The Feminist Origins of “Eight Cups a Day”: The Water-Healing Quackery That Empowered Women’s Medicine. (Excerpt)

By Erika Janik

Today, when it seems that most Americans carry a water bottle to drink their eight daily glasses, the importance of water to health seems obvious. But for 19th-century hydropaths, water was more than just a sugar- and calorie-free drink: It was a social good able to cure nearly every disease as well as the social and cultural ills that threatened the health and stability of the nation.

Drinking was not the only way to enjoy water’s munificence, though; water was also to be experienced through elaborate rituals of bathing, showering, soaking, sweating, and wrapping. This diversity of baths, not to mention the idea of bathing itself, was highly unusual for most Americans. In 1835, a letter from a reader in the Boston Moral Reformer asked, “I have been in the habit during the past winter of taking a warm bath every three weeks. Is this too often to follow the year round?” Although it offered cures for disease, hydropathy functioned more as a water-based lifestyle plan with a vision of radically transforming the world through personal health achieved through nature’s purest substance.

Hydropathy grew out of the observations and experiments of Vincent Priessnitz. A peasant born in 1799 on a farm in Grafenberg in Silesian Austria, located in today’s Czech Republic, Priessnitz discovered water’s potential as a cure-all after an 1816 farm accident. One day while he was baling hay, a runaway horse and wagon trampled the teenaged Priessnitz, leaving him with several broken ribs and a bruised left arm. The doctor from a nearby town told him that the severity of his injuries made it unlikely he’d ever work again. Priessnitz, however, refused to accept this prognosis. He wrapped himself in wet cloths and ate very little while consuming large quantities of cold water. To reset his broken ribs, he pressed his abdomen against a chair and inhaled deeply, allowing the expansion of his chest to push his ribs back into place. Priessnitz eventually recovered from his injuries, and the success of his self-cure led him to broaden his investigation into the curing power of water.

Priessnitz sought not only to wash disease away but to deny it entry into the body through a healthy lifestyle of diet and exercise. Priessnitz argued that filth and a poor diet gave disease easy access into the body. In The Hydropathic Encyclopedia, American hydropath Dr. Russell Trall explained that disease was “produced by bad air, improper light, impure food and drink, excessive or defective alimentation, indolence or over-exertion, [or] unregulated passion.” For Trall, it all boiled down to “unphysiological voluntary habits.” In other words, sickness resulted from laziness, a lack of exercise, and junk food, the familiar chords of obesity debates to this day.

Perhaps hydropathy’s most visible legacy is in the popularly held belief in drinking eight glasses of water a day. This notion was appropriated and echoed with increasing fervor in the late 19th century by the temperance movement. By the 1910s and 1920s, American newspapers and magazines were filled with exhortations to consume eight glasses of water for health on a daily basis. Although scientists and doctors continue to disagree over how much water is enough, the idea of drinking fluids regularly for health remains undisputed.

Priessnitz’s water cure became renowned throughout the Western Hemisphere. Visitors marveled at Priessnitz’s ability to diagnose disease and devise a treatment plan simply by studying the quality and cast of a patient’s skin. He never checked the pulse, looked at the tongue, or asked patients about their complaints. By 1840, nearly 1,700 patients per year sought treatment at Grafenberg.

Priessnitz’s success spurred countless imitators and admirers. The first water cure in the United States opened its doors in 1843, followed by a second the next year. Both were in New York City and were operated by disillusioned regular doctors. But it was Mary Gove Nichols and her husband, Thomas, who made hydropathy famous. Born in Goffstown, N.H., in 1810, Mary Sargeant Neal was the precocious daughter of a freethinking father who encouraged her active and curious mind. As a teenager, she pored over the pages of the books her medical-student brother brought home, fascinated by the workings of the human body but perhaps also wondering why she could find so little information on the health of women like herself.

An unhappy marriage in 1831 to Hiram Gove, who disdained her reading and creative writing, helped turn Mary into a champion of women’s rights and a prominent health reformer. To ease her mental and physical suffering, Mary defied her husband and turned back to the medical books that had so enthralled her as a child. She discovered Sylvester Graham, an early advocate of dietary reform, vegetarianism, and hygienic reform and determined that women’s well-being and happiness depended on the freedom achieved through personal health. Excited by her newfound knowledge, Mary wanted to tell other women of the salvation that could be found in knowing about and taking charge of their own bodies.

In 1838, Mary made a name for herself lecturing (a scandal in and of itself for a woman) on the shocking topics of women’s health, anatomy, and physiology. Women’s health was a topic rarely, if ever, discussed at the time, much less in public. With no female regular doctors, many women ignored their own health problems and endured in silence to avoid being seen by male doctors, which social mores deemed improper. Hundreds packed lecture halls to see the thin, dark-haired woman with an open and intelligent face and exuberant brown eyes discuss the healthy female body.

