell on their own without ever completely allying with orthodox medicine. Starr theorized that these sects arose late enough that the orthodox profession and its political action arm, the AMA, had no need to ally with them and would rather battle with them publicly. This made these sectarian views separate and distinct from the homeopathic and eclectic schools.

The Founding of Naturopathic Medicine

Benedict Lust

Lust came to the United States in 1892 at the age of 23. He suffered from a debilitating condition in his late teens while growing up in Michelbach, Baden, Germany, and was sent by his father to undergo the Kneipp cure at Woerishofen. He stayed there from mid-1890 to early 1892; not only was he “cured” of his condition, but he also became a protégé of Kneipp. Dispatched by Kneipp to bring the principles of the Kneipp water cure to America, he emigrated to New York City.

By making contact in New York with other German Americans who were also becoming aware of the Kneipp principles, Lust participated in the founding of the first “Kneipp Society,” which was organized in Jersey City, New Jersey, in October 1896.

Lust also attended the first organizational meeting (in mid-October 1896) of the Kneipp Society of Brooklyn. Subsequently, through Lust’s organization and contacts, Kneipp Societies were founded in Boston; Chicago; Cleveland; Denver; Cincinnati; Philadelphia; Columbus; Buffalo and Rochester, New York; New Haven, Connecticut; San Francisco; New Mexico; and Mineola on Long Island, New York.

The members of these organizations were provided with copies of the Kneipp Blatter and a companion English publication Lust began to put out called The Kneipp Water Cure Monthly.

The first “sanatorium” using Kneipp’s principles was organized in this country shortly before Lust’s arrival. Charles Lauterwasser, an earlier student of Kneipp’s who called himself a hydrothic physician and natural scientist, opened the Kneipp and Nature Cure Sanatorium in Newark, New Jersey, in 1891.

In 1895, the Brooklyn Light and Water-Cure Institute was established in Brooklyn, New York, by L. Staden and his wife Carola, both graduates of Lindlahr’s Hygienic College in Dresden, Germany. According to their advertising, they specialized in natural healing, Kneipp water treatment, and Kuhne’s and Preissnitz’s principles (including diet cure, electric light baths [both white and blue], electric vibration massage, Swedish massage and movements, and Thure-brandt massage).

In 1895, Lust opened the Kneipp Water-Cure Institute in New York City, listing himself as the owner and Dr. William Steffens as the residing physician. At the same address (on 59th Street) in October of that year, Lust opened the first “Kneipp store.” In the originating November 1896 edition of The Kneipp Water Cure Monthly and Kneipp Blatter, he advertised his store and sanitarium as personally authorized by Kneipp. In the first part of 1896, just before his organizing of various Kneipp Societies around the New York area, Lust returned to Woerishofen to study further with Kneipp.

Kneipp died in Germany, at Woerishofen, in June 1897. With his passing, Lust was no longer bound strictly to the principles of the Kneipp water cure. He had begun to associate earlier with other German-American physicians, principally Dr. Hugo R. Wendel (a German-trained Naturarzt), who began, in 1897, to practice in New York and New Jersey as a licensed osteopathic physician. In 1896, Lust entered the Universal Osteopathic College of New York, graduated in 1898, and became licensed as an osteopathic physician. In 1897, Lust became an American citizen.

Once he was licensed to practice as a health care physician in his own right, Lust began the transition toward the concept of “naturopathy.” Between 1898 and 1902, when he adopted the term “naturopath,” Lust acquired a chiropractic education and changed the name of his Kneipp store to Health Food Store (the original facility to use that name and concept in this country), specializing in providing organic foods and the materials necessary for drugless cures. He also began the New York School of Massage (listed as established in 1896) and the American School of Chiropractic, all within the same facility—Lust’s Kneipp Institute.

Photographs of this facility taken between 1902 and 1907, when the facility moved to another location, show a five-story building listing “Benedict Lust—Naturopath, Publisher, Importer.”

He returned to Germany in 1907 to visit with Dr. Baumgarten, Kneipp’s medical successor at the Woerishofen facility, which was then run, in cooperation with Baumgarten, by the Reverend Prior Reily, the former secretary to Kneipp and his lay successor at Woerishofen. As directed by Kneipp, Reily had completed, after Kneipp’s death, Kneipp’s master work Das grosse Kneipp—Buch. Lust maintained contact with the partnership of Reily and Baumgarten throughout the early part of the twentieth century.

In 1902, when he purchased and began using the term naturopathy and calling himself a “naturopath,” Lust, in addition to his New York School of Massage and American School of Chiropractic, his various publications, and his operation of the Health Food Store, began to operate the American School of Naturopathy, all at the same 59th Street New York address.

By 1907, Lust’s enterprises had grown sufficiently large that he moved them to a 55-room building. It housed the Naturopathic Institute, Clinic and Hospital; the American Schools of Naturopathy and Chiropractic; the now entitled Original Health Food Store; Lust’s publishing enterprises; and New York School of Massage. The operation remained in this four-story building, roughly twice the size of the original facility, from 1907 to 1915.

From 1912 to 1914, Lust took a “sabbatical” from his operations to further his medical education. By this time he had founded his large estate-like sanitarium in Butler, New Jersey, known as “Yungborn” after the German sanitarium operation of Adolph Just.

In 1912 he attended the Homeopathic Medical College in New York, which, in 1913, granted him a degree in homeopathic medicine and, in 1914, he received his degree in eclectic medicine. In early 1914, Lust traveled to Florida and obtained an MD’s license on the basis of his graduation from the Homeopathic Medical College and the Eclectic Medical College of New York City.

He founded another “Yungborn” sanitarium facility in Tangerine, Florida, and for the rest of his life, while continuing his publications, he engaged in active public lecturing. He also continued to maintain a practice in New York City and operated the sanitariums in Florida and New Jersey. His schools were operated primarily by Hugo R. Wendel.

From 1902, when he began to use the term naturopathy, until 1918, Lust replaced the Kneipp Societies with the Naturopathic Society of America. Then, in December 1919, the Naturopathic Society of America was formally dissolved due to its insolvency and Lust founded the American Naturopathic Association (ANA). Thereafter, 18 states incorporated the association.

In 1918, as part of his effort to replace the Naturopathic Society of America (an operation into which he invested a great deal of his funds and resources in an attempt to organize a naturopathic profession) and replace it with the ANA, Lust published the first Universal Naturopathic Directory and Buyer’s Guide (a “yearbook of drugless therapy”).

Although a completely new version was never actually published, despite Lust’s announced intention to make this volume an annual publication, annual supplements were published in either The Naturopath and Herald of Health or its companion publication Nature’s Path (which commenced publication in 1925). The Naturopath and Herald of Health, sometimes printed with the two phrases reversed, was published from 1902 to 1927, and from 1934 until after Lust’s death in 1945.

This volume documented the merging of the German and American influences that influenced Lust in his development of the practice of naturopathy. The voluminous tome, which ran to 1416 pages, was dedicated to:

The memory of all those noble pioneers and discoverers who have died in the faith of Naturopathy, and to their courageous successors in the art of drugless healing, all of whom have suffered persecution for saving human lives that medical autocracy could not save, this work is respectfully dedicated by its editor Benedict Lust, N.D., M.D., “The Yungborn,” Butler, New Jersey, U.S.A., April 1, 1918.

Lust’s introduction is reprinted here in its entirety to show the purpose of the directory and the status of the profession in the early 1900s:

Introduction

To the Naturopathic Profession, the Professors of Natural Healing in all its branches, the Professors of Scientific Diet, Hydrotherapy, Heliotherapy, Electrotherapy, Neuropathy, Osteopathy, Chiropractic, Naprapathy, Magnetopathy, Phytotherapy, Exercise, Swedish Movements, Curative Gymnastics, Physical and Mental Culture, Balneopathy, and all forms of Drugless Healing, the Faculties of all Drugless Colleges, Institutions, Schools, and all Professors of Hygiene and Sanitation; Manufacturers of Naturopathic Supplies; Publishers of Health Literature, and Natural Healing Societies, GREETINGS:

I have the honor to present to your consideration and goodwill, this Volume, No. 1, Year 1918-1919, of the Universal Naturopathic Directory, Year Book of Drugless Healing, and Buyers’ Guide.

For twenty-two years past, the need of a directory for Drugless Therapy has been felt. The medical world is in a condition of intense evolution at the present time. It is evolving from the Drugging School of Therapy to the Drugless School. People by the million have lost confidence in the virtues of Allopathy and are turning with joyful confidence to the Professions of Natural Healing until it has been estimated that there are at least forty thousand practitioners of Naturopathic healing in the United States.

The motto that IN UNITY THERE IS STRENGTH is the foundation of the present enterprise.

Hitherto, the drugless profession has lacked that prestige in the eyes of the public, which comes from the continuous existence of a big institution, duly organized and wielding the immense authority which is derived no less from organization and history than from the virtues of the principles that are held and practiced by such institutions. The public at large instantaneously respects an institution that is thoroughly organized and has its root earthed in history.

The time has fully arrived when the drugless profession should no longer exist in the form of isolated units, not knowing one another and caring but little for such knowledge. Our profession has been, as it were, as sheep without a shepherd, but the various individuals that constitute this movement so pregnant with benefits to humanity, are now collected for the first time into a Directory and Year-Book of Drugless Healing, which alone will give immense weight and dignity to the standing of the individuals mentioned therein.

Not only will the book add to the prestige of the practitioner in the eyes of his patients, but when the scattered members of our profession in every State desire to obtain legislative action on behalf of their profession and themselves, the appeal of such a work as our directory will, in the eyes of legislators, gain for them a much more respectful hearing than could otherwise be obtained.

Now, for the first time, the drugless practitioner finds himself one of a vast army of professional men and women who are employing the most healthful forces of nature to rejuvenate and regenerate the world. But the book itself throws a powerful light upon every phase of drugless healing and annihilates time and distance in investigating WHO IS WHO in the realm of Drugless Therapy.

A most sincere effort has been made to obtain the name and address of every adherent of the Rational School of Medicine who practices his profession within the United States, Canada and the British Isles. It is impossible at this stage of Naturopathic history, which is still largely in the making, to obtain the name and address of every such practitioner. There were some who, even when appealed to, refused to respond to our invitation, not understanding the object of our work. Many of even the most intelligent members have refused to advertise their professional cards in our pages. But we can only attribute these drawbacks to the fact that every new institution that has suddenly dawned upon human intelligence will find that a certain proportion of people who do not understand the nature of the enterprise because the brain cells that would appreciate the benefits that are sought to be conferred upon them, are undeveloped, but a goodly proportion of our Naturopaths have gladly responded to the invitation to advertise their specialty in our columns. These, of course, constitute the brightest and most successful of our practitioners and their examples in this respect should be followed by every practitioner whose card does not appear in this book.

We take it for granted that every one of the forty thousand practitioners of Naturopathy is in favor of the enterprise represented by this Directory. This work is a tool of his trade and not to possess this book is a serious handicap in the race for success.

Here will be found an Index of by far the larger number of Naturopaths in the country arranged in Alphabetic, Geographic and Naturopathic sections. Besides this, there is a classified Buyers’ Guide that gives immediate information regarding where you can find special supplies, or a certain apparatus, or a certain book or magazine, its name, and where it is published. The list of Institutions with the curriculum of each will be found exceedingly useful.

Natural healing, that has drifted so long, and, by reason of a lack of organization, has been made for so many years the football of official medicine, to be kicked by any one who thought fit to do so, has now arrived at such a pitch of power that it has shaken the old system of bureaucratic medicine to its foundations. The professors of the irrational theories of life, health and disease, that are looking for victims to be inoculated with dangerous drugs and animalized vaccines and serums, have begun to fear the growth of this young giant of medical healing that demands medical freedom, social justice and equal rights for the new healing system that exists alone for the betterment and uplifting of humanity.

I want every Professor of Drugless Therapy to become my friend and co-worker in the great cause to which we are committed, and those whose names are not recorded in this book should send them to me without delay. It will be of far greater interest and value to themselves to have their professional card included amongst those who advertise with us than the few dollars that such advertisement costs.

