As a young man in his native Scotland, James C. Thomson enjoyed browsing the Edinburgh bookshops for popular health books, written by "crazy advocates of water treatment, physical culture and dietetic reform." He read the most "odd and freakish" sections to his friends in medical school and listened with glee to their "authoritative debunkings." He couldn't have known that in a few short years he would be rereading these books "in a different frame of mind: instead of looking for laughs he was desperate for any glimmer of hope" (C.L.Thomson 1987, 3).
Thomson was born July 18, 1887, at his family's farm, Eastertown of Gagie in the county of Angus. He claimed such distinguished relations as David Livingstone, the explorer, and William Thomson, the inventor of the pneumatic tire. Thomson was eleven when his father died, and shortly thereafter his mother took him and his two sisters to Edinburgh where he attended Daniel Stewart's College. His mother was "a striking character, of formidable presence and with an unwavering faith in her own rights and judgment," characteristics she shared with her son and which would serve him well in his future career as a naturopath (ibid., 2-3).
At sixteen, Thomson joined the Royal Navy, but eighteen months later he "went down with an acute lung condition," tuberculosis. In the Naval Hospital he deteriorated so drastically that he was discharged as incurable. His doctor sent him home with no more than three months to live. The sick young man interpreted the hearty slap on the back which accompanied this news as a challenge, and he decided at that instant to fight for his life, "just to spite you, you . . . . (nautical expression)." He stated many years later: "The most active therapeutic agent of which I know consists in a determination to get well at all costs" (1954, 192).
With nowhere else to turn, Thomson dug out the popular health works he had read before only for sport. "In a crude and groping way, he formulated a regimen for himself and stuck to it with determination." He retired to a cousin's farm where he could devote himself full-time to the job of fighting for his life. He prayed daily that the bleeding from his lungs would stop. One day he realized that he had been so engrossed in prayer that he failed to notice that he hadn't bled for a week. He continued to build up his health and to educate himself as much as possible in the ways of natural healing. To study further, he decided to set off for America.
His first destination was Battle Creek, Michigan, where he worked at Bernarr Macfadden's natural health sanatorium. He treated the famous American writer Sinclair Lewis and met C. W. Post, who became rich marketing the coffee substitute Postum and the breakfast cereal Post Toasties. Initially, Thomson was quite impressed by the results he witnessed from Macfadden's regime, primarily fasting and daily enemas. He saw "disease of almost every type fade away under treatment as morning mist does before the summer sun." However, he noticed over time that the patients "did not stay cured." As his enthusiasm "began to wilt a little," he came across an article by Henry Lindlahr, pointing out the dangers of injudicious fasting and bowel cleansing (ibid., 6-7). Thomson promptly left Battle Creek for Chicago to join Lindlahr, "who seemed to be producing more stable results." Thomson realized that he had found what he had come to America seeking, "a comprehensive system of natural methods of treatment, bound together by a philosophy and resting firmly on a scientific basis" (C. L. Thomson 1987, 4).
If he needed further convincing that he had come to the right place, an unusual incident on his trip provided it. During a dangerous mid-Atlantic storm, Thomson stood on deck of the steamship and watched "the enormous waves build up, far above deck height." Then, suddenly:
. . . as he was gazing at a great green wall of water, he saw in the midst of it, a clear picture of a brightly lit room, through an archway, in which sat a middle-aged man surrounded by a circle of people . . . . The scene was nothing like any place he had previously seen, and the people were unfamiliar (ibid.).
Thomson gave this no further thought until his first visit to Lindlahr's sanitarium in Chicago, which was on a Sunday evening.
As he entered the main hallway, he looked through an archway and there was the scene exactly as it appeared to him in the Atlantic storm many months before. It was Dr. Lindlahr seated amidst his patients at a Sunday Evening health talk (ibid).