In the summer of 1845, finally free of her husband, Mary traveled to Brattleboro, Vt., to investigate Priessnitz disciple Dr. Robert Wesselhoeft’s Hydropathic Institution—one of the most exclusive and expensive water cures in the United States. Impressed by what she saw, she began training as a water-cure physician, offering physiology lessons to patients in exchange for her education.

While Priessnitz’s original system called for water to be used both internally and externally, most American hydropaths believed that water worked best when applied gradually through the skin. The wet sheet became the standard method of application. First, the attendant would dip a sheet of cotton or linen in cold water and spread it on several thick wool blankets. The patient would then be wound up in the sheet and blankets by the attendant and secured with pins or tape. Once wrapped, patients would shiver and then lie sweating on feather beds for anywhere from 25 minutes to several hours depending on the seriousness of the illness. After they worked up a good sweat, the attendant unwrapped them and plunged them in a cold bath followed by a brisk drying. For severely debilitated patients, the wet-sheet treatment could be too much, so an alternative known as the wet dress was used instead. A loose-fitting nightgown-like garment, the wet dress allowed patients to dispense with the services of an attendant and to walk comfortably while also soaking up water. Most wet-dress patients also went to bed in the outfit, a damp and presumably clammy night of sleep.

Wesselhoeft taught his students, Mary among them, the art of individual prescription, adapting cures to each patient’s symptoms, stamina, and age. “The same treatment that would cure one might fail entirely with another,” she later noted.

After three months in Brattleboro, Mary moved to New York City in 1846 and began giving lectures and writing articles and books on health and hydropathy.

Though she’d never attended medical school, by the late 1840s, she led a doctor’s life and had earned a reputation as a trustworthy medical expert. Mary’s husband, Hiram Gove, finally consented to a divorce in 1847. That same year she met a young writer named Thomas Low Nichols, whose writing and progressive views on women she admired. The two married the following July. Inspired by his new wife’s work in hydropathy, Thomas enrolled in medical school to study “the very errors and absurdities” of regular medicine, graduating from New York University with his medical degree in 1850.

Most hydropaths believed that the only qualifications necessary to practice should be a personal commitment to the principles of hydropathy and a willingness and ability to practice them responsibly. Unlike regular medicine, hydropaths de-emphasized the authority of the physician in favor of creating independent patients able to diagnose and care for themselves. Patients thus had a substantial responsibility for their own outcomes. “If a patient thoroughly understands his or her disease, and has the requisite energy to accomplish a cure,” wrote Mary, “it may be done almost anywhere, and with very meager advantages.” She recounted stories of female patients who managed to heal themselves even while weak with disease through their own “indomitable energy.” Hydropaths believed that hygienic habits were best mastered through willpower and self-control, an ideology that mirrored wider societal beliefs about personal responsibility and social improvement.

In 1851, Mary and her new husband opened the nation’s first hydropathic medical school, the American Hydropathic Institute, in New York City. Concerned about the dangers of the misapplication of cold water, not to mention charlatans masquerading as hydropaths for profit, the Nicholses believed that the potency of water required expert guidance. More than teaching about water, though, Nichols wanted to provide a medical education for women to meet the national demand for female doctors.

With few exceptions, most of the nation’s medical schools refused to admit women. By and large, regular medicine tended to regard being female as a disease in and of itself. At the American Hydropathic Institute’s inaugural ceremonies, Mary delivered an address entitled “Woman the Physician” that argued for the importance of female doctors. Rather than reject cultural assumptions about women’s caring nature, she claimed women’s innate talents uniquely qualified them for the profession. The Nicholses’ progressive views of women aligned perfectly with hydropathy’s expansive understanding of women and women’s health. Hydropaths shared their era’s belief in women’s softer, more caring nature: They just did not see this as a justification for keeping women out of the medical profession.

Encouraging women to get involved in hydropathy contributed to the financial health of the nation’s water cures as well. To attract women and their money, hydropaths needed female attendants and practitioners to serve them. Women consistently outnumbered men in attendance at hydropathic institutes. It’s not hard to imagine why. For many women, visiting a water cure was the first, and perhaps only, time their needs were put above those of their husbands and children.

Hydropathy took the radical step of naturalizing women’s life stages. For hydropaths, puberty, menstruation, childbearing, and menopause were not dread diseases needing intervention but natural processes in a woman’s life. Women did not become weak and ill because of their sex but because of some outside cause, just like men. Hydropaths urged women to take an active role in their own health and to maximize their health and happiness through diet, exercise, and other hygienic practices, all of which dramatically expanded women’s power to determine and control their own lives. As a result, hydropathy provided a refuge for progressive women, and many of America’s first generation of female doctors came out of hydropathy.

Excerpted from "Marketplace of the Marvelous: The Strange Origins of Modern Medicine" by Erika Janik, out now from Beacon Press.

Erika Janik has written for Smithsonian.com, Mental Floss, The Onion, and Wisconsin Public Radio.

