of a serene mind. They believed that it is better to prevent illness than to try to cure it once it occurs—a concept we're just getting around to understanding in this modern age of Western medicine. We've certainly made a lot of progress in the last two thousand years!
The use of plants and herbs was already highly developed in many cultures many centuries ago. Thriving pharmacopoeias were produced in China, Egypt, and Greece. The Chinese, who were using acupuncture in addition to herbs, massage, and gentle exercise, had delineated points on the body that could be needled or cauterized to cure or alleviate pain associated with most ailments. Historians indicate that the Chinese may have filtered water and prescribed boiling water and eating hot dishes as a means of avoiding infection.6 Because Egyptians actively engaged in embalming the dead, they began to learn the delicate intricacies of the human anatomy. Egyptians and Greeks used herbs and foods to balance the humors, often using St. John's Wort, yarrow, and plantain to heal wounds and ward off illness. And whether Chinese, Egyptian, or Greek, disease prevention teachings, along with suggestions for keeping the body in balance, were a major component of these early beliefs.
During medieval times and even later, setbacks were not uncommon. Wars, cultural revolutions, plagues, malnutrition, and rampant disease left many victims in their wake. Keeping pace with the turbulence and magnitude of disease and death was challenging for physicians, at best. And in the 1500s and early 1600s, when the ancestors of some of us first set off across the Atlantic in search of a better life, scurvy and rickets were taking thousands of lives before the historic ships ever reached America's shores. Unprepared for the primitive life of the New World, women and babies died in childbirth, and nature's bitter elements took many lives as well. Native American healers, familiar with the restorative powers of their lands, shared shamanic teachings about the healing properties of plants, grains, and community. Recognizing the value of these natural remedies, the earliest settlers continued the medical evolution by sending these ideas back to Europe to incorporate them with the European healing tradition.
As the oceans' waters ebb and flow across sand, pebbles, and jagged rocks, so has medical theory over the centuries. The eclectic blend of Native American, African, Eastern, and European traditions eventually evolved into the new medicine: the Western way—the path that continues to dominate our medical treatments today. Corresponding with the U.S. industrial revolution, the mid-1800s marked an end to the free-spirited, anything-goes medicine of earlier times. Just like factory managers, physicians began to value the importance of fixing parts and keeping our bodies working like finely oiled machines. This type of thinking, along with the concept that bacteria produce disease and that antitoxins could be used to ward off these bacteria, formed the early roots of biomedicine. The American Medical Association was formed in 1847, and by the end of the nineteenth century its members were lobbying for state licensing laws. In the twentieth century, Western biomedical theory, as the conventional route to caring for the sick, was designated the one true path to health. Virtually every state in the United States passed laws governing medicine and its practice.
Because the medical establishment was quick to label alternative approaches to the Western way as hocus-pocus and quackery, chiropractors, homeopaths, and practitioners from other schools of thought (often women) were pushed out of the mainstream medical arena. The Pure Food and Drug Act, regulating the prescription of medicinals, was passed by 1906. With the release of the Flexner Report, Medical Education in the United States and Canada, in 1910, competing forms of medicine were virtually obliterated. Abraham Flexner, a U.S. educator and founder of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, developed the report to set standards for American medical school education. In some instances the report helped regulate education, which in the 1800s had been far from adequate, ensuring that doctors were qualified to care for the ill and infirm.
But the Flexner Report certainly had its shortcomings: it was rigid, leaving little room for innovation and flexibility in medical education, and it never addressed the patient-doctor relationship. At the time that the Flexner Report was written, this relationship was taken for granted. Of course, the patient would always be considered above all else, Flexner reasoned. So he did not write that concept into the standards. As generations of doctors learned how to treat human bodies, that's all they learned. The importance of listening and staying connected to the patient was lost somewhere between anatomy and pharmacy. And even Flexner, who was not a physician, was eventually displeased with the rigid standards that he had originally helped create.
Within a few short years following Flexner's curricula guide, alternative medical schools—schools of homeopathy and osteopathy to name two—were left with little more than fringe status, and most were forced to close their doors. (Homeopathy is a school of treatment involving the administration of minute doses of remedies to increase the symptoms a patient is experiencing in an effort to spur the body's powers to restore harmony. Osteopathy is the science of manipulating the musculoskeletal system to restore health.) Biomedicine was the standard. Doctors and the powerful lobby of the AMA successfully kept the "charlatans," as they called them, out of the arena for nearly sixty years. It wasn't until consumer confidence in conventional medicine started to wane three decades ago that an opening appeared for alternative paths of healing. Many of the changes began to emerge in the sixties. Reports on the serious side effects of commonly used drugs like antibiotics started chipping away at consumer confidence. Coupled with a resurgence of more virulent strains of tuberculosis and deadly bacterial species like strep-A (the flesh-eater), not to mention new diseases like AIDS and Alzheimer's and cancer that traditional treatments could not cure, medical shoppers began looking for more. They wanted to find something to help them feel better, not necessarily get rid of the disease, just make them feel better. They wanted a more satisfying way of life.
MEDICINE AMERICAN-STYLE
Western Miracles and the Deification of Doctors
Many of this country's medical breakthroughs have had some basis in ancient Eastern wisdom. Drawing on an eleventh-century Chinese practice of using a powder derived from aging smallpox scabs to prevent disease, English country doctor Edward Jenner further evolved this Asian discovery into a vaccine for smallpox. Jenner scratched eight-year-old James Phipps's arm with the cowpox virus. It was this simple experiment that, several generations later, led to the eradication of smallpox in America and most of the world.7 Although it was the Chinese who first used this technique, Jenner was named the Father of Vaccinology.
By the first half of this century, new medical discoveries had dramatically altered the face of Western medicine. Soaring past ancient horizons, medicine's innovations unveiled frontiers never before explored by even the most adventurous of healers. British bacteriologist Alexander Fleming was one such pathfinder. Returning from vacation in 1928, the pioneering scientist was cleaning up his laboratory and discarding used culture plates, when he observed something new: a fungus that had been flourishing on the culture plates in his absence was destroying the fringes of the deadly staphylococcus bacteria that had been smeared on the plates. His observations, although not fully appreciated and developed into penicillin until the 1940s, gave rise to a new era of treatment.8
At the same time government, academia, medical science, and the private sector, namely, drug companies with big dollars, formed previously unheard of alliances. Vast sums of government dollars were poured into medical research at medical schools and universities, and this powerful partnership9 began a miraculous wave of invention that launched Western medical care into an age of wondrous findings and technological advances. Smallpox and polio were virtually eradicated in the Western hemisphere; human eggs could be fertilized in test tubes instead of in the mother's womb; surgery and medical imaging, enhanced by computers and robotics, became commonplace; body organs could be transplanted from dead patients into living ones, from pigs to humans; and through innovations in communication, and remote surgery techniques, surgeons and patients could remain on opposite sides of the country during surgical procedures.
As we approach the end of this millennium, technology is advancing more rapidly than even such sci-fi legends as Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov could predict.
