John Wesley and The Origins of the Natural Health Movement

[n2doc]

Examine the discourse of any alternative medicine and you will encounter a surprisingly homogenous set of themes: that their methods are natural, simple, available to all, and are based on ancient and traditional knowledge. Cures for disease are freely available from nature and we do not need the intermediation of a medical elite to provide us with them. These cures have been known for generations and we have lost sight of them through an unwarranted fixation with science and progress.

Advocates of alternative medicine frequency position themselves against ‘conventional’ medicine by describing it as narrowly focussed on a scientific view of people, lacking in a personal approach and corrupted by the status, money and greed of physicians and drug companies. Such views would appear to be recent reactions to the often dehumanising experience of modern medicine where people appear to be treated like machines, and where doctors are accused of neglecting their patients’ spiritual and emotional needs. Alternative medicine is a call for a more human and personal medicine. However, these themes are not new. Such accusations have deeper roots in history and date back long before the emergence of current medical practice.

John Wesley is best known for his theological activities and the founding of the Methodists. He gave rise to a religious movement with tens of millions of followers. However, his best selling book was not a religious book. He was not just concerned with saving people souls; he also had keen interests in healing their bodies. In 1747 he published a book, Primitive Physic, that listed the ‘easy and natural cures for most diseases’. His medicinal beliefs followed quite closely his religious beliefs. He rejects the authority of the medical ‘priests’, the doctors, and embraces the authority of Nature, just as he called for people to seek a personal understanding of their faith through scripture and not the priesthood. As his theology taught that the Bible was the one reliable source of truth and that we could individually understand it through personal experience, his medicinal approach stated that nature was the source of healing remedies and we could understand what was effective through direct experience of such treatments.

The book is a list of ailments and their corresponding cures, listed in priority. Try the first, and only if that did not work, move onto the second and third. The emphasis is on cures that could be readily available to most. So, we have honey as a cure for bee stings and, most delightfully, holding a puppy against the stomach as a cure for stomach pains. We find nettles, and cinnamon and onion as staples of the first aid kit. There are prunes, lemonade and liquorice. A few cures stand out as having many uses – most obviously Wesley had a belief that cold water baths were a near panacea.

more (risque):
http://www.quackometer.net/blog/2009/11/john-wesley-and-origins-of-natural.html

[MineralMan]

1. At the time he wrote, there was little that doctors

could offer. In fact, they prescribed natural remedies in many cases, since they had nothing superior in their pharmacopoeia. Since then, we have discovered effective remedies and preventatives for many illnesses.

I'm not entirely sure why the "alternative" medicine community delves back into these times. We know stuff today that wasn't dreamed of in the 18th century. It is one of their major failures.