It will be noted that there are quite a number of Drugless Healers belonging to foreign countries (particularly those of the Western Hemisphere) represented in this Directory. The profession of medicine is not confined to any race, country, clime or religion. It is a universal profession and demands universal recognition. It will be a great honor to the Directory, as well as to the Naturopathic profession at large to have every Naturopathic practitioner, from the Arctic Circle to the furthest limits of Patagonia, represented in the pages of this immense and most helpful work.

I expect that the Directory for the year 1920 will be larger and even more important than the present Directory and that it will contain the names of thousands of practitioners that are not included in the present work.

The publication of this Directory will aid in abolishing whatever evils of sectarianism, narrow-mindedness and lack of loyalty to the cause to which we are devoted, that may exist. That it will promote a fraternal spirit among all exponents of natural healing, and create an increase of their prestige and power to resist the encroachments of official medicine on their constitutional rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, by favorably influencing Legislators, Law courts, City Councils and Boards of Health everywhere, is the sincere belief of the editor and publisher.

Having introduced the volume, Lust leads off with his article entitled “The principles, aim and program of the nature cure system.”

Again, this relatively brief article is reproduced here in its entirety, so that one can see the merging of influences:

The principles, aim and program of the nature cure system

Since the earliest ages, Medical Science has been of all sciences the most unscientific. Its professors, with few exceptions, have sought to cure disease by the magic of pills and potions and poisons that attacked the ailment with the idea of suppressing the symptoms instead of attacking the real cause of the ailment.

Medical science has always believed in the superstition that the use of chemical substances which are harmful and destructive to human life will prove an efficient substitute for the violation of laws, and in this way encourages the belief that a man may go the limit in self indulgences that weaken and destroy his physical system, and then hope to be absolved from his physical ailments by swallowing a few pills, or submitting to an injection of a serum or vaccine, that are supposed to act as vicarious redeemers of the physical organism and counteract life-long practices that are poisonous and wholly destructive to the patient’s well-being.

From the earliest ages to the present time, the priests of medicine have discovered that it is ten times easier to obtain ten dollars from a man by acting upon his superstition, than it is to extract one dollar from him, by appealing to reason and common sense. Having this key to a gold mine within their grasp, we find official medicine indulging at all times in the most blatant, outrageous, freakish and unscientific methods of curing disease, because the methods were in harmony with the medical prestige of the physician.

Away back in pre-historic times, disease was regarded as a demon to be exorcized from its victim, and the medicine man of his tribe belabored the body of his patient with a bag in which rattled bones and feathers, and no doubt in extreme cases the tremendous faith in this process of cure that was engendered in the mind of the patient really cured some ailments for which mental science and not the bag of bones and feathers should be given credit.

Coming down to the middle ages, the Witches’ Broth—one ingredient of which was the blood of a child murderer drawn in the dark of the moon—was sworn to, by official medicine, as a remedy for every disease.

In a later period, the “docteur a la mode,” between his taking pinches of snuff from a gold snuff box, would order the patient bled as a remedy for what he denominated spirits, vapors, megrims, or miasms.

Following this pseudo-scientific diagnosis and method of cure, came the drugging phase in which symptoms of disease were unmercifully attacked by all kinds of drugs, alkalis, acids and poisons which were supposed, that by suffocating the symptoms of disease, by smothering their destructive energy, to thus enhance the vitality of the individual. All these cures have had their inception, their period of extensive application, and their certain desuetude. The contemporary fashion of healing disease is that of serums, inoculations and vaccines, which, instead of being an improvement on the fake medicines of former ages are of no value in the cure of disease, but on the contrary introduce lesions into the human body of the most distressing and deadly import.

The policy of expediency is at the basis of medical drug healing. It is along the lines of self-indulgence, indifference, ignorance and lack of self-control that drug medicine lives, moves and has its being. The sleeping swineries of mankind are wholly exploited by a system of medical treatment, founded on poisonous and revolting products, whose chemical composition and whose mode of attacking disease, are equally unknown to their originators, and this is called “Scientific medicine.”

Like the alchemist of old who circulated the false belief that he could transmute the baser metals into gold, in like manner the vivisector claims that he can coin the agony of animals into cures for human disease. He insists on cursing animals that he may bless mankind with such curses.

To understand how revolting these products are, let us just refer to the vaccine matter which is supposed to be an efficient preventive of smallpox. Who would be fool enough to swallow the putrid pus and corruption scraped from the foulest sores of smallpox that has been implanted in the body of a calf? Even if any one would be fool enough to drink so atrocious a substance, its danger might be neutralized by the digestive juices of the intestinal tract. But it is a far greater danger to the organism when inoculated into the blood and tissues direct, where no digestive substances can possibly neutralize its poison.

The natural system for curing disease is based on a return to nature in regulating the diet, breathing, exercising, bathing and the employment of various forces to eliminate the poisonous products in the system, and so raise the vitality of the patient to a proper standard of health.

Official medicine has in all ages simply attacked the symptoms of disease without paying any attention to the causes thereof, but natural healing is concerned far more with removing the causes of disease, than merely curing its symptoms. This is the glory of this new school of medicine that it cures by removing the causes of the ailment, and is the only rational method of practicing medicine. It begins its cures by avoiding the uses of drugs and hence is styled the system of drugless healing. It came first into vogue in Germany and its most famous exponents in that country were Priessnitz, Schroth, Kuhne, Kneipp, Rickli, Lahmann, Just, Ehret, Engelhardt, and others.

In Sweden, Ling and others developed various systems of mechano-therapy and curative gymnastics.

In America, Palmer invented Chiropractic; McCormick, Ophthalmology. Still originated Osteopathy; Weltmer, suggestive Therapeutics. Lindlahr combined the essentials of various natural methods, while Kellogg, Tilden, Schultz, Trall, Lust, Lahn, Arnold, Struch, Havard, Davis, Jackson, Walters, Deininger, Tyrell, Collins and others, have each of them spent a lifetime in studying and putting into practice the best ideas of drugless healing and have greatly enlarged and enriched the new school of medicine.

Life maltreated by allopathy

The prime object of natural healing is to give the principle of life the line of least resistance, that it may enable man to possess the most abundant health.

What is life?

The finite mind of man fails to comprehend the nature of this mysterious principle. The philosopher says “Life is the sum of the forces that resist death,” but that definition only increases its obscurity. Life is a most precious endowment of protoplasm, of the various combinations of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen, and other purely mineral substances in forming organic tissues. As Othello says, referring to Desdemona’s life, which he compares to the light of a candle—

“If I quench thee thou flaming minister,

I can thy former light restore

Should I repent me; but once put out THY light,

I know not whence is that Promethean heat

That can thy light relume.”

The spark of life flickers in the sockets of millions and is about to go out. What system of medicine will most surely restore that flickering spark to a steady, burning flame?

Will [it be] the system that employs poisonous vaccines, serums and inoculations, whose medical value has to be supported by the most mendacious statements, and whose practitioners are far more intent on their emoluments and fame, than they are in the practice of humanity?

The Allopathic system, which includes nine tenths of all medical practitioners, is known by its fruits, but it is an appalling fact that infant mortality, insanity, heart disease, arteriosclerosis, cancer, debility, impoverished constitutions, degeneracy, idiocy and inefficiency have enormously increased, particularly during the last twenty-five years, that is, during the regime of inoculations, serums and vaccines.

Naturopathy, on the other hand, so far as it has been developed, and so far as official medicine will allow it to act, leaves no such trail of disease, disaster and death behind it. Natural healing is emancipation from medical superstition, ignorance and tyranny. It is the true Elixir of Life.

The Allopaths have endeavored to cure sick humanity on the basis of the highly erroneous idea that man can change the laws of nature that govern our being, and cure the cause of disease by simply ignoring it. To cure disease by poisoning its symptoms is medical manslaughter.

Dr. Schwenninger of Germany says: “We are suffering under the curse of the past mistakes of our profession. For thousands of years medical doctors have been educating the public into the false belief that poisonous drugs can give health. This belief has become in the public mind such a deep-seated superstition, that those of us who know better and who would like to adopt more sensible, natural methods of cure, can do so only at the peril of losing practice and reputation.

“The average medical man is at his best but a devoted bigot to this vain school-craft, which we call the Medical Art and which alone in this age of science has made no perceptible progress since the days of its earliest teachers. They call it recognized science! Recognized ignorance! The science of to-day is the ignorance of to-morrow. Every year some bold guess lights up as truth to which but the year before the schoolmen of science were as blind as moles.”

And Dr. O.W. Holmes, Professor of Anatomy in Harvard University, states: “The disgrace of medicine has been that colossal system of self-deception, in obedience to which mines have been emptied of their cankering minerals, entrails of animals taxed for their impurities, the poison bags of reptiles drained of their venom, and all the inconceivable abominations thus obtained thrust down the throats of human beings, suffering from some fault of organization, nourishment, or vital stimulation.”

And these misguided drug doctors are not only not ashamed of their work, but they have induced subservient legislators to pass laws that perpetuate the age-long scandal of allopathic importance, and the degenerative influence of the poisons, and to actually make it a crime on the part of nature doctors to cure a man of his ailment. The brazen effrontery of these medical despots has no limits. They boast of making the State legislators their catspaw in arresting, fining and imprisoning the professors of natural healing for saving human life.

Legislators have no right to sit in judgment over the claims of rival schools of healing. They see tens of thousands of sick people go down to their graves by being denied the cures that the employers of nature’s forces alone can give them. It is their business to provide for the various schools of medicine a fair field and no favor.

A citizen has an inalienable right to liberty in the pursuit of happiness. Yet the real saviors of mankind are persecuted by the medical oligarchy which is responsible for compulsory vaccination, compulsory medical inspection of public school children, and the demands for State and Federal departments of health, all for the ostensible good of the people, but in reality for the gain of the Medical Trust.

The naturopaths

The Naturopaths are desirous of freedom for all schools of medicine. They are responsible practitioners who are willing to be examined by an impartial council, appointed by and acting for the State, who will testify to the life and character of every drugless physician before he is entitled to practice medicine. Not one invidious discrimination should be made between the different schools of medicine. The state should see to it that each school should have a full opportunity to do its best for the up-lifting of its citizens.

The program of naturopathic cure

1. ELIMINATION OF EVIL HABITS, or the weeds of life, such as over-eating, alcoholic drinks, drugs, the use of tea, coffee and cocoa that contain poisons, meat eating, improper hours of living, waste of vital forces, lowered vitality, sexual and social aberrations, worry, etc.

2. CORRECTIVE HABITS. Correct breathing, correct exercise, right mental attitude. Moderation in the pursuit of health and wealth.

3. NEW PRINCIPLES OF LIVING. Proper fasting, selection of food, hydropathy, light and air baths, mud baths, osteopathy, chiropractic and other forms of mechano-therapy, mineral salts obtained in organic form, electropathy, heliopathy, steam or Turkish baths, sitz baths, etc.

Natural healing is the most desirable factor in the regeneration of the race. It is a return to nature in methods of living and treatment. It makes use of the elementary forces of nature, of chemical selection of foods that will constitute a correct medical dietary. The diet of civilized man is devitalized, is poor in essential organic salts. The fact that foods are cooked in so many ways and are salted, spiced, sweetened and otherwise made attractive to the palate, induces people to over-eat, and over eating does more harm than under feeding. High protein food and lazy habits are the cause of cancer, Bright’s disease, rheumatism and the poisons of auto-intoxication.

There is really but one healing force in existence and that is Nature herself, which means the inherent restorative power of the organism to overcome disease. Now the question is, can this power be appropriated and guided more readily by extrinsic or intrinsic methods? That is to say, is it more amenable to combat disease by irritating drugs, vaccines and serums employed by superstitious moderns, or by the bland intrinsic congenial forces of Natural Therapeutics, that are employed by this new school of medicine, that is Naturopathy, which is the only orthodox school of medicine? Are not these natural forces much more orthodox than the artificial resources of the druggist? The practical application of these natural agencies, duly suited to the individual case, are true signs that the art of healing has been elaborated by the aid of absolutely harmless, congenial treatments, under whose ministration the death rate is but five per cent of persons treated as compared with fifty per cent under the present allopathic methods.

The Germanic Influence

The philosophical origins of naturopathy were Germanic. The most significant influences, except those of Russell Trall, the osteopathic concepts of A.T. Still (at this time strictly the correction of spinal lesions by adjustment), and the chiropractic principles of D.D. Palmer, were originally Germanic. (This was well established in the January 1902 editorial in Water Cure Monthly.)

