Origins of Naturopathy
In the early 1890s another German youth found himself on the brink of the
grave. In this instance, however, the man—Benedict Lust (1872–1945; Fig.
9.1)—was a recent immigrant to America, having come to New York in 1892
to seek his fortune only to find tuberculosis instead. Given up to die by
allopaths (“my death warrant was made out by the doctors in my presence”),
he decided to return to his homeland for what days he had left, and there he
was attracted to the invalid’s haven of Wo¨rishofen. Eight months later he was
once again in possession of full health and resolved to use his new strength
as an emissary of Kneipp to the New World; indeed, the priest/healer “commissioned”
him, Lust said, to “go into the new World and spread the Gospel
of the Water Cure.”5
Lust returned to New York in 1896 and set about fulfilling his commission
right away. Part of his responsibility, he believed, was to make the healing
system more accessible to Americans. Several Kneipp cures had already been
established in the early 1890s, but they were restricted to German immigrant
communities and made no appeal to the broader populace; initially, the only
public notice taken of American Kneippists was ridicule of their barefoot strolls
through Central Park. Thus while Lust began his health publishing ventures in the mid-’90s with German-language periodicals, in 1900 he switched to
English with his Kneipp Water Cure Monthly (though he maintained a small
German-language section in each issue). The magazine was different from
other Kneipp publications with respect to content as well, for Lust had acquired
a faith in several therapies beyond those employed in Wo¨rishofen. Before leaving Germany the second time, he had looked into a number of
other components of the rich tradition of “nature cure” that had flourished in
that country since early in the century. Various programs of diet, exercise,
massage, sunbathing, and other drugless options impressed him as valuable
additions to Kneipp’s baths and herbs, so the system of care that he publicized
in his magazine and provided at the clinic he opened in New York stretched well beyond the boundaries of Kneippism. Even the American-born practices
of osteopathy and chiropractic were embraced by Lust (he earned a DO degree
in 1898), and it was soon evident that Kneippism was too limited and misleading
a designation for his collection of natural remedies. Just how he came
up with a new name is not entirely clear (there are several accounts), but by
1901 Lust was calling his approach to healing “naturopathy.” (Literally meaning
“nature disease,” the name was disapproved of by many of Lust’s followers,
who preferred more accurate designations such as “nature cure,” “natural
therapeutics,” or “physiatrics”; “naturopathy” was the name that stuck, however.) The following year he founded the Naturopathic Society of America
(renamed the American Naturopathic Association in 1919), and he served as
the organization’s only president until his death.6
Naturopathic Philosophy
In March 1901 Lust opened the American School of Naturopathy in midtown
Manhattan. The first educational institution for the training of practitioners in
the new field, it conferred the degree of ND (Naturopathic Doctor) on graduates
of its two-term, eighteen-month curriculum. The approach to healing
that was taught at the school is presented nicely in a “tree of disease” designed
by another leader of naturopathy in the 1910s. There one sees the full range
of human infirmities, from colds to cancer, growing out of a trunk impaired
by “Accumulation of Morbid Matter in The System” and other disordered
states of vitality. The soil from which the trunk of physical impurity rises is
one of “Violation of Nature’s Laws” of diet, exercise, and other components
of hygiene, violations occurring because of humanity’s ignorance, indifference,
lack of self-control, and self-indulgence. Where regular doctors blamed disease
on insults to the body from outside, particularly infection with germs, early
naturopaths saw all sickness originating within the body. (Note among the
tree’s branches that “Germs, Bacteria” are listed as a disease, not a cause.) Rather than the individual being attacked by some alien pathologic agent, each
person was responsible for attacking his own body with unnatural habits of
life. In brief, all diseases were fundamentally the same, internal poisoning, and
thus all therapy had to be directed toward inner cleansing. Nature attempts
to eliminate morbid material on her own but sometimes is so overwhelmed
by the products of self-indulgence as to require assistance.7
Imposing self-control and returning to nature’s intended mode of life
(hygeiotherapy, in other words) was a necessary first step but was not always
sufficient. Then active measures to rid the body of impurities had to be
brought into play—but only measures that were friendly to nature by offering
support or stimulation. A fundamental principle for naturopathy was that drugs were unfriendly—by definition. Drugs were poison, and to use poison to fight
the poison of disease was pitting “Beelzebub against the Devil”: “Say Doc,”
a young boy in a 1913 naturopathic cartoon asks, “does that M.D. you sign
after your name stand for much dope?” More than any other system of the
early twentieth century, naturopathy utilized and identified with the term
“drugless healing”: “Drugs have no place in the human body,” Lust insisted;
“GIVING A SICK MAN THINGS TO MAKE HIM WELL THAT
WOULD MAKE A WELL MAN SICK IS STUPID, IGNORANT AND
CRIMINAL.” (“Criminal” was not just rhetoric for Lust; in one of his more
agitated moments he demanded that the drug poisoner should be “where he
belongs—in the electric chair or at the end of a rope.”) Contempt for drugs
did not, however, prevent naturopaths from using healing herbs, remedies that
many others thought of as drugs. To their way of thinking, herbs were a gift
from heaven (Lust bowed before “Our Lord’s Kindness in the Healing
Herbs”); they grew from the bosom of nature and were employed in their
natural state, not chemically altered or synthesized in the pharmaceutical laboratory
by “chuckle-headed scientists [who] believe they are a whale of a lot
bigger than Nature herself.”8
But botanicals had to share space in the naturopathic armamentarium
with any number of other restorative agents. An official definition of naturopathy
adopted in 1907 included “mechanical, physical, mental and [twentyseven]
spiritual methods, such as mechanical and physical vibration, massage,
manipulation, adjustment, electricity, magnetism, earth, water, air, sun and
electric light, hot and cold, moist and dry baths, fasting, dieting, physical
culture, suggestive therapeutics,” and anything else that could be interpreted
to strengthen the vis medicatrix naturae or remove obstacles to its free functioning;
naturopathy, Lust dictated, was a system of “Pathological Monism
and Therapeutic Universalism,” by which he meant there was only one disease
(inhibition of the body’s “natural power”) but a virtual infinity of healing
agents (all of nature’s forces).9
Healing interventions were not limited to physical modalities, however,
for naturopathy was understood to mean not just trusting in nature to heal
but striving to return to one’s proper place within the natural creation. The
“principal object” of naturopathy was “to re-establish the union of man’s body,
brain, heart and all bodily functions—with nature.” True well-being required
mental and spiritual health as well, so students also had to master such areas
as “Mental and Divine Healing, . . . Pure Love, Soul-Marriage, Pre-Natal Culture, Painless Parturition, . . Natural Babyhood, Child Culture,” and the on-the-face-of-it
dubious discipline of “Passionless Fatherhood.” For the soul, there were
“Physical Immortalism, Spirit-Unfoldment, [and] God-Consciousness.”10
