IN NO OTHER field have pseudo-scientists flourished as prominently as in the field of medicine. It is not hard to understand why. In the first place, a medical quack—if he presents an impressive façade—can usually make a great deal of money. In the second place, if he is sincere, or partly sincere, the healing successes he is almost sure to achieve will greatly bolster his delusions. In some cases, of course, the doctor is an out-and-out charlatan. In other cases he is as sincere as was Piazzi Smyth about the Great Pyramid. In still other cases, there is that baffling mixture of sincerity and skullduggery which so often is found within a crackpot’s brain.
There are two great secrets of the quack’s success. One is the fact that many human ills, including some of the severest, will run their course and vanish without treatment of any sort. Suppose, for example, Mrs. Smith is unable to get rid of an annoying cold. She decides to try a new doctor she has heard about, whose methods are unorthodox, but who has been strongly recommended. The doctor proves to be a distinguished-looking man who talks with great authority about his work. Diplomas from several medical schools are on the wall, and he is apt to have a number of letters after his name. (Mrs. Smith doesn’t know that these degrees were given by small schools no longer in existence, some of which the doctor himself may have founded.)
Mrs. Smith decides she has nothing to lose. In addition, she is lonely and enjoys talking to doctors about her troubles. So she takes off her shoes and stockings and lets the doctor shine infra-red light on her feet for ten minutes. It costs only five dollars, but of course she has to return for two or three additional treatments. After a week or so her cold has vanished. Incredible as it may seem, Mrs. Smith is now firmly persuaded that the infra-red light is responsible for the cure. She becomes one of the doctor’s loyal boosters. Before the year is over, he has milked several hundred dollars from her bank account.
Charles Fort summed it all up succinctly. “Eclipses occur, and savages are frightened. The medicine men wave wands—the sun is cured—they did it.” Half the successes of medical quacks are exactly of this sort.
The other half are due to the fact that many of life’s ills are wholly or in part psychosomatic. If a patient with such complaints has faith in a doctor, regardless of how bizarre the doctor’s methods may be, he often will be miraculously cured. And, of course, the larger the following the doctor has, the more the patient’s faith is augmented. Moreover, if dozens of Mrs. Smith’s friends are chattering about infra-red healing, the stronger will be her desire to become part of this trend—an initiate who can talk about her experiences with the new type of treatment. When everyone is seeing flying saucers, you naturally would like to see one yourself. If everyone is getting cured by infra-red, you want to be cured the same way. Regardless of what her more enlightened friends, or even the family doctor, may tell her, Mrs. Smith has one simple and irrefutable answer—it works.
And work it does. Every time the federal government drags a quack into court, he has no trouble at all finding scores of people willing to testify about miraculous cures. Just as every faith-healing revivalist, no matter how strange his doctrines, will have astonishing platform successes, so every modern witch doctor, no matter how preposterous his rituals, will always find patients he can heal.
In this chapter we shall glance at four outstanding medical cults, all of them founded by pseudo-scientists, which have won many millions of disciples in the United States. It will be followed by a survey of individuals whose views did not develop into “schools,” a section on food fads, and finally a chapter on Dr. Bates and his methods of eye training.
The first medical cult of any importance in America—homeopathy —had its origin in the mind of a German doctor, Samuel Christian Hahnemann. He published his great opus, The Organon, in 1810. According to Hahnemann, there is a “Law of Similia” which states that “like cures like.” In longer words, a drug will cure a disease if that same drug, taken by a healthy person, will produce symptoms similar to those of the disease.
Hahnemann and his followers set about “proving,” as they called it, as many new remedies as possible. This involves giving the compound to a healthy person, in increasing amounts, until symptoms appear. The symptoms are then compared with those of known ailments, and if similar, the drug is deemed of value in treating that ailment. Although certain diseases have characteristic symptoms, and hence call for specific medication, actually each individual is considered unique and treated in terms of whatever complex of symptoms are found, regardless of the name of the disease.
