by Paul J Croce
critiques of these practices such as when he noted that, when water- curer
therapies called for patience through a healing pro cess, “sometimes its ef-
fects seem to be like romances or poems,” a view he continued to call, in the
next few years, a “poetical interpretation. ”50
Despite romantic associations, water cure included careful empirical
study of the effects of water in vari ous applications, amounts of time, and
degrees of temperature. Sectarians actually resembled those mainstream
doctors who insisted on sensitivity to individual patients by retaining the
princi ple of specificity with re sis tance to both clinical routinism and labo-
ratory attention to physiological factors. Specificity in hydropathy included
adapting each therapy to the patient’s own “reactive power,” and this was
especially true about the temperature of the water, which was changed to
suit personal constitutions. Variation in temperature became a tool. As one
practitioner put it, “the word cold . . . comprises a scale of many vari ous de-
grees,” each with distinct impacts on health. Although advocates of water
cure, along with irregulars in general, were more comfortable than regular
doctors with in- home, nonexpert medical care, they also felt that it could go
too far without knowledgeable advice. For example, many amateurs, hearing
generalizations about the benefits of cold water, applied it too rashly. One
practitioner complained that some house holders with their “radical and ex-
travagant ideas . . . bathe their children half to death” and expose them to
too much cold— better for these people to consult “Water- Cure physicians
who know their business. ”51 Mainstream medicine had no mono poly on
professional impatience with popu lar misunderstanding of expert stan-
dards of practice.
114 Young William James Thinking
These hydropaths laid claim to intimate understanding of the “cleansing
effect of Nature’s own best pure fluid”– namely, water in all its vital uses for
life and health. Outsiders looked at water cure as a simple system because of
its supposedly singular focus, even though the use of water was thoroughly
supplemented with keen attention to “the agencies of air, exercise, diet,
clothing, etc.” Within their prime focus, however, advocates relished the
“endless variety of applications of water, internal and external, warm, hot,
or cold, . . . vapor as well as liquid,” administered with a wide range of dif-
fer ent baths and wet packs. They even showed the same social trends
toward specialization that influenced mainstream professional practice;
James praised one establishment in Germany, emphasizing that it was “the
most potent of all in abdominal disorders.” Hydropaths were eager to point
out that the water was not a miracle cure, or even the cause of cure, but it
was a prime and wholly natu ral vehicle for the real source of health and
healing: as with sectarian medicine in general, they believed that individ-
ual vitality, or the patient’s own “organic strength,” was “the universal rem-
edy for all diseases.” It was this confidence in the physical manifestation of
the individual’s unique personal or spiritual identity that gave sectarians
their readiness to let nature heal with a minimum of interference, because
it was an “infallible sage.” By contrast, mainstream doctors treated the or-
ganism like a “stupid child that must be forced to be happy.” Unlike orthodox
treatments that “strike directly at the abnormality of the functions,” water-
cure therapies removed the symptoms “through the indirect means of
normalization of the chemical and structural relations of the diseased or-
ganism” as a whole.52 When not repulsed by the unnaturalness of main-
stream remedies, sectarians including hydropaths admitted the directness
and speed of mainstream therapies but warned about their side effects; and
so they maintained, as did most sectarians, that the slow but thorough pace
of healing from their more natu ral remedies would bring more substantial
and enduring results, especially when combined with generally healthy
living.
Water- cure prac ti tion ers offered a variety of means for nature to cure
through water applications, based on attention to the body’s own mecha-
nisms for removal of unhealthy material. The constant state of “appropria-
tion and secretion” effectively allows the body to take in healthy substances
and let out the unhealthy. Congestion of these natu ral pro cesses brought
disease, with health emerging from release. Sweating already drives unhealthy
matter through the pores of the skin, and excretion releases still more. To
Between Scientific and Sectarian Medicine 115
supplement these natu ral pro cesses, vari ous baths would change the configu-
ration of the blood vessels and other organs and do so even more effectively,
hydropaths insisted, than drugs. The cold would act to repulse “the blood
from the part of the body subjected thereto,” and the healthful reaction
would come from “the contra- operation of the organism” itself with its “in-
crease of heat in the refrigerated part.” Because the therapy supported a
pro cess already in place, the positive impact would endure far past the ap-
plication of cold. And “if the organism be vigorous,” hence the insistence on
good hygiene, the therapeutic increase in heat would continue still further.