The specific influences on which Lust drew for his work, in order of their chronological contributions to the system of naturopathy, are the following:

1. Vincent Preissnitz (1799–1851)

2. Johann Schroth (1798–1856)

3. Father Sebastian Kneipp (1821–1897)

4. Arnold Rickli (1823–1926)

5. Louis Kuhne (c. 1823–1907)

6. Henry Lahman (no dates known)

7. F.E. Bilz (1823–1903)

8. Adolph Just (1859–1939).

Also of note were Theodor Hahn and T. Meltzer, who, in the 1860s, were well known for their work in the movement called, in German, Naturatz or “naturism.”

In photographs accompanying his article “The principles, aim and program of the nature cure system,” Lust described each of these thinkers as follows:

1. VINCENT PREISSNITZ, of Graefenberg, Silesia. Founder of Hydropathy. Born October 4, 1799. A pioneer Naturopath, prosecuted by the medical authorities of his day, and convicted of using witchcraft, because he cured his patients by the use of water, air, diet and exercise. He took his patients back to Nature—to the woods, the streams, the open fields—treated them with Nature’s own forces and fed them on natural foods. His fame spread over the whole of Europe, and even to America. His cured patients were numbered by the thousands. The Preissnitz compress or bandage is in the medical literature. Preissnitz is no more, but his spirit lives in every true Naturopath.

2. JOHANN SCHROTH, a layperson, not described in Lust’s directory but often talked of in later works and prominently mentioned for his curative theories in Bilz’s master work, The Natural Method of Healing. Schroth smashed his right knee in an accident with a horse and it remained stiff in spite of repeated medical treatment. At last, a priest told Schroth that Preissnitz’s methods might help, and Schroth decided to give them a try. In order to avoid frequent changing of the packs that were directed by Preissnitz, he placed several packs on top of one another, wrapping the whole portion with a woolen cloth. He left this pack on the injured knee for several hours and produced a moist heat which he theorized to cause the poisonous toxins to dissolve and be swept away. These packs are still used as part of the “Schroth cure” and have reportedly become famous for their blood-cleansing effect. (From an article in the March 1937 Naturopath and Herald of Health by Dr. T.M. Schippel.) As noted by Bilz, the Schroth cure, called by Bilz “the regenerative treatment,” was developed for treatment of chronic diseases through the use of an extreme diet following total fasting by withdrawing of all food and drink and then the use of totally dry grain products and the eventual reintroduction of fluids.

3. FATHER SEBASTIAN KNEIPP, of course, is much described and the photos include one of Kneipp lecturing to the multitudes at Wandelhale at Woerishofen, attending Pope Leo XIII in 1893, noting this is the only consultation on health care matters that Kneipp ever consented to outside of Woerishofen, though many famous and aristocratic individuals desired his counsel, and a picture of Kneipp with the Archdukes Joseph and Francis Ferdinand of Austria walking barefoot in new-fallen snow for purposes of hardening the constitution. It was noted that the older Archduke was cured by Kneipp of Bright’s disease in 1892, and it noted that the Archduke Joseph, in appreciation of this cure, donated a public park in the town of Woerishofenat a cost of $150,000 florens. The Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the son of Archduke Joseph, was the individual whose murder precipitated World War I. There is a further picture of Kneipp surrounded by “Doctors” from different parts of the world while he gave consultation to numerous patients.

4. ARNOLD RICKLI, founder of the light and light and air cures (atmospheric cure). Dr. Rickli was one of the foremost exponents of natural living and healing. In 1848, he established at Veldes, Krain, Austria, the first institution of light and air cure or as it was called in Europe the “atmospheric cure.” In a limited way (rather very late) his ideas have been adopted by the medical profession in America for the cure of consumption. He was an ardent disciple of the vegetarian diet and exemplified the principles of natural living in his own life. The enclosed photo shows him at the age of 97, when he was still active and healthy. He has since passed on, but his work still lives as a testimonial of his untiring efforts. He was the founder and for over 50 years the President of the National Austrian Vegetarian Association.

5. LOUIS KUHNE wrote, in 1891, The New Science of Healing, the greatest work of basic principles in natural healing. In the tradition of Natural Healing and prevention, Kuhne has been described as one who “… advocated sun, steam baths, a vegetarian diet, and whole-wheat bread … in these relatively early days.” His renowned work constitutes the only true scientific philosophy for the application of all Drugless Methods. He was the first to give to the world the comprehensible idea of pathology and the first to proclaim the doctrine of the “unity of cure.” His book Facial Expression gives the means of diagnosing a patient’s pathological condition and determining the amount and location of the systemic encumbrance. He is the founder and first Master of Naturopathy.

6. DR. H. LAHMAN. When the University of Leipzig expelled H. Lahman for his spreading medical sedition among the students, it added a staunch advocate to natural healing. Dr. Lahman finished his medical education in Switzerland and returned to Germany to refute in practice the false ideas of medical science. He later founded the largest Nature Cure institution in the world at Weisser Hirsch, near Dresden, Saxony. He was a strong believer in the “Light and Air” cure and constructed the first appliances for the administration of electric light treatment and baths. He was the author of several books on Diet, Nature Cure and Heliotherapy. As noted in Other Healers, Other Cures: “Heinrich Lahmann came along to stress no salt on foods and no water with meals … ”¹⁵ His works on diet are authoritative and his “nutritive salts theory” forms the basis of rational dietetic treatment. This work has but recently come to light in America, and progressive dietitians are forsaking their old, worn-out, high protein, chemical and caloric theories for the “organic salts theory.” Carque, Lindlahr, McCann, and other wide awake food scientists have adopted it as a basis for their work. Dr. Lahman was a medical nihilist. He denounced medicine as unscientific and entirely experimental in its practice and lived to prove the saneness of his ideas as evidenced by his thousands of cured patients.

7. PROFESSOR F.E. BILZ. That real physicians are born, not made, is well illustrated in the case of Dr. Bilz, who achieved his first success in healing as a lay practitioner. As a mark of gratitude, a wealthy patient presented him with land and a castle in which to found a Nature Cure sanitarium.… The Bilz institution at Dresden-Rdebeul, Germany, became world renowned and was long considered the center of the Nature Cure movement. Professor Bilz is the author of the first Naturopathic encyclopedia, The Natural Method of Healing, which has been translated into a dozen languages, and in German alone has run into 150 editions. He has written many works on Nature Cure and Natural Life, among them being The Future State, in which he predicted the present World War, and advocated a federation of nations as the only logical solution of international problems.

8. ADOLPH JUST, famous author of Return to Nature and founder of original “Yungborn” in Germany.

Both Adolph Just’s Return to Nature and Louis Kuhne’s The Natural Science of Healing were translated into English by Lust and released through his publication house.

The Convergence with American Influences

The Universal Naturopathic Directory was truly eclectic in its compilation and composition. Besides the Lust articles the volume included: “How I became acquainted with nature cure” by Henry Lindlahr, MD, ND (which was reproduced in large part in the introduction to volume 1 of Lindlahr ¹⁶); “The nature cure” by Carl Strueh, MD, ND; “Naturopathy” by Harry E. Brook, ND; “The present position of naturopathy and allied therapeutic measures in the British Isles” by Allen Pattreiouex, ND; “Why all drugless methods?” by Per Nelson; and “Efficiency in drugless healing” by Edward Earle Purinton (a reprint of the 1917 publication, referred to earlier, which was composed of a series of articles published in The Herald of Health and Naturopath between August 1914 and February 1916).

The volume also contained Louis Kuhne’s “Neo-naturopathy (the new science of healing)” in the first publication of the translation by Lust, and articles on electrotherapy, neuropathy, dietology, chiropractic, mechanotherapy, osteopathy, phytotherapy, apyrtropher, physical culture, optometry, hydrotherapy, orthopedics, pathology, natural healing and living, astroscopy, phrenology, and physiology—all of which were specially commissioned for the directory from practitioners and authors considered expert in these subjects.

Also included was a national directory of drugless physicians in alphabetical order, geographically arranged and itemized by profession; biographical notes on American contributors of note; the naturopathic book catalog; a guide to natural healing and natural life books and periodicals; a classified list of medical works; a series of book reviews; a buyer’s guide for naturopathic supplies; and, in addition to extensive indexes, a “parting word” by Lust.

The volume contained numerous advertisements for naturopathic schools, sanitariums, and individual practices, and it closed with the following note:

This, then, completes Volume 1 of the Naturopathic Directory, Drugless Yearbook and Buyer’s Guide for the years 1918 and 1919.

Into it, has been placed the conscientious labor of many willing hearts, hands and minds. It is their contribution to the noble cause of natural healing. It will stand as a monument to their endeavors, as well as a memorial to the great souls, the fathers of natural healing, who have passed on.

Let this, then, herald a new era—the era wherein man shall recognize the omniscience of Nature, and shall profit through conforming to her laws.

In the biographical sections, it is apparent that Lust owed a great deal of the feeling of camaraderie in the nature cure movement to some varied American practitioners. The most prominent of these had their biographical sections contained in the 1918 directory. Two of them deserve specific note and attention: Palmer and Still.

Lust met A.T. Still in 1915 in Kirksville, MO, shortly before Still’s death. From their meetings, Lust noted later in the Naturopath and Herald of Health (June 1937) that Still believed that osteopathy by “compromising with medicine is doomed as the school that could have incorporated all the natural and biological healing arts.” Lust wanted naturopathy to fill this void.

Lust also had lengthy acquaintance with B.J. Palmer (the son of D.D. Palmer, the founder of chiropractic), who, following in his father’s footsteps, put Davenport, Iowa, and the Palmer Chiropractic College on the map.

Lust also became connected with Henry Lindlahr, MD, ND, of Chicago (as noted in the autobiographical sketch contained in the directory ¹⁷ and reprinted in volume 1 of Lindlahr¹⁶). Lindlahr was a rising businessman in Chicago with all the bad habits of the “gay nineties” era. In his 30s, he became chronically ill. He had gone to the orthodox practitioners of his day and received no relief.

Then, he was exposed to Schroth’s works, and in following them began to feel somewhat better. Subsequently, he liquidated all his assets and went to a German sanitarium to be cured and to learn nature cure. He returned to Chicago and enrolled in the Homeopathic/Eclectic College of Illinois. In 1903, he opened a sanitarium, which included a residential sanitarium, located in Elmhurst, Illinois, a “transient” clinic (office) on State Street in Chicago, and “Lindlahr’s Health Food Store.”

Shortly thereafter. he founded the Lindlahr College of Natural Therapeutics, which included hospital internships at the sanitarium. The institution became one of the leading naturopathic colleges of the day. In 1908, he began to publish Nature Cure Magazine and began publishing his series of Philosophy of Natural Therapeutics, with volume 1 (“Philosophy”) in 1918. This was followed by volume 2 (“Practice”) in 1919, volume 3 (“Dietetics”; republished with revisions as originally published in 1914), and, in 1923, volume 6 (“Iridiagnosis”). The intended volumes 4 and 5 were in production at the time of Lindlahr’s death in 1927. As described in Other Healers, Other Cures¹⁵:

Henry Lindlahr, another American, is remembered for his conviction that disease did not represent an invasion of molecules, but the body’s way of healing something. In other words, he viewed symptoms as a positive physiological response—proof that the body is fighting whatever’s wrong. Accordingly, a fever is a “healthy” sign and one should be let alone, unless it is dangerously high, of course.

The impact of all these gentlemen on the development of naturopathy in America, under Lust’s guidance, was profound.

From these beginnings, the naturopathic movement gathered strength and continued to grow through the 1920s and 1930s, having a major impact on natural healing and natural lifestyle in the United States.

Along the way, Lust was greatly influenced by the writings of John H. Tilden, MD (largely published between 1915 and 1925). Tilden was originally a practicing physician in Denver who became disenchanted with orthodox medicine and began to rely heavily on dietetics and nutrition, formulating his theories of “auto-intoxication” (the effect of fecal matter remaining too long in the digestive process) and “toxemia.”

Lust was also greatly influenced by Elmer Lee, MD, who became a practicing naturopath about 1910 and whose movement was called the “hygienic system,” following the earlier works of Russell Trall. Lee published Health Culture for many years.