Homeopathic remedies are administered in inconceivably small doses. It was Hahnemann’s conviction that the more minute the dose, the more potent. Compounds are frequently diluted to one decillionth (i.e., a millionth of a millionth of a millionth, etc., up to ten of these millionths) of a single grain. One homeopath proved 1,349 symptoms from a dose of one decillionth of a grain of common table salt. Such dilution is like letting a drop of medicine fall into the Pacific, mixing thoroughly, then taking a spoonful. Hahnemann believed that as the drug became less “material” it gained “spiritual” curative powers, and in many cases recommended diluting until not a single molecule of the original substance remained! This produced remedies of extremely high potency. Moreover, the doctor believed, the full effect of such medicine may not be manifested until thirty days after being taken. In some cases, curative powers persist until the fiftieth day. Hahnemann also taught that seven-eighths of all chronic diseases were variations of psora, more commonly called the itch. This aspect of his views, however, was quickly discarded by his followers.1
Wrangling among homeopaths over the exact nature of the “homeopathic dose” soon split the movement into two factions—the purists who followed Hahnemann, and the “low potency” men who thought it of value to preserve at least some of the original compound, even though only a few molecules. Modern purists have discarded Hahnemann’s “spiritual” effects for mysterious “radiations” which remain after the material substance has vanished, and which have a physical basis not yet understood. Just as the Law of Similia has an analogy in the vaccination principle, so the doctrine of the infinitesimal dose has a slight factual basis—but only in reference to a small number of drugs. The homeopathic error was to take both these limited truths, exaggerate them to the point of absurdity, and apply them universally to all medicines.
The materia medica of homeopathy is understandably much larger than that of “allopathy” (a homeopathic term, now obsolete, for orthodox medicine). About 3,000 distinctly different drugs have been “proved,” and new ones are still being added. The Foundation for Homeopathic Research, headed by Dr. William Gutman, of New York City, recently “proved” that the metal cadmium, in a highly diluted dose, cured a certain type of severe migraine.
Some idea of the worth of homeopathic medicines may be gathered from the fact that one of them (no longer used) was called lachryma filia, and consisted of tears from a weeping young girl. Other curious remedies are made from such substances as powdered starfish (asterias rubens), skunk secretion (mephitis), crushed live bedbugs (cimex lectularius), powdered anthracite coal, powdered oyster shells, and uric acid (acidum uricum) obtained from human urine or snake excrement. Most homeopathic medicines are obtained from plants, though in recent years there has been a trend toward proving metallic compounds. Any substance, organic or inorganic, is a potential homeopathic drug. A doctor announces that he has proved a new medicine, colleagues try it out, patients get well, and so a new remedy is added to the materia medica. Research by reliable pharmacologists has shown that all these weird drugs, in the diluted form in which they are given, are entirely harmless—producing neither symptoms nor cures (except, of course, psychosomatic ones).
As might be expected, however, millions of people took these infinitesimal doses of valueless drugs and were immensely benefited. Of course a few died, but then even allopaths can’t save all their patients. The cult spread rapidly over Europe in the 1820’s, reached England and America in the 1840’s, and came to its pinnacle of success about 1880 in the United States. Emerson and William Cullen Bryant were believers, but Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his book Homeopathy and Kindred Delusions, 1842, delivered one of the earliest and most effective blasts against the movement. By 1900 there were twenty-two homeopathic colleges in the nation, an immense literature, and dozens of periodicals. A huge monument to Hahnemann was erected on Scott Circle, in Washington, D.C., where it stands to this day.
From 1900 on, the movement declined. One by one the American schools faded away. Some of the more prosperous—like New York Medical College, Manhattan, and the Hahnemann Medical College, Philadelphia—kept diluting the amount of homeopathy in the curriculum until they evolved into potent, first-rate medical schools. Today there are no homeopathic colleges in the States, though a few schools, like the two just cited, offer graduate courses in the subject. Several thousand doctors still consider themselves homeopaths, however, with Philadelphia leading in the number of practitioners. All these men have standard M.D.’s, and in matters of diagnosis, surgery, etc., make full use of orthodox medical science. It is only in the giving of drugs that they call upon the homeopathic tradition; though even here, especially in emergencies, they occasionally resort to allopathic remedies. The homeopathic drugs are obtained from special pharmacies which flourish in several large cities. The Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy, published in Philadelphia, is the cult’s leading periodical. The current issue at the time of writing (March, 1952) features an article on medicines made from various types of spider webs and poisons.
In the United States, homeopathy is still declining, although a number of prominent people, like Marlene Dietrich (who also believes in astrology), are enthusiastic patrons. In Europe, on the other hand, there has been a marked revival since the war, especially in Germany and France. In France it is in competition among faddists with a recent rebirth of interest in “acupuncture,” the ancient Chinese art of curing ills by puncturing the body at various spots with gold and silver needles. Homeopathy continues to be respectable in England, where it is traditional for the Royal Family to maintain a homeopath as family physician, and where the Royal Homeopathic Hospital of London is one of the finest in the world. The cult has always been popular among the nobility of England and the Continent. India and South America are other areas where the movement is flourishing.
