In 1893, Henry Lindlahr was a prosperous business man, banker, mayor, and leading citizen of Kalispell, Montana. He had made his fortune in land speculation, buying cheap land ahead of the railroads, then selling it to them at high prices for their transcontinental line. He was 5'6" and weighed over 250 pounds, and considered a brace of ducks a fitting appetizer to a full course dinner. At this pinnacle of success, he was diagnosed with sugar diabetes and advised by the ablest doctors to set his affairs in order. Ten years later, in 1903, he was one year away from graduation from medical school and had already started a successful nature cure practice in Chicago as a licensed Drugless Practitioner. Eating a modified vegetarian diet, he no longer had diabetes; indeed, he was enjoying unprecedented health. Over the next twenty years he became the foremost practitioner of scientific naturopathy in America.
Lindlahr's transition from business tycoon to scientific nature doctor is an absorbing tale.
He was born in Germany on March 1, 1862, and spent the first twenty years of his life there.
He was educated as a brewing and baking chemist, but after emigrating to America he followed his fortune west and entered the world of business. Having achieved his highest goals, ready to enjoy the fruits of his labor, he was informed that he had a fatal disease for which there was no cure. He later summed up his situation in this way:
At the age of thirty-five I found myself a physical and mental wreck without faith in God, in Nature or in myself. Many times the desire to end my miserable existence threatened to overwhelm me. The terror of it all was my utter ignorance and helplessness. I failed to see the causes of my troubles, much less the way out of them (H. Lindlahr 1923, 439).
A sympathetic friend gave him a copy of Louis Kuhne's The New Science of Healing, which introduced him to the concept of disease being caused by violations of nature's laws. As Lindlahr read the book, "it was as though a great light were arising before me and illuminating my darkened consciousness." He began to realize that health was regulated by natural laws just as immutable as those governing gravitation. He immediately began to practice the Kuhne's regimen on himself and found the results "most gratifying" (ibid.).
While Lindlahr's condition improved under his makeshift home care, his diabetes and the threat it posed to his life remained. Having exhausted the possibilities for help from the best of America's doctors, he undertook a journey to Vienna to seek out the most noted physicians of Europe, where he received the same diagnosis and hopeless prognosis. Then Lindlahr was prevailed upon by a companion to visit Wörishof en in Bavaria where Father Kneipp practiced his natural healing. His interview with the priest was short and to the point.
The priest smelled his breath, surveyed his 250-odd pounds, and said bluntly: 'You have the sugar disease. You are a pig (glutton). You will take sitz baths, live on fruits and greens and vegetables alone. You shall have no breads, no cereals, no meats (V. Lindlahr 1973, 14).
By the next spring, Lindlahr was free of sugar and within a few more months he had lost 43 pounds and fully regained his health. Lindlahr stayed in Europe several additional months to travel to other natural healing centers. What he observed and experienced there and at Wörishofen changed his health and revolutionized his whole outlook on life. Having been saved himself by natural health methods, he began to wonder about his friends and family members who had died before him at early ages from similar conditions.
In our halcyon days of youthful vigor, we are apt to look upon health culture, mind culture and higher philosophy with contempt and derision, but suffering is the great awakener, revealer and teacher. . . .
In my youth I had learned the Ten Commandments, but neither in church, school nor college had I been taught that there is a decalogue and a morality of the physical as well as the spiritual I accepted the popular belief that life and death, health and disease are largely matters of chance or dependent upon drafts, wet feet, germs and bacteria or upon the will of a capricious Providence. My friends of the medical profession assured me that eating and drinking and the use of liquor and tobacco had little to do with physical condition . . . . (H. Lindlahr 1923, 438-439)
Lindlahr felt betrayed by official medicine. He believed his doctors should have warned him and his loved ones of the mistakes of eating and living which could lead to unnecessary disease and early death. He never forgot that his health was saved by laymen such as Kuhne and Kneipp whom most medical doctors considered quacks. Having completed his cure in Europe, Lindlahr returned to America, moved to Texas and re-entered the world of business. However, he found himself strangely discontent. He wrote:
I realized that commercial pursuits, no matter how remunerative, could never again satisfy me. Money making had lost its charm. Higher and finer ideals had taken its place . . . . I had grasped the law of service which ordains that we achieve contentment and happiness only as we make others happy. "Freely ye have received, freely give." In compliance with this injunction of the Master, I decided to make Nature Cure my life work (H. Lindlahr 1923, 440).