In addition to John Tilden, MD, and Elmer Lee, MD, another medical doctor, John Harvey Kellogg, MD, who turned to more nutritionally based natural healing concepts, was greatly respected by Lust. Kellogg was renowned through his connection with the Battle Creek Sanitarium. The sanitarium itself was originally founded in the 1860s as a Seventh Day Adventist institution designed to perpetuate the Grahamite philosophies of Sylvester Graham and William Alcott. The sanitarium was on the verge of being closed, however, due to economic failure, when in 1876, Kellogg, a new and more dynamic physician-in-chief, was appointed.

Kellogg, born in 1852, was a “sickly child” who, at the age of 14, ran across the works of Graham and converted to vegetarianism. At the age of 20, he studied for a term at Trall’s Hygio-Therapeutic College and then earned a medical degree at New York’s Bellevue Medical School. He maintained an affiliation with the regular schools of medicine during his lifetime, due more to his practice of surgery than his beliefs in the area of health care.⁴

Kellogg designated his concepts, which were basically the hygienic system of healthful living, “biologic living.” Principally, Kellogg defended vegetarianism, attacked sexual misconduct and the evils of alcohol, and was a prolific writer through the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. He produced a popular periodical, Good Health, which continued in existence until 1955. When Kellogg died in 1943 at the age of 91, he had had more than 300,000 patients through the Battle Creek Sanitarium (which he had had renamed from Western Health Reform Institute shortly after his appointment in 1876), including many celebrities, and the “San” became nationally well known.

Kellogg, along with Tilden and Elie Metchnikoff (director of the prestigious Pasteur Institute and winner of the 1908 Nobel Prize for a contribution to immunology), wrote prolifically on the theory of auto-intoxication. Kellogg, in particular, felt that humans in the process of digesting meat, produced various intestinal self-poisons that contributed to auto-intoxication.

As a result, Kellogg became a near fanatic on the subject of helping humans return to a more healthy, natural state by returning to the naturally designed usage of the colon. He felt that the average modern colon was devitalized by the combination of sedentary living, the custom of sitting rather than squatting to defecate, and the modern civilized habit of ignoring “nature’s call” out of an undue concern for politeness. Further, Kellogg concentrated on the fact that the modern diet had insufficient bulk and roughage to stimulate the bowels to proper action.

Kellogg was also extremely interested in hydrotherapy. In the 1890s, he established a laboratory at the San to study the clinical applications of hydrotherapy. This led, in 1902, to his writing Rational Hydrotherapy. The preface espoused a philosophy of drugless healing that came to be one of the bases of the hydrotherapy school of medical thought in America.

Tilden, as mentioned, was of a similar mind. He must have been to have provided natural health care literature with his 200-plus page dissertation entitled “constipation,” with a chapter devoted to the evils of not responding when nature called.

This belief in the “evils” drawing away from the natural condition of the colon was extremely important to Kellogg’s work.⁴ Because of Lust’s interest, Kellogg’s The New Dietetics (1921) became one of the bibles of naturopathic literature.¹⁸

Lust was also influenced by the works of Sidney Weltmer, the father of “suggestive therapeutics.” The theory behind Professor Weltmer’s work was that whether it was the mind or the body that first lost its grip on health, the two were inseparably related. When the problem originated in the body, the mind nonetheless lost its ability and desire to overcome the disease because the patient “felt sick” and consequently slid further into the diseased state. Alternatively, if the mind first lost its ability and desire to “be healthy” and some physical infirmity followed, the patient was susceptible to being overcome by disease.

Weltmer’s work dealt specifically with the psychological process of desiring to be healthy. Lust enthusiastically backed Weltmer’s work and had him appear on the programs at various annual conventions of the American Naturopathic Association (which commenced after its founding in 1919).

Lust was also personal friends with and a deep admirer of Bernarr MacFadden.¹⁹ MacFadden was the founder of the “physical culture” school of health and healing, also known as “physcultopathy.” This school of healing gave birth across the country to gymnasiums at which exercise programs, designed to allow the individual man or woman to maintain the most perfect state of health and human condition possible, were developed and taught.⁴ Other Healers, Other Cures described it as follows¹⁵:

The next Naturopathic star, after Kellogg, was Bernarr MacFadden, the physical culturist who built a magazine-publishing empire (his first magazine was Physical Culture founded in 1898). MacFadden proselytizes for exercise and fresh vegetables, hardly eccentric notions. But his flamboyant efforts to publicize them and his occasional crack-pot ideas (like freezing the unemployed, then thawing them out when the Depression was over) alienated many people. Still, he was his own best advertisement. He fathered nine children by four wives and was parachuting from planes in his 80s. One of MacFadden’s admirers was that arch-foe of the medical profession, George Bernard Shaw, the longevous eccentric in his own right …

Lust was also interested in, and helped to publicize, “zone therapy,” originated by Joe Shelby Riley, DC, a chiropractor based in Washington, D.C., and one of the early practitioners of “broad chiropractic.” Zone therapy was an early forerunner of acupressure as it related “… pressures and manipulations of the fingers and tongue, and percussion on the spinal column, according to the relation of the fingers to certain zones of the body. …”¹⁷

Several other American drugless healers contributed to a broad range of “-opathies” that Lust merged into his growing view of naturopathy as the eclectic compilation of methods of natural healing. The Universal Directory also contained a complete list of osteopaths and chiropractors as drugless healers within the realm of Lust’s view of naturopathic theory. His other significant compatriots at the time of the publication of the directory were Carl Stueh, described by Lust as “one of the first medical men in this country who gave up medicine and operation for natural healing”; F.W. Collins, MD, DO, DC, an early graduate of the American School of Naturopathy (1907) who went on to graduate from the New Jersey College of Osteopathy (1909) and the Palmer School of Chiropractic (1912); another “broad chiropractor,” Anthony Matijaca, MD, ND, DO, the naturopathic resident expert in electrotherapy and an associate editor of the Herald and Health Naturopath (the inverted name of the Lust journal at the time of the directory); and Carl Schultz, ND, DO, MD, president and general manager of the Naturopathic Institute and Sanatorium of California, essentially the second school in the country to pursue the education of physicians under the name of “naturopathy.”

In Inner Hygiene: Constipation and the Pursuit of Health in Modern Society, Whorton ²⁰ offered his first assessments of the work of Lust as it related to the emergence of naturopathy in the early twentieth century:

Most of the drugless clan also identified themselves as practitioners of naturopathy, a system of practice that grew out of hydropathy, as well as German water-cure and nature-cure traditions. Organized in the late 1890s under the leadership of German immigrant Benedict Lust, naturopathy sought to cure the full scope of human ills with natural agents (herbs, water, air, sunlight, electricity, massage, and others), agents that supported and stimulated the body’s own healing mechanisms.

In his extensive assessments of Lust’s work and writings in Nature Cures: the History of Alternative Medicine in America, Whorton ²¹ attempted to put the philosophical development of naturopathy in a reasonable historical context:

However much a dreamer Lust was in some respects, he was an insightful realist in others. He was correct in believing that simply giving nature support as it ran its course was the best one could do with many diseases in his day. He was correct in seeing self-abuse as the source of much physical, and emotional, suffering and attacked it with an ardor that MDs could not bring to the task until nearly a century later. Recent medical lamentations over the evils of smoking, sexual promiscuity, and other risky behaviors adopted in the thoughtless chase after pleasure have nothing on Lust’s jeremiads …

Lust was right in reprimanding allopaths for focusing so strongly on disease as to lose sight of the importance of promoting health. He was right in appreciating the need to “individualize” the treatment of each patient—and in seeing patient self-responsibility as part of that individualization.

Early Twentieth-Century Medicine

The Metamorphosis of Orthodox Medicine

Naturopathy’s formative years, and in some respects its halcyon days, were from 1900 to 1917. In many jurisdictions modern licensing laws were not yet in effect, so varied schools of healing were openly practiced. By 1920, however, the American world of medicine had undergone a sharp transition, culminating in four decades of change.

A look at the structure of early medical care in the United States is instructive, even as practiced and dominated by the orthodox school, when noting the changes that occurred between 1875 and 1920.

In 1875, the following was descriptive of American medical practice:

• The practice, even in urban areas, sent the doctor to the patient; the “house call” was the norm.

• There was little modern licensing regulation.

• Hospitals were charitable institutions where persons too poor to otherwise receive health care were usually sent when ill.

• The AMA, although formed in 1846, and generally representative of the professional goals of the regular or orthodox school of medicine, had scarcely begun to make any political inroads at all.

• Medical schools required little or no college education for entrance and were largely apprenticeship based and proprietary in nature, having changed little throughout the century.

• Although some doctors had begun to specialize, to do so was far from the norm. The major recognized specialties were surgery, obstetrics, and gynecology.

• Many different types of doctors existed, and society’s reaction to of the profession neither recognized specific expertise nor necessarily rewarded professionals in medical practice well.

• Although the orthodox school made up roughly 80% of professional medical practitioners, the homeopaths and the eclectics were visible and respected in their own communities for their abilities and expertise, and much of the public relied on other “irregular” practitioners.

By comparison, in 1920, a total metamorphosis of the medical profession had occurred:

• By 1920, practices had become office oriented and clinic oriented.

• Modern licensing principles had become fully developed, and physicians and surgeons were licensed in all jurisdictions. Most other health care providers had some licensing restrictions placed on them, if they were recognized at all.

• Due largely to the introduction into surgery of the practice of antiseptic techniques and aseptic procedures and a correspondent decline in operative mortality, institutional care in the hospital became increasingly accepted. Also, clinical pathology and diagnostic laboratory procedures had become well developed, and the hospital had become a major training and clinical research facility that was generally more acceptable to the patient.

• The AMA was approaching the peak of its political power, having exercised, through its Council on Medical Education and its Council of Pharmacy and Chemistry, major effects on medical schools and the pharmaceutical industry.

• The transition to research- and education-based medical schools, instead of practitioner apprenticeships and proprietary education, had become complete. All recognized medical schools had a 4-year curriculum, with an undergraduate degree or substantial undergraduate study required as a prerequisite. In addition, most schools, in conjunction with most licensing statutes, required a year’s internship.

• Specialization was becoming well developed, and the number of specialty groups had increased considerably. This would continue through the 1930s and into the early 1940s.

• Professional authority and autonomy had undergone a substantial transition, and the allopathic physician was now recognized as the medical expert.

• By 1922, the last eclectic school was on the verge of closure, and in the early 1930s, the last of the homeopathic schools in the United States was also on the verge of closure. The influence of these sects on orthodox medicine had dwindled to almost nothing. Naturopaths and other alternative health care practitioners had adopted the areas of expertise previously considered the territory of homeopaths and eclectics.

The Halcyon Years of Naturopathy

In 1924 Morris Fishbein succeeded George Simmons as editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Fishbein had joined the editorial staff of JAMA under Simmons immediately after his graduation from Chicago’s Rush Medical School in 1913. Campion pointed out the following ⁹:

Over the years, Fishbein not only established himself as the gifted editor of the most widely read medical journal in the United States; he also learned how to extend his editorial position, how to project his opinions nationwide. He became, as the saying went in those years, a “personality.” TIME referred to him as “the nation’s most ubiquitous, the most widely maligned, and perhaps most influential medico.”

In addition to his development of JAMA as an editorial and personal voice, Fishbein also continually railed against “quackery.” Lust, among others, including MacFadden, became Fishbein’s epitome of quackery. When MacFadden became a wealthy man, after his publishing company included popular magazines like True Confessions and True Detective, he began campaigning for the 1936 Republican presidential nomination. In response, a physician submitted, under the initials “K.G.,” a tongue-in-cheek listing of the cabinet that would exist under MacFadden, including the newly created “Secretary of Aviation” for Lust. Lust was a popular figure by this time who conducted such a busy lecture schedule and practice, alternating between the “Yungborns” in Butler, New Jersey, and Tangerine, Florida, that he had become almost as well known as an airline traveler. Lust devoted a complete editorial in Nature’s Path to a response.

Although Fishbein had JAMA as a personal editorial outlet, Lust had his own publications. Commencing with the Naturopath and Herald of Health in 1902 (which changed its name to Herald of Health and Naturopath in 1918), Lust continually published this and other monthly journals. In 1919 it became the official journal of the ANA, mailed to all members. Each edition contained the editorial column “Dr. Lust Speaking.”

