Naturopathy was a form of alternative medicine that emphasized living in accordance with “nature’s laws.”[1] Founded by Benedict Lust in 1902, naturopathy proposed that the body could be healed through natural means without the use of pharmaceutical drugs. Subscribing to the belief in the Unity of Disease, which posits that a single cause of disease manifests as different illnesses, naturopathic philosophy argued that the body could naturally heal itself if the patient maintained sufficiently healthy habits, thereby placing the onus of well-being upon the patient. One of naturopathy’s early advocates, Henry Lindlahr, explained that, contrary to mainstream American medicine, naturopathy was a preventative form of healthcare and argued that it was “more advantageous to prevent disease than to cure it.”[2] In this vein, naturopaths emphasized the necessity of “natural” and nutritious foods, advocated for a balanced diet, and criticized fad diets as overly restrictive and lacking nutrition.[3] As the head of the American Naturopathic Association, Lust emphasized the value of leading a healthy lifestyle instead of solely caring for the body once issues arose.[4] Naturopathy took a relatively holistic approach to health; in addition to habits supporting physical well-being, naturopathy’s Christian leaders also emphasized self-regulation and “positive spiritual well-being.”[5] Habits, such as eliminating waste, eating a nutritious diet, and constructing a positive mental state, were claimed to increase “vitality,” a term naturopaths used to describe overall well-being. Evacuation was so integral to the naturopathic framework that early 1900s vendors marketed “internal baths,” claiming their product “assists nature instead of forcing her.”[6] It was certainly, as the same article noted, “a most interesting method.”
Detractors would likely have agreed that naturopathy was “interesting.” A 1914 New York Times headline described this “vaguely defined art of healing” as just another “healing cult.”[7] This skepticism painted naturopathy as an ineffective and unsafe form of medicine,[8] one that was “too complicated, and at the same time too simple.”[9] Critics argued that naturopathy lacked structure and principles that truly distinguished it from the era’s mainstream medicine. Naturopathy, they claimed, simply recycled outdated practices and beliefs that mainstream doctors had relied upon centuries prior and made an ill-defined distinction between natural cures, such as herbs and physical therapy, and unnatural treatments. To mainstream practitioners, the name naturopathy was misleading, as nature was integral to all forms of healing in some capacity. Even the pharmaceutical drugs naturopaths railed against were, in a sense, natural, as they were simply naturally occurring substances in an isolated state.[10] While naturopathy as a movement dissolved in the 1950s when the spiritual emphasis disintegrated, some of its philosophical remnants persisted, and perhaps intensified, as time progressed.