Careful distinctions in the use of temperature for diff er ent patients also ap-
plied to diff er ent types of illness. For example, “persons with shattered nerves
must, under all circumstances, carefully guard against taking cold”; in-
stead, “diseased nerves must be tranquilized not excited,” and such patients
need “temperate water,” which “gradually soothes” the nerves.53 This was a
therapy that spoke to young James’s par tic u lar health conditions.
These therapists viewed the use of cold water as a power ful tool, which
with too long application or in a patient with a weak constitution could
cause injury or even death. When administered properly, the shock of the
cold water would improve heath, but only after bringing actual setbacks, such
as “evacuations of the morbific matters in boils, eruptions, perspirations,
diarrheas, etc.” This was the period of “crisis” in the cure, and although
uncomfortable and experienced as a temporary setback, it was anticipated
eagerly, even “with plea sure and hope.” To most observers, and in the critical
perspective of mainstream medicine, such symptoms were signs of contin-
ued disease— and particularly alarming and disgusting events— that needed
to be stopped. As uncomfortable and unpleasant as these symptoms were in
themselves, they were crucial to the water- cure treatment because they
indicated that “nature is successfully exerting herself to throw off the dis-
ease,” which they understood to be literally exiting the body with the unpleas-
ant secretions. And so, in water cure, as with other sectarian therapies, even
unpleasant symptoms were a “happy fortune”; the acute crisis was a necessary
/> and even welcome stage toward cure. By contrast, when attacking the symp-
toms, regular medicines could indeed make the patient feel better in the
short run, but these served as treatments that, the sectarians maintained,
would merely suppress diseases by preventing their exit. This is why water-
cure therapists, along with other sectarians, showed less concern for symp-
toms than did regular physicians. Instead of being objects for attack, fevers
and other vigorous “excitation[s]” served as “radical curative endeavors of
116 Young William James Thinking
the organism.” The crisis would also release any previous and often harm-
ful medicines, such as the mercury compound calomel (or helpful medi-
cines with short- term gains and harmful side effects); patients would even
“taste decidedly the medicaments again” as they were “driven out.” In
short, the therapy turned chronic long- standing health prob lems into “pri-
mary or acute diseases,” expressed in the crisis— similar to what homeo-
paths called a temporary “aggravation,” which homeopath Wilkinson called
the “instructive pa norama” of sickness— all steps in the body’s natu ral dy-
namics toward improved health. 54
James’s steady application of water- cure therapies helps explain his own
frequent use of the term crisis, often without alarm; in light of his sectarian
practice, he may have actually partially welcomed his personal trou bles of
the next few years after he earned his M.D. He was thinking about his trou-
bles as stages toward insight even before hearing Charles Peirce’s theory of
doubt as a stage toward belief; and his medical experiences could have pre-
disposed him to resonate with this thinking. He was already applying his
understanding of the role of crises in alternative medicine more broadly: in
1870, when he was in some of his own most difficult times, he urged his
brother Henry to “pick up heart” through a time when he was “so out of
order,” since “it may be a crisis bro’t on by the Water Cure.” In par tic u lar,
the “low spirits” his brother was then suffering was a frequent “concomi-
tant of oxaluria,” an excretion of excess oxalates in the urine; small amounts
of this organic acid are normal, taken in from many plant foods and even
produced by the human body, but poor metabolism can indeed bring ex-
cesses that produce melancholy along with poor digestion. As James him-
self said, the crisis setbacks were part of a broader “tendency to recover.” He
continued to use this mental model of the benefits of abrupt change in
his study of religious conversion and in his psychological observation that
“[t]he breaking up of mental bad habits is a part of every chronic cure.” Dur-
ing crisis events, the body discharges the causes of its ill health; and unless
freed from the long- standing prob lems leading to these acute moments, the
prob lems would remain embedded or suppressed, causing repeated chronic
symptoms. For just these reasons, sectarian therapists even called the acute
crises “healing diseases.” With these symptoms serving as part of the body’s
adaptive means for coping with diseases, nonmainstream physicians ironi-
cally showed more fidelity to evolutionary theory than did scientific medicine
with its eagerness to correct prob lem conditions; such medical interventions
would remove a natu ral adaptation from the body’s natu ral healing powers. 55
Between Scientific and Sectarian Medicine 117
Despite the long- term benefits of crises and aggravations, the forecast of
worsening health before improvement generally held increasingly less appeal
to most patients compared to the promise of immediate improvement from
mainstream medicine, with its ability to deal with severe symptoms and quell
the dangers they might pose, even when only appearing temporarily.