In the early 1920s, the “health fad” movement was reaching its peak in terms of public awareness and interest. As described, somewhat wistfully, in his June 1937 column, Lust announced the approach of the 41st Congress of Natural Healing under his guidance:

The progress of our movement could be observed in our wonderful congresses, in 1914 Butler, N.J., 1915 Atlantic City, 1916 in Chicago, 1917 Cleveland, 1918 New York, 1919 Philadelphia, 1920 and 1921 again New York, and 1922 in Washington, D.C., where we had the full support and backing of the Congress of the United States. President Harding received the president and the delegates of our convention and we were the guests of the City of Washington. Through the strenuous efforts of Dr. T.M. Schippel, Hon. Congresswoman Catherine Langley of Kentucky, and eight years of hard work financed and sustained by Dr. Schippel and her powerful friends in Congress, Naturopathy was fully legalized as a healing art in the District of Columbia and the definition was placed on record and the law affirmed and amended by another act which has been fully published over and over again in the official journal of the A.N.A., Naturopath.

In 1923 in Chicago, with the help and financing of the great and never-to-be forgotten Dr. Henry Lindlahr, we had a great convention. Not only were all the Naturopaths there but even to an extent our congress was recognized and acknowledged as official and of great importance by the medical people, particularly by the Health Commissioner of Chicago. We held a banquet, and there were discussions covering all platforms of the healing art. It was the first congress in the United States where medicine and Naturopathy in all its branches such as the general old-time Nature Cure, Hydrotherapy and Diet, Osteopathy, Naprapathy, Chiropractic, Neuropathy and Physiotherapy were represented on the same platform. The speakers represented every modern school of healing and the movement at that time was in the direction of an entirely recognized and independent school of healing. There were two camps, official medicine and official Naturopathy, the medical camp having all that is good and bad in medicine and surgery and all the other schools of healing that had sold their birthright and trusted to the allurement of organized medicine, such as Homeopaths, Eclectics, Physio-medics, and the Osteopaths to a large extent. The Osteopaths were always in the wrong camp when they went on mixed boards and Dr. Andrew Taylor Still, the father of Osteopathy, told me in 1915 that by compromising with medicine Osteopathy is doomed as the school that could have incorporated all of the natural and biological healing arts.

The year following we had the great congress in Los Angeles which has never been duplicated. We had to meet in two hotels because the crowds ran over 10,000. The glorious banquet will never be forgotten and the congress celebrated and demonstrated that the initial and first intent of the A.N.A. to teach the public Natural Living and Nature Cure was realized. We will never forget the glorious week in Los Angeles where the authorities and the whole city joined us. The success of that congress was largely due to the talent of Dr. Fred Hirsch, the successor to Prof. Arnold Ehret and the noble and generous Naturopaths of the A.N.A. of Cal. There was never a second congress like that.

Then we had the great congresses of New York in 1925, Indianapolis 1926, Philadelphia 1927, Minneapolis 1928, Portland, Oregon 1929, New York 1930, Milwaukee 1931, Washington, D.C., 1932, Chicago 1933, Denver 1934, San Diego 1935, and Omaha 1936.

In 1925 Lust began to try to reach more of the general populace through the lay publication Nature’s Path. The Naturopath and Nature’s Path were later merged because the self-supporting advertising and subscription monies were more available by publication to the general populace than to the members of the association (The Naturopath, 1902–1927; Nature’s Path, 1925–1927; merged 1927–1933; separated 1934–1938; Nature’s Path, 1939–1945).

How large a professional movement Lust inspired during this period of naturopathy’s emergence was difficult to gauge. An extensive government survey was not undertaken until 1965. However, as Whorton described in Nature Cures,²¹ naturopathy had an impact:

Those were messages that had enough appeal, evidently, to allow naturopathy to expand steadily through the first decades of the century until by 1923 Lust could estimate that there were nine thousand naturopaths, a “vast army of professional men and women” working on all continents to “rejuvenate and regenerate the world.” His figures were undoubtedly inflated. An independent study [the work of the CCMC discussed later] put the number of naturopaths at “possibly 1500,” allowing that if the “allied groups” that advocated drugless healing under other names [physiotherapy, sanipractic] were added on the total may reach 2500. Yet whatever their numbers, naturopaths had grown into a force not to be ignored.

Although Lust’s claim of 9000 naturopaths worldwide is impossible to assess, 5000 practitioners may be a reasonable estimate of the reach of his naturopathy in the United States by the late 1920s and into the 1930s. As Whorton ²¹ reported, the mixer orientation within chiropractic was also becoming a growing presence. This orientation was a philosophy that tended to merge chiropractic and naturopathy in education and practice.²² Although homeopathy has undergone a small revival in recent years, very few MDs now practice it. It is currently mainly of interest to naturopaths, who earn doctor of naturopathy (ND) degrees and to a few chiropractors. Naturopaths closely resemble chiropractors in that they use spinal manipulative therapy and because so-called mixer chiropractors also use naturopathic methods such as heat, cold, hydrotherapy, physiotherapy, dietary supplements, and even some herbal and homeopathic remedies, which is why the traditional, or “straight,” chiropractors disparagingly call them “medipractors.” Until the middle of the twentieth century, a few mixer schools offered both DC and ND degrees, either as alternatives or together after an additional semester of study. Whorton noted a “1930 survey in which some 1,800 chiropractors participated, found, for example, that 1,124 employed hydrotherapy, 1,173 used light therapy, 1,257 provided electrotherapy, and a full 1,352 trusted vibration therapy.”²¹

In January 1934, Lust commenced republication of the title Naturopath and Herald of Health in addition to Nature’s Path. Each volume opened with his personal column, different for each publication. Both publications were issued through 1938, when the Nature’s Path again became the sole publication until Lust’s death in 1945.

After the Universal Directory, Lust continued to write volumes on naturopathic principles, although he was more of a synthesizer, organizer, lecturer, and essayist than a scientific documenter of naturopathic principles. His most enduring contributions may remain his early translations of Kuhne’s and Just’s works.

During the 1920s and up until 1937, Lust’s brand of “quackery,” so labeled by Fishbein, was in its most popular phase. Although the institutional markings of the orthodox school had gained ascendancy, before 1937 it had no real therapeutic success in the treatment of disease outside of the broad advancements in public health.

Lust’s naturopathy, together with chiropractic and osteopathy, continued to be on the outside looking in, this lack of therapeutic advancement notwithstanding. Practitioners of all three movements were continually prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license, although they often won their cases by establishing to juries that their practices were (even according to the testimony of medical men) not the same as medicine at all. At the time orthodox practitioners could offer little or no expectation of cure for many diseases, and the “health food and natural health” movement was generally popular.

During the 1920s, Gaylord Hauser, later to become the health food guru of the Hollywood set, came to Lust as a seriously ill young man. Lust, through application of the nature cure, removed Hauser’s afflictions and was rewarded by Hauser’s lifelong devotion. His regular columns in Nature’s Path became widely read among the Hollywood set.

As noted in Other Healers, Other Cures¹⁵:

The last big name in Naturopathy was Gaylord Hauser, a Viennese-Born food scientist (as one of his early books identified him) turned to Naturopathy in his later years. He is best remembered for advising the eating of living foods, not dead foods, and for escorting Greta Garbo around. In addition to fresh fruits and vegetables, Hauser’s “Wonder Foods” were skinned milk, brewers yeast, wheat germ, yogurt, and black strap molasses.

The naturopathic journals of the 1920s and 1930s are instructive. Much of the dietary advice focused on poor eating habits, including the lack of fiber in the diet and an overreliance upon red meat as a protein source. More than half a century later in the 1980s, the pronouncements of the orthodox profession, the National Institute of Health, and the National Cancer Institute finally accepted the validity of these early assertions by naturopaths that poor dietary and living habits (particularly smoking) would lead to degenerative diseases, including cancers associated with the lungs, the digestive tract, and the colon.

The December 1928 volume of Nature’s Path was the first American publication of the works of Herman J. DeWolff, a Dutch epidemiologist who was one of the first individuals to assert, based on studies of the incidence of cancer in the Netherlands, that there was a correlation between exposure to petrochemicals and various types of cancers. He saw a connection between chemical fertilizers and their usage in some soils (principally clay) that led to poisons remaining in vegetables after they had arrived at the market and were purchased for consumption. Again, it was 50 years before orthodox medicine began to accept the wisdom of such concerns.

As Whorton noted in Nature Cures, naturopaths were less successful than osteopaths and chiropractors in accomplishing professionalization by the elevation of professional standards, including professional education. This occurred despite the formation of a National Board of Naturopathic Examiners of the ANA in 1940. There was constant internal bickering, which “by the 1940s had taken on a more ominous tone.” Although “standards at naturopathic schools were steadily raised from the 1940s on, thanks to both professional idealism and the requirements of state licensing laws,” based on “a perusal of the statutes of the dozen states in which naturopaths were licensed in the late 1940s,” the divisive trends within naturopathy “would not begin to be reversed until the 1970s.”

Whorton ²¹ observed that there was no misunderstanding where Lust himself stood on the need for professional standards:

Obtaining their own licensing statutes was perceived by alternative practitioners as a critical measure for purging incompetence and quackery from their own rank. “Where there is no official recognition and regulation,” the founder of naturopathy, Benedict Lust maintained, “you will find the plotters, the thieves, the charlatans … (The) riff-raff opportunists bring the whole art into disrepute.” By the time Lust said this, shortly before his death in 1945, frustrating experience had demonstrated that “that is the fate of any science—any profession—which the unjust laws have placed beyond the pale.” In following the evolution of alternative medicine over the first third of the twentieth century, it is essential to keep in mind that constant battle of each system to bring itself within the pale.

The Emerging Dominance of American Medical Association Medicine

In 1937, the status of conventional (allopathic) medicine began to change. The change came with the beginning of the era of “miracle medicine.” Lewis Thomas in his interesting work The Youngest Science²³ compared his education and internship as a physician to his father’s life as a physician. His father believed that bedside manner was more important than any actual medication offered by the physician. His father went into general surgery so that he could offer some service to his patients that actually made some change in their condition. Thomas pointed out that the major growth of “scientific medicine” until 1937 advanced diagnosis rather than offering any hope of cure.

This introduction of “miracle medicine,” the social impact of World War II on health care, and the death of Lust in 1945 all combined to contribute a precipitous decline for naturopathy and natural healing in the United States. (During the war, the necessity for crisis surgical intervention techniques for battlefront conditions encouraged use of morphine, sulfa drugs, and penicillin for diseases not previously encountered in civilian life by American combat soldiers. This resulted in rapid development of higher-technology approaches to medicine and highly visible successes.)

Lust recognized this and his editorializing became, if anything, even more strident. From the introduction of sulfa drugs in 1937 to the Salk vaccine’s release in 1955, the American public became used to annual developments of miracle vaccines and antibiotics.

Lust died in September 1945 at the Yungborn facility in Butler, New Jersey, preparing to attend the 49th Annual Congress of his American ANA. In August 1945, for the official program of that congress held in October 1945 just after his death, he dictated the following remarks:

What is the present condition of Naturopathy? What is its future? I can give my opinion in a very few words. For fifty years I have been in the thick of the fight to bring to the American people the Nature Cure. During that period I have had an opportunity to judge what Naturopathy has done, and can accomplish and the type of men and women, past and present, who make up the Naturopathic ranks.

Let us take the present situation first. What is Naturopathy accomplishing? The answer to that is: “Everything.” Naturopathy holds the key for the prevention, alleviation and cure of every ailment, to man and beast alike. It has never failed in the hands of a competent Naturopath. Whatever the body can “catch”—that same body, with proper handling, can eliminate. And that takes in cancer, tumors, arthritis, cataract and the whole gamut of “incurable medical” disease and ailments. During my years of practice I, personally, have seen every type of human ailment and so-called serious “disease” give way to the simple, proven Naturopathic methods. I make no exception to that statement.

