Preface: Situating “Alternative Medicine” in the Modern Period

Different times produce different historians of medicine and different definitions of their object of research. With the advent of the social history of medicine in the 1970s and the entering of non-medical historians into the field, medical history has widened to encompass the history of health and illness in general with all its diverse topics and approaches. Given the way history reflects present-day concerns, however, it is curious that the history of what is here broadly named "alternative medicine" during the last century and a half has so far hardly been given any attention. The general assumption seems to be that with the consolidation of academic medicine in the mid-nineteenth century and the introduction of health insurance schemes, all other kinds of medicine have withered to such an extent as to become negligible. This, of course, is contradicted by the present popularity of "alternative" or "complementary medicine". As Roy Porter once expressed it: quacks were "an unconscionable time dying".' Yet questions remain as to how "alternative medicine" has changed in content and how its popularity has fluctuated. Statistics are usually far too rough to be of much help. We are given to believe, for instance, that by the 1930s in the USA academic medicine reigned supreme and that it had all but eclipsed alternative medicine because only a meagre five per cent of those who attended the sick were irregular practitioners.2 But we should beware of such easy conclusions since this figure almost certainly disregarded methods of self-help and ethnic or specifically female forms of health care. It seems we know even less in this respect about nineteenthand twentieth-century Europe, to which this special issue is dedicated, since statistics before the 1960s are even sparser and more problematic. It is true that British and Dutch medical journals reported German sources which put the total number of "illegal" practitioners in Saxony in the year 1900 at 1578, yet we know very little about the precise role these healers occupied in the local and regional medical market, and today, nearly a hundred years later, we are not much the wiser.3 Similarly, to mention one of the few early twentieth-century British examples, we still have not evaluated the 1910 survey of "unqualified" chemists, herbalists, bonesetters, dentists, faith healers and their ilk.4