The wonderful results I witnessed in others, and experienced myself, filled me with such enthusiasm for the work that I was not able to think or plan anything else (H. Lindlahr 1914, 251).
Although he was nearly forty, Lindlahr decided, "for the peace of my soul," to study medicine. He thought that as a medical doctor he could help correct the wrong thinking which had kept American medicine ignorant of the natural health principles that saved his life.
Undecided where to study, he chose Chicago over San Francisco on the flip of a coin.
Lindlahr was an eager student both inside and outside of class. In every free moment he haunted the John Crear library to study diet and nutrition. He also hired a doctor to give him private instruction in osteopathy. By 1902, he had qualified to sit for the Illinois Drugless Practitioner Examination, which he passed. With this license he started a nutritional practice which grew to such proportions that it threatened his regular medical studies.
In 1904, he graduated from medical school, received his medical license and began to practice full-time. His first patient was a waiter at a prominent Chicago restaurant with a nasty varicose leg ulcer. The referrals which came from the rapid cure of this patient got Lindlahr's practice off to a fast start.
Another early case was not so successful. A noted businessman with gallbladder disease did not improve as expected despite Lindlahr's most strenuous efforts and most careful instructions. When he stopped at a nearby restaurant to buy a loaf of pumpernickel bread, he happened to see his gallbladder patient feasting on roast duck and dressing. He realized that his chances for a successful nature cure practice were limited unless he could find a way to supervise his patients' activities and meals. Two months later he purchased a large property on Chicago's Ashland Boulevard, which he converted to a sanitarium.
This property, located on 515-529 South Ashland Blvd., was known as the Mike McDonald homestead, "the former residence of the well known millionaire, politician and gambler." By January, 1906, the conversion of the mansion to a sanitarium was complete.
Lindlahr started the sanitarium from scratch with "not a single friend or acquaintance to aid him in the propaganda of the new gospel of living and healing" (Davidson 1923, 454).
He entered into this venture against the advice of his friends and family, because he "wanted to demonstrate to suffering humanity and to the medical profession the possibility of curing chronic disease" (H. Lindlahr 1918, 123). During his training in medical school he was fully exposed to the therapeutic nihilism regarding chronic disease which he had first encountered when his doctors had told him there was nothing to be done for his diabetes except to go home and prepare to die. His European nature cure experiences had opened his eyes to a radically different concept of disease which allowed for the cure of chronic conditions.
Lindlahr believed, like the early nature doctors before him, that chronic disease was "due to the accumulation of waste matter and poisons" and that "every so-called acute disease is the result of a cleansing and healing effort of Nature" (H. Lindlahr 1922, 19). He felt that all diseases were acute before they became chronic, that chronic disease was the result of suppression of acute disease. "If acute diseases are treated in the natural way," he wrote, "there are no chronic diseases to cure." Such chronic supposed-to-be-incurable diseases as tuberculosis, cancer, locomotor ataxia, paresis, paralysis agitans, infantile paralysis, secondary and tertiary syphilis, etc., yield to the natural treatment, provided there is enough vitality in the system to respond to treatment and the destruction of vital parts and organs has not too far advanced (H. Lindlahr 1914, 252).
He was fond of using secondary and tertiary syphilis as examples of chronic diseases which were the result of neglect or suppressive drug treatment of the primary, acute stage, and he claimed to have cured hundreds of cases, many "far advanced." Like Lust, he was a staunch enemy of the mercurial treatment of this disease.
Be not deceived: neither this nor any other disease can be cured by putting poisons into the human bodies. The only possibility of cure lies in taking the old poisons out of the system, and this can be accomplished solely by natural methods of treatment (H. Lindlahr 1913, 16).
In his experience, adding drug poisons to the body's poisons only made matters worse.
To Lindlahr, nothing was more harmful in medicine than the suppression of disease. He believed that disease was nature's effort to eliminate morbid matter from the body and restore normal function. "What the Old School of Medicine calls the disease," he said, "we look upon as the Cure" (H. Lindlahr 1922, 221).Therefore to suppress disease was to suppress its cure. He deplored orthodox medical reliance on "fighting" disease.
