HIST 249 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: World View, Sectarianism, Mary Baker Eddy
Alternative Medicine
• Reading:
o Course pack: Norman Gevitz, “Unorthodox Medical Systems”
•
Assignment #2:
o Secondary literature that mentions information that is from the textbook - that is
okay
o Question 1 & 2 - how to interpret the text
• What is the author doing in this text? What is the text doing?
• Don’t just stick with finding a definition
• Go beyond this
• Don’t just define tuberculous
• What is the text doing
• This is the same for question #2
• Author does not say "my strategy is…."
• More about finding out about what the text does
• If it turns out that a lot of the students interpreted the question in a specific
way grades will be adjusted
• 19th & 20th century - Alternative Medicine
o Readings - Gevitz - unorthodox healing system, survey & discussion of hypothesis
o Helps you understand mainstream modern medicine too
• Alternatives to 'Alternative'
o
Natural
• Assume there is something unnatural about mainstream medicine
• What is natural?
• Black box -- what is so unnatural?
• Something is 'unnatural' about biomedicine… but what
o
Complementary
• Add on to biomedicine
• Value neutral
• Did not think of themselves as complementary to mainstream medicine
• Invented quite recently by biomedicine to make peace
• Real people in charge - still mainstream doctors
• Permitted as an add on only to mainstream medicine
o
Unorthodox
• Realistic
• Value judgement on the nature of alterative medicine
• All alternative medicine made in opposition to mainstream medicine (but this
wasn’t always the case)
• Accurate
• Heretical
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2
• Deviant
• A historical perspective - reading (Don Bayes)
o 19th-21st centuries - western modern medicine embraces new concepts (disease
specificity, localization, physiology)
o Principles that underline modern medicine are very similar to traditional western
medicine
o Western traditional medicine - persist in the population & become 'alternative
medicine'
o Hippocratic medicine - balance, imbalance, humoural theory
o Western modern medicine - disease specificity, pathological anatomy, not about
balance/environment, is about pin pointing a cause, capturing the disease as an
entity
o Galenism - folk
o
The alternative medicine paradigm
A. Body
▪ Holistic - body/soul, environment, lifestyle
• The body & soul are the same
• A whole
▪ Fluids & energy
B.
Disease
▪ Imbalance in the body
▪ Putrefaction (toxins)
• Old fashioned idea
• Many medicines are about purifying the body of toxins
• New concern about the environment
C. Therapy
▪ Re-balancing, cleansing, helping nature heal
▪ Emphasis on hygiene & prevention
▪ Preference for herbal pharmacopeia
▪ Continuum between profession & self help
• Shared knowledge between the practitioner & physician
• Western traditional medicine
• Bedside medicine
▪ Recuma - root & herb medicine
▪ 19th century - first nations were thought to have more knowledge on
herbs & natural medicine
▪ 'Spa culture'
▪ European's have lead the way
▪
Hydrotherapy
• Use of water goes back to antiquity
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3
• Vinzenz Priessnitz - farmer
• Sebastian Kneipp - priest
• 101 ways of applying water to your body, hot baths, cold
baths, baths with different kinds of water (salt)
• Reconnecting with nature
• Walking bare foot in grass
• Nature - becoming de-naturalized
• For city dwellers - physical reconnection with the earth
▪
John Harvey Kellogg - 1938
• Kellogg's cereal
• Used to be a health food
• For suppressing sexual urges
• Health reformer of the period
• Focus on the digestive system
• Biomedicine
• Esoteric
▪ Doctor has a type of training/education that is foreign to anyone who is
not trained/educated as a doctor
▪ Hospital medicine
▪ Scientific knowledge - ordinary people do not even have the vocab for
▪ Pathology - often thought of as putrefaction - uses everyday experience
to understand health & disease
▪ Words used are words that patients would understand
• Doctors knowledge = Knowledge of disease
▪ Signs & symptoms to label disease precisely
• Not about knowledge of disease, is about knowledge of the patient
▪ Disease is more of a thing / object
▪ Discovery of micro's in the 18th century - specific living agents being
responsible for disease
▪ They are the cause of the disease
▪ Cholera is cholera no matter who has it
▪ It is always the same disease
▪ Patients simply become patients of the disease
▪ (Different than Hippocrates medicine - not about the individual patient
dealing with a disease)
• Criterion for admissible therapy = if the doctor knows why it works
• Efficacy determined by the doctor (MD)
• Western traditional medicine
• Exoteric
• Knowledge of patient
• Disease = event or relationship, of the individual
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