Nature Cures The History of Alternative Medicine in America

In the autumn of 1994, a New Yorker cartoonist imagined a clinical scene in which a patient who is literally radiant with health, his body throwing off a nearly blinding aura of wellness, is nevertheless being sternly admonished by his physician because he has achieved his health the wrong way: “You’ve been fooling around with alternative medicines, haven’t you?” the doctor scolds.1 New Yorker cartoons constitute the most sensitive of barometers to shifting currents in America’s cultural atmosphere. And in truth, whatever one chooses to call it—alternative medicine, unconventional medicine, holistic medicine, complementary medicine, integrative medicine (some even like the term vernacular medicine)—a lot of people have been fooling around...