The Law of Similia has been distorted in many weird ways by quacks. Thirty years ago Dr. Loyal D. Rogers, of Chicago, widely advertised his methods under the slogan “without use of drugs or bugs.” Rogers’ medicine was obtained by “attenuating, hemolizing, incubating and potentizing” a few drops of the patient’s blood. His book Auto-hemic Therapy was published in 1916. In New York City, Dr. Charles H. Duncan went a step further. His Autotherapy, 1918, explains how he cured boils by giving the patient an extract from the boil, tuberculosis by an extract from the sputum, dysentery by injecting a fluid obtained by filtering the excretions, and so on.
Naturopathy, like homeopathy, is a world-wide medical cult which had its origin in Europe. Unlike homeopathy, however, it has no single founder. It simply grew. In essence, it is a complete reliance on “nature” for healing. Medicine and surgery are used as little as possible or not at all. As might be expected, hundreds of strange methods of therapy clustered about the movement, so it is not easy to say exactly what the tenets of naturopathy are.
The earliest naturopaths were European doctors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Vincenz Priesnitz and Father Sebastian Kneipp were pioneers of hydrotherapy (water cures). Adolph Just’s Return to Nature recommended sleeping on bare ground, walking barefooted on wet lawns and sand, and using clay compresses. Louis Kuhne’s The New Science of Healing opposed all drugs, recommending instead the use of steam baths, sunlight, a vegetarian diet, and whole wheat bread. Heinrich Lahmann was against putting table salt on foods and drinking water at mealtimes. Antoine Bechamp defended the view that disease produces bacteria rather than the other way around.
An early pioneer of naturopathy in the United States was John H. Kellogg, a Seventh Day Adventist who founded the Battle Creek Sanitarium.2 He was responsible for the great importance nature therapy plays in present Adventist beliefs. Another American, Henry Lindlahr, made the “discovery” that disease, instead of being the result of invasion of the body by harmful microbes, was really the body’s natural way of healing something. Finally, there was Benedict Lust, a disciple of Father Kneipp, who perhaps should be regarded as the most important early figure in American naturopathy. He established a school in New York, resort spots in Butler, New Jersey and Tangerine, Florida, wrote many books, edited several magazines (one of which, Nature’s Path, in the hands of Lust’s descendants is still going lustily), and managed to get himself arrested about sixteen times in battles against the “drug trusts.” His advertisements often appeared in Bernarr Macfadden’s health magazines.
Macfadden himself was a great promoter of naturopathy. His monumental five-volume Encyclopedia of Physical Culture, 1912 (subtitled A work of reference, providing complete instructions for the cure of all diseases through physcultopathy), is one of the greatest of all pseudo-medical works. Volume 4 contains 572 pages devoted to an alphabetical listing of all major diseases—including Bright’s disease, polio, cancer, etc.—together with Macfadden’s methods of home treatment. The treatments involve, in most cases, special diets, exercises, and water therapy. Cancer, for instance, is treated with a fast, followed by exercises and a “vitality building regimen.” There is no suggestion that the patient should consult a physician. In fact there is a “Word of Warning” at the beginning of the section which states, “It positively must be remembered that the methods recommended in this work cannot be combined with the internal use of drugs or medicine. An attempt to use drugs while pursuing the treatments here advocated may lead to very serious results, and is to be depended upon under no circumstances.”
In fairness to Macfadden it should be said that in later years he has become less extreme in his medical opinions. But not much so.3 He is firmly convinced, for example, that cancer can be cured by a diet of nothing but grapes, and a few years ago offered $10,000 to anyone who could prove it wasn’t so. (The theory that a grape diet can cure all kinds of ailments has long been popular in grape growing areas of Europe, and has a literature as extensive as the literature extolling the “virtues” of goat’s milk.)
Hundreds of schools calling themselves naturopathic sprang up here and there in the early years of the century. They were as frowsy as could be imagined. Most of them consisted of a few rooms in a walk-up apartment, with classes at night, and gave handsomely engraved diplomas at the close of brief instruction periods. Sometimes several diplomas were given, bearing the names of different schools, all using the same premises and teaching the student simultaneously. When framed, they made an impressive-looking wall for the graduate’s office. There was little unity of beliefs behind these schools. In addition to their strange diets, massages, and water cures, dozens of curious little crackpot movements found their way into the curriculum. We shall glance briefly at two of them—iridiagnosis and zone therapy.