Thomson and Lindlahr found that they had many interests in common, and a strong mutual respect developed. Thomson was such an "eager pupil" and "tireless worker," and Lindlahr eventually made him manager of the sanitarium. Thomson carried out his duties with distinction, especially in his work with psychiatric cases. However, not all of Thomson's activities at Lindlahr's were serious and health-oriented. Thomson often accepted friendly challenges from co-workers to see who could eat the most ice cream in a sitting, the loser having to cover the cost of the confections. According to his son, Thomson "never had to pay." Although Thomson left Lindlahr to strike out on his own after "frictions within the Lindlahr menage developed to an uncomfortable degree," Thomson always adhered to the principles and practices he learned from his mentor and constantly quoted his teachings (ibid., 8).
From Chicago Thomson traveled to Missouri where he set up a successful practice long enough to become known locally as the "Sunshine Doctor." From there he went to Florida, but he found its climate too warm for his health. In 1912 he decided to return to Scotland for a rest.
Back in Edinburgh he established a small practice and accepted as one of his first patients a Miss Jessie Hood, secretary to a famous eye specialist at the Royal Infirmary. Miss Hood, skeptical at first, soon had to admit "there was something lovable about the young quack." When he healed her of a condition her boss had assured her was incurable, she was even more impressed. For his part, Thomson began to find that Edinburgh had more than its agreeable climate to recommend itself. In June, 1913, he and Miss Hood were married.
Shortly after their son, Leslie, was born in 1914, World War I broke out. As a staunch pacifist, Thomson refused induction into the armed forces and had to appear before a panel of judges. Thomson presented his case with uncompromising militancy. Instead of imprisoning him, as he expected, the tribunal unanimously agreed to exempt him. He went home "utterly deflated and with a feeling of having been cheated" (ibid., 9-10).
Against the earnest advice of Lindlahr who had warned him against the "difficulties and heartbreaks" of a residential practice, Thomson decided to establish a sanatorium in Edinburgh. However, he could not afford the estate he desired and moved into a large house in the West End of Edinburgh, 11 Drumsheugh Gardens, "right in the middle of the medical world." For the next sixteen years "Drumsheugh" would be "a hive of industry." It housed his family, school, growing practice and publications office. He established a free clinic for needy children, founded the magazine Rude Health, and imported the first mercury vapor lamp for ultraviolet therapy. He experimented extensively with x-rays and received so much radiation exposure that he developed nodules on his arms. By 1938, when the estate he had originally hoped to purchase came back on the market, Thomson could now afford its considerable price. The magnificent old mansion of Gothic proportions, made of a rare pinkish orange sandstone, cemented with putty instead of mortar, was in dire need of rehabilitation.
In April of 1939, after massive renovation, Thomson opened the doors of "Kingston," his beautiful new in-patient facility; but shortly thereafter, World War II broke out. The resultant rationing, call-up of staff, blitzes and invasion scares were a challenge to the development of the new clinic, but Thomson and his wife, with the help of their son and daughter, both naturopaths, managed to overcome these difficulties. Additionally, various legal and medical authorities did their best to close Kingston down under numerous pretexts. But Kingston stayed "open and active." Thomson represented himself during these prosecutions "with more than credit," having previously suffered from incompetent legal counsel in an alleged traffic violation, for which he went to prison and staged a thirteen-day hunger strike rather than pay a fine for an unjust conviction. During this time Thomson was diagnosed with radiation sickness from his exposure to x-rays and given only two years to live, but he managed to overcome this too (ibid., 14-15).
Thomson became one of the greatest nature cure philosophers of the mid-twentieth century, and his practice, the "Kingston system," was directly descended from Lindlahr.
In our philosophy and practice we keep the word 'cure' firmly attached to its original meaning . . . cure in its original form, implied a combination of care and curiosity. Care for the ailing person and curiosity about why he became ill (1960, 50-51).
"Anyone who offers a short cut to health, ignoring cause," he noted elsewhere, "is a quack" (1954, 89). Like Lindlahr, he was a staunch believer in the vis medicatrix naturae.
