The historiography of nonconventional medicine in Germany: A concise overview

Abstract

Quite a number of nonconventional forms of healing originated in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Germany (e.g., mesmerism, homoeopathy, hydropathy, anthroposophical medicine).This historical fact provides more than just an excuse for pursuing the historiography of nonconventional medical practices in German-speaking countries.It provides, too, a useful basis for a comparative look at this phenomenon, challenging the traditional view that "regular medicine and fringe medicine have had their own autonomous histories".1Although recent medical history has preferred to look at structures, agents, trends and developments in biomedicine, in the last decades nonconventional medical views and practices have also found their historians, especially among scholars concerned with social history and the history of ideas.2Irrespective of the methodological approaches adopted, there can be no doubt about the expansion of the interest in the history of nonconventional medicine in Germany since the 1980s.However, there are already some earlier histories of noncoventional medicine, either of branches which are no longer widely available (mesmerism, exorcism) or of unorthodox therapies which have in the meantime developed into popular and well established health belief systems (e.g., hydrotherapy).3Even historians have difficulties in finding a language in which simply to name and to describe, without imposing a connotative judgement.As Bonnie Blair O'Connor has pointed out, "the very actions of naming and describing presuppose a particular point of view and often carry a moral tone".4Most labels used to describe health belief systems other than modern, scientific, Western medicine, are relative terms, as for example "alternative", "marginal", "fringe", "unorthodox" or "irregular".They are either misleading or carry an unfortunate semantic load."Marginal" and "fringe", for instance, imply near or beyond the limits of acceptability, and so hint at inadequacy."Irregular"

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