Iridiagnosis is the diagnosis of ills from the appearance of the iris of the eye.4 This great science was discovered by Ignatz Peczely, a Budapest doctor, who published a book about it in 1880. The art found an immediate response among homeopaths in Germany and Sweden, and was introduced into the United States by Henry E. Lahn, who wrote the first book in English on the subject in 1904. Naturopath Henry Lindlahr, a pupil of Lahn’s, produced a definitive study, Iridiagnosis and other Diagnostic Methods, in 1917, although a few more recent works have appeared.
According to Lindlahr, Dr. Peczely discovered the new science at the age of ten when he caught an owl and accidentally broke the bird’s foot. “Gazing straight into the owl’s large, bright eyes,” writes Lindlahr, “he noticed at the moment when the bone snapped, the appearance of a black spot in the lower central region of the iris, which area he later found to correspond to the location of the broken leg.” Young Ignatz kept the owl as a pet. As the leg healed, the black spot developed a white border, indicating the formation of scar tissue in the bone.
According to iridiagnosticians, the iris is divided into about forty zones which run clockwise in one eye, counterclockwise in the other. The zones connect by nerve filaments to various parts of the body, much in the manner that chiropractic theory connects the body to parts of the spine Spots on the iris are called “lesions.” They indicate malfunctioning of the corresponding body part. J. Haskell Kritzer, in his Textbook of Iridiagnosis, fifth edition, 1921, carefully explains how to recognize artificial eyes, thus avoiding the embarrassment of basing a lengthy diagnosis on them.
Anyone who thinks no medical movement could be more insane than iridiagnosis, is much mistaken. Zone therapy is even worse. This point of view assumes that the body is divided vertically into exactly ten zones, five on each side of the body, and each zone terminating in an individual finger and toe. Exactly how the parts of each zone are connected is one of the mysteries of this cult, since the ten divisions completely ignore the nerve and blood vessel systems. Zone therapists suspected that some hitherto undiscovered submicroscopic network was involved.
Without going into detail, the zone therapists believed that almost every type of body pain could be checked, and in many cases the cause of the pain removed, by putting pressure on the proper finger or toe, or some other part of the affected zone. This pressure was applied by various means—chiefly rubber bands (worn on a finger or toe until it turned blue), spring clothes pins, or the teeth of a metal comb pressed into the flesh.
The inventor of zone therapy was Dr. William H. Fitzgerald, a graduate of the University of Vermont, and for many years the senior nose and throat surgeon of St. Francis Hospital, Hartford, Connecticut. His associate, Dr. Edwin F. Bowers, first introduced the new science in a series of popular articles in Everybody’s Magazine, where they were enthusiastically endorsed by the editor, the late Bruce Barton. Later, in 1917, Fitzgerald and Bowers collaborated on a book titled Zone Therapy. Many subsequent books appeared by other authors, of which the most notable was Zone Therapy, by Benedict Lust, the father of American naturopathy.
Lust’s book describes how to treat most of the common ills, including cancer, polio, and appendicitis. Goiter requires pressure on the first and second fingers, but if “the goiter is very extensive, reaching over into the fourth zone, it may be necessary to include the ring finger. . . .” Eye pains and disorders also call for pressure on first and second fingers, but deafness requires a squeezing of the ring finger or the third toe. “One of the most effective means of treating partial deafness,” Lust writes, “is to clamp a spring clothes pin on the tip of the third finger, on the side involved in the ear trouble.”
Nausea is relieved by pressing a metal comb against the backs of both hands, and childbirth is rendered painless if the mother clasps a comb in each hand so she can press the tips of all fingers against the teeth. “Also,” Lust adds, “rubber bands around the great toe and the second toe afford a gratifying help.” For dentists, zone therapy is invaluable. No need to use anesthetics—merely attach tight rubber bands to whatever fingers relate to the zone including the tooth, and the tooth becomes insensitive to pain.
For falling hair, Lust recommends a method which he correctly describes as “simplicity itself.” It consists of “rubbing the fingernails of both hands briskly one against the other in a lateral motion, for three or four minutes at a time, at intervals throughout the day. This stimulates nutrition in all the zones, and brings about a better circulation in the entire body, which naturally is reflected in the circulation of the scalp itself.”