The combative method fights disease with disease, poison with poison, and germs with germs and germ products. In the language of the Good Book, it is 'Beelzebub against the Devil' (ibid., 16).
This view necessarily held that germs were not the causes of infectious diseases but rather secondary manifestations of a disturbed metabolic environment. To Lindlahr, the common cold was "vicarious elimination," where the mucus lining of the respiratory tract was taking up the slack for sluggish skin, intestines, liver and kidneys (ibid., 86). His early training as a brewery and bakery chemist introduced him to the concept that not all germs were bad. Indeed, the brewer's and baker's art depended on beneficial strains of microbes. He felt that fear instilled by the bacterial theory of disease often did more harm than the organisms themselves. His approach was not to kill the germs but rather to remove the morbid matter, or "cell feces," upon which they thrived. Lindlahr believed that health came from nature, not that disease came from germs.
"Every moment," he wrote, "there are enacted in our bodies innumerable mechanical, chemical and psychological miracles. Who or what performs these miracles? We call it Nature" (V. Lindlahr 1973, 229).
Since health came from nature, then nature must be given free reign. Lindlahr regarded the vis medicatrix naturae, or the healing power of nature, as the true physician which pervades every body cell and repairs and heals from within. He was highly critical of the allopathic approach of fighting nature. "When nature pulls right," he wrote, "the doctor pulls left. Every serious problem is counteracted" (H. Lindlahr 1919, 39).
He felt the physician's job was to remove obstructions and establish normal conditions so that the healing power of nature could work to best advantage. Avoiding the suppression of disease was to Lindlahr the medical equivalent to the biblical injunction, "Resist not Evil" (H. Lindlahr 1922, 229).
Thus Lindlahr, with his patients securely in a controlled environment, embarked on his mission to demonstrate the curability of chronic disease. His methods were those of the nature cure doctors in the old country adapted to twentieth-century Chicago and integrated with the manipulative therapies emerging in America. Like Lust, he saw the one-sidedness of many of the European nature cures, and strove to integrate the best of all of them; in eclectic fashion.
While one admirer's assessment of Lindlahr's work as "the first effort ever made to combine in one system all that is good in the various methods of treating human ailments" may be too exuberant, Lindlahr was an effective combiner of the various natural methods because he thoroughly understood their underlying principles (H. Lindlahr 1923, 441).
In his Catechism of Nature Cure Lindlahr recognized five categories of natural therapy:
1) Return to nature, 2) Elementary remedies, 3) Chemical remedies, 4) Mechanical remedies, and 5) Mental/spiritual remedies (H. Lindlahr 1922, 22-23).
The first category, Return to nature, played the biggest role in the therapies practiced and taught at the Lindlahr Sanitarium, and especially meant a return to a more natural diet. Lindlahr believed strongly in nutrition and kept up-to-date on all the latest findings in that field. He understood and used the action of foods as medicines, long before vitamins were discovered. When he said, "Our head cook is the chief pharmacist," he was earnest (V. Lindlahr 1973, 41). He used fruits, now known to contain vitamin C, to cure scurvy; brown rice, now known to contain thiamine, to cure beriberi; green leafy vegetables, now known to contain iron, to cure anemia; and Irish moss, now known to contain iodine, to cure goiter. Indeed, he sometimes filled his doctor's bag with oranges, a rare commodity in those days, when going on house calls for sick children.
Within the plants lie vital life principles . . . which defy description and are not discoverable by chemical analysis. These act specifically in different ailments . . . Time will undoubtedly disclose these mysteries which explain vitality and life itself, but now we must content ourselves with the secure knowledge that certain foods and plants are medicines (ibid., 45).
Lindlahr had studied nutrition in Europe with the famous Swiss doctor and "living food" advocate Max Bircher-Benner (1867-1939), and so became a sworn enemy of the rich American diet in which he had so freely indulged as a younger man. He believed that strong blood did not need large quantities of fats and proteins from meat and dairy products but rather "positive mineral salts" from fruits and vegetables (H. Lindlahr 1981, 55). He felt that overeating created morbid toxins which taxed these vital mineral salts and could actually lead to nutritional deficiencies. Lindlahr emphasized a vegetarian diet at the sanitarium, and his wife, Anna, wrote The Vegetarian Kitchen, a masterfully concise and accurate explanation of the relationship between diet and health. However, Lindlahr did not "intend to make a fetish of vegetarianism" (H. Lindlahr 1910, 290). He often incurred the wrath of militant vegetarians by suggesting that properly prepared and combined vegetables and meats could be more wholesome than certain bad vegetarian combinations.