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Trusting the Water Cure

By W. Caleb McDaniel, 7-24-12

[This is the paper I delivered on July 20 at the 2012 annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic in Baltimore. The (slightly modified) title of the talk was: “Spreading the News about Hydropathy: How Did Americans Learn to Stop Worrying and Trust the Water Cure?” A printer-friendly version can be found in Rice University’s Digital Scholarship Archive.]

Historians of the early republic now understand a great deal about how the post office, the steam engine, the telegraph, and the printing press helped to stitch a growing nation together while simultaneously connecting Americans to a wider world. The “water cure,” a nineteenth-century health reform movement also known as hydropathy, was in many ways the perfect example of how an antebellum “communications revolution” created extensive information networks on even the most obscure topics. After its genesis in Austria in the 1830s and 1840s, by the 1850s the “water cure” claimed a transatlantic following with devotees as diverse as Charles Darwin, Stonewall Jackson, David Ruggles, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a host of unknown clients from Russia, Germany, Italy, and beyond. By the beginning of the Civil War, the New York City newspaper, The Water-Cure Journal, claimed tens of thousands of subscribers, and over 200 hydropathic establishments dotted the country from upstate New York, to Biloxi, Mississippi, and Salem, Oregon.

Yet health reform movements like the “water cure” also illustrate the two biggest points I would like to make in this talk. First, information networks built by new institutions, technologies, and publications never wholly displaced interpersonal networks as conduits of information. New media has almost always been “social” media, and in the early republic friends and family members remained crucial sources of information who shared and spread the news they liked and steered each other away from what they did not. Leaders and fans of alternative health movements understood this well. The followers of homeopathist Samuel Thomson sent agents into 22 states and territories by 1833 to form “Friendly Societies,” local groups of families and friends who could support each other and share information about botanical remedies. The publishers of the Water-Cure Journal likewise built their subscription base by offering prizes to readers who used their interpersonal ties to bring friends or family members to the cause. Such savvy tactics showed an awareness of how important the social network was to the spread of new ideas.

A second point I want to make today is related to the first: interpersonal communication networks remained important in the early nineteenth century not just as means of circulating information, but as means of cultivating trust in information. The case of the “water cure” helps make this point especially clear, for the dramatic spread of hydropathy was more than just a matter of spreading news and methods. Rather, the spread of hydropathy was the product of countless private decisions by individuals to place their trust in “water cure” therapies–enough trust to try them on their own bodies or the bodies of those they loved.

The ailing American abolitionist Henry Clarke Wright made that decision in the winter of 1843 and 1844, when he traveled to the Austrian water cure establishment run by Vincent Priessnitz in Graefenberg, nestled high in the Silesian alps. Priessnitz was renowned as the inventor of hydropathy, and by the time Wright arrived he was attracting as many as 1700 people a year to Graefenberg. True believers in Priessnitz’s methods for curing illness preached that anyone could practice hydropathy, even in their own home. But Wright, who had suffered for much of the year with a persistent cough, was persuaded to travel all the way to the water cure’s source to consult with Priessnitz himself.

The methods that Wright discovered there shared much in common with other contemporary health reforms–hostility to drugs and “heroic” therapies like blood-letting, distrust of traditional physicians, an emphasis on diet and preventive hygiene, and a belief that restoring the sick to health was mostly a matter of allowing nature take its course. But what distinguished Priessnitz’s ideas from other cures was the belief that applications of water alone could resolve most illnesses, whether they were chronic or acute. Patients like Wright were wrapped in freezing cold wet sheets and then cocooned in thick blankets to relieve fever. Water cure patients sat in water, submerged themselves in water, stood under water as it was poured over them, wore wet compresses, wrapped themselves in dripping sheets, and ate a meager diet washed down, of course, with water.

Needless to say, these experiences were not always pleasant in an Alpine winter. Nine weeks into his stay, Wright described climbing into baths rimmed with ice and confessed to a friend in England that he had developed a “perfect Hydrophobia. I have a horror of cold water. I can’t get warm. But I’m told it is a good sign!” Wright went on to joke with his correspondent, another water cure devotee, about the seeming absurdity of his position. “Oh dear me!” he exclaimed. “Weakness, low spirits, shiverings & shakings, fever, head-ache, tooth-ache, & every other ache, a good sign! Well—I know my lungs are getting well.”

In these lines, Wright pinpointed the paradox at the heart of hydropathy: Priessnitz held that wet sheets and douches worked by bringing the body to a moment of crisis, in which any morbid elements would be expelled. But in practice, this meant that patients who began to feel worse under Priessnitz’s ministrations were often told they were getting better! “Everything is reversed here,” Wright explained, “& you are counted fortunate & happy according to the intensity of your pain & anguish. ‘The cure is taking effect’ is the consolatory response to all your groans & cries of torture.”

