In 1774, the leading American physician, Benjamin Rush (see Chapter 22), published a treatise on the importance of Native American remedies, and he later advised Lewis and Clark in 1803. Amazingly only one man died on the expedition, which implied that nature was a healthier place than Civilization. Charles Dickens described the unhealthy conditions of “civilized” areas in grim detail in his American Notes (1842). The “west cure, rest cure, and nature cures” became recommended means of recuperating from the illnesses of nineteenth-century civilization. This cure was used to good effect by future President Theodore Roosevelt, for example.

Other journeys of exploration expanded the frontier and the reach of frontier medicine, including those of Zebulon Pike (1806; before Lewis and Clark had even returned), Hugh Campbell (1833; with Dr. John Scott Harrison, who was son of President William Henry Harrison and father of President Benjamin Harrison and who died of alcoholism just prior to his father’s election in 1840), John C. Frémont (1836-1848), and John Wesley Powell (named for the aforementioned Methodist minister), sometimes accompanied by colorful “mountain men” like Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger, and Kit Carson.

Andrew Jackson’s election in 1828 had provided a second American revolution with the ascendency of the common man along with his medicines. A backlash against the regular medicine of the elites was accompanied by the formal organization of natural healing by Samuel Hahnemann (see Chapter 24), Samuel Thomson (see Chapter 21), Franz Joseph Gall, and later John Harvey Kellogg (see Chapter 21). By the middle of the nineteenth century, the natural remedies of frontier medicine represented a well established and widely available form of health care in America.

During the Civil War, after the Union naval blockade of the South began working in 1862, the Confederacy found it difficult to obtain manufactured medicines and turned to natural remedies, publishing a pamphlet listing native herbs that could be used for treatment: snakeroot, sassafras, partridgeberry, lavender, dogwood, tulip tree, and red and white oak. Confederate Medical Corps kits contained many of these remedies toward the end of the war. After the Civil War came the heyday of patent (herbal) remedies, including Dr. Pepper, Dr. John Pemberton’s Coca-Cola, and Dr. Hire’s Root Beer, still enormously popular today as “soda,” “pop,”“ tonic,” and “root beer.”

The term quacks (from the German quacksalver “quicksilver” or “mercury,” which was actually a toxic regular medical treatment of the time) began to be applied to the practitioners of natural remedies (considered useful on the American frontier from the 1500s to the 1850s) suddenly at about the time the American Medical Association was organized in 1847—in reaction to the formation of the American Homeopathic Association in 1842.

Physicians and scientists who made real health advances with the use of natural healing in the mid- to late-nineteenth century (Thomson; Vincent Priessnitz [the water cure]; Russell Trall [the nature cure]; Nikola Tesla, pioneer of electromagnetism) were rounded up in the judgment of twentieth-century history together with true charlatans like Thomas Alva Edison, Jr. (son of the inventor, who did his best to put Tesla, the true genius of electricity and bioenergy, out of business), John Romulus Brinkley, Dr. C. Everett Field, and Norman Baker. This label came to include hypnotists and “magnetic” healers (e.g., Franz Anton Mesmer) and the emerging manual therapists (e.g., Andrew Taylor Still, Daniel David Palmer) of the nineteenth century who originated in and were also initially a phenomenon of the rural frontier. In retrospect, the exploits of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century charlatans seem quaint in comparison with the organized havoc wreaked on the public health during the last quarter century by the drug and insurance industries.

The great unexamined assumption for today’s reader is that natural healing in the later nineteenth century became “quackery.” This attitude betrays something of a triumphalist approach to the wonders of twentieth-century medicine, whereas twenty-first-century American medicine in many ways has become nothing to celebrate. The vast majority of Americans were once able to leave “frontier medicine,” for two or three generations, and enjoy medical practice and health care marked by well-trained physicians they knew and trusted, and the widespread availability of compassionate health services in hospitals that were accountable to their own communities. In the twenty-first century Americans now subsidize and sustain with hundreds of billions of dollars each year (16% of gross domestic product—the largest share in the world, but resulting in only the fortieth best health status among nations) a largely ineffective, inequitable, unsustainable health care system for the benefit of an unaccountable corporate-government-research complex of vested interests—marked by the arrogance and intransigence of mainstream biomedical research elites, excessive corporate profiteering through “blockbuster” drugs and direct-to-consumer marketing (rather than true therapeutic breakthroughs), and the mirage of “biotech” cures, as well as the substitution of hard-won medical knowledge and clinical judgment by insurance company bureaucracies that results in withholding of care and health care rationing (ironically, that which had been the greatest fear under the “socialized medicine” of a single-payer system). For several decades many have awaited the next “miracle” drug, biotech breakthrough, and, now, medical information technology for solutions to our health care crisis. This book illustrates that often it is ancient knowledge and wisdom about healing that, when adapted to new circumstances, provide truly innovative approaches to health problems.

In today’s economy, the health care crisis is rapidly moving toward collapse. Many Americans may find themselves back on the medical frontier, where fortunately the natural healing and remedies once spurned (including some in this book) are still abiding in the contemporary consumer movement labeled as “complementary/alternative medicine.”

If biomedicine cannot explain scientific observations of alternative medicine, the biomedical paradigm will be revised.

Science must account for all of what is observed, not just part of it. That is why physics has moved beyond Newtonian mechanics—biology beyond typology. Is it possible for a biomedical model to be constructed for which its validity includes observations from CAM? Although it may be necessary to wait for new insights from physics and biology to understand CAM in terms of biomedicine, clinical pragmatism dictates that successful therapeutic methods should not be withheld while mechanisms are being explained—or debated. We live in a world filled with opportunities to observe the practice of integrative medicine; all that remains is to apply scientific standards to its study. In the meantime, patients are now waiting for mainstream physicians to understand the mechanisms of CAM. Also, we can come to understand the underlying intellectual content and history of alternative forms as complete systems of thought and practice.