Politics of Healing

Robert D. Johnston is Associate Professor and Director of Teacher Education in the History Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"A fascinating introduction to a multifaceted and complexly negotiated reality that is so often obscured under the not terribly illuminating label of complementary and alternative medicine. Indispensable for any student of North American health care and its twentieth-century development." -- Charles E. Rosenberg, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, is the author of Explaining Epidemics, The Care of Strangers"This collection of essays offers both wide-ranging and elegant analyses of alternative medicine in the United States. From anti-vaccination and anti-fluoridation to alternative cancer care and health foods, the exceptional scholars represented in this volume set a new standard for historical reflections on the political cultures of medicine and healing in twentieth-century America. The book will be essential to anyone--policymakers, insurers, historians, regular physicians, alternative practitioners, and patients-- interested in the histories of alternative medicine and why, in the 1990s, complementary and alternative medicine transformed the health landscape. Historian Robert D. Johnston has performed a magisterial act of scholarship in bringing new light and provocative observation to the complex issues in healing in modern America." -- Susan E. Lederer is the author of Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America Before the Second World War"This openness to nuance and complexity makes this volume an essential reference work for anyone interest in understanding more clearly why more than 40 percent of adult Americans now use at least one form of alternative medicine." -- The Journal of American History

• Robert D. Johnston, Introduction: The Politics of Healing PRECURSORS: THE YEARS IN THE WILDERNESS Nadav Davidovitch, Negotiating Dissent: Homeopathy and Anti-Vaccinationism at the Turn of the 20th Century Anne Taylor Kirschmann, Making Friends for 'Pure' Homeopathy: Hahnemannians and the Twentieth-Century Preservation and Transformation of Homeopathy Barbara Clow, Revisiting the 'Golden Age' of Regular Medicine: The Politics of Alternative Cancer Care in Ontario, 1900-1950 Michael Ackerman, Science and the Shadow of Ideology in the American Health Foods Movement, 1930s-1960s INTERSECTIONS: ALLOPATHIC MEDICINE MEETS ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE Otniel E. Dror, 'Voodoo Death': Fantasy, Excitement, and the Untenable Boundaries of Biomedical Science Wade Davies, Western Medicine and Navajo Healing: Conflict and Compromise CONTESTING THE COLD WAR MEDICAL MONOPOLY Naomi Rogers, Sister Kenny Goes to Washington: An Unorthodox Nurse, Polio, and Medical Populism in Postwar America Michelle M. Nickerson, 'It Could Happen Here': California Housewives, Anti-Communism and the Alaska Mental Health Bill of 1956 Gretchen Ann Reilly, 'Not a so-called democracy': Antifluoridationists and the Fight Over Drinking Water CONTEMPORARY PRACTICES/CONTEMPORARY LEGACIES Amy Sue Bix, Engendering Alternatives: Women's Health-Care Choices and Feminist Medical Rebellions Georgina Feldberg, Inside-Out: Holism and History in Toronto's Women's Health Movements Velana Huntington, A Quiet Movement: Orisha and the Healing of People, Spirit, History, and Community Sita Reddy, The Politics and Poetics of 'Magazine Medicine': New Age Ayurveda in the Print Media David J. Hess, Complementary and Alternative Medicine Cancer Therapies in Twentieth- Century North America: The Emergence and Growth of a Social Movement Matthew Schneirov and Jonathan David Geczik, Beyond the Culture Wars: The Politics of Alternative Health CONCLUSIONS Robert D. Johnston, Contemporary Anti-Vaccination Movements in Historical Perspective James C. Whorton, From Cultism to CAM: Alternative Medicine in the Twentieth Century