Such candid admissions may seem amusing in retrospect, but they point to a problem that historians of the cure have only partially answered: in the heat (or the cold!) of the moment, how and why did water cure patients decide to trust specific treatments and doctors to make them well, even in the face of their own doubts or awareness of countervailing evidence? The experience of another, more famous abolitionist highlights how potentially unamusing such decisions could be. In April 1849, William Lloyd Garrison and his wife Helen Garrison watched with growing concern as their six-year-old son, Charles Follen Garrison, “complained of feeling unwell.” Through several days of vomiting and flu-like symptoms, the Garrisons attempted to treat their son with the water cure, wrapping him in “the wet sheet three or four times.” When that failed, Lloyd later reported in an anguished letter, “we also gave him the homeopathic prescriptions as accurately as we could discover his symptoms described in our books, but without much skill or knowledge.” Finally, after four days, while still “hesitating whether to go for a physician,” Garrison was “advised by a friend to try a medicated vapor bath.”

The same friend “said that his wife would be happy to administer it,” and Garrison quickly agreed, believing that sweating was what Charley needed—a key premise for movements like hydropathy. He therefore agreed to make an “experiment” of the vapor bath, and even helped his friend’s wife strap his lethargic son into a wooden chair positioned above steaming water. Almost as soon as the “bath” began, however, the poor boy became, in Garrison’s words, “perfectly frantic . . . his screams were appalling.” When Charley was removed, fifteen or twenty minutes later, Garrison discovered, too late, that his child had been horribly scalded by steam from the vapor bath, “the skin being entirely destroyed on one side.” A few days later, the injured boy died, leaving his parents enveloped in guilt and grief.

As the Garrisons’ tragic experience shows, decisions to trust alternative therapies and delay other sorts of care could quickly become matters of life and death for nineteenth-century families. Yet Garrison’s story illustrates just how persistent trust in the water cure or similar therapies could be, even in the face of strong countervailing evidence that the cures were not working or were actively causing harm. In this case, as Garrison later explained, “such was my confidence in the judgment of the lady” who administered the vapor bath that “I did not even suspect that she might be raising the steam to an undue height.” As his son screamed in pain, Garrison even “appealed to his little manhood in the best way I could . . . urging him to bear it all with fortitude, as he would undoubtedly be benefitted by the operation.”

All parents face difficult choices when trying to care for a suffering child. But it is still appropriate to ask why someone like Garrison could place so much confidence in the prescriptions or judgments of alternative health practitioners, enough to urge his son to endure an obviously botched treatment? In the case of the water cure, the current historiography answers questions like this only in the most general terms. Scholars have explained the attractions of hydropathy partly by contrasting its relatively passive and hygenic regime with “harsh” conventional techniques practiced by professional doctors. And historians have also shown why hydropathy complemented general currents in antebellum culture, especially to women and reformers drawn to the camaraderie and respite of water cure establishments and the ethic of individual empowerment and non-conformism offered by the cure. More generally, historians of alternative medicine have shown why cures that seem ridiculous now made sense given nineteenth-century assumptions about the body and its operations that patients, physicians, and alternative practitioners all, to some extent, shared. Historians of medicine also point to the charisma and savvy marketing skills of individual physicians as crucial to establishing the credibility of unconventional therapies.

Yet while all of these approaches do much to explain why antebellum Americans in general might be attracted to hydropathy or persuaded to try its methods, they are less successful when it comes to explaining specific decisions by specific individuals like Garrison and Wright. For example, pointing to the perils of professional medicine at the time does not explain fully why a patient might trust the water cure over other alternative therapies, or why patients trusted certain combinations of therapies. As Garrison’s experience illustrates, antebellum Americans attracted to hydropathy seldom chose one therapy, even to address one case of illness. To understand the decision-making matrices that produced their trust in these therapeutic regimes, we need to know more than the things that made the water cure culturally appealing.

It is here, I think, that attention to interpersonal networks of information may ultimately provide insights that an exclusively macroscopic approach cannot. Antebellum Americans who trusted the water cure did not make their decisions in a vacuum or solely with the help of impersonal media like printed books, which, as Garrison’s testimony shows, could fail to offer consolation and help in a moment of crisis. In those moments, most people do—and did—turn to the embodied or empathetic knowledge provided by close friends and family members. Significantly, Garrison tried the vapor bath for his son largely on the advice of “a friend.”

The role that such friends played in shaping decisions like Garrison’s is not easy to measure, primarily because obtaining glimpses into the private decisions of individual patients is more difficult than counting the number of water cure establishments or subscriptions to water cure publications. Garrison and Wright were hardly representative Americans, and may not even have been representative of those who tried alternative therapies like the water cure. Nonetheless, in their cases and others, anecdotal evidence does suggest the importance of close interpersonal ties of kinship and friendship in engendering confidence in hydropathy.

Wright, for example, was largely convinced to visit Graefenberg on the recommendation of his friend Elizabeth Pease, a Quaker abolitionist from Darlington, England, who frequented a water cure establishment at Ben Rhydding and who met many American abolitionists in person during their tours of the British Isles. Wright and Pease were also critical to Garrison’s decision to try the water cure only a few months before Charley’s death. When Garrison, a longtime adherent of homeopathic treatments, became ill in the spring of 1848, he initially considered using sarsaparilla. But, as he told his good friend Pease, “dear Henry is urging me very strongly to go to Dr. [David] Ruggles’s Water Cure Establishment in Northampton,” and Pease added her own strong endorsements of that advice, writing later that year that she hoped “hydropathy may do as much for thee as under the blessing of God, it has done for me.”