I cannot understand why we should be so distrustful of the forces which built our bodies out of an almost invisible speck of protoplasm. . . . If they can build a body, they should be able to repair it (1938, 46).
He was a purist in his nature cure philosophy, insisting that healing came from within, not from without. "Genuine Nature Cure," he wrote, "has no use for medicaments or 'remedies' in any form" (1960, 59). He believed healing occurred only within living tissues. It was as much a function of the living body as breathing. He considered the idea that one person heals another person "a pitiful superstition" (ibid., 28) "It is no more possible for one human being to cure another human being," he wrote, "than it is for one person to breathe for another" (1950, 5). As he told a very sick patient who overcame "terminal" tuberculosis, "I cannot cure you, but you can probably cure yourself if you do as I tell you" (1960, 58).
This strict attitude, of course, led to many conflicts with "mixers" who employed herbal, nutritional and homeopathic remedies in their naturopathic practices, and who, Thomson felt, had an "inadequate understanding" of natural treatment. Their patients had little faith "in their inborn self-healing powers, and feel the need to lean upon some variety of bottled remedy" (1954, 19). Because the vis tnedicatrix naturae was intolerant of toxic tissues, Thomson taught that real health was rarely placid. To emphasize this point he entitled his magazine Rude Health. The body underwent periodic detoxifications, or as Thomson liked to call them, "house cleanings," which unburdened it from the poisons that made it sick. These detoxifications were easily misinterpreted. Most people became upset when they got sick, but Thomson preached an alternative point of view:
When your body decides upon a spring cleaning, instead of becoming emotional and afraid, you should be thankful to your body for making such an excellent effort on your behalf (1950, 3).
Like Lindlahr and his predecessors, Thomson believed that chronic disease resulted from suppression of acute disease. He was fond of quoting the famous Summerhill educator, A. S.
Neill, who agreed with nature cure practices:
I believe that Nature Cure people are right when they apply to physical disease the same method that we apply to psychical disease. Just as a buried wish should be lived out, so should a buried poison be allowed to find its way out (1939, 65).
Thomson often invoked John H. Tilden's "intelligent leaving alone," as the best course for working with the vis medicatrix naturae during a healing crisis (1938, 50). If the body's efforts to expel toxins were suppressed, he believed, one could eventually expect "the long suffering and lingering death from cancer" (ibid., 17). Thomson even went so far as to suggest that the drawn-out agony so often seen in modern death was less attributable to life-saving devices than to debilitating medicines given throughout life, which left the body without the vitality to accomplish its own natural, peaceful demise. Because all disease resulted from accumulated toxins and was in fact the result of the body's attempts to get rid of them, Thomson did not believe in "conferring titles upon conditions of ill health" (1947, 11).
Conventional diagnostic names promote the mistaken idea that the "disease" has to be suppressed and that only one part or system of the body is affected. "Disease is never only local," he wrote. "Your body is either all healthy or all unhealthy" (1950, 11). Conventional diagnosis also imparted a sense of hopelessness to patients with "terminal" diseases. Thomson believed that "incurable diseases do not advance without supplies. Withdraw the cause and the body is self-healing" (1954, 18).
The prevention of intoxication through natural living and the allowance for detoxification by not suppressing acute disease were the keys to vibrant health which Thomson believed were available to every person. "Healing is essentially a 'do-it-yourself phenomenon," he wrote late in his career (1960, 51). Like Lindlahr, he believed that maintaining healthful habits by strong self-control was of utmost importance. "There is but one cure," he wrote, "break the habit" (1954,71). The secret to a long, healthy life was "to live within one's physiological limits at all times." This simple goal is rarely attained due to the worst human habit of all, "the daily adventure to see how near to disaster we can go without being caught."(1960, 28).
What is wrong with most people is that they want to eat things that are not good for them, they want to drink things that are not good for them, and they want to do things that are not good for them (1954, 18).
In short, they wanted to enjoy life, not only health. Most of them didn't want to be the health puritans prescribed for by nature cure.
