Other Healers: Unorthodox Medicine in America

Book Overview

Sixty million Americans have relied at some point in their lives on osteopaths, chiropractors, folk or religious healers, naturopaths, homeopaths, and acupuncturists; millions more employ alternative psychological systems, unorthodox diet and fitness programs, and a range of self-help treatments. Yet until recently, most historians and social scientists of medicine have assumed that unorthodox movements were of comparatively minor significance in the study of medicine and society.

In "Other Healers" Norman Gevitz and eight other authors explore the most significant alternatives to orthodox medicine to have gained a place in American society from the early 19th century to the present. Neither advocating nor debunking these alternatives, they explore phenomena that range from Thomsonism, the early botanical system that was progenitor of the first native American sects, to the faith-healing of contemporary pentecostals and charasmatics; from the Water Cure Movement, which provided important support for the efforts of early feminist reformers, to osteopathy, whose practitioners are now licensed to offer the same range of services as M.D.'s.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801837103
• ISBN13: 9780801837104
• Release Date: October 1988
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 324 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 9.0"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A FASCINATING HISTORICAL DISCUSSION OF UNORTHODOX MEDICINE IN AMERICA

Norman Gevitz teaches the history of medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago; in this 1988 Johns Hopkins University Press book, he has gathered essays (two that he wrote, eight by others) dealing with different historical aspects of "unorthodox medicine" as practiced in this country. There are chapters on "The Botanical Movements," the Water-Cure movement, Homeopathy, Osteopathy (a specialty of Gevitz's; see his book The D.O.'s: Osteopathic Medicine in America), Chiropractic, Christian Science healing, Divine Healing, Folk Medicine, and more. Figures such as Wooster Beach ("founder of eclecticism"), Samuel Thomson, William Andrus Alcott (cousin of the Transcendentalist leader, who was Louisa May Alcott's father), and Sylvester Graham (unfortunately remembered most often now as the inventor of the "graham cracker," rather than as an alternative health crusader) are among those covered. The book is filled with insightful comments. For example, Gevitz notes in his Preface that "Women have always played a significant role in the genesis and growth of unorthodox medicine." Martin Kaufman's essay on Homeopathy notes that "during the 1980s, homeopathy has made a remarkable comeback." In Walter Wardwell's sympathetic treatment of Chiropractic, he suggests that if chiropractors "were to consent to functioning as limited medical specialists in SMT---that is, if they were to relinquish their claims to be able to treat all kinds of conditions and modify their theory that all illnesses are due to spinal sublaxations and that the only appropriate therapy is their removal," that "Medical opposition to chiropractors should diminish in proportion to chiropractors' adoption of this more limited role." This book is highly recommended for anyone interested in an academic but respectful treatment of the history of alternative medicine in America.