Origins Of Alternative Medicine.

I am stating only what everybody knows to be true, when I say that the general confidence which has heretofore existed in the science and art of medicine ... has within the last few years been violently shaken and disturbed, and is now greatly lessened and impaired. The hold which medicine has so long had upon the popular mind is loosened; there is a widespread skepticism as to its power of curing diseases, and men are everywhere to be found who deny its pretensions as a science, and reject the benefits and blessings which it proffers them as an art.

This complaint sounds modern enough, something that might have appeared in last week's JAMA. In fact, it was issued in 1848. At that time (as with today), the clearest sign of erosion of public confidence in allopathic medicine was the rapid growth over the preceding two decades of rival healing systems that claimed to be safer and more effective than conventional medicine. Those systems began to appear at the turn of the century, largely as protests against the bleeding, purging, and other heroic measures practiced by physicians of the day; however, there were more reasons for revolt than dissatisfaction with standard therapies. There had been alternatives to conventional methods of cure before the 1800s: both folk medicine and quackery had been options for centuries. But the different versions of alternative medicine, as they were derisively labelled even through the early decades of the twentieth century, were a distinct departure. They were actual systems of care, the practitioners of each being bound together not just by their opposition to the medical establishment, but also by shared theoretical precepts and therapeutic regimens: by membership in local, state, even national societies and by publication of their own journals and operation of their own schools. Essentially, they were professionalized. And by the end of the 1840s, this medical counterculture had cornered roughly 10% of the health care market