The therapeutic mainstays of the "Kingston system" were diet, hydro-therapy and spinal manipulation. Thomson's dietary philosophy was summed up in a Lindlahr statement he liked to quote: "One-third of what we eat enables us to live; the other two-thirds enables the doctors to live" (1954, 24).
Thomson prescribed a mostly raw food vegetarian diet and railed against denatured foods, especially those with artificial preservatives:
We now have food that "keeps" indefinitely. . . which means that germs cannot live on it and that, in turn, means that we would be well advised not to try to do so either. If the additives are so poisonous that they will kill bugs, it is only a matter of time before it does the same to the human consumer (1960, 29).
Thomson also practiced judicious, short-term fasting on his patients and promoted the drinking of Koumiss, a cultured raw milk product, as a source of healthful bowel flora.
He regarded hydrotherapy as "one among several equally important parts of Nature Cure practice." His hydrotherapy practices fell squarely within the tradition of Priessnitz, Kneipp and Kuhne. One of his favorite therapeutic baths was the "squat splash," a modification of Kuhne's friction sitz bath suitable for home use, where the patient squats in a tub with three to four inches of cold water and splashes the lower abdominal and perineal areas (C. L.
Thomson 1970, 11).
Unlike some predecessors and contemporaries, Thomson did not advocate internal hydrotherapy. His experience at Macfadden's sanatorium convinced him of the disadvantages of enemas and colonic irrigations, and he used them only in special circumstances. He was also against copious water drinking.
For the majority of the chronically ill persons with whom we have had to deal, the most common physical peculiarity has been a long-established tendency toward flabby, water-logged tissues—very often derived from following medical advice to drink so many pints of water daily (1960, 4).
While he was a strong advocate of detoxification, he believed the popular idea of flushing the system out with water was misguided. "Elimination is of a chemical and not a mechanical nature," he wrote (1970, 14). Thomson was convinced that excessive water intake diluted the intestinal juices, caused the intestinal tissues to "lose their tensile strength," and promoted constipation by causing a rebound dryness (1950, 21). One of Thomson's books was entitled Two Health Problems: Constipation and Our Civilization, which indicted laxatives, enemas and excessive water drinking as causes rather than cures of chronic constipation.
While water drinking to overcome intestinal dryness could achieve immediate relief of constipation, it was at the expense of the body's future well-being and regularity. Instead of secreting its own mucous fluids to lubricate its membranes, the bowel learned to rely on massive water intake to artificially wash its contents through. In the tradition of Kneipp, who believed the body should be hardened by judicious challenges, Thomson advocated keeping the bowel as dry as possible. "Dryness of faecal matter is stimulus for the secretion of mucous fluids," he quoted from Lindlahr. "When the stimulus is lacking the intestines become less active" (1954, 13-14).
Additionally, Thomson believed that excess water increased the absorption of toxins from the intestines into the bloodstream, because "the bowels are distended, and their walls accordingly stretched and thinned, therefore becoming more easily permeable to the bowel contents" (1970, 15). This is an intriguing theory in light of the intense research which is currently being conducted on the relationship between gastrointestinal mucosal permeability and disease (Crissinger 1990, 145-154).
Thomson believed manipulating the spine was essential for achieving and maintaining healthy organs and tissues. He used it skillfully to correct nerve and circulatory imbalances which hampered normal function.
Although often accused of extremism because of his radical devotion to nature cure, Thomson saw himself as striving for the "sweet reasonable" in all things (1960, 4). This tendency was manifest in his approach to iris diagnosis, which others had taken to extremes.
He favored common sense iridology "shorn of glamour" and not "obscured with romanticism" (1970, 17). Common sense described much of his approach. He made a dramatic cure of gangrene of the foot in a patient by, among other things, having her quit smoking. Concerning her previous doctors she told him:
I used to lie in bed talking and smoking all the time they were examining me. You are the first person who ever said that tobacco could have anything to do with my condition (1960, 32).
