Pseudo-Science and Society in 19th-Century America

Arthur Wrobel

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813155449
• eBook ISBN: 9780813186757
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: North American History

Progressive nineteenth-century Americans believed firmly that human perfection could be achieved with the aid of modern science. To many, the science of that turbulent age appeared to offer bright new answers to life's age-old questions. Such a climate, not surprisingly, fostered the growth of what we now view as "pseudo-sciences"—disciplines delicately balancing a dubious inductive methodology with moral and spiritual concerns, disseminated with a combination of aggressive entrepreneurship and sheer entertainment.

Such "sciences" as mesmerism, spiritualism, homoeopathy, hydropathy, and phrenology were warmly received not only by the uninformed and credulous but also by the respectable and educated. Rationalistic, egalitarian, and utilitarian, they struck familiar and reassuring chords in American ears and gave credence to the message of reformers that health and happiness are accessible to all.

As the contributors to this volume show, the diffusion and practice of these pseudo-sciences intertwined with all the major medical, cultural, religious, and philosophical revolutions in nineteenth-century America. Hydropathy and particularly homoeopathy, for example, enjoyed sufficient respectability for a time to challenge orthodox medicine. The claims of mesmerists and spiritualists appeared to offer hope for a new moral social order. Daring flights of pseudo-scientific thought even ventured into such areas as art and human sexuality. And all the pseudo-sciences resonated with the communitarian and women's rights movements.

This important exploration of the major nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences provides fresh perspectives on the American society of that era and on the history of the orthodox sciences, a number of which grew out of the fertile soil plowed by the pseudo-scientists.

ARTHUR WROBEL

1.Introduction

Recent studies about the nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences—primarily phrenology, mesmerism, spirtualism, hydropathy, and homoeopathy—have assumed a new character. Instead of being polemics by either partisans or opponents, or mere journalistic histories recounting the sensational and eccentric, these studies range from the popular and biographical to the intellectually esoteric. They are also interpretive. Scholars are discovering that these disciplines were warmly received during their heyday, not only among the uninformed and credulous but also among the respectable and educated, and that the diffusion and practice of these disciplines intertwined with all the major medical, cultural, and philosophical revolutions in nineteenth-century America.

On the surface, these pseudo-sciences have apparent differences. Homoeopathy and hydropathy, for instance, were medical sects, while spiritualism, mesmerism, and phrenology explored uncharted avenues of knowledge. Such differences, however, should not be overemphasized. Of greater significance are the remarkable number of premises, methodologies, and teleological assumptions they shared and that placed them squarely in the midst of major currents of nineteenth-century thought. Their doctrines complemented the national belief that America occupied a special place in mankind’s history; denied the distinction between body and mind, the material and the spiritual; gave credence to the message delivered by reformers that health and happiness are accessible to men; and presented a unified view of knowledge and human nature that seemingly accounted for the structure of nature and man’s place within it. Rationalistic, egalitarian, and utilitarian, they struck familiar and reassuring chords that were pleasing to the ears of Americans.

The essays in this volume reflect the richness and diversity that research in these disciplines offers. They illuminate and in some instances alter our understanding of some major nineteenth-century American cultural configurations. And they suggest how several of these sciences survived the profound revolution in scientific methodology at the turn of the last century and extended well into our own—some intact, others in modified form, and others as renascent influences on disciplines currently held as “true” sciences. Most of the essays in this volume also have bearing on the seemingly insoluble debate over demarcation, the criteria that differentiate “true” science from “pseudo” science.

Science, as formalist critics assert, must be consistent to be true; but for scholars who approach it from the perspective of the history of science, the problem is compounded. Taylor Stoehr’s essay provides fuel for historicist externalists who take into account the degree to which the politics, cultural milieu, or ideology of a given era determines or influences judgments as to whether a discipline is proper science or not. In tracing the colorful career and intellectual peregrinations of a pseudo-scientist par excellence, one Robert Collyer, Stoehr leaves us wondering whether arguments about demarcation should not take into account changing concepts of the scientist and his discipline. Collyer’s case reminds us that discovery is a precarious affair; the ability to ask the right questions or recognize the proper application often distinguishes a scientist from a pseudoscientist. In short, the fineness of the line separating science from pseudo-science very nearly gives the whole demarcation debate, as one scholar maintains, mere emotive value.

