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Physic and Metaphysic in Nineteenth-Century America: Medical Sectarians and Religious Healing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Catherine L. Albanese
Catherine L. Albanese
Affiliation:
Ms. Albanese is professor of religion in Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio.
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Extract

Writing in the first issue of The Magnetic and Cold Water Guide in 1846, an unnamed editor hailed the virtues of the cold-water cure: “Instead of the dosing and drugging of the old system of practice, it proposes to rely on the indwelling healing power of nature alone, to provoke and regulate which, it employs the widespread element of fresh unadulterated water.” In case readers had not caught the full dimensions of the message, the writer inserted “the testimony of an experienced physician of Massilon, Ohio.” The doctor, an A. Underhill, waxed eloquent on his investigations of “the Water Treatment of disease” and worked his way to a concluding rhetorical flourish. “Physiology, Phrenology, and Magnetism,” he summarized, “are the keys that are unlocking the great mysteries of nature and mind, and letting us in, as it were, to the inner temple, where the sunbeams of light and truth are filling the minds and understandings of all the truly devout worshippers of the Eternal principles which govern all things.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , December 1986 , pp. 489 - 502
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1986

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References

Research on medical sectarian movements (hydropathy, Thomsonian herbalism, homoeopathy, osteopathy, and chiropractic) was conducted during the summers of 1982 and 1983 at the American Antiquarian Society and other specialized libraries, with the aid of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Independent Study and Research and a Samuel Foster Haven Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society. I am grateful to both the endowment and the society for their support and assistance. Material in this essay is taken from a longer study of nature religion in America (in process) in which it appears in another context. The longer work will discuss themes and concerns that, perforce, are only glanced over here.

1. “Testimony of a Physician to the Benefits of Hydropathy,” The Magnetic and Cold Water Guide I (06 1846): 7–8.Google Scholar

2. Although it may be academic heresy (and certainly a reversal of my own initial assumptions) to say so, my reading of the sources persuades me that the nearer, more immediate shapers of natural therapeutics were, first, mesmerism and, then, Swedenborgianism. Not that the Transcendentalists—and especially Ralph Waldo Emerson with his active lyceum lecture career—did not share and help to forge the template of ideas behind the religion of nature. But, in general, the language of healing—and some of the healers—show a more direct connection with mesmerism and Swedenborgianism. In the final analysis, though, ideas were “in the air,” and causal explanations become unproductive.

3. “Our Platform,” The Water-Cure World 1 (04 1860): 5.Google ScholarThe Water-Cure World was edited by C.R. Blackall, again a medical doctor.

4. W.T. Vail, “Origin of Human Diseases,” ibid. (May 1860): 10–11; ibid. (September 1860): 27 (emphasis in original).

5. For “Christian physiology,” see the discussion in Whorton, James C., Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers (Princeton, 1982), pp. 38–61.Google Scholar But Whorton couches his exposition in terms of the preventive therapeutics of the health-reform movement rather than the curative tactics of medical sectarianism; and he is especially concerned with the Christian physiology of Sylvester Graham and William Andrus Alcott.

6. For a brief and useful recent introduction to water cure, see Donegan, Jane B., “Hydropathic Highway to Health”: Women and Water-Core in Antebellum America, Contributions in Medical Studies 17 (Westport, Conn., 1986), pp. xi–xx, 3–17, 185–201.Google Scholar Donegan suggests the upper and middle-class background of institutional patients (p. xiii).

7. Jane Donegan notes that “irregular medical practitioners probably accounted for no more than ten percent of the total number of nineteenth–century physicians; “Hydropathic Highway to Health,” p. 195. For her source, see Rosen, George, The Structure of American Medical Practice, 1875–1941, ed. Rosenberg, Charles E. (Philadelphia, 1983), p. 16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Not all of Donegan's ten percent–and, especially, their many patients–should be understood as consciously embracing nature religion. Nonetheless, the metaphysical structure that supported sectarian therapeutics was based on the religion of nature, even if it also often had Christian components.

8. “Dyspepsia and Its Causes” [Letter from J.M.A., to his brother; reprinted from the Philadelphia Saturday Courier], Boston Thomsonian Manual 9 (1 12. 1842): 9;Google Scholar “An Apology,” The Boston Thomsonian Medical and Physiological Journal 1(15 04 1846): 219Google Scholar (upper case in original); “Extracts from an Address of Prof. I. M. Comings, M.D.,” ibid. (15 May 1846): 246.

9. Woodbury, O. A., “Homoeopathy the Only True Medical Practice,” The Homoeopathic Advocate and Guide to Health 1 (08. 1851): 65–66Google Scholar (emphasis in original).

10. For useful introductions to the thought of Emanuel Swedenborg, see Synnestvedt, Sig, ed. The Essential Swedenborg: Basic Teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian (New York, 1970),Google Scholar and Trobridge, George, Swedenborg: Life and Teaching. 4th ed. (1935; reprint ed., New York, 1962).Google Scholar For Swedenborg's conflation of matter and spirit, see the typical instances in Swedenborg, Emanuel, Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell, from Things Heard and Seen, trans. Ager, J. C. (1852; reprint ed., New York, 1964), pp. 6–7;Google ScholarThe True Christian Religion, Containing the Universal Theology of the New Church, trans. John C. Ager (1853; reprint ed., New York, 1970),Google Scholar vol. 2, pp. 244–246, 100–101; Swedenborg, , Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell, pp. 19, 41, 100–101, 184, 257, 261, 354;Google ScholarSwedenorg, , True Christian Religion, 1: 367.Google Scholar And for the classic statement of correspondence by a New England Transcendentalist, see Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Nature, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ferguson, Alfred R. et al. 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1971—), 1: 17–23.Google Scholar

