Holistic Medicine In The Nineteenth Century.

The Thomsonian in Figure is extending a fraternal helping hand to the weak and harried patient, whereas the MD appears to be restraining him, even pushing the struggling man deeper into the slough of sickness and death. The Thomsonian practitioner's show of caring for his patient as a person is an expression of a holistic orientation—treat the whole patient and treat him as a unique human being. This cartoon shows holistic orientation nearly a century and a half before the word holistic came into vogue. Homeopathy went even farther, giving consideration to a patient's every little complaint, mental as well as physical, in the search for just the right drug to duplicate the sick person's full array of symptoms. Holism was exhibited in the teachings of other alternative schools of practice as well.

From the beginning, practitioners of complementary medicine have claimed superior relations with patients, sometimes offending conventional physicians with an air of “holisticer than thou” condescension.The holism of nineteenth-century alternative medicine, however, went well beyond the basic principle of paying heed to the emotional and spiritual side of patients. Today's definition of holistic has been expanded from “treatment of the whole patient” to include an emphasis on motivating patients to assume some responsibility for and participation in their care and recovery. Likewise, from its inception, alternative medicine aimed to give patients the power to help themselves. Thomsonianism took self-help most seriously, actually selling Family Right Certificates that gave purchasers the legal right to prescribe for and treat themselves botanically: “Every man his own physician” was the Thomsonian motto.

But homeopaths encouraged people to be their own physicians, too, selling domestic kits of the most useful remedies, complete with instructions on how to use them for self-care; hydropaths published manuals of health advice and home water treatments; and in the early twentieth century, naturopaths also produced an extensive body of popular literature promoting a wide array of natural remedies for home use.

Our contemporary interpretation of holism has also embraced lifestyle regulation and the promotion of wellness as a major element of complementary care. This orientation, it can be argued, stems from American hydropathy in the 1850s, which drew on an earlier popular health reform movement to graft behaviors, such as abstinence from alcohol and tobacco, vegetarianism, regular exercise, fresh air, and sexual restraint, onto the original system of various cold water baths. The resulting hybrid was known as hygeio-therapy, a method that “restores the sick to health by the means which preserve health in well persons” .

The hygeio-therapeutic tradition was preserved and carried on to the present by naturopathic medicine.Other features of nineteenth-century alternative medicine have persisted to the present, such as objection to the medicalization of pregnancy and labor. Enough has been said, however, to make it clear that nineteenth-century alternative practitioners looked upon the allopaths as the true irregulars in medicine