Also, this distinction often becomes obvious only in retrospect. As John Greenway shows, the many nostrums and mechanical devices that filled catalogues and newspapers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century shared the same premises and even the language of legitimate research programs. At a time when the medical community was unable to account for seeming electrotherapeutic cures and the properties and nature of electricity were still unknown, the gulf separating commercial electric gadgets claiming to cure everything from nervous exhaustion to constipation from those sanctioned by the medical establishment was negligible. Greenway also underscores the point implicitly made in several ensuing essays in this volume: after pseudo-scientific explanations proved inadequate, researchers were forced into new ways of thinking about the etiology of disease and pursued new areas of research.

During their heyday, nevertheless, all the pseudo-sciences explored in this volume amassed an impressive list of testimonial successes. While questions can be raised about the legitimacy of their cures or the experiences they professed to unfold, we know that a large segment of the American population did believe in their efficacy. Given the state of contemporary scientific theory and practice, all these disciplines could even lay fair claim to being legitimate sciences. Their methodological underpinnings were securely grounded in scientific induction, or Baconianism. Empirical rather than speculative, reasoning from experimentation and observations rather than a priori arguments, Baconianism universally came to be regarded—according to Edward Everett, editor of the North American Review and a Unitarian minister—as “the true philosophy.”¹

For some of the newer sectarian medical movements, induction was a relatively straightforward matter of observing the effects of certain drugs or procedures. In many ways, homoeopathy and hydropathy seemed to have greater claims to empiricism than did orthodox medicine, which was comprised of a motley admixture of folk wisdom and intuitive approaches to healing.

In attempting to understand the living organism in light of its own laws, Samuel Hahnemann, the German founder of homoeopathy, devised a “law of similars,” which, he asserted, was a “law of nature.” Imitating nature, which they claimed often cures one disease by generating a milder one with similar symptoms, homoeopaths administered medicines or curatives in infinitesimal quantities that were known to generate in a healthy person symptoms like those exhibited by the patient. In combating the less virulent, artificially induced disease, homoeopathic theory asserted, the body cured simultaneously the primary disease. The process of testing the effects of these drugs or curatives was known as “proving.” In a prover’s scrupulous recording of every symptom he felt after taking a dose, the homoeopaths had their strongest claim as an inductive science. For a period of forty years homoeopathy enjoyed sufficient respectability to challenge orthodox medicine as the primary system of medical care in this country.²

While the lore in historical annals recording cures wrought by hydrotherapeutics, especially the precedent of the Roman Thermae, formed the long foreground of hydropathy, its more immediate history and its development into a medical system can be traced to Vincent Priessnitz. Noting how native Silesian peasants successfully used cold water compresses to aid in reducing the swelling of bruises or treating tumors in cattle, Priessnitz cured himself of injuries sustained from a severe horse fall with the consumption of cold water and the use of cold compresses. By the mid-1830s, Europeans and Americans made medical hegiras to Gräfenberg in Silesia. They were fleeing the violent procedures of orthodox medicine—blistering, puking, purging, cupping, bleeding, and poisonous doses of mercury and arsenic—as well as seeking this gentle therapy for relief from a host of ailments ranging from dyspepsia and prolapsus uteri to broken bones and rheumatism. Very soon water-cure emerged in this country as a viable system of medical treatment. It attracted adherents from all classes of society. No section of the country enjoyed a monopoly on the system, but the Northeast nurtured the system’s leaders, published most of its monographs and periodicals, and refined its methodology.

While homoeopathy and hydropathy largely confined themselves to the curing of bodily ailments, the other pseudo-sciences—phrenology, mesmerism, and spiritualism—used empirically derived data to carry their scientific investigations into considerably wider areas. By nineteenth-century standards their empiricism was beyond reproach. Phrenology’s founder, Franz Josef Gall, a brilliant Viennese anatomist who made revolutionary discoveries about various neurophysiological functions, also established the physiological basis of mind. His theories were soundly based on comparative anatomical studies of the brain. Gall attributed the higher mental functioning of humans over other species to humans’ more highly developed cortexes. He also attributed differences in personal characteristics among humans to cortical differences. He went even further. He identified twenty-seven faculties that he felt comprised the cognitive, sensory, and emotional characteristics of a human being. He taught that these faculties are located in identifiable areas of the brain and that the contour of the cranium provided an observer with an accurate understanding of the development of those faculties.³

