Heralds of Health: Selling the Nature Cure, From Germany to the United States, 1880–1960

This dissertation examines how the “nature cure”—a set of health-related beliefs and practices—spread outward from German central Europe between the late 19th and the mid-20th century to become an influential part of the modern medical, cultural, political, and economic landscape internationally, particularly in the United States. It traces how the “cold water cure” developed by a Silesian farmer in the 19th century is connected to the fad diets of late-twentieth-century California, following both the German emigrants who exported the nature cure and founded organizations to support this work in the early 20th century and the continued development of the cure in Germany during the same period. The dissertation traces both the ideas practitioners espoused—and popularized through books, periodicals, sanatoria, and schools—and the practical conditions that shaped their successes and failures. It explores both their writings and the legal battles and business decisions that determined the forms their endeavors took. It examines how this tradition of seemingly marginal practices——now sometimes understood as part of “alternative” medicine and historically often associated with radical cultural and political movements—also became an important part of mainstream cultural and economic life internationally, shaping consumer products, popular ideas, and public health a century later. I argue that the particular view of nature and of curing the body that these practitioners of the “nature cure” developed—which distinguished them from the many other “alternative” ideas about health that existed contemporaneously—allowed them to gain and retain this foothold in the mainstream even as orthodox medicine grew substantially in its organization and effectiveness over the course of the century.