ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Conflict and the "Cure": Nature Curists and Organized Medicine in the U.S. and Germany, 1914-1945

• In Event: World War Histories of Science

English Abstract

Between the two world wars, advocates of the "nature cure” alternately clashed and collaborated with medical doctors and the state in the United States and Germany. The “nature cure,” a loosely related group of health beliefs rooted in the 19th century German "cold water cure,” was popularized in the US in the early 20th by German immigrants and formed the foundation of naturopathy and other branches of “alternative” medicine.

In Germany, nature curists cooperated with successive German state bodies, from the Weimar Republic to the National Socialists, to become more fully integrated with German “regular” medicine and with the state insurance system; in contrast, while practitioners in the United States also sought cooperation with the state, they found themselves at increasing odds with organized “regular” doctors.

In each case, conflicts between the parties often appeared to contemporaries (as they have to later observers) to be about efficaciousness, qualifications, or medical ideology, and for good reason. The nature curists’ relentless opposition to vaccination and recommendations like orange-eating and positive thinking as a cure for syphilis raised the ire of the American Medical Association and other bodies. Following the stories several key nature-cure advocates including Benedict Lust, Arnold Ehret, and the Kneipp Associations, I argue, however, that differences in efficaciousness were less important to these conflicts than were the parties’ willingness to make political alliances and their rival approaches to credentialing and expertise, rooted above all in the nature curists’ longstanding emphasis on “self-care.”

Author

• Laura Farley Cremer, University of Chicago