The tongue, throat, and roof of the mouth also have the tenfold division, hence many therapeutic measures involve pressure in these regions. Headaches, for instance, are cured by pressing the thumb against the roof of the mouth. Menstruation difficulties are relieved by pressures on certain parts of the tongue. Whooping cough is cured in three to five minutes by pressing a certain spot on the back of the throat. “In an experiment with several hundred cases of whooping cough,” wrote Fitzgerald and Bowers, “we have not yet seen a failure from the proper application of zone therapy.”
It seems inconceivable that this cult would attract a following, nevertheless hundreds of naturopaths took it seriously and reported astonishing results. Books dealing with the art are filled with case histories of patients who found immediate relief from intense pain, and eventually a complete recovery from long-standing and serious ailments.
Today, the shrewder schools of naturopathy have abandoned iridiagnosis, zone therapy, and other wilder aspects of the movement, but all of them agree that the chief cause of disease is not bacteria from outside but a violation of natural laws of living. And all of them believe that drugs are harmful. Dr. Robert A. Wood, a Chicago naturopath and former president of the American Naturopathic Association of Illinois, expresses the creed as follows:
Naturopaths do not use drugs of any kind, nor do they use inorganic substances that may injure the system. Instead, they rely on vitamins, minerals, chlorophyll, vegetable and fruit juices, raw cow’s milk, and a balanced diet. With all diseases, the allopath suppresses but does not cure. His sole aim is to kill pain, to give temporary relief. He uses antipyretics to suppress all fevers—quinine, aspirin, salicylate, and other coal-tar products which suppress the fever, but leave the toxins which cause the fever inside the system. The naturopath aids the fever, however, or reduces it physiologically with natural methods—distilled water with lemon juice; lots of fresh, raw fruit juices; wrapping the body in hot, wet bath towels; and last, but not least, the greatest fever reducer of all—colonic irrigation.”
Naturopaths are fond of using enemas to rid the body of poisons. Apparently they feel it is quite “natural” to insert a tube into the rectum and pour large quantities of water into the lower intestines. On the other hand, it is “unnatural” to take a drug which in many cases is merely a compound found in nature, but purified so its effects are stronger.
More than 85 per cent of all cases of appendicitis, according to Dr. Wood, can be relieved by fasting for a short period, then taking a cold-water enema every day for four days, followed by a special diet. The use of drugs to cure syphilis, he says, not only does not cure, but also causes locomotor ataxia. In an article in the American Mercury, May, 1950 (from which the above views and quotations are taken), he boasts of having cured a man of sixty-five who contracted syphilis at the age of sixteen and had not been treated since. “I used no mercury, nor any other allopathic ‘guesswork’ remedies,” he states.
On another occasion, Dr. Wood went to work on a boy of five who suffered from tuberculosis of the pelvic bone. The disease had eaten two holes through the bone. “With the exception of the tuberculosis holes,” Dr. Wood writes, “a slight spinal curvature, and the fact that one leg had become shorter than the other, he was in fairly good condition. His diet was given priority, with natural foods supplemented by natural calcium. Sitz baths, sun baths, cold sprays, hot packs, infra-red, vibrations, exercise, manipulations, colonic irrigations, and other natural remedies were used. The last X-rays showed the condition completely healed.”
The naturopath’s opposition to the bacterial theory of disease is, of course, shared by many religious groups. Christian Science, New Thought, and Unity head the list, not to forget Jewish Science, founded in 1922 by Rabbi Morris Lichtenstein, of New York City. He is the author of numerous works on the subject, including Jewish Science and Health, a fair imitation of Mrs. Eddy’s famous text. Among prominent individuals who opposed the germ theory, George Bernard Shaw was perhaps the most notable. In one of his last books, Everybody’s Political What’s What, 1944, you will find a witty defense of naturopathy. Drugs merely suppress symptoms, he writes. The disease usually breaks out again unless the person is healthy enough to let nature cure him in spite of the drugs. Like Antoine Bechamp, a French chemist and contemporary of Pasteur, Shaw rejects the theory that diseases are caused by air-borne germs. Germs —according to Bechamp, Shaw, and most of the men mentioned in this chapter—are the products of disease. They develop within ailing body cells. Once developed, however, they are infectious. Shaw was convinced that most epidemics were traceable to laundries where microbes from a sick person’s handkerchiefs and clothing would infect the clothes of others. As might be expected, Shaw was also a lifelong opponent of vaccination, vivisection, the eating of meat, Caeserean operations, and the removal of the tonsils and appendix.5
Eugene Debs, the famous Socialist labor leader, died in the Lindlahr Naturopathic Sanitorium, Elmhurst, Illinois. Morris Fishbein, in his Fads and Quackery in Healing, 1932 (from which much of this chapter is drawn), tells the tragic story. Debs had recently been released from prison, and finding himself ailing, had gone to the sanitorium for a rest. One day he visited Carl Sandburg, who lived nearby, and on his way back lapsed into unconsciousness. After two days of treatment at the sanitorium, Debs’ brother asked Dr. Fishbein to check on the labor leader’s condition. Fishbein found Debs in a coma, the pupil of one eye dilated and the other contracted—a fact not noticed by the staff, and which indicated a brain disturbance. His body was badly dehydrated. Being unconscious, he had not asked for a drink in two days, and so no one had given him one. He was suffering from malnutrition, having been on a fasting cure then being recommended by Bernarr Macfadden and Upton Sinclair. When Debs’ heart began to falter, the “doctors” administered a nature remedy—totally worthless—made from cactus. After this failed, they tried electric treatment, badly burning Debs’ skin. In final desperation, they made a crude attempt to inject digitalis, a drug which properly administered might have had beneficial effects. But Debs was beyond help and died the following day. His treatment was typical, Fishbein reports, of naturopathic methods.