It is not wise to be too finicky about food selection. Constant slavish fear of eating this, and eating that; of eating too much and eating too little is just about as bad as the other extreme of priggish promiscuousness. A hypochondriac mind will sour and poison the best of viands, and too great a monotony in food selection will destroy the wholesome zest and enjoyment of foods which is the best stimulus for the secretion of digestive juices (ibid., 289) Lindlahr liked to point out that the "narrow fanaticism of Simon pure vegetarianism" repels rather than attracts intelligent converts and was the biggest factor preventing the wider adoption of a rational vegetarian diet. "We would eat a piece of meat once in a while ourselves," he wrote, "just to save us from that unfortunate frame of mind." A keynote for Lindlahr in diet and all therapies was, "It is good to be natural but by all means let us be rational" (ibid., 290).
Lindlahr was one of the earliest practitioners to recognize that some patients had bad reactions to certain foods. His "foundation diet," which restricted foods he found to be the most commonly offending, was a precursor to the "elimination diets" used by many allergy doctors today.
Lindlahr also practiced therapeutic fasting on his patients in a cautious, limited way during acute phases of their conditions such as in healing crises. With some patients Lindlahr even used his own version of the "dry diet," a modification of the Schroth Cure. He substituted dried fruit for the dry white bread and found that he could forego the wine, which he felt was only necessary in the Schroth plan to counteract the morbid effects of the bread.
Return to nature also meant adopting a rational lifestyle. This frequently meant making changes in occupation or working conditions. Lindlahr attracted patients from coal mines and quarries throughout the Midwest. "You don't need a doctor," he often told them, "you need a new job" (V. Lindlahr 1973, 84). He was very concerned about occupational health. Some of his most difficult cases were those which were under the constant stress of a noxious working environment. He believed that dangerous industries such as mining and quarrying should be taken under government control to ensure healthy working conditions. For voicing these sentiments Lindlahr was branded by some as a socialist. This may have been what attracted Eugene B. Debs, the famous socialist and labor leader, to become a patient at the sanitarium.
Debs was sixty-six and an ill and wary man when President Harding ordered his release from prison in 1921. Nevertheless, as historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., noted, "Gene pressed ahead in his work, writing on the need for prison reform, working for the party, till fatigue would overtake him and send him, ashen-gray and trembling, to his bed or to Lindlahr, the Socialist sanitarium in Chicago" (Debs 1948, xii). Debs entered the Lindlahr Sanitarium in mid-July 1922, and was well enough by September that "he ran foot races with a young tuberculosis patient" (Ginger 1949, 434). He also brought excitement to the sanitarium with the many prominent visitors who came to see him, among them Sinclair Lewis, the famous author of Main Street (1920), and Carl Sandburg:
Sinclair Lewis arrived at Lindlahr in August for a brief rest, and he was quickly recruited for the discussions held by Debs and Sandburg. One Saturday night Sandburg even brought his guitar and gave the patients "a most charming entertainment in folk lore, etc. It was a complete conquest," Debs wrote David Karsner, "and they all love him. Lewis will also entertain them and the patients here feel big with importance. No 'Main Streeters' here" (ibid., 436).
When Lindlahr had difficulty getting a patient well with natural methods, he went to the patient's home or workplace to inspect environmental conditions which might be inhibiting the cure. In one instance, he cured a successful bakery owner of his hypertension and obesity by ordering him to give up his sedentary managerial style and go back into the hot sweaty kitchen as a baker.
Lindlahr also included rational dress in his return-to-nature lifestyle. He crusaded against the corset, recommended suspenders instead of belts, and made a neighborhood cobbler "moderately well-to-do" by referring patients with chronic musculoskeletal problems to him for properly built and fitted shoes. He was an early opponent of tobacco use and blamed the "deplorable health of the English army" on cigarette smoking. In fact he saw the pre-World War I ascendancy of Germany as a direct result of that nation's "return to nature" (H. Lindlahr 1924, 425).