Now let us see the type of men and women who are the Naturopaths of today. Many of them are fine, upstanding individuals, believing fully in the effectiveness of their chosen profession—willing to give their all for the sake of alleviating human suffering and ready to fight for their rights to the last ditch. More power to them! But there are others who claim to be Naturopaths who are woeful misfits. Yes, and there are outright fakers and cheats masking as Naturopaths. That is the fate of any science—any profession—which the unjust laws have placed beyond the pale. Where there is no official recognition and regulation, you will find the plotters, the thieves, the charlatans operating on the same basis as the conscientious practitioners. And these riff-raff opportunists bring the whole art into disrepute. Frankly such conditions cannot be remedied until suitable safeguards are erected by law, or by the profession itself, around the practice of Naturopathy. That will come in time.

Now let us look at the future. What do we see? The gradual recognition of this true healing art—not only because of the efforts of the present conscientious practitioners but because of the bungling, asinine mistakes of orthodox medicine—Naturopathy’s greatest enemy. The fiasco of the sulpha drugs as emphasized disastrously in our armed forces is just one straw in the wind. The murderous Schick test—that deadly “prevention” of diphtheria—is another. All these medical crimes are steadily piling up. They are slowly, but inevitably, creating a public distrust in all things medical. This increasing lack of confidence in the infallibility of Modern Medicine will eventually make itself felt to such an extent that the man on the street will turn upon these self-constituted oppressors and not only demand but force a change. I may not be here to witness this revolution but I believe with all my soul that it is coming. Yes, the future of Naturopathy is indeed bright. It merely requires that each and every true Naturopath carry on—carry on—to the best of his and her abilities. May God bless you all.

The effects of postwar events on osteopathy and chiropractic were completely different from the effect on naturopathy. In the early days of osteopathy, there was a significant split between the strict drugless system advocated by A.T. Still (osteopathy’s originator) and the beliefs of many MDs who converted to osteopathy because of its therapeutic value. The latter group did not want to abandon all of the techniques they had previously learned and all of the drugs they had previously used when those therapy techniques were sometimes effective. Ultimately, most schools of osteopathy, commencing with the school based in Los Angeles, converted to more of an imitation of modern orthodox medicine. These developments led to more of an accommodation between the California osteopaths and the members of the California Medical Association. (This developing cooperation between the California Osteopathic and Medical Association was one of the major issues leading to the downfall, in 1949, of Fishbein’s editorial voice in JAMA.) Thus, osteopathy found a place in professional medicine, at the cost of its drugless healing roots and therapies.⁹

Naturopathy had become an element of chiropractic education and practice at least as early as 1910 with the founding of the Peerless College of Chiropractic and Naturopathy in Portland, Oregon.²² From this point on, naturopathic education developed in two tracks: schools of naturopathy owned and operated by naturopaths and chiropractic schools that had naturopathic curricula in addition to the core chiropractic programs. These latter schools were a central part of the mixer orientation within chiropractic.^22,²⁴

Initial assessments of schools of naturopathy occurred in the 1920s and 1930s. These assessments came from those within, or allied with, allopathy and were therefore hardly unbiased, but much of the information in these assessments seemed credible. The progression of education in naturopathy would be expected to have been similar to that of chiropractic, if somewhat smaller in scale. In this regard, Wardwell noted ²²:

Wiese and Ferguson ²⁵ identified 392 different chiropractic schools as having existed in the United States. When those for which there is no evidence of more than a year of operation are eliminated, the number is reduced to 188. Most of them probably produced few graduates—the number of schools increased rapidly to their largest between 1910 and 1926, and then contracted, particularly during the depression of the 1930s and World War II.

The history of schools of naturopathy followed much the same pattern. Whorton ²¹ noted in Nature Cures that this was the case. The operators of these schools seemed, at least on the surface, aware of the kind of criticisms to which proprietary trade and professional schools were subjected: limited facilities, limited resources, and an emphasis on collecting revenue versus providing a full professional education.^22,²⁴ The leading operators of schools of naturopathy sought, at least on paper, to respond to these criticisms. By letter agreement dated October 7, 1922, four of the most identifiable leaders of naturopathy—Benedict Lust, Joe Shelby Riley, F.W. Collins, and Henry Lindlahr—committed to the formation of the Associated Naturopathic Schools and Colleges of America and committed themselves as “the Presidents of Naturopathic Schools in the United States of America” to specific educational minimums “on and after January 2, 1923”: “all matriculants must have a primary school education ^* and all naturopath courses must be composed of four years of six months each.” Additionally, the letter provided that “time allowance or credits may be given to practitioners in the field who desire to take up the naturopathic courses, and to licensed physicians of other methods of healing,” the amount of such credit being left to each school’s discretion.

In the summer and fall of 1927, representatives of the AMA’s Council on Medical Education and Hospitals conducted inspections—unannounced and incognito—of schools of “chiropody, chiropractic, naturopathy, optometry, osteopathy, physical therapy, as well as a large number of institutions.” From these inspections, several reports were generated, including the Council’s report on “Schools of Chiropractic and Naturopathy in the United States,” which appeared first as part of the Council’s Annual Report, 1928, and later as reprinted in JAMA. The report identified 40 schools of chiropractic and 10 schools of naturopathy and detailed the inspections of “some schools of Chiropractic and of Naturopathy”: Palmer School of Chiropractic (a straight school), National College of Chiropractic (a mixer school that was reported as having recently purchased and assimilated Lindlahr College of Natural Therapeutics), Los Angeles College of Chiropractic (another leading mixer school), the combined American School of Naturopathy, Inc. and American School of Chiropractic, Inc. (Lust’s own New York City schools, although Lust was observed to have been “in Florida” at the time of the inspections), and the Naturopathic College and Hospital of Philadelphia. The reports were predictably negative with regard to facilities, resources, and the clearly proprietary nature of the establishments.

Louis Reed of the Committee on the Costs of Medical Care, in discussing “Naturopathic Schools”²⁴ relied heavily on this report from the AMA’s Council and observed that “in 1927, according to the American Medical Association, there existed twelve naturopathic colleges with not over 200 students. These figures would probably hold good for the present time.” Reed also concluded that there were “a considerable number of miscellaneous drugless healers of a type similar to chiropractors practice in this country” as of 1932 and that “the naturopaths form the largest group of these practitioners.… Of these various cults, only the naturopaths and the sanipractors have any considerable membership. Many of the (other) cults are really part of the naturopathic group.”²⁴

As to numbers of drugless practitioners, Reed observed that “only the roughest estimate can be made—probably there are about 2500,” of which naturopaths “number possibly 1500,” and sanipractors—“only the name distinguishes sanipractors from the naturopaths”—numbered some 500 in their Washington state “stronghold.” Reed also observed that as of 1932: “A few states—Connecticut, Florida, Oregon, South Carolina, Utah, Washington and the District of Columbia—provide for licensing of naturopaths as limited practitioners.… In addition to those mentioned, certain states (Alabama, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Wyoming) make (other) provision for the licensing of drugless or limited practitioners.”²⁴

Reed’s work for the CCMC, although clearly biased against all of the healing philosophies he identified as “medical cults” (a la Fishbein), principally osteopathy, chiropractic, and naturopathy, was the only work that attempted to survey the presence and impact of these schools of healing in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s.^* A decade later, in April 1945, another work of this kind appeared in the Rhode Island Medical Journal. The article, “Naturopathic Legislation and Education,” was written by the Rhode Island Medical Society’s Executive Secretary, John E. Farrell, to set out some of the society’s reasons for opposing legislation that would license naturopathy in Rhode Island. The article noted that according to the 1942–1943 Report of the Committee on Education of the ANA, 13 schools of naturopathy in the United States met the criteria of the ANA; the article went on to make a lengthy “Report on Schools” through visits to most of the identified schools.^† The predictable criticisms of these schools as underfinanced, underresourced, and proprietary in nature appeared once again, although by actual detail of description, National College (Chicago) and Western States (Portland) seemed to be well-established, functioning mixer schools of chiropractic and naturopathy.

The effect on chiropractic of the post World War II years was somewhat different. Because of educational recognition under the G.I. Bill, the number of chiropractors in the country grew substantially, and their impact on the populace grew accordingly. The sect eventually grew powerful enough in terms of numbers and economic clout that it could pose a legal challenge to the orthodox monopoly of the AMA. However, in the immediate postwar years, the AMA gained tremendous political clout. Combined with the American Legion and the National Board of Realtors,²⁶ these three groups posed a powerful political triumvirate before the U.S. Congress.

These years, called the years of the “great fear” in Caute’s book by that name,²⁷ were the years during which to be unorthodox was to be “un-American.”

Across the country, courts began to take the view that naturopaths were not truly doctors, since they espoused doctrines from “the dark ages of medicine” (something American medicine had apparently come out of in 1937) and that drugless healers were intended by law to operate without “drugs” (which became defined as anything a person would ingest or apply externally for any remedial medical purpose). In this regard, the Washington State Supreme Court case of Kelly v. Carroll^‡ and the Arizona State Supreme Court case of Kuts-Cheraux v. Wilson document how significant limitations were placed on naturopaths under the guise of calling them “drugless healers.”

In the state of Tennessee, as a reaction to the 1939 publication of the book Back to Eden by herbalist Jethro Kloss, court action initiated by the Tennessee State Medical Association led first to the publishers being forbidden to advertise the book for any therapeutic purpose. They were allowed only to acknowledge that it was in stock. Then, following a serious licensing scandal during the war years, the Tennessee State Legislature declared the practice of naturopathy in the state of Tennessee to be a gross misdemeanor, punishable by up to one year in jail.

Although it was under considerable public pressure in those years, the ANA undertook some of its most scholarly work, coordinating all the systems of naturopathy under commission. This resulted in the publication of a basic textbook on naturopathy (Basic Naturopathy published in 1948 by the ANA ²⁸) and a significant work compiling all the known theories of botanical medicine (as commissioned by the ANA’s successor after its 1950 name change to the American Naturopathic Physicians and Surgeons Association), the Naturae Medicina published in 1953.²⁹ Naturopathic medicine began splintering when Lust’s ANA was succeeded by six different organizations in the mid-1950s.

The primary organizations among these were the successor to the ANA, which underwent a name change in 1950 to the American Naturopathic Physician and Surgeon’s Association, and subsequently changed to the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians (AANP) in 1956, and the International Society of Naturopathic Physicians formed under the leadership of M.T. Campenella of Florida shortly after Lust’s death, with its American offshoot, the National Association of Naturopathic Physicians.

In the face of the AMA’s determination to eliminate chiropractic, and with it naturopathy—healing philosophies that were linked through the mixer orientation within chiropractic (during the 1930s and through the 1960s the majority camp within a divided chiropractic)—naturopathy went through a period of decline described by Hans Baer (see Bibliography).

Walter Wardwell was a sociology professor who became an early leader in what developed as a subspecialty in the 1950s: medical sociology. His earliest work, starting with his doctoral dissertation (1951) at Harvard, focused on chiropractic as an example of a marginalized health profession (see Bibliography). As early as his doctoral dissertation, Wardwell discussed naturopathy as an adjunct discipline to chiropractic in the context of the continuing division of chiropractic into mixers and straights. As he later noted ³⁰:

Comparison of the survival of chiropractic with that of osteopathy and naturopathy is a quite different matter which does not involve metaphysical or epistemological differences between them. Furthermore, the overlap in theory between chiropractic, osteopathy and naturopathy is very great. Differences between osteopathic and chiropractic manipulative treatment appear to be more a matter of who applies the technique rather than differences in technique itself. The distinction between chiropractors and naturopaths is even more blurred because they often trained at the same schools and sometimes they studied both fields simultaneously. As recently as 1948, three of the currently accredited chiropractic colleges offered N.D. (Doctor of Naturopathy) and D.C. (Doctor of Chiropractic) degrees.

In this context he described naturopathy as a school of healing that became extinct as two historical factors converged: the death of Lust in 1945, leaving naturopathy without its “founder,” and the mandate in the early 1950s by the major mixers’ professional group, the National Chiropractic Association (NCA), that it would no longer accredit chiropractic schools that granted degrees in naturopathy:

In the case of naturopathy, chiropractic’s victory is nearly complete. Although there may still be up to 2000 naturopaths in practice ^* with naturopaths licensed in a few states, and one small school in Portland, Oregon, still offers naturopathic degrees, none of the schools that formerly offered both chiropractic and naturopathic degrees currently does so. With practically no new recruits entering the profession, naturopathy must disappear.

