Gwyneth Paltrow didn’t invent the American naturopathy trend, this guy did
How to sell the feel-goods to the public, version 1.0
Benedict Lust sounds more like a probiotic smoothie powder than a grown man. It’s fitting, then, that he became America’s foremost lifestyle guru — while insisting everyone call it science.
The German-born father of naturopathy found his calling in his twenties, after he claimed an intensive regimen of water therapy cured him of life-threatening tuberculosis. From that point, he dedicated the rest of his life to marketing alternative medicine to Americans.
The 20-year-old German had just moved to New York in 1892 when he contracted a serious case of TB. His doctors gave up treatment. “My death warrant was made out by the doctors in my presence,” he later said, according to Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America. He returned to Germany, resigned to spend the remainder of his days at home.
That’s when he discovered Wörishofen, a spa facility dedicated to hydrotherapy. There, a Bavarian priest named Sebastian Kneipp administered his “water cure,” a series of treatments that alternated water temperature and pressure in an effort to stimulate and heal the circulatory system, which Kneipp believed was the root of all disease. After eight months, Lust’s tuberculosis was gone.
Invigorated and astounded, Lust predicted hydrotherapy’s potential in America and pledged to “go into the New World and spread the Gospel of the Water Cure.” With Kneipp’s blessing, he began studying and contributing to periodicals, eventually founding his own in 1900, Kneipp Water Cure Monthly. He established additional Kneipp Societies.
Unfortunately, he soon discovered the Kneipp name didn’t command the same reverence in America; the country’s handful of acolytes were constantly teased for walking barefoot through Central Park. He would have to expand the brand.
Lust renamed Kneippism “naturopathy” in 1901, when he bought the term from Dr. John Scheel, another German homeopath, and founded the American School of Naturopathy in New York. Naturopathy went far beyond water therapy; it exposed Americans to a deep holistic movement known as Lebensreform (Life Reform). Since the mid 19th century, in response to a growing anxiety around industrialization, Germany had grown Lebensreform into the world’s most influential health movement, founded on organic eating, vegetarianism, homeopathy, nudism, natural healing, and the study of the supposed healing properties of sunlight, fresh air, and greenery. Lebensreformers did not advocate complete removal from society, however; they sought a peaceful, mindful coexistence with the increasing chaos of urban life, and even went so far as to build several “garden cities” on the outskirts of German urban centers before World War II.
Lust knew the quickly modernizing United States would go for the idea. Whenever daily life changes rapidly, people want to return to the old ways.
Naturopathy claimed Hippocrates as its symbolic founder, thus provoking a battle with the professional medical establishment that continues to this day. Modern doctors “have sought to cure disease by the magic of pills and potions and poisons that attacked the ailment with the idea of suppressing the symptoms instead of attacking the real cause of the ailment,” rallied Lust. He claimed drugs were the true weakness, whereas nature exposed a person to the “elements,” so to speak, and made them stronger. Under naturopathy, only a person’s “vitality,” a spiritual life force that defied scientific explanation, held the cure.
Quantifying the medical applications of the soul was no easy task. As naturopaths continued to war with doctors, Lust attempted to distance himself from cries of pseudoscience by distinguishing naturopathy from the quacks who flooded alternative medicine at the turn of the 20th century. “Where there is no official recognition and regulation, you will find the plotters, the thieves, the charlatans,” he said. “[The] riff-raff opportunists bring the whole art into dispute.” Besides tending to his school of naturopathy, Lust earned a degree in osteopathy, opened spa-like sanitariums, founded the American Naturopathic Association, and published a new magazine called Nature’s Path. One early and outspoken naturopath follower was Bernarr Macfadden, a bodybuilder who immortalized an American health and fitness frenzy.
Despite the public’s infatuation with natural living, naturopathy struggled for footing. As science and medicine achieved major technological breakthroughs, naturopaths remained intently focused on disease prevention through healthy lifestyle. Few medical schools taught “irregular medicine,” as alternative medicine was then called. Though some offered ND (Doctor of Naturopathy) degrees, they were generally considered inferior. Naturopaths left the operating room to the MDs.
Benedict Lust, the man who created a mainstream appreciation for alternative healing, and later paved the way for an appreciation of Eastern disciplines like yoga, died in 1945. It was a new postwar era, not to mention the birth of the TV dinner. Naturopathy and Lebensreform had largely faded from mainstream practice.
But today, the wellness movement governing the millennial marketplace advocates the same basic principles as early naturopathy: clean eating, fitness, and mindful coexistence with the breakneck pace of modern society. Surveys show 32 percent of millennials are willing to pay more for “healthier products,” compared with 21 percent of Baby Boomers; and millennials spend twice as much on self-care experiences, such as health clubs, diet plans, and life coaching.
Market surveys for jade eggs are still forthcoming.