Finally, nothing in this category of therapy was more important for Lindlahr than rest and relaxation. He felt that convalescence allowed nature to make "the real cure," and often sent his patients on vacations up into the Michigan woods. Outpatients of the sanitarium had to spend their weekends in bed. This was to economize the vital force. He informed new sanitarium patients that their cases would be handled by Dr. Diet and Dr. Quiet. (V. Lindlahr 1973, 189-191).
Lindlahr's second category of natural therapy was elementary remedies such as water, air, light, electricity. The basement of the sanitarium was given over to water therapy. Both the men's and the women's sections were made up of small cubicles lined with tin, equipped with a short length of garden hose with a three- or four-way nozzle and a tin sitz bath. As the sanitarium prospered he replaced these with tiled rooms and elaborate water-projecting installations. The same excellent results were obtained in toning the patient's circulation regardless of the sophistication of the equipment.
All the sanitarium's ambulatory patients had to appear for their water treatments each morning. It was initially difficult to talk them into the cold water therapies, but once they experienced their benefits, they would "indignantly refuse to take other treatment if there was to be no cold water" (H. Lindlahr 1922, 242).
Lindlahr also used hot hydrotherapies. He employed fever baths to treat syphilis and gonorrhea. Later he experimented with the blood-washing-shower, or marathon bath, of Christos Parasco, which Lust introduced to him on his visit to Chicago in 1923. He studied its effects on blood pressure, blood counts and urinalyses, and finding beneficial results, instituted a modified, more intense version of the extended hot showers (H. Lindlahr 1924, 425). He plausibly explained this peculiar hydrotherapy's mechanism of action as follows:
The continual dropping of hot water on the body draws the blood to the surface and discharges its impurities through the relaxed and open pores. The morbid excretions are then washed away by the constant flow of hot water (H. Lindlahr 1923, 528).
Lindlahr believed that the human being was an "air animal." He himself was a "fresh air fiend" who always quizzed his patients on the ventilation in their sleeping and working rooms and who occasionally came to blows with fellow streetcar riders over the issue of whether or not to open the windows. He foresaw that "If we get a few more million automobiles in this country, the air in cities is going to be so poisoned with their fumes that we're going to have a whole new crop of diseases to deal with" (V. Lindlahr 1973, 86).
Lindlahr felt fresh air was important not only for the lungs but also for the skin. He routinely prescribed air baths, exposing the naked body to moving currents of air, because he believed a properly functioning skin would excrete waste products. He felt the skin must be free several times each day to breath, detoxify, make vitamin D and regulate water and salt balance. He found air baths effective for hot flashes, low blood pressure, weight reduction and chronic fatigue. After his conversion to nature cure Lindlahr took three air baths every day of his life.
He felt an air bath was "as important as a bowel movement" (ibid., 74). He claimed that the open-air sleeping porches and sun parlors, which we can still see today on houses built during his era, were the result of his air bath propaganda.
During his travels in Europe, Lindlahr studied with Niels Finsen, a pioneer of ultraviolet therapy. One of the first improvements he made on the sanitarium was to construct sunbathing areas on its roof. With separate sections for men and women, patients could exercise and rest with full exposure to the sun. While sun baths would be commonplace in decades to come, Lindlahr's rooftop solarium caused a scandal in his respectable Chicago neighborhood.
Lindlahr treated many skin and joint conditions with sunlight and even used water and olive oil pre-exposed to the sun as medicine. He used ultraviolet lamps when they became available, as well as phototherapy and chromotherapy. Another elementary remedy used at the sanitarium was electricity. Lindlahr employed high-frequency and Morse wave among other electrical modalities.
Lindlahr's third category of natural therapy was chemical remedies. By these he meant herbs and homeopathic remedies. While he used these skillfully in his practice, he did not emphasize them in his writings, probably because he felt the necessity for their use could be avoided by following his other natural precepts.
The fourth category of natural therapy was mechanical remedies. Lindlahr was familiar with osteopathy, chiropractic, naprapathy, neuropathy, Swedish movement and massage. He "reconciled the divergences of the various spinal methods by incorporating the best of them in his system of Neurotherapy" (Davidson 1923, 452).