By the late 1970s, Wardwell had learned of efforts in the Pacific Northwest to keep naturopathy alive. In his chapter in the Handbook of Medical Sociology, Wardwell noted this presence in the Northwest (which had received no mention in the first two editions in 1963 and 1972)³¹:

The accrediting of chiropractic colleges is encouraging uniformity, not only in curricula but in scope of practice. Those colleges that formerly offered the Doctor of Naturopathy (N.D.) as well as the D.C. degree have ceased doing so, leaving naturopathy with only one remaining small college in Portland, Oregon.

By publication of his masterwork, Chiropractic: History and Evolution of a New Profession (1992),²² Wardwell devoted substantial attention to the impact of naturopathy on the mixer orientation within chiropractic and traced naturopathy’s final educational decline to the untimely death in 1954 of William A. Budden, DC, ND, the president of Western States Chiropractic College (WSCC; Portland, Oregon). After Budden’s death, WSCC continued to teach naturopathy until 1958, but dropped its ND degree program in 1956. This was the last resistance to the position of the accrediting committee of the NCA, and no chiropractic ND programs remained. Wardwell observed, though, that the seeds of a naturopathic reemergence had been planted in the Northwest after Budden’s death and that naturopathy might survive.

The last ND diplomas were granted at WSCC in 1958 to students who were enrolled in the ND program at the time of Budden’s death. Brinker ³² noted the following:

Political pressure from the chiropractic profession had begun in the late 1940s to force chiropractic schools to relinquish programs granting naturopathic degrees. After threatening loss of accreditation, the National Chiropractic Association finally forced Western States College to drop its School of Naturopathy in 1956, and it became exclusively Western States Chiropractic College.

Efforts to keep naturopathy alive through education and licensure were examined by two reports prepared in 1958, a time when the Utah legislature was reexamining naturopathy’s licensure in the aftermath of a case from the Utah Supreme Court that had dealt its practicing NDs a crippling blow. The first was A Study of the Healing Arts with a Particular Emphasis Upon Naturopathy (November 1958), prepared as “A Report to the Utah Legislative Council” by legislative council staff. As part of its work, the staff conducted inquiries of and site visits to seven schools accredited by the Utah Naturopathy Examining Board as of August 1957.

Separately, the Bureau of Economic and Business Research ^* of the University of Utah (BEBR) undertook a study focusing on schools that had granted naturopathy degrees and produced Survey of Naturopathic Schools (“Prepared for the Utah State Medical Society,” December 1958). Preparation of the study was, as noted in the title, undertaken by the university research program at the request of the state medical society, but the preparation of the study was independent, and “no attempt was made by that group to influence the results of the study” (Foreword and Acknowledgements).

The BEBR study, done with the requested cooperation of investigators from five other universities located in various sections of the United States, surveyed all of the schools listed by Utah licensees as schools of graduation or schools attended, using records maintained by the Utah Department of Business Registration.¹⁰ Because the state of naturopathic education in the 1950s is relevant, some observations from this study are worth noting³³:

One of the most important results to emerge from this study is that there are virtually no schools now teaching naturopathy.

Of the twenty-six schools investigated during this study, only nine were still in existence in the fall of 1958. Of these nine, only three are now granting naturopathic degrees and two others are teaching naturopathy.

Of the three schools granting ND degrees, the study found that one school, Sierra States University in California, began offering a “postgraduate” ND degree after the most highly respected chiropractic program in the country, Los Angeles College of Chiropractic, had discontinued its ND degree program in 1948. National College of Naturopathic Medicine (NCNM), the Oregon school, had—in 1957, its first year of operation—four ND students who were starting at NCNM and 60 enrolled “postgraduate” DCs pursuing ND degrees. The school had been recognized by the Utah examining board but had not yet granted degrees. The third school granting ND degrees as of 1957-1958 was the Central States College of Physiatrics in Eaton, OH, essentially the one-man operation of H. Riley Spitler, author of Basic Naturopathy (published by the ANA in 1948). This school granted a Doctor of Mechanotherapy (DM) degree, recognized in only Ohio and Alabama by law, or an ND degree to anyone who sought licensure in a state where an ND degree would qualify a graduate for licensure. The course of study for both degrees was the same, and the school had graduated 10 students in the previous 2 years. Its ND degrees were recognized in Utah.

By 1955, the AANP, as it ultimately became known, had recognized only two schools of naturopathic medicine, the Central States College of Physiatrics in Eaton, Ohio, under the leadership of H. Riley Spitler, and Western States College of Chiropractic and Naturopathy located outside Portland, Oregon, under the leadership of R.A. Budden. Budden was a Lindlahr graduate and among the group that took over control of the Lindlahr College after Lindlahr’s death in the 1920s. He moved west after World War II when the northwestern states, including Oregon, became the last bastion of naturopathic medicine in this country.

This state of affairs was accurately described by Homola ³⁴ in his book on the history and evolution of chiropractic:

As of 1958, only five states (Arizona, Connecticut, Oregon, Virginia and Utah) separately classified and provided licensing provisions for the naturopath. A few states, however, did permit licensing of drugless healers following examination by (a) board. (A good number of states have repealed their laws licensing naturopaths in recent years.) Chiropractic schools that employ the use of physiotherapy teach a course that is very similar to the practice of naturopathy. Likewise, the three or four naturopathic schools still operating today have a curriculum similar to that of many chiropractic colleges. In fact, at least four chiropractic colleges awarded naturopathic degrees along with the chiropractic degree before they came under the jurisdiction of the national Chiropractic Association. With the approval of this organization, the schools were prohibited from issuing naturopathic degrees. This practically amounted to a death-dealing blow to the profession of naturopathy.³⁴

In 1967, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; the Public Health Service; and the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) published Public Health Service Publication number 1758, State Licensing of Health Occupations. With the assistance of The Council of State Governments, the NCHS collected data regarding licensure of health professionals at the state level. “Chapter 8: Naturopaths” recorded the available data for the naturopathic profession as of the mid-1960s. In summary, the NCHS identified five states and the District of Columbia as licensing naturopaths as of 1967: Arizona, Connecticut, Hawaii, Oregon, and Utah. California and Florida were identified as renewing existing licenses but granting no new licenses. The publication reported that by 1965, California had renewed 66 licenses and Florida, 136. Licenses in effect by state were: Arizona (100), Connecticut (47), Hawaii (14), Oregon (148), and Utah (42). No numbers were provided for the District of Columbia. The report stated the following ³⁵:

In addition to Doctors of Naturopathy (ND) there are other limited branches of medicine; these have not been included in the study. In the State of Washington the Drugless Therapeutics Examining Committee functions (for such licensure). The Ohio law states which branches are to be specified on certificates issued by the State Medical Board to limited practitioners. No attempt has been made to collect information on these drugless healers who are few in number.

Active state practitioners were also numbered (although the reason for the differentiation is not clear) as: Arizona (53), Connecticut (29), Hawaii (13), and Oregon (121). Given the existence of approximately 50 practitioners at the time in Washington, and some practicing in Idaho under a decision of the Idaho Supreme Court, there appear to have been perhaps as many as 600 to 700 remaining naturopaths practicing at the end of the 1960s.^*

According to documentation provided to the federal Department of Health Education and Welfare in 1968 by the again-remaining professional association—the National Association of Naturopathic Physicians—only 17 degrees were granted from 1960 to 1968. By 1968, this association had 168 members and estimated that there were perhaps 500 “active” naturopaths in the United States. Congress adopted Medicare in 1965. The legislation covered payment for the services of physicians (essentially MDs and DOs), hospital services, and “other therapeutic services” that would commonly be provided through these conventional means. As Wardwell reported,²² in 1967, Congress directed the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), Wilbur Cohen, to study the inclusion services of “additional types of licensed practitioners.” The surgeon general and other HEW staff prepared the resulting Independent Practitioners under Medicare using advisory committees only (Wardwell served on the Expert Review Committee for Chiropractic and Naturopathy), which actually had little input. This report documented the ebb tide of naturopathy’s “period of decline” as Baer later labeled it.³⁶ The section of the report Naturopathy concluded that as of 1968:

Naturopathic theory and practice are not based on the body of basic knowledge related to health, disease, and health care which has been widely accepted by the scientific community. Moreover, irrespective of its theory, the scope and quality of naturopathic education do not prepare the practitioner to make an adequate diagnosis and provide adequate treatment.

Considering the state of the profession in 1968, these negative assessments were hardly unexpected.

The Modern Rejuvenation

After the counter culture years of the late 1960s and feeding of an American disenchantment with organized medicine which began after the miracle drug era faded, exposing some of orthodox medicine’s limitations, alternative medicine began to gain new respect. Naturopathic medicine underwent an era of rejuvenation as a late 1970s consumer interest in more “holistic” medicine began to emerge.

As succinctly described in Cassedy’s ³⁷ Medicine in America: A Short History, this phenomenon, which was not limited to naturopathic medicine, was consistent with the modern and continuing, “search for health beyond orthodox medicine”:

It should not have been surprising to anyone that certain organized therapeutic sects continue to exist in mid–twentieth century America as successful and conspicuous alternatives to regular medicine. This is not to say that they offer the same threats to the medical establishment or play the same roles as their nineteenth-century counterparts had, as complete therapeutic systems. But they do continue to hold a strong collective appeal for individuals who mistrust or are somehow disenchanted with mainline medicine. They have appealed also to antiauthoritarian sentiments that flourish throughout society. Moreover, as earlier, they satisfy various needs that regular medicine continues to neglect or ignore.

The same author, in describing the post-World War II decades and the changing fortunes of such healing theories as naturopathic medicine, observed as follows:

The period also brought about the renewal or updating of certain previously widely used therapies and considerable experimentation with others, some of them exotic. To an extent this trend represented the rediscovery by trained physicians, nurses, and other regular health professionals of certain values and older styles of therapy. The participation of such professionals proved to be an essential ingredient in the rebirth of several such therapies. However, the major reason for the new successes was the wide-spread active interest and involvement of America’s literate lay people in the search for more personal or humane forms of treatment.

As another author, John Duffy,³⁸ observed in From Humors to Medical Science:

Since health is too closely related to cultural, social, and economic factors to be left exclusively to doctors, American lay people have always engaged in do-it-yourself medicine, resorted to “irregulars and quacks,” and supported health movements. As a result of the current fad for physical fitness, our streets are beset by sweat-suited individuals of all ages doggedly jogging their way to health and long life. In addition, stores selling “natural” foods are flourishing, physical fitness salons have become a major business, and anti-smoking and weight-loss clinics and workshops are attracting thousands of individuals bent on leading cleaner and leaner lives. And those for whom physical activity in itself is not enough are seeking physical and mental well-being through faith healing, yoga, and a host of major and minor gurus.

When neither mental effort nor physical exercise can solve medical problems, the sceptics of modern medicine can always turn to the irregulars. A recent estimate places a number of Americans who have relied on an irregular practitioner at some time in their lives at 60 million, and, aided by the high cost of orthodox medicine, irregular medical practice appears to be on the rise…

At the beginning of this period of rejuvenation, the profession’s educational institutions had dwindled to one, the National College of Naturopathic Medicine (which had branches in Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon), which was founded after the death of R.A. Budden and the conversion of Western States College to a straight school of chiropractic. Kruger’s ¹⁵ book Other Healers, Other Cures described it as follows in 1974:

Today, Naturopaths in seventeen states are licensed to diagnose, treat, and prescribe for any human disease through the use of air, light, heat, herbs, nutrition, electrotherapy, physiotherapy, manipulations, and minor surgery. At present, one can earn an D.N. [a misnomer, actually—N.D.] degree at the National College of Naturopathic Medicine in Seattle and Emporia, Kansas, [where, by contract, the first two years of the four-year medical education were then taught], or the new North American Naturopathic Institute in North Arlington, New Jersey [there is also a school in Montreal]. The four-year curriculum covers many standard medical courses—anatomy, bacteriology, urology, pathology, physiology, X-ray reading etc.—but also includes botanical medicine, hydrotherapy, electrotherapy, and manipulative technique…

The public, by the late 1970s, was particularly ripe for another rejuvenation of naturopathy’s brand of “alternative” health care. As described in Murphy’s Enter the Physician: The Transformation of Domestic Medicine, 1760–1860, when discussing this cyclical rejuvenation in the mid-twentieth century ³⁹:

Contemporary crusaders still stress prevention as the layperson’s primary duty, but a growing chorus is calling for every person to assume the newly proactive role in his or her own health care.