He also used common sense to invent natural treatments of stunning simplicity such as the "T. K. Wriggle." Sitting or standing, have the subject place both feet flat on the floor. Then the toes of one foot are raised as high as the footwear will allow—keeping the sole of the foot firmly pressed down. Then lower the raised toes and raise the lowered ones alternately, at about the speed of walking. Keep that up during all your waking hours and, providing the wriggler's nutritional and other habits are reasonable. . . practically all ulcers, skin eruptions, intermittent claudication, etc., should quietly fade away.
In the tradition of the earliest nature doctors, Thomson learned this "trick" by watching horses, cows, elephants and other large animals. "The healthy ones all keep wriggling," he wrote, "the unhealthy ones keep still." It adds that little push to defective circulation which can decide the issue . . .
. These results have been obtained over and over again in cases pronounced 'impossible' by all kinds of leading authorities (1960, 34-35).
Of course, Thomson was a strong advocate of prevention. Even though he had good success treating advanced disease, he repeatedly emphasized, "We cannot hope for results by treating the end-effects of wrong living" (1938, 8). He roundly condemned vaccination and food pasteurization as misguided public health measures which caused far more sickness than they prevented, and he was a strong critic of conventional pharmaceutical medicine. He felt drugs were poisonous substances which could only intoxicate the body, and that placing official medicine's "Rx" before their names did nothing to change the nature of these harmful remedies. He pointed out the irony of the stern media warnings to burglars which always followed thefts of drugs from a doctor's car or pharmacy: "I would say that any material which is likely to damage a healthy thief is even more likely to harm an unhealthy invalid" (1960, 46). When a heckler interrupted his "Belfast Lecture" with the question, "What would you put in the place of drugs?" Thomson answered, "Surely if we get rid of a bad thing, it is unnecessary to put anything in its place" (1950, 9). He felt pharmaceutical medicine had turned health care on its head.
The drug-doper studies human habits and tries to alter natural laws to suit them; the Naturopath studies natural law and corrects the individual habits till they harmonize (C. L. Thomson 1983,10).
Thomson felt there was an unseemly profit motive operating in the promotion of drugs by physicians. He liked to quote Lord Horder on pharmaceutical corruption: "Formerly the chemist was the servant of the doctor; today he tends to become the doctor's master" (1960, 20).
Thomson advanced the provocative theory that chemical pesticides such as DDT and chlordane played a role in the etiology of infectious diseases such as polio and hepatitis by intoxicating tissues and making them susceptible to viruses. He went so far as to suggest that the large chemical companies made out nicely by selling the cause of disease and then marketing its supposed cure. He repeatedly made radical links between health and politics, condemning the war machine and the drug machine as co-conspirators in keeping the world sick. "The healthy man," he wrote, "has no desire to damage or destroy anything; not even his fellow man!" (1960, 39). In addition, Thomson despised all specialization in medicine. He considered a specialist someone "who knows nothing else" (1947, 14).
Of course, the medical establishment returned Thomson's harsh criticism in kind, and Thomson spent a lot of his time and energy testily answering his allopathic critics. He was especially irked by established medicine's unwillingness to acknowledge nature cure's successes. He claimed a conspiracy between the news media and the "medical junta" kept naturopathic successes out of the press, and that medicos were primed with pat answers such as "amusing explanation" or "misdiagnosis" when confronted with naturopathic successes (1960, 5). Thomson found this latter device maddening. "Could it be," he wrote, "that in some peculiar way only people who have been wrongly diagnosed and advised gravitate toward Kingston?" He related the case of a female surgeon with breast cancer who was certified as incurable by the top eight British specialists in the field. In desperation she came to Thomson and was cured on his program. Upon return to the specialists, she was certified by all eight of them to be cancer-free and wrongly diagnosed. Enraged by such hypocrisy, she embarked on a bitter campaign against orthodox cancer therapy and "held it up to ridicule in a most uncompromising way." She died mysteriously of a gunshot to the back of the head (1960, 42-44).