Lindlahr was not a big fan of the physical culture craze which other naturopaths had embraced because he found that the average patient would not stay with it. "A hobby will stick," he would say, "gymnastics won't" (V. Lindlahr 1973, 93). He employed F. H. Behncke for eighteen years as "physical director" of the sanitarium. Behncke's job was to interest the patients in croquet, gardening, bicycle riding, horseshoes, bowling or some other activity that they would continue once they left the sanitarium. Behncke's talent for this added greatly to the success of the sanitarium.
Lindlahr understood and utilized the psychoanalytical techniques of Jung and Adler. Due to an apparent misunderstanding on the part of the public, who may have equated the term "sanitarium" with the term "asylum," Lindlahr had ample opportunity to practice these techniques. Most of the patients brought to his institution during its early years were insanity cases. He appreciated their effects on the health of the mentally ill, but he realized that many mental conditions came from abnormal physiology and chemistry. He claimed a fifty percent success rate for "all so-called incurable nervous disorders" (Lindlahr 1910, 458).
Lindlahr was also a student of New Thought, a philosophy which emphasized the power of the mind in achieving health and happiness. In his writings he liberally quoted Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish philosopher and patron saint of the New Thought movement.
Although Lindlahr was a strong critic of Christian Science because of its neglect of the physical aspects of health, he respected its insight into the mental and spiritual influences on health, and made use of them in his methods.
Lindlahr recognized fear as the great emotional enemy of health. "Fear is faith in evil," he wrote, showing a gift for the apt epigram. He considered the fear habit to be committing slow suicide through psychical refrigeration. To him cheerfulness was "the best of all tonics and love the greatest physician. " He likened anger to "psychological phthisis" (tuberculosis).
He tried to demonstrate to his patients that "the best way to help yourself is to help others," and employed "positive affirmations" to establish healthy conditions in the mind so that they could be "conveyed to and impressed upon the cells" (H. Lindlahr 1922, 403). These techniques remain popular to this day.
New Thought was often associated with spiritualism. Lindlahr had a mild interest in spiritualistic phenomena and was not afraid of the ramifications this might have on his reputation. "As a 'Nature Cure Doctor,'" he wrote, "we are already so hopelessly 'irregular and unscientific' that a few more sins added to our already long list of medical and scientific heresies matter but very little" (H. Lindlahr 1910, 459).
No aspect of mental and emotional health was more important to Lindlahr than self-control. He observed that many of his patients were sick because their minds were disorderly and they lacked the will power to do the things necessary for health. He believed that disease was "brought on by violations of Nature's laws" and that "it can only be overcome by compliance with the law." "Obedience to the law" was the only means of cure (H. Lindlahr 1922, 29-30). To comply with these laws required self-control, self-mastery and unselfish personal effort. "The demoralizing effect of health law-breaking . . ." he wrote, "does not depend so much upon the enormity of the deed as upon the loss of self-control" (V. Lindlahr 1973, 231). He did not limit the necessity for self-control to physical practices but rather emphasized its importance for controlling mental and emotional habits as well. "The brain is a musical instrument," he wrote, "under the absolute control of the will of the ego" (H. Lindlahr 1981, 189).
Lindlahr geared his sanitarium therapies to instill these qualities in his patients. A rigid, unvarying daily schedule was followed. Former pleasures were given up and beneficial hardships endured. The orderliness of the sanitarium was to demonstrate and teach discipline.
The laborious efforts required by the therapies necessarily involved the patients in their own cures. While the hydrotherapies, dietetics and other natural therapies were strong forces for health, Lindlahr admitted that the greatest benefit of his program was the "strengthening of will power and self-control, the learning of obedience" (H. Lindlahr 1973, 231).
We cannot cheat Nature by any means whatsoever—not by Christian Science, electricity, blood washing or any other therapeutic measure. We still have to comply with Nature's laws or take our spanking (H. Lindlahr 1923, 529).
He believed that "life is a school for personal effort. If it were not so, life would be meaningless" (V. Lindlahr 1973, 208). He inspired in all his patients a strong faith in the "wonder-workings" of nature. He "seared deeply into their minds the thrilling and comforting knowledge that there is a physician within all of us; that Nature's healing powers are automatic and need only to be encouraged and fostered" (ibid., 199). He added: "Once we have learned the laws of living and have mastered self-control, all that Nature holds in store for us in health matters is at our command" (ibid., 231).