It is difficult to say how many naturopaths are operating in the United States today—probably not more than a few thousand. Several health magazines follow the naturopathic line, and dozens of mail order pharmacies continue to supply “natural” remedies in the form of mineral salts, vitamin compounds, yeast foods, herb products, and so on. Many of these firms operate in a semi-undercover fashion, blaming their “persecution” on the American Medical Association and the “drug cartels.”
It is equally difficult to estimate how much harm naturopaths do. Their opposition to vaccination, fortunately, has not influenced enough people to prevent the astounding health gains it has made in recent years. Another decade, and smallpox, diphtheria, and whooping cough may be completely wiped out as native diseases. Tens of thousands used to die annually of these preventable scourges. The return to raw milk would bring with it new epidemics of scarlet fever, typhoid, tuberculosis, and other disease against which pasteurization has made unbelievable strides. Rejection of sulfa drugs and penicillin (which attack germs, not symptoms) has probably caused the deaths of untold numbers of naturopathic patients for whom colonic irrigations caused only harm.
Perhaps the best insight into the medical knowledge of a naturopath can be gained from the following statement by Dr. Wood in a letter to the American Mercury, August, 1950: “If atmospheric bacteria bring about disease as claimed by the medical profession, then why is it millions of Indians . . . bathe daily in the filthy Ganges river, a river teeming with billions of germs? . . . To my knowledge, there has never been a serious epidemic outbreak of any disease.” To which Dr. Joseph Wassersug politely replied by pointing out that the death rate from infectious diseases in India is higher than almost anywhere else in the world, and that deadly epidemics of cholera, in some cases great enough to become world-wide, have been directly traced to bathing festivals in the Ganges. There is no indication, however, that this newly gained knowledge of India has induced naturopaths to stop flushing colons and pocketbooks.
A number of cults have been built around an exaggerated notion of the effects of bad posture and poor muscular co-ordination on health, and although they are not strictly part of the naturopathy movement, this is an appropriate spot to mention them. The late philosopher John Dewey, who lived to the age of ninety-two, always attributed his longevity to his practice of the highly dubious theories of a self-educated Australian named Frederick Matthias Alexander. Alexander was a professional reciter until his voice mysteriously failed him. After orthodox doctoring failed to help, he began to experiment on himself with the result that he regained his voice, and found he had developed an elaborate technique of sensory and muscular training. In 1904 he established a school in London, where he won many distinguished converts, including Aldous Huxley and the late Sir Stafford Cripps. The school was moved to Stow, Massachusetts, at the outbreak of the last world war, then back to England a few years later. At present, Alexander directs a school near Bexley, in Kent. He has written four books explaining his methods, three of which contain enthusiastic introductions by Dewey.6 A German system of posture and exercise, developed by Bess M. Mensendieck, also acquired a considerable vogue in this country during the thirties (see her work, The Mensendieck System of Functional Exercises, 1937, as well as the similar theories of Mabel E. Todd, The Thinking Body, 1937).
The belief that all sorts of human ills spring from an inability to relax properly also has a large literature and following. Edmund Jacobson’s Progressive Relaxation, 1929, is the most important reference to this point of view. It has been revived recently by a reissue of a more popular work of Jacobson’s, You Must Relax, 1934, and by Dr. David H. Fink’s Release From Nervous Tension, 1943. Thirty years ago a Chicago doctor named E. H. Pratt decided that an inability to relax certain openings of the body caused many common ailments. His practice of what he called “orificial therapy” apparently brought relief to thousands.
