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Alternative Medicine, Alternative Politics
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Short Description: Alternative medicine. may have been sidelined by some mainstream. practitioners, but this was not true of ... eth-century alternative medicine in a broader ...
Content Inside: B o o k R e v i e w s Alternative Medicine, Alternative Politics by David Cantor reductive, scientific medicine allegedly The Politics of Healing: Histories of Alter- achieved some of its greatest triumphs. In this native Medicine in Twentieth-Century newer account, holistic traditions thrived in North America modern medicine well before the 1960s, in- edited by Robert D. Johnston cluding constitutional, social, and psychologi- cal medicine, as well as neo-humoralism and (New York: Routledge, 2004), 388 pp., neo-Hippocratism. Second, historians have $29.95 also begun to complicate the story of the marginalization of alternative traditions in the Until recently, the dominant account of early part of the century. Alternative medicine Western medicine in the twentieth century may have been sidelined by some mainstream was the story of the rise of a monolithic crea- practitioners, but this was not true of all. On ture called scientific medicine or biomedicine. the contrary, many interwar clinical holists be- In this story, mainstream medicine became gan to take an interest in alternative traditions more and more reductive in outlook and domi- such as homeopathy and naturopathy, despite nated by laboratory research and technology. hostility from some of their medical colleagues One of the results of this process was that by toward traditions they branded as "quackery." the early decades of the century, alternative, Thus, recent attempts to integrate "comple- holistic healing traditions had largely been mentary" and "orthodox" medicine have their sidelined by conventional medicine. Only in roots in older efforts to marry "alternative" and the 1960s, the standard narrative goes, did a "orthodox" traditions in the 1920s and 1930s. major challenge to this trend emerge. Critics The Politics of Healing provides an excellent attacked conventional medicine for its reduc- introduction to some of the best work being tionism and its tendency to offer standardized, undertaken in the history of "alternative" med- dehumanized forms of care. In its place they icine. In the first place, it adds to a growing lit- promised a return to more humanistic tradi- erature that explores the flourishing of alter- tions, focused on the whole individual and the native traditions before the 1960s. In the economic, social, psychological, and some- traditional account, orthodox medicine was times spiritual conditions that promoted ill- supposed to have secured the allegiance of ness or encouraged healing. Thus, in this ac- most Americans by the early twentieth cen- count there were two distinct traditions: the tury, and hence the leverage necessary for a reductive one of mainstream medicine, and the state-sponsored monopoly of health care in the holistic one of its alternatives. United States. Yet as the essays in the first half In the past few years historians have in- of the book document, alternative traditions creasingly come to question such a narrative. routinely contested such dominance and suc- First, they have begun to trace the flourishing ceeded in attracting major public support. of a variety of holistic movements within Some of the essays examine distinct schools of mainstream medicine in the early part of the practice (such as homoeopathy or Native twentieth century--the very moment when American healing); others explore single-issue David Cantor (cantord@mail.nih.gov) works as a historian for the National Library of Medicine and the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. He has written on the histories of cancer and the rheumatic diseases and is the editor of Reinventing Hippocrates (Ashgate, 2002). H E A L T H A F F A I R S ~ Vo l u m e 2 3 , N u m b e r 5 2 7 3 DOI 10.1377/hlthaff.23.5.273 ©2004 Project HOPEThe People-to-People Health Foundation, Inc.
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