Thomson was also rankled by established medicine's eagerness to exploit the death of any nature cure patient as proof of the ineffectiveness of its methods—even if it occurred many years after allopathy had given up on the patient. He wrote:
The only way we could overcome that recurring criticism would be to arrange for our patients to live forever. Ultimately they all die and just as surely as this happens we learn that still another Nature Cure failure has been registered' (1960, 41).
Thomson became keenly aware of the hidden hand of organized medicine working behind the scenes. He was once enthusiastically received by a Glasgow University medical society and eagerly invited back to speak again, only to have the invitation rescinded when the medical society was reprimanded by a higher body for allowing him to speak the first time. He also cited instances where tuberculosis patients, cured by naturopathic treatments, were not given a clean bill of health required in order to return to work after they disclosed the method by which they were cured.
Besides his practice and his promotion of health reform through his many books, Thomson was the principal of the Edinburgh School of Natural Therapeutics, which he founded in 1913. For over two generations this school was "the only place in Britain at which a truly professional and adequate understanding of training in Nature Cure could be obtained" (C. L. Thomson 1967, 9). Thomson continually upgraded the instruction available at his school. His eventual insistence upon four full years of training led to "an unhappy difference of opinion with Stanley Lief." This resulted in Thomson's leaving the Nature Cure Association in 1927, an organization which both he and Lief had helped start in 1922. He then established the Society of Registered Naturopaths. Just because students graduated from the Edinburgh School did not mean that Thomson was finished with them; he was famous for traveling all over the country to check on them and help them build good practices.
Indeed it was the furious pace that Thomson, who "refused to relax," kept up which lead to his demise. He worked "at full pressure right up to the onset of his last illness" (C. L.
Thomson 1983, 15). One day in his workshop he was "struck violently in the diaphragm by a heavy piece of metal." Possibly due to his over-exposure to x-rays decades before, and to the scar tissue on his lungs from his tuberculosis, the injury did not heal as expected, and complications set in. He died March 27, 1960. Alluding to his father's saying that, "the only way we could prove the success of Nature Cure would be to keep all our patients alive forever," his son, Leslie, wrote:
He gallantly approached that ideal in his own life, by extending an expected three months of wasting existence into fifty-six years of vigorous activity, during which he taught thousands of people how to extend their own lives and usefulness (ibid., 15).
Thomson was eulogized by the son of his first Edinburgh patient:
He is finished with his earthly body, which for so long was held together by his courage, his determination and his will, but our remembrances of him and the blessings of countless numbers, who owe so much to his help and guidance and who took strength from his dominant personality, will never die (ibid., 16).
Along with Stanley Lief, Thomson helped transplant Lindlahr's scientific version of nature cure to the British Isles, and his dynamic personality ensured that it took root and thrived. His successful clinical practice, books, and respected school were the fruits of a Herculean labor. Thomson's son called him "the first physician to base his methods on proven facts, and not at all on mystery and superstition" (1970, 4). Perhaps the highest tribute paid him came from a long time colleague:
Without his strength, ability, power and inspiration, the Society (of Registered Naturopaths) might never have existed, nor would we as practitioners have been here (Harrison 1969, 5).
James C. Thomson was fortunate to have a son of equal stature. Charles Leslie Thomson (1914-1992) followed his father as the Director of the Kingston Clinic, which he ran for 30 years until its demise. He was an outstanding practitioner, teacher and author. One of his admirers summed up his accomplishments as follows:
He was a literary descendant of Dr. Lindlahr, whom he once described as a "great collector of information." His father honed this down to a pragmatic or workable format, and Leslie improved its literary and scientific credibility through extensive research, his ongoing clinical experience and homely parallels (Fenton 1992, 2).
from: NATURE DOCTORS Pioneers in Naturopathic Medicine Friedhelm Kirchfeld & Wade Boyle
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