Garrison and Wright were not the only American abolitionists whom Pease ultimately persuaded to trust or try the water cure. In 1847 she also recommended the cure to the invalid wife of Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips, who told Pease in August 1847 that “your cordial description of Ben Rhydding would almost draw Ann across the water. She looks longingly on the Cure, & may try it yet.” When Wendell and Ann Phillips did ultimately go to Northampton to seek help from David Ruggles, the African American hydropathist, Wendell gratefully informed Pease of their decision “to try your own valued water cure.” And Garrison’s own eventual decision to go to Northampton also highlighted the importance of a valuable friend like Pease, the only correspondent to whom Garrison confided the details of Charley’s gruesome death, in prompting individual decisions to act. In a letter of introduction to British abolitionists written for his friend Maria Weston Chapman, who was about to cross the Atlantic, Garrison noted that Pease would be “highly gratified on hearing that I am at last trying the ‘Water Cure.’” And in the same letter, he wrote, in reference to Pease, “what would the world be without such friendship?”

A world without such friendship may very well have been a world in which the “water cure” had a less extensive and enduring reach. To be sure, advice from friends was no guarantee that someone would trust hydropathy, any more than exposure to an issue of the Water Cure Journal might have been. Garrison had been “prevailed on” by friends to try the water cure for years before he actually did so. Another Boston abolitionist associated with Garrison confessed in a letter to an Irish abolitionist that his family remained “a sad set of misbelievers” in the “hydromania” of friends like Pease and Wright. For every example of someone converted to the water cure by the recommendation of a friend or relative, one could probably find another example of someone like the abolitionist John Brown, who had “little faith in the water treatment” even though his sons were devoted readers of the Water Cure Journal and his wife visited Ruggles’s water cure establishment. Indeed, the authors of personal testimonials published in the Water Cure Journal often boasted of their persistence in trusting the water cure against the advice of their skeptical friends and family, or spoke vaguely of having “heard of the Water-Cure” from no one in particular.

Nonetheless, beneath these proud statements of individual self-reliance and skepticism, I suspect there are numerous experiences more akin to Garrison’s and Wright’s, like the decisions of abolitionists Abby Kelley and Stephen Foster to try the water cure only after urging from family and friends, or the decision of Susan Helen DeKroyft, a popular nineteenth-century author who began losing her eyesight in 1845 and published a book of letters about her long search for a cure. DeKroyft’s journey began at the New York Institution for the Blind, but there she was subjected to a battery of conflicting advice of what she should do. “Last summer,” she wrote, “the advice of all the doctors was, ‘Go to the springs; showering and bathing will do more for you than medicine,’” while still others advised that she try a water cure establishment on Long Island. “To that various objections were raised,” not least from DeKroyft herself, who was skeptical of hydropathy “until a friend gave it a very satisfactory trial.” This friend, equipped with her own douche bath and water cure apparatus in her home, allowed DeKroyft to try the method “with much benefit both to my general health and eyes.” Another “good friend” proved critical to her later decision to go to Long Island after all.

I have sketched the outlines of a problem that I believe still warrants examination: how did antebellum Americans decide to trust particular information and recommendations about the water cure enough to submit to its rigors? I have also suggested that an answer may lie in the interpersonal means by which news of the water cure reached them. Both the problem and the answer are only visible, however, if we take seriously the difficult and sometimes agonizing choices that patients had to make about therapy for themselves and their loved ones.

After all, when antebellum Americans like Garrison chose to apply the water cure in their families, it was not a light decision. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton once said in the case of her own son’s sickness, which she treated with the water cure, “I am anxious beyond endurance” and “feel guilty when I have a sick child.” In the face of such powerful emotions of anxiety and guilt, simple belief in the proposition of the water cure may well have needed the endorsement of other patients who were close friends or kin. Helen DeKroyft suggested as much when she confessed that “sometimes the simple, unvarnished story of a patient, tells more in favor of the doctor than all of his long and well-written essays upon Materia Medica, Theory and Practice.”

To confirm that DeKroyft’s insight was more widely shared would require more research than I have presented today. But examining the importance of inter-patient and interpersonal networks in the spread of the water cure may prove useful for two groups of historians. For historians of medicine who are usually focused on relations between doctor and patient, the water cure may present a case in which networks and friendships among patients proved critical to the cure’s expansion and credibility. Meanwhile, for historians of the communications revolution in this period, the water cure suggests the need for continued attention to the micro-historical scale of information exchange. Infrastructral changes deserve most of the credit for the circulation and spread of news about hydropathy, but understanding why particular people made personal decisions to act on information received may require looking at ties closer at hand.

