Wrestling with Nature From Omens to Science

Science and Medicine 213

Unfortunately for the regulars, the sectarians had no intention of abdi-
cating their own claim to science, particularly in a society that was grant-
ing science ever more cultural authority. Some, especially the homeopaths,
claimed to be more scientifi c than the allopaths, because their “provings”
(that is, experiments to see how healthy patients responded to various
doses of drugs), constituted experimental medicine. For at least one ho-
meopathic practitioner, the “science of medicine” amounted to noth-
ing more than “a knowledge of how to cure the sick.”^55 Wooster Beach,
founder of the eclectic sect, referred to his practice as “the scientifi c system
of medicine.”^56 Delegates at a convention in 1852 to organize a national
society of botanic physicians refl ected this view when they extended an
invitation to “all who believe that medicine is strictly a natural science,
and as systematic as are other natural sciences.”^57 One of Thomson’s dis-
ciples contrasted the “the horrible, unwarrantable, murderous quackery”
of the regulars with the “truly scientifi c practice” of botanics, based on
“the immutable laws of Creative wisdom.”^58
When new systems of healing—Christian Science, osteopathy, and
chiropractic—appeared in the late nineteenth century, at a time when
scientifi c medicine was enjoying unprecedented popularity, they, too,
cloaked themselves in the mantle of science. Mary Baker Eddy may have
rejected the reality of disease, death, and matter itself, but she insisted
on calling her system of healing Christian Science and on naming her
major text Science and Health (1875).^59 Andrew Taylor Still likewise based
his “Science of Osteopathy” on “a scientifi c principle.”^60 D. D. Palmer,
who in the late 1880s was trying to educate the world about “the science
of magnetic healing,” went on a few years later to found chiropractic,
the most successful sectarian movement of the twentieth century. Palmer
defi ned science as “knowledge; ascertained facts; accumulated informa-
tion of causes and principles systematized.” In his Text- Book of the Science,
Art and Philosophy of Chiropractic (1910) he laid out his claim to being a
genuine scientist:

I ascertained these truths, acquired instruction, heretofore unrecognized,

regarding the performance of functions in health and disease. I systematized

and correlated these principles, made them practical. By doing so I created,

brought into existence, originated a science, which I named Chiropractic;

therefore I am a scientist.^61

As Steven C. Martin has shown, chiropractic’s claims to science rang
less hollow at the turn of the twentieth century than they do now. Chi-
ropractors may have rejected the new laboratory- based experimental