Osteopathy, America’s third great medical cult, was the brain-child of a medical illiterate named Andrew Taylor Still. Very little is known about Still’s life in spite of the fact that he published in his old age, at his own expense, a lengthy autobiography. It is a rambling, contradictory, egomaniacal work—one of the unintentionally most amusing autobiographies ever penned by a self-declared genius. It is difficult to understand how any osteopath with a sense of humor could read this book and remain in his profession. Almost all the biographical data has since been found false, although most osteopaths continue to accept the book as a valid account of the author’s career.
There is no evidence Still had any early medical education other than helping his father, a Methodist missionary, take care of ailing Shawnee Indians. He claimed to have been a cavalry officer for the northern army during the Civil War. A picture in his book shows him riding his faithful mule, brandishing a sword, and leading a battle charge on one occasion when a musket ball passed through his vest lapels. The picture is captioned Osteopathy in danger. Six illustrations are devoted to a dream allegory in which the author is severely butted by the Ram of Reason. His osteopathic school had been losing money and the ram was trying to butt some business sense into him. Another picture, in full color (when pseudo-scientists publish a book they spare no expense), shows a peacock with tail feathers spread. It is titled Professor Peacock. The text explains how we can learn from the bird’s feathers how God governs the body.
After a ten year gap in his later life, about which Still says nothing, he writes that “In June, 1874, I flung to the breeze the banner of osteopathy.” The Swedish massage movement was then popular, and it is likely that this gave him his basic idea, although Still attributes it to divine inspiration. The word osteopathy, which he coined, means literally “sick bones.” (He also invented the word “diplomate” for a graduate of his school, but osteopaths have not cared for the word.) It was Still’s theory that diseases are caused by a malfunctioning of the nerves or blood supply, in turn chiefly due to the dislocation of small bones in the spine. These dislocations are called “subluxations of the vertebrae.” Their pressure on nerves and blood vessels prevents the body from manufacturing its own curative agents. The osteopath’s job is to find these subluxations and “adjust” them, though what makes them stay adjusted remains an osteopathic mystery. Actually, subluxations are as elusive as the canals on Mars. Only believers are able to locate them. Other doctors consider them entirely mythical. In extremely rare cases the small bones of the spine may get out of place, but if they do, they cause almost none of the symptoms or ailments osteopaths say they cause.
In his autobiography Still records some astonishing cures brought about by spinal rubbing. In one case he grew hair three inches long, in a week, on a head completely bald. On another occasion, in Hannibal, Missouri, he “set 17 dislocated hips in one day.” The reader is not told how it happened that Hannibal, which had a population then of 7,000, had so many dislocated hips.
It was not until 1894 when Still, then sixty-six, founded his first school, at Kirksville, Missouri. At eighty-two he wrote the school’s first textbook. In it he reveals the methods of spinal manipulation by which he had been able to “cure” yellow fever, malaria, diphtheria, rickets, piles, diabetes, dandruff, constipation, and obesity. He never admitted the existence of germs. “I pay no attention to laboratory stories of micro-organisms,” he wrote. “We have but little time to spare in analyzing urine, blood lymph, or any other fluid substance of the body because we think life is too precious to dilly-dally in laboratory work. . . .”
It was Still’s considered opinion that he was “possibly the best anatomist now living.” One of the most fascinating pictures in his autobiography is one of Still seated under a tree in his back yard, studying an anatomical chart and dictating to his wife. The bones of a human arm are draped over one leg. Other parts of the skeleton are leaning against the tree and hanging from the trunk.
Much of the book is devoted to religious speculation, Still having been a convert to the Millerite movement (forerunner of Seventh Day Adventism), although he later went back to his original faith of Methodism.
Osteopathy made little headway abroad, but in the States it quickly blanketed the continent. It seems that every graduate of Still’s school wanted to open up his own college. Today there are about 11,000 practitioners. Outside of Los Angeles, where the concentration is greatest, they flourish best in small cities. As Dr. Fishbein points out, in a large city they meet too much resistance from a well-established medical profession, and in the small town they lack the knowledge to take care of emergencies. In small cities, however, they can operate quietly and catch patients with minor ills and psychosomatic ailments who perhaps benefit from the massage. Actually, a brisk walk or a warm bath would be even better for the circulation, but the back rub feels pleasant—especially for patients with repressed sexual longings (or homosexual if the practitioner is of the same sex).