From: wcm1.web.rice.edu

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Medical Heresy in the Nineteenth Century: Women and the Water Cure

By Gene Franks

"Health and bodily perfectionism might be the ultimate metaphors for self-determination and choice amid cultural uncertainty and upheaval; they do indeed yield a self-directed, life-giving, empowering vision. Now, as then, health may be one of the few arenas in which a utopian, perfectionist ideal can be sought and--for given moments--realized."--Susan E. Cayleff, Wash and Be Healed: The Water-Cure Movement in Women's Health.

Editor/Publisher/Writer's Note: The article that follows is twice-recycled. It appeared first in a paper version in Pure Water Gazette #22, October, 1989, then was improved and expanded for paper publication in Gazette #47, Fall, 1997.  The present version, improved, I hope,  dates from the Spring of 2001.  The pictures are from a magazine article published a century and a half ago.

I think you'll be surprised at how the current upsurge of popularity of alternative healing systems had its exact parallel in pre-Civil War America. You may be surprised, too, at how little the "regulars," or allopathic doctors, have changed their ways in the century and a half they've been "practicing" since the days described in the article.  The Bleed, Purge, and Poison strategy of Antebellum "heroic" medicine isn't all that different from today's Slash, Burn, and Poison style. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, the French say.  The more things change, the more they stay forever the same.

A century and a half ago, one of America's most hazardous professions was that of the affluent housewife. Freed from the necessity to contribute to family income, many ladies of the leisure class inherited the role of petted, over-protected dolls--overfed on rich and highly refined foods, inactive, and extremely unhealthy. Among their worst enemies were the dressmaker and the doctor.

Fashion was such a burden to health that reformer Lydia Sayer Hasbrouk liked to say, "Dress reform to us is synonymous with health reform." In an effort to achieve the appearance of an unnaturally narrow waist, women were wrapped in "misery-making machines" consisting of tightly-laced corsets stiffened with whalebones and steel splints. These caused pain in the chest, abdomen, and pelvis, and probably contributed to miscarriages and premature births. Many women suffered deformed ribs and chronic shortness of breath. Equally oppressive was the effort to achieve a "tea cosy effect" by wearing six, eight, or more heavy underskirts weighing up to 15 pounds and supported by strings drawn so tightly that they left visible indentations even after death.

Although fashion was hideous, doctors were a more immediate threat. Pre-Civil War doctors treated women, one writer of the time said, like "ignorant children who must be guided by their betters--especially by their physicians."

For middle- and upper-class women, pregnancy, parturition (as childbirth was called), and postpartum complications were the leading health concerns. Seeking to replace midwives as birthing attendants, doctors waged a systematic campaign--a campaign still much in evidence today--to turn childbirth into a medical problem. As Jane Donegan explains in Hydropathic Highway to Health:

Although then as now, the vast majority of births were uncomplicated, doctors stressed the potential hazards that accompanied every normal case. They capitalized on their medical training to emphasize their claim--not always founded in fact--that only with their assistance could childbearing be transformed into a safer, shorter, and less terrifying event. In the process, physicians redefined parturition. What had once been regarded as a natural physiological function eventually became a pathological condition requiring the physician's scientific rnanagement.

The "scientific management" of childbirth came to be standard fare of the medical system known as "heroic medicine," which was practiced by "regular" doctors, or allopaths.  Heroic medicine featured an invasive, aggressive attack on disease, relying on such weapons as bloodletting (by way of venesection, or opening of the veins, applying leeches, and cupping) and massive drugging.

The process of procreation was in general shrouded in secrecy, and the information that women got from doctors was less than perfect. Doctors advised, for example, that conception was most likely to occur during menstruation and was least likely during the period we now know as ovulation. It is no wonder that women seemed to be eternally pregnant.

Doctors believed, too, that the cessation of menstruation during pregnancy indicated a problem needing heroic intervention. Bloodletting was the logical cure. Bleeding weakened the "patient" and lent support to the notion that pregnancy was a disease requiring medical treatment. A respected specialist in uterine diseases in 1858 taught medical students to insert leeches into the womb even though he admitted that the practice "could induce a paroxysm of almost intolerable suffering." Exercise was discouraged, and even young women became virtual invalids during pregnancy and for weeks or months after childbirth.

The famous physician Benjamin Rush defined childbearing as "a disease taking the form of a clonic spasm" and recommended venesection and medicating with opium. Bloodletting, in fact, became the standard treatment for most of the "symptoms" of pregnancy, including morning sickness, swelling of the hands, wrists, and face, headache and vertigo. Doctors even sought to control hemorrhage with bloodletting, theorizing, according to Jane Donegan, that "bleeding a woman [until she was unconscious] would temporarily reduce circulation and encourage her blood to clot." This practice often led to temporary blindness and prolonged periods of weakness.

Another standard treatment for the disease of childbearing was ergot, a powerful drug used to "excite uterine contractions," thus inducing labor. Much abused by inexperienced physicians (and some doctors of the time began practice in obstetrics without having so much as witnessed a childbirth), ergot, in the words of one doctor,  left a trail of "ruptured uteri, deadborn children, puerperal convulsions, and widowered husbands."  The problem was that when given prematurely--as often happened--ergot stimulated forceful uterine contractions that could rupture the uterus or destroy the fetus by forcing it against the undilated cervix.