11. “The Scope and Spirit of Osteopathy,” Journal of Osteopathy 4 (05 1897): 12;Google Scholar Andrew Taylor Still, “The Chemicals of Life” [Extracts from the autobiography of Andrew Taylor Stilil], ibid. 5 (July 1898): 63 (the Journal of Osteopathy calls Still's autobiography his “biography”); “Vis Medicatrix Naturae,” ibid. 4 (November. 1897): 275. For a discussion of Still's involvement with magnetic healing and his possible spiritualism, see Gevitz, Norman, The D.O.'s: Osteopathic Medicine in America (Baltimore, 1982), pp. 13–14; 156,Google Scholar n. 52. Still–like D.D. Palmer who, in 1895, founded chiropractic about one hundred miles from Kirksville, Missouri, in Davenport, Iowa—had earlier advertised himself as a magnetic doctor. (Still's osteopathy was the older system, begun in 1874.) Nineteenth-century osteopaths, in general, battled claims that their system was allied with spiritualism. See, for example, Helen de Lendrecie, “Around the Flag,” Journal of Osteopathy 4 (05 1897): 30.Google Scholar

12. Mesmer, Franz Anton, “Dissertation on the Discovery of Animal Magnetism (1779),” in Mesmerism: A Translation of the Original Scientific and Medical Writings of F. A. Mesmer, trans. George Bloch (Los Altos, Calif., 1980), p. 67.Google Scholar For useful discussions of mesmerism, see Zweig's, Stefan account in Mental Healers: Franz Anton Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud (1932; reprint ed., New York, 1962), esp. pp. 15–33,Google Scholar in which Zweig notices a lack of conceptual coherence between the cosmological teaching of planetary influence and the practical ability of the “animal” magnetist; and see Fuller, Robert C., Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (Philadelphia, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. Palmer, Daniel David, Journal, as quoted in Vern Gielow, Old Dad Chiro: Biography of D.D. Palmer, Founder of Chiropractic (Davenport, Iowa, 1981), p. 56.Google Scholar

14. Palmer, D.D., The Chiropractor's Adjuster: Text-book of the Science, Art and Philosophy of Chiropractic (Portland, Ore., 1910; reprint ed., 1966), pp. 446, 542, 399.Google Scholar (No place of publication is supplied for the reprint, which was reproduced priately in facsimile by David D. Palmer.) For further discussion of D.D. Palmer and chiropractic germane to this essay, see Albanese, Catherine L., “The Poetics of Healing: Root Metaphors and Rituals in Nineteenth-Century America,” Soundings 63 (Winter 1980): 390–394.Google Scholar

15. Here and elsewhere I use the term “New Theology” advisedly, since the medical sectarians were, of course, simply rearticulating elements of the Western occult-metaphysical tradition. See, for example, Walker, Daniel P., The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, 1972).Google Scholar

16. Novak, Barbara, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (New York, 1980), p. 134.Google Scholar

17. The best near-contemporary summaries of Phineas P. Quimby's life and thought, by a partisan, may be found in Dresser, Horatio W., ed. The Quimby Manuscripts (1921; reprint ed., Secaucus, N.J., 1969),Google Scholar and Dresser, Horatio W., Health and the Inner Life: An Analytical and Historical Study of Spiritual Healing Theories, with an Account of the Life and Teachings of. P. Quimby (New York, 1906).Google Scholar

18. Quimby, Phineas P., in Dresser, Quimby Manuscripts, pp. 253–255.Google Scholar Quimby's writings in the Manuscripts date mostly from 1859 to 1865.

19. Ibid., p. 258 (brackets in Dresser text).

20. Ibid., pp. 175, 335–336.

21. Ibid., pp. 299, 414.

22. Neither in this case nor in the case of Mesmer can we surmise that Quimby had firsthand knowledge. But certainly, at least through his patient and student Warren Felt Evans, who had left the Methodist ministry for the Swedenborgian New Church, he would have come to know major Swedenborgian themes. Horatio Dresser, however, vigorously denied any Swedenborgian influence on Quimby, although he cited one reference to Swedenborg in Quimby's lecture notes (see Dresser, , Quimby Manuscripts, pp. 18, 56–57).Google Scholar

23. For Quimby's use of the idea of correspondence, see, for example, Quimby Manuscripts, pp. 263, 313, 267. Gail Thain Parker thought that “Swedenborg's definition of ‘influx’ was invaluable” to mind curists; Parker, , Mind Cure in New England: From the Civil War to World War I (Hanover, N.H., 1973), p. 42.Google Scholar

24. Quimby, , in Dresser, Quimby Manuscripts, p. 61.Google Scholar

25. Ibid., pp. 180, 213–214, 272, 118. For “spiritual matter,” see also, for example, ibid., pp. 227, 231, 235, 246, 334.

26. Ibid., p. 186 (brackets in Dresser text).

27. The best study of the New Thought movement is still Braden, Charles S., Spirits in Rebellion: The Rise and Development of New Thought (Dallas, 1963).Google Scholar

28. Eddy, Mary Baker, “The Oak on the Mountain's Summit,” in Mary Baker Eddy, Miscellaneous Writings, 1883–1896 (Boston, 1896), p. 392;Google ScholarGlover, Mary Baker [Eddy], Science and health (1875; reprint ed. Freehold, N.J., n.d.), pp. 229, 225Google Scholar (emphasis mine). For metaphors of harmonizing and governing, see, for example, [Eddy], , Science and Health (1875), pp. 295, 330, 339;Google Scholar and for the characterization of Jesus, see Eddy, Mary Baker G., Historical Sketch of Metaphysical Healing (1885; reprint ed., New York, n.d.), p. 8.Google Scholar

29. Eddy, Mary Baker, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Boston, 1906), p. 183.Google Scholar