Since Still’s day there has been considerable evolution of osteopathic doctrines as its doctors try, in Fishbein’s phrase, to enter orthodox medicine by the back door. They now massage other parts of the body than the spine, give water and electrical therapy, administer anesthetics, prescribe drugs, and even perform elementary surgery, like yanking tonsils or delivering babies. In recent years they have turned their attention toward mental ills. One osteopathic study has shown that schizophrenia is due to subluxations in the upper bones of the neck! The viewpoint of the more enlightened present-day osteopath is that medicine has a function, but does only half the job. Manipulation is still needed to restore the body’s “structural integrity.” In the six so-called “accredited” schools of osteopathy there are now four-year courses in basic medicine, and all but eight states permit the graduates to give drugs and perform surgery.
Chiropractic—the fourth and greatest of American medical follies —arose about twenty years after osteopathy, from which it borrowed heavily. Like the original osteopaths, its practitioners concentrate on adjusting spinal subluxations which they believe cause most human ills, and they share with the naturopaths a rejection of drugs and the germ theory of disease. Unlike osteopathy, it has shown small tendency to change. Today its some 20,000 practitioners (almost all of them in the United States) are about as scientific in their methods as the Chinese and French acupuncturists.
The founder—Daniel D. Palmer—was originally a grocer and fish peddler in Davenport, Iowa. In 1895 he discovered he could cure people by “animal magnetism,” so he closed his store and for ten years practiced magnetic healing. Then one day he made an even more momentous “discovery.” Here is an account of the event; as told by his son B. J. Palmer in a Wisconsin court:
Harvey Lillard came in thoroughly deaf. Father looked him over, and there was a great subluxation of the back. Harvey said he became deaf within two minutes after that popping occurred in his spine, and had been deaf for seventeen years. Father thought of this thing, which was that if something went wrong in the back and caused deafness, then reduction of this subluxation should cure it. The bump was adjusted, and within ten minutes Harvey regained his hearing.
That was “B. J.’s” account. Those who have studied the history of chiropractic, however, suspect it is legendary, and that “D. D.” probably picked up the notion of subluxations from the osteopaths. His textbook, The Science, Art, and Philosophy of Chiropractic, 1910, contains little original speculation. At any rate, there is no question that it was his son, B. J., who developed chiropractic into the thriving business it is today.
B. J., like many chiropractors, ended his formal education with the ninth grade. His school at Davenport, founded in 1895, originally gave only a two-week course. At present its period of training is eighteen months. Hundreds of other schools are scattered over the United States, differing widely in theories and methods. For example, B. J. taught that diphtheria came about by the subluxation of the sixth dorsal vertebra. But a textbook used by a college in Chicago says that diphtheria must be treated by manipulating the third, fifth, and seventh cervical vertebra, the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, seventh, tenth, and twelfth dorsals, and the fifth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh cranial nerves. The same textbook says that in treating scarlet fever “particular attention must be given to the second to fifth cervicals and the tenth to twelfth dorsals.” According to B. J., scarlet fever is due to subluxations between the sixth and twelfth dorsals.
If you are a devotee of chiropractic, here is a simple test you can make. Call on a practitioner, name a few symptoms, memorize carefully the exact spots where he finds subluxations, then leave on some pretext before he gives you a treatment. Go to a second chiropractor, name a different set of symptoms, and see if he finds the same spinal spots in need of adjustment. If he doesn’t, try a third chiropractor, and continue until you obtain duplicate diagnoses. This may be an expensive experiment, but it should prove illuminating.
The current Manhattan Red Book lists over 200 chiropractors (they are not licensed in New York) to about 80 osteopaths. One advertisement shows the familiar spinal chart with parts labeled to indicate the areas of the body they control. These charts have about the same relation to modern anatomy as a phrenological chart of head bumps bears to modern brain study. Palmer graduates usually identify themselves as such in the ads, and call attention to their neurocalometer service.
The neurocalometer is one of B. J.’s most lucrative inventions. It is an electrical device which allegedly makes a spinal diagnosis. The National Chiropractic Association, the cult’s leading organization, does not think much, however, of either Palmer or the neurocalometer. The N.C.A. publishes a magazine with a much larger circulation than B. J.’s, and they have not included the Palmer school on their list of “accredited” colleges.
Another chiropractic invention fills an entire room at the Palmer clinic. I am not sure exactly what it does, but its name is magnificent. It is called an electroencephaloneuromentimpograph.