While many other problems attributable to medical treatment could be discussed, such as mercury poisoning and the spread of infection, it is enough to say that by the middle of the nineteenth century women's health in America was in a deplorable state. Catherine Beecher, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of  Uncle Tom's Cabin, made an informal survey of over 1,000 women in 79 communities and found that the sick outnumbered the well by a ratio of three to one. Mrs. Beecher commented: "I am not able to recall, in my immense circle of friends and acquaintances all over the Union, so many as ten married ladies born in this century and country, who are perfectly sound, healthy, and vigorous."

Mrs. Beecher's suggested remedies  for women's poor health were three: dress reform, vigorous exercise,  and participation in the water cure.

Hydropathy, The Water Cure

The science of hydropathy, or the water cure, developed as one of the several heretical therapeutic systems that arose to offer alternatives to heroic treatment. Water therapy is based on the reasonable belief that water is the natural sustainer of life and therefore possesses varied and powerful curative properties. Water therapy has a long and interesting history, but here it is convenient to say that nineteenth century hydropathy began with a medically untrained Austrian named Vincent Priessnitz, who developed the essentials of the system while treating himself for, and recovering fully from the effects of what doctors had deemed an "incurable" accident.

In 1826 Priessnitz opened a water cure establishment at Grafenberg in the mountains of Silesia. It was an immediate success and, known as the "Water University," became a model for many similar establishments in Europe and  America.

The Priessnitz treatment, which centered on water, air, exercise, and diet, was quickly acclaimed for its effectiveness. Priessnitz' success was explained by Susan Cayleff:  

"Retrospectively, his success stemmed from removing his patients from the stresses  and excesses that had often induced their illnesses, providing a pleasant communal setting, implementing diet and exercise regimens that strengthened the body, ceasing heroic therapeutics, letting nature help right what was reversible, involving patients in their own cure through habit reformation, and applying the mystical healing powers attributed to Priessnitz' personality."

The water cure centers stressed plenty of rest, moderate living in all respects, outdoor exercise, a spare and wholesome, often vegetarian diet, avoidance of drugs and invasive medical treatments, and the internal and external use of pure water as a purifying and curative agent. Their success, especially when compared with heroic treatment, would seem inevitable.      

Hydropathy spread quickly in America. According to one account, 213 cure centers were established between 1843 and 1900. Although most treated both sexes, the centers were especially popular with women; and women, who had long been denied access to the "regular" medical field, not only gained acceptance but took the lead as water-cure physicians.

The advancement of women as health practitioners was strongly advocated by the very influential Water Cure Journal,  a publication that from 1845 through the 1850s promoted hydropathy as well as the related issues of temperance, women's rights, and dress and medical reform. The Journal also proclaimed gynecological medicine to be hydropathy's main concern.  In an age of exaggerated modesty, the Journal addressed such forbidden topics as abortion, the frequency of sexual intercourse, masturbation, and barrenness.  "In all these matters," Kathryn Kish Sklar writes, "hydropathy lived up to its claim to be the friend of nineteenth-century women. Its sympathy for the special medical problems of women stood in stark contrast to the hostility and indifference characteristic of traditional contemporary medicine."

Hydropathy presented a totally fresh approach to childbirth, denying that it was a disease, as the allopaths seemed to believe,  or that it was of necessity excruciatingly painful because it was God's punishment for Eve's sin, as many believed. Water curists taught that excessive pain in childbirth was unnatural and unnecessary--the result of poor health. They stressed extensive exercise and proper diet during pregnancy and the relaxing effects of free movement and warm-water baths during labor. Perhaps the most startling result of hydropathic parturition was that women found they could be up and about a few days after delivery. With the scientific management of allopathy, two months of invalidism after delivery was not uncommon.

The main message of the water-cure centers to women, though, was the revolutionary premise that "a woman's body belonged to herself--not to her doctor, not to her children, and not to her husband."

The cures themselves involved a regulated, wholesome lifestyle and the liberal use of water both internally and externally. Priessnitz urged patients to drink 20 to 30 glasses of water per day to induce internal cleaning, and no other beverage was permitted. A variety of bathing techniques were used to promote general cleansing and to address specific problems. The most commonly used treatment was the wet-sheet pack. In this "bath, " the patient was wrapped in a mummy-like encasement consisting of a sheet dipped in cold water and four blankets. Additional covers were added until the patient perspired freely. The patient was then removed from the wrapping and plunged into a cold bath. A doctor described the therapeutic effect as follows:  

When the pure water of the wet sheet came into contact with the skin the impure water of the blood on the inside of the skin passed through the skin into the water of the wet sheet while pure water of the wet sheet passed through the skin to supply the place of the impure water.  An interchange took place.