What would this entail? There are probably as many answers to this question as there are respondents, but it is striking to note how many of the solutions would have been familiar to our ancestors who lived between 1760 and 1860. One recurring idea, for instance, is that each person knows his or her own constitution history the best, and therefore has a duty to communicate that knowledge to medical personnel. Another is a refurbished concept of vis medicatrix naturae, the belief that many diseases are self-limiting and therefore do not require much medical intervention—and certainly not the amount or the sort to which contemporary Americans are accustomed. Most significantly, today’s analysts are calling on professionals and non-professionals to build and nurture a health care partnership very much like that envisioned by nineteenth-century health publicists: a partnership based on mutual respect, clear understanding and faithful execution. In that scenario, both as it originally evolved and in its updated version, it is the doctor who directs treatment, but crucial to a successful outcome are the informed and responsible actions of the patients, other care givers, and the patient’s family and friends.

In 1978, the John Bastyr College of Naturopathic Medicine was formed in Seattle, Washington, by Joseph E. Pizzorno, Jr., ND (founding president), Lester E. Griffith, ND, and William Mitchell, ND (all graduates of the National College of Naturopathic Medicine), and Sheila Quinn, who felt that it was necessary to have more institutions devoted to naturopathic care and the teaching of naturopathic therapeutics. To differentiate Bastyr from the other “irregular”³⁸ schools, Pizzorno coined the term “science-based natural medicine” and developed the curriculum to implement it. Bastyr’s co-founder and first president, Joseph Pizzorno, recognized that “anecdotal and unverified ‘cures’, particularly when associated with unusual therapies do our cause little good.” Consequently, instruction at the school “has concentrated more on the scientifically verifiable aspects of natural medicine and less on the relatively anecdotal nature cure aspects.”²¹

In Other Healers, Unorthodox Medicine in America,⁴⁰ a volume written to provide “a scholarly perspective on unorthodox movements and practices that have arisen in the United States” (from the editor’s preface), author Martin Kauffman, a modern expert in homeopathy from the Department of History at Westfield State College, detailed Bastyr’s homeopathic requirements to graduate:

In 1978, three naturopathic practitioners in Seattle founded the John Bastyr College of Naturopathic Medicine. During the sixth quarter all students at that school are required to take 44 hours of course work in homeopathy, after which they may elect another 66 hours and up to 238 hours of clinical homeopathic instruction. The significance of the naturopathic schools to the resurgence of homeopathy is demonstrated by the fact that “about one third of the graduating class specialized in homeopathic practice, a total of about 50 each year in all.”⁴⁰

During the late 1970s, other naturopathic doctors also recognized the need to establish educational institutions for students of naturopathic medicine; subsequent efforts included colleges in Arizona (the Arizona College of Naturopathic Medicine), Oregon (the American College of Naturopathic Medicine), and California (the Pacific College of Naturopathic Medicine). Unfortunately, none of these three survived.

As public demand for natural healing grew in the 1980s and 1990s, the emerging profession continued to grow a breadth and quality of educational opportunity for those seeking accredited doctorate-level programs in naturopathic medicine.

With thriving enrollments at Bastyr and National College, the Council on Naturopathic Medicine was founded in 1978 to establish and oversee educational standards, and today is recognized by the U.S. Secretary of Education as the national accrediting agency for programs leading to the Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine (ND or NMD) or Doctor of Naturopathy (ND) degree. To further build on the cornerstone of accredited education and ensure educational quality, in 1986 the Naturopathic Physician Licensing Examination became the first national board exam for graduates; today, graduates must pass a two-part medical exam in biomedical and clinical sciences before they are eligible to use the title “ND.” This exam is modeled after the conventional medical board exam for allopathic graduates, the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam, which assigns the “MD” license. This training was described in detail in a report from 2001 by the University of California San Francisco Center for Health Professions: “Naturopathic physicians are typically trained in a wide array of alternative therapies including herbology, homeopathy, massage, hydrotherapy, physical medicine, behavioral medicine, Traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, acupuncture, and nutrition therapy, as well as clinical practices such as minor surgery, pharmacology and obstetrics.”⁴¹

With educational standards set, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, a select group of new programs and institutions attained accreditation status with the Council on Naturopathic Medicine: Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine and Health Sciences, Tempe, Arizona; the College of Naturopathic Medicine at the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut; the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine, Toronto, Ontario; and, in 2011, the Boucher Institute of Naturopathic Medicine, British Columbia, Canada. The establishment of multiple geographic locations for this type of education paves a solid future for the profession, providing hundreds of newly graduated naturopathic doctors every year in the United States and Canada.

There are favorable commentaries on the current state of naturopathic medicine. Other Healers, Unorthodox Medicine in America,⁴⁰ is a volume written to provide “a scholarly perspective on unorthodox movements and practices that have arisen in the United States.” As described in the Encyclopedia of Alternative Health Care by Olsen⁴²:

While naturopathic medicine is now legal (in several states), many naturopaths practicing in other states are old-timers, practicing under their original “drugless therapy” licenses, issued before laws prohibiting new naturopathic practices went into effect.

In cooperation with regional associations, the AANP has won licensure and scope of practice protection at a steady rate on par with the growth of schools accredited by the Association of Accredited Naturopathic Medical Colleges. As of 2011, 15 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, five Canadian provinces, and the U.S. territories of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands regulate the naturopathic profession (Box 4-1).

Baer’s interest in the evolution of chiropractic as a philosophy of healing led him to Wardwell’s work and to Wardwell’s earlier scholarship, which had been tied to the mixer orientation within chiropractic. Baer took note of his descriptions of naturopathy as a near-extinct philosophy. Predictions of extinction were consistent among the assessments of social scientists in the 1970s and continued into the mid-1980s. Twaddle and Hessler, Rosengren, Whorton, and most notably Wardwell, all discussed naturopathy as a once-observable but marginalized philosophy of health and healing at odds with the conventional medical claims of a scientific medicine (see Bibliography). These social scientists placed naturopathy’s demise sometime in the 1950s when chiropractic severed its open naturopathic link by terminating ND programs.

Baer, before Wardwell, took special note of Bastyr and the professionalization represented by its scientific medicine–based curriculum and the publication of a John Bastyr College of Naturopathic Medicine project, The Textbook of Natural Medicine.

In his 1992 Medical Anthropology article ³⁶ “The Potential Rejuvenation of American Naturopathy as a Consequence of the Holistic Health Movement,” Baer detailed his own view of Naturopathy’s “three stages of development” noted at the outset of this chapter. Besides relying on material covered in the original chapter of “The History of Naturopathic Medicine,” which first appeared in 1985, Baer covered much of the new material regarding the emerging (1900–1930s) and declining (1940–1970s) stages of naturopathy.

Baer particularly broke new ground with his recognition of a “potential rejuvenation” of naturopathy as naturopathic medicine and his recognition that the profession had knowingly or unknowingly adopted a recognized survival strategy as a matter of organizational policy: professionalization. Baer also advanced a theory regarding the “potential rejuvenation” as tied to the emergence in the 1970s of holistic medicine. Holistic medicine, as a philosophy of healing, had a cultural affinity with the eclecticism inherent in naturopathic philosophy. In his 2001 book,⁴³ Biomedicine and Alternative Healing Systems in America, Baer updated this view of the status of naturopathic medicine in a chapter entitled “Naturopathy and Acupuncture as Secondary Professionalized Heterodox Medical Systems.” With the passage of the additional 10 years, Baer observed⁴³:

Unlike chiropractic, which no longer poses a serious threat to biomedicine because of its status as a specialty emphasizing spinal manipulation, a rejuvenated naturopathy finds itself in direct competition with biomedicine because both systems claim to provide a comprehensive approach to health care.

As osteopathy and chiropractic did earlier, naturopathy … (is) increasingly incorporating the theory and social organization of biomedicine.

(N)aturopathy with (its) reductionist philosophy and (its) focus on individual responsibility for healthy living may well undergo further growth in an era of growing health costs.

The Twenty-First Century Awaits

Baer carried his examination of the sociopolitical aspects forward in his 2001 article,⁴⁴ “The Sociopolitical Status of U.S. Naturopathy at the Dawn of the 21st Century” which examined the state of naturopathic medicine as it prepared to enter the twenty-first century. Although “professionalized naturopathy has undergone tremendous growth and legitimization since the late 1970s, nevertheless, it finds itself in a tenuous situation at the dawn of the twenty-first century in that its strength is confined primarily to the Far West and New England; it faces increasing competition from the partially professionalized and lay naturopaths; and it faces the danger of being overshadowed by a powerful biomedical system that is increasingly incorporating aspects of holistic health into its own practice.”

He offered no definitive answers to these questions of naturopathic medicine’s future, but he also highlighted areas needing further attention by social scientists: continued exploration of the reasons for naturopathy’s decline and rejuvenation and continued study of the naturopathic profession in recognition of its state of professionalization.

In closing, Baer observed: “In sum, while changes in the popular ideas about health and healing unleashed the social forces that enabled professional naturopathy to get back on its feet, those same social forces may overwhelm its core claim to being a unique, natural approach to healing.”

Whorton expressed the view that in many respects the transition from the marginalized naturopathy to the professionalized naturopathic medicine has now been accomplished.⁴⁵ He traced his view of this transformation as part of the larger transformation “from alternative medicine to complementary medicine” on the part of osteopathy, chiropractic, and naturopathy. Whorton described the factors that allowed this transformation even after the death of Lust in 1945: the issue of the “field’s lack of a scientific basis” was determined internally when the “died-in-the-wool believers in ‘nature cure’” were outlasted by the “liberal practitioners belonging to the so-called western group, naturopaths concentrated in the western states who recognized the validity of mainstream medicine’s scientific foundation and sought to incorporate biomedical science into their own system and apply it under the guidelines of naturopathic philosophy.”

As Whorton noted, “a key figure among the pseudo-medicals was John Bastyr—a practitioner in Seattle since the 1930s, and particularly well-known for his advocacy of natural childbirth.” Bastyr, Whorton noted, “recognized the necessity of naturopathy staying abreast of advances in biomedical science and applying those advances ‘in ways consistent with naturopathic principles’.”²¹ Bastyr was directly involved with the formation and maintenance of the NCNM during the years of naturopathy’s decline and lived to see much of “the short history of John Bastyr College (of Naturopathic Medicine) (which) is the most compelling illustration of the triumphant rebirth of naturopathy as naturopathic medicine.”²¹

Bastyr has been called “The Father of Modern Naturopathic Medicine” by Pizzorno, ND,⁴⁵ the moving spirit behind the professionalization of naturopathic medicine and the founding president of Bastyr University. No individual has carried the practice of NDs in the United States in the way that Lust did, but Bastyr and the others profiled by Kirchfeld and Boyle in Nature Doctors kept naturopathy alive during its decline in the 1950s and 1960s so that it could, in time, reemerge.

The movement continues to grow, and so, the impact of natural healing has come full circle. In an era where the statistical number of persons born who are expected to contract cancer, now recognized as a degenerative disease, has increased rather than declined, and the incidence of other degenerative diseases (arthritis, arteriosclerosis, atherosclerosis, etc.) has increased in direct relation to the lengthening of life expectancies produced by improved sanitation and nutrition (although speciously claimed by AMA medicine to be the result of their therapies), the early teachings of Lust, Lindlahr, and others appear to have more validity than ever.

References

1. Starr P. Social transformation of American medicine. New York: Basic Books; 1983.

2. Griggs B. Green pharmacy. London: Jill, Norman, & Hobhouse; 1981. 180-183, 251

3. Haller J. Medical Protestants: The Eclectics in American Medicine. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press; 1994. 1825-1939

4. Whorton J. Crusaders for fitness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Press; 1982. 138-147

5. Rothstein W. American physicians in the 19th century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press; 1972.

6. Haller J. American medicine in transition, 1850-1910. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press; 1981. 234-279

7. Rosen G. The structure of American medical practice. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania; 1983.

8. Brown E.R. Rockefeller medicine men. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; 1978.

9. Campion F. AMA & US health policy since 1940. Chicago: AMA Publishers; 1984.

10. Burrows J. Organized medicine in the progressive era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press; 1977. 31-51