Nineteenth-century American health reformers and the early nature cure movement in Britain.

Interest is currently focused on healing systems lying outside the territory of conventional scientific medicine, but the boundary of orthodoxy is not always clear and shifting attitudes are reflected in changing preferences for labelling unorthodox medicine as "alternative", "fringe", or "complementary". Unorthodox therapies, being defined purely by exclusion from orthodoxy, show great diversity but most claim to heal by the use of "natural" remedies, relying largely on the healing power of nature.1 The "purest" example is perhaps nature cure or naturopathy, which became sufficiently coherent in Britain early in the present century to allow the formation of several associations under its banner.2 The founders of these societies held many views in common, which might be summarized as follows. Man in his natural state is healthy: disease results from disobedience to nature's laws. Disobedience may involve wrong eating by selecting unnatural (e.g., refined, preserved, or chemically contaminated) foods, including flesh, or simply by over-eating. Disobedience also involves wrong living, e.g., taking insufficient exercise or fresh air, or using stimulants and poisons such as alcohol, tea, coffee, and tobacco, or using allopathic drugs, sera, and vaccines. Correct mental attitudes are equally important, the idea ofobedience to nature implying a moral, ifnot religious, obligation to strive towards perfect health. This perfection implies a wholeness of the individual achieved by harmony between the physical, mental, and spiritual being. Disease is not a foreign entity invading the body as an enemy that must be defeated and suppressed. Rather, the symptoms of an "illness" are the body's attempts to throw off impurities and hence are to be encouraged. If symptoms are suppressed by allopathic medicines, the impurities seek another outlet and acute illness becomes chronic. Impurities may derive from unnatural food or drink, or failure of normal elimination by the skin, kidneys, or bowels, or the generation of impurities by wrong function such as fermentation or constipation in the bowel. Germs are commonly the result rather than the cause of illness, flourishing only in already damaged tissues. Disease can only be radically cured by "natural" remedies, which