From the patient's viewpoint, the wetsheet wrap was less scientific. Here's a poem written by a patient named Carrie May at the Saratoga Water-Cure in 1857:

First they wrap you closely
In a dripping sheet.
A bottle of hot water
Is then placed at your feet:

Blanket after blanket
Wrap around your form,
Comfortables in plenty,
Keep you nicely warm: . . .

Acting like an opiate,
 Easing all your pain,
Calming down your bounding pulse,
Cooling off your brain.

Puts you in a slumber,
Gives you dreams of bliss,
 Naught is any Treatment
 Is so nice as this. . .

Whatever the curative effects, the "dreams of bliss" described by Carrie May sound a lot better than having your blood drained by leeches or lancet.

The water-cure centers had a profound effect on American health and American thinking. They served as rallying points for many divergent ideas--from women's rights and dress reform to dietary and hygienic instruction. The people involved with the cures were for the most part far ahead of their time.

Water-cure doctors, for example, consistently stressed the importance of a spare, meat-free diet. They were forerunners, with hygienists like Sylvester Graham (the man Graham Crackers were named after), of the gradual but steady rise of vegetarianism. Similarly, the water Purists' successes with drug-free, noninvasive treatment have certainly opened doors in the public mind for the gentler and increasingly popular "alternative" therapies of today. Above all, the hydropathists reminded us of the inseparable relationship that exists between good health and pure water.

Every age considers itself the peak of civilization and loves to point a finger at its ancestors' follies. From our vantage point, heroic medicine's reliance on bloodletting seems naive and outrageous.

We should not forget that bloodletting was not a medical fad but the dominant medical strategy for many years. Many current medical practices, even some that are strongly established as medical tradition, will seem equally absurd to future generations. Certainly the aggressive tactics of modern cancer therapy will be the shame of our age. The shame lies not only in the total failure of the much touted "War on Cancer" (which the medical establishment will continue to wage as long as we are gullible enough to pay for it so lavishly), but equally in the boldfaced suppression of successful alternative therapies. For example, the FDA persecution of Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, whose antineoplaston therapy has proven to be not only highly effective but also totally free of the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation, is a black page in our history. That one must travel to Mexico to receive the well-documented advantages of the totally natural and harmless Gerson therapy is equally shameful. Dr. Julian Whitaker, editor of Health & Healing  newsletter and a practicing physician, avoids cancer treatment because of the political climate. He writes:

Given our dismal track record in treating cancer, you'd think that the medical establishment would be open to alternatives. However, it is exactly the opposite. Cancer generates billions of dollars, and the financial interests involved work tirelessly to influence government to outlaw alternatives and eliminate your choice. In the state of California, as well as others, it is illegal to treat cancer with anything but surgery, radiation or chemotherapy!

I do not, as a rule, treat cancer patients. My reasons for this are very simple. I do not live in Mexico, and I do not want to go to jail. If the environment was less oppressive, I would open the doors for cancer, and regardless of what I did, I'm convinced that it would be at least as successful as what is being done now. . .

I look upon cancer in the same way that I look upon heart disease, arthritis, high blood pressure, and even obesity, for that matter, in that by dramatically strengthening the body's immune system through diet, nutritional supplements, and exercise, the body can rid itself of the cancer, just as it does other degenerative diseases. Consequently, I wouldn't have chemotherapy and radiation because I'm not interested in therapies that cripple the immune system, and, in my opinion, virtually insure failure for the majority of cancer patients.

(Of incidental interest in the context of this article, recent issues of Health & Healing have presented  strong evidence that ailments from asthma to arthritic and low-back pain conditions can often be effectively corrected simply by increasing one's intake of pure water.)

Other customs that will certainly earn  us the derision of future generations    include our childishly naive belief in vaccination  a truly silly idea when you look at it squarely, apart from the hype and propaganda that government and the medical establishment spew out daily in its support. Equally outrageous, and equally tragic, is modern medicine's adoption of the religious ritual of circumcision as a medical treatment simply because it is profitable. It will be a happy day for men when circumcision finds its final resting place on the scrap heap of medical bad ideas.

A single scrap heap will not be large  enough to hold the medical atrocities against women. Certainly the problems of childbirth have not diminished with modern medical management of pregnancy, and the "regulars"  continue to wage war against  midwives.  As Dr. Robert Mendelsohn pointed out in Confessions of a Medical Heretic, the Church of Modern Medicine  still views women as second-class creatures. Pregnancy is still treated as if it  were a disease. The bag of tricks has new gadgets, but the result is the same. Dr. Mendelsohn writes:

If you're pregnant, you go to the doctor and he treats you as if you're sick. Childbirth is a nine-month disease which  must be treated, so you're sold on intravenous fluid bags, fetal monitors a host of drugs, the totally unnecessary episiotomy, and--the top of the line product--the caesarean birth!

The U.S. now ranks second only to Brazil in the percentage of Caesarean births. Our Caesarean birth rate grew from 5% in 1962 to 23% in 1992. That's progress.

From: purewatergazette.net

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