James had his own most extensive experience of water cure during
his trip to Germany. With plans for learning science and also for improving
health especially at the beginning of his stay, James was “feeling quite
hopeful of recovery.” He spent four months reading and learning German,
and then he made his first visit to Teplitz, in Bohemia near Dresden. After a
short stay in August 1867, he was ready to resume work: “I have been greatly
reinvigorated by my stay here, and consider myself a well man.” Before his
treatments at the German water cure, he had complained that “the state of
my back . . . [had] been very much worse than before I left home.” He also
reported a host of digestive prob lems including chronic gastritis and dyspep-
sia. He commented that, while at Teplitz, “owing to the weakening effects of
the baths, both back & st[oma]ch. got worse if anything.” Recognizing the
role of temporary setbacks, he did not report his own weakening with alarm
or even surprise; he even ended the very sentence about getting worse by
saying that while under these treatments he was “happy as a king,” and he
went on to say, “I have been growing every day steadily better in every re-
spect.”56 He was experiencing the benefits of his temporary but healing set-
back, but he would experience the burden of crises over and over again.
Any rebound was a rare delight for the long- suffering James, so he caught
himself thinking “I . . . hardly wish to believe it yet,” since he had come to
know “the terrible jerk of a relapse . . . as has so often happened.” Sure
enough, by November, once he was established in Berlin, he found himself
less able to work because “this Sickness takes all the Spring, physical &
mental, out of a man.” Symptoms physical and mental continued to inter-
twine: he reported that “I am in a mood of indigestion and blueness.”
Throughout the winter, his back prob lems persisted, sometimes getting
“much worse,” sometimes “getting slowly better.” While engaged in reading
and attending lectures in Berlin, his energy would decline and his symp-
toms worsen. However, he had faith that real healing would come at the
water cures, and so, “I am looking forward to Teplitz in the Spring to give
my back another shove,” although he fully realized that with these tempo-
rary crises, “the effect of all this is weakening to the body generally of
course— & the local trou ble usually feels a good deal worse at first.” Even
118 Young William James Thinking
the setbacks did not make him doubt the value of this alternative therapy
but spurred him to want more, since he found “ these baths . . . of great effi-
cacity to me.” 57
Even with his general endorsement of water cures, James sometimes
grew impatient with the crises that were part of the pro cess of therapy, and
at these moments he gave voice to the mainstream’s skepticism. For exam-
ple, on his second visit to Teplitz, he complained that “the baths had done
me no good but rather the reverse.” Still, he had to admit that “since then I
have grow[n] considerably better,” and he gamely went back for more water
cure. Since his improvements and relapses left him at about the same level
of health as before the baths,
he wryly commented that “all the harm that
[Teplitz] has done me has been loss of time & pocket.” And yet, by later in
the spring, the hope of getting healthy enough to work in a laboratory of
physiological psy chol ogy made him want to “give the baths a fair chance of
working, and then go to Heidelberg,” to learn from the scientists whose
work he had been studying and whose laboratory investigations into psy-
chol ogy he hoped to join, Hermann Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt. 58
James’s last months in Eu rope became a kind of endurance contest for
his efforts to find a cure, with moments of hope for physiological laboratory
study breaking through. In May he was feeling worse, and he resolved to
rest by staying in Dresden rather than taking up university study. The next
month, he took on his long- anticipated trip to Heidelberg with its holy grail
of physiological laboratories. But upon getting there, he “fled . . . under the
influence of a blue despair.” He explained that “one of the men I went to
hear does not lecture,” so he explained, “I should not have been able to
stand the monotony.” His comments veered away from physical complaints
and into psychological insight. His surface be hav ior showed weakness, but
in the pro cess, he had discovered a “resource . . . to keep of sound mind.”
His coping resource included “walking off tedium and trou ble” and keeping
“in reach of conversation, music, french & en glish newspapers.” In short,
when he was suffering internally, he turned to his own inner citadel for the
things he could control, and the learning he craved reached beyond science.
In addition, he wanted his surroundings to be healthy and stimulating: in
par tic u lar, he needed “at least the sight of rushing affairs that a large city
gives”; by contrast, Heidelberg was “a mere village.” Even as his observa-
tions took humanistic and cosmopolitan turns, he identified his experience
in the language of sectarian medicine by referring to this “Heidelberg cri-
sis.” This was one of his first uses of the word “crisis,” but it did not involve
Between Scientific and Sectarian Medicine 119
any dread panic or even any fearful moment; applying the stages of holistic
healing more broadly, he was frustrated about not reaching his vocational