Mesmerism had equally convincing claims to science. It provided a reasoned theory based on repeated successes and experiments to account for the cure of bodily diseases by inspired individuals from Jesus to a late eighteenth-century Austrian exorcist, Father J.V. Gassner. This movement’s founder, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), believed that all human bodies are subject to an invisible magnetic fluid. Physicians could cure imbalances or misalignments of this magnetic force-field by manipulating the fluid in a patient’s afflicted areas, using either magnets or, with the more gifted healer, the passing of hands over the body. Mesmer’s theory had just enough science to appeal to a new rationalism—his hypothesis of a universal fluid derived from Newton’s electromagnetic ether—and enough spiritual overtones to appeal to latent religious needs as well. Though a Royal Commission that included Benjamin Franklin, the chemist Lavoisier, and the physician Guillotin denied the existence of animal magnetism and consequently the utility of Mesmer’s therapeutics, followers of Mesmer continued to effect cures for ailments ranging from hysteria to mysterious pains.⁴ By the time mesmerism blossomed in the 1830s on these shores, it had assumed a new guise having sinister and even occult overtones: it could cure ailments, but a mesmerist could also control the mind of another and even elicit clairvoyant visions.⁵

An eclectic synthesis that included mesmerism’s probing of telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition, the doctrines of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, and the social thought of Charles Fourier formed the next major pseudo-science to emerge in America—spiritualism.⁶ A doctrine about communication between spirits of the dead and human mediums, spiritualism began in Hydesville, New York, in 1848 when two sisters, Margaret and Kate Fox, professed to have received intelligent communication, in the form of mysterious rappings, from the spirit of a murdered man. Spiritualism absorbed the Swedenborgian doctrines of the correspondence between material and spiritual realities and the existence of a hierarchical series of spiritual spheres surrounding the earth. Swedenborg did spirtualism another service when, in 1848, his spirit and that of the Greek physician Galen allegedly visited the mesmerized body of Andrew Jackson Davis, soon to be dubbed the “Poughkeepsie Seer.” According to Davis, Swedenborg promised to make him a channel of divine truth and wisdom and Galen proclaimed him a clairvoyant healer. The latter prophecy had merit insofar as the nineteen-year-old Davis started healing by prescribing cures after visualizing the inner organs of patients.⁷ All such occurrences appeared to verify the claims spiritualists so often made, namely that theirs was an empirical science that repeatedly proved the reality of spiritual communication and cured bodily and spiritual ills.

Encouraged by such discoveries about the relation of anatomical and physiological characteristics to the operation of the human mind, about the existence of paranormal mental activities, about reciprocal communications between the mundane and spiritual worlds, the various pseudo-scientists widened their field of inquiry. They felt about their various disciplines as Emerson did about mesmerism, that “it affirmed unity and connection between remote points, and as such was excellent criticism on the narrow and dead classification of what passed for science.”⁸ Their discoveries also appeared to confirm their age’s certainty that mind and matter were transcendentally linked. Homoeopathy, for instance, attributed disturbances in the body to perturbations in a person’s spiritual force that, in good health, animates and governs the body. Thus, homoeopathic doses were not aimed at the disease but at strengthening the spiritual force and reestablishing the harmonious interrelationship between the two spheres.⁹ Similarly, Davis taught that discord in man’s spiritual principle caused an ensuing material imbalance manifesting itself as disease.¹⁰

Speculations about the constitution of man and its relation to external meaning at this time were as understandable as they were irresistible. For the first time men seemed close to discovering empirical proof supporting ontological and teleological premises that their age inherit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Robert H. Collyer’s Technology of the Soul
• 3. “Nervous Disease” and Electric Medicine
• 4. Hydropathy, or the Water-Cure
• 5. Andrew Jackson Davis and Spiritualism
• 6. Phrenology as Political Science
• 7. Sexuality and the Pseudo-Sciences
• 8. Washington Irving and Homoeopathy
• 9. Sculpture and the Expressive Mechanism
• 10. Mesmerism and the Birth of Psychology
• 11. Afterword
• Contributors
• Index