Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Susan Cayleff’s Nature’s Path is the first substantial history to be written about naturopathy, an eclectic, often radical approach to natural healing that emerged in the late 1800s, flourished during the interwar years, and reemerged in recent decades as a significant part of the complementary and alternative medicine revival. Cayleff, whose 1987 book Wash and Be Healed remains one of the best studies of the nineteenth-century water cure movement, is the ideal person to undertake this task.¹ The result is a fascinating—although at times hard-to-follow—account of naturopathic ideas, practices, and institutions. [End Page 137]

In essence, naturopathy was a “system of medicine based on the premise that the body will heal itself when various components are strengthened through the use of nontoxic, natural therapies” (p. 1). Its proponents believed that a healthy diet, fresh air, sunshine, massage, hydrotherapy, and attention to the mind and spirit were far superior to the toxic drugs, vaccinations, and surgical procedures associated with mainstream medicine. While promoting naturopathy’s distinctive core of ideas, the founding generation, in particular the husband-and-wife team of Benedict and Louisa Lust, made common cause with any healing tradition critical of the methods of scientific medicine and the political dominance of the American Medical Association. In their eagerness to gain allies to fight the AMA’s efforts to brand all natural healers as quacks, the Lusts promoted a concept of naturopathy as “a practice without fences or arbitrary boundaries” (p. 188).

As Cayleff shows, the naturopaths’ embrace of the outsider status and radical rejection of scientific medicine complicated their efforts to professionalize. Unlike osteopaths and chiropractors, who proved more willing to accept scientific innovations and follow mainstream medicine’s educational model, the naturo-paths remained deeply suspicious of any move that would bring them closer to mainstream medicine. As Cayleff writes, “naturopaths’ unyielding refusal to accept successful scientific advances, coupled with incessant wobbling on their own standards, compromised their efforts to gain political and legal legitimacy” (p. 179). Their “big tent” approach also made it difficult to maintain a safe distance from healers whose methods were far less principled than their own.

At the same time, Cayleff wants us to appreciate the ways in which naturo-paths anticipated modern beliefs about the importance of the “mindbodyspirit” continuum, and “were ahead of their time in challenging the excesses and side effects of industrialization,” including the dangers of “environmental toxins” (p. 142). She clearly admires her subjects for their iconoclastic views, their commitment to social reform, and their holistic approaches to healing. Like the water cure, naturopathy empowered women to be cocreators of its principles and successful as its practitioners. But while praising their progressive views on some issues, Cayleff stresses their class- and race-bound limitations as well. Like many Progressive era reformers, they had a favorable view of the eugenics movement and overestimated how much control poor Americans had over their own health circumstances. As she observes, the Lusts’ New Jersey resort Yungborn “was out of reach for the poor ethnic immigrants, for the struggling working poor living in squalor a mere thirty miles away, and for most blacks emigrating from the South” (p. 88). Cayleff also notes how their fervent rejection of all scientific advances, including the germ theory, sulfa drugs, and the polio vaccine, undercut their legitimacy with the public.

While it presents an abundance of fascinating material, Nature’s Path is a frustrating book to read. Cayleff tends to go back and forth in time in a confusing fashion; similar points are discussed in multiple chapters, so that the overall sense of what happened when gets muddled. While the focus on professional leaders is understandable, more detail about why patients were drawn to naturopathy and what its practice meant to them would have been welcome. There are errors of [End Page 138] fact and oversimplifications that limit the book’s...