Lindlahr was apparently successful in utilizing these mental and spiritual remedies. Visitors frequently commented on the cheery, happy atmosphere in the sanitarium. At times, as many as twenty percent of the patients were "permanent guests," men and women who chose to live there "because it gave them hope and courage, because it was a peaceful haven for them." One doctor who made repeated inspections of the sanitarium was intrigued by the natural therapies and amazed by the attitudes of the patients. "I've never seen such patients," he said. "I think they're all hypnotized by Dr. L." (ibid., 199-200).
Still, Lindlahr realized that the heart of his health message was also his biggest public relations problem. "The greatest drawback to the spreading of the Nature Cure idea," he wrote, "is the necessity of self-control which it imposes" (H. Lindlahr 1922, 419).
Lindlahr was the first naturopathic doctor to distinguish himself as a scientific diagnostician. His own health experiences caused him to be repelled by what he perceived as the allopathic idea that disease resulted from unpredictable accidents. He believed that every disease had a cause and, if it had not already done irreparable harm, that it could be cured by removing its cause. He was obsessed with finding the causes of his patients' conditions. He often told them: "We are going to pull your disease out by the roots" (V. Lindlahr 1973, 33).
He hated the concept of "idiopathic" conditions which was in as common use then as now. "Don't send me diagnosis reports with idiopathic on them," he once flared. "If you don't know why a patient is sick, it's not a diagnosis" (ibid. 1973, 85).
As a consequence of this concern, the Lindlahr Sanitarium's diagnostic department was, by one estimate, "the most complete in any medical institution of this country," and its personnel "of highest caliber." The department was run by three medical doctors who had no other duties but diagnosis. They gave every patient a thorough examination from head to foot, which lasted from two to four days. They used "up-to-date allopathic methods" as well as osteopathic and chiropractic methods for spinal analysis. The x-ray department contained "the latest and best equipment for Roentgen ray and fluoroscopic examinations," and an "expert dentist" examined the mouth and teeth of every patient (Davidson 1923, 455). "There is no backwardness at Lindlahr's," an impressed Benedict Lust wrote, "everything is progressive and up to date" (Lust 1922, 500).
Lindlahr also employed iris diagnosis at his sanitarium and wrote a book on the topic. He had studied iris diagnosis under Henry Edward Lahn, M.D. (1864-1921), also known as H. E. Lane, who had come to America from Bohemia in 1899. About 1905, Lahn founded the Cosmos Institute and Sanitarium in Chicago, a European-style nature cure. He introduced iris diagnosis to America with his book Diagnosis from the Eye (1904). Lust praised him as "a real true Naturopath who stuck to principles and was the only genius in Iridiagnosis we have yet had in America" (Lust 1921, 558).
While detractors claimed that "the methods of diagnosis used in the Lindlahr institution were preposterous" (Fishbein 1932, 119), there is no reason to believe that the sanitarium did not enjoy first-rate diagnostic services. Lindlahr established a strict division of labor between the diagnostic and therapeutic departments of the sanitarium to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. As many as one third of the patients visiting the sanitarium came exclusively for diagnostic purposes.
What kind of results did Lindlahr achieve with his sanitarium patients? For acute conditions the answer appears to be very good. One writer noted:
Thus in the Lindlahr Sanitarium during the flu epidemic of 1918-1919, three hundred cases were successfully treated without a single death; while at the Cook County Hospital just across the street, fifty-four deaths occurred of three hundred cases treated by medical methods (Hale 1926, 218).
Lindlahr claimed never to have lost a case of typhoid, diphtheria, smallpox, or scarlet fever, and to have lost only a single case each of cerebro-spinal meningitis and lobar pneumonia (H. Lindlahr 1922, 188). He also held "a continuous record of more than 20 years successful treatment of appendicitis without surgery and without a death, although some of the cases received came with the usual alarming prognosis of 'abscess and threatened infection of the peritoneal cavity'" (Hale 1926, 218).
Lindlahr's confidence in natural treatment of acute conditions was built early in his career when he was studying nature cure in Germany and he visited some friends in a neighboring village. He found the housewife in great anxiety about her husband who had just been diagnosed with a serious case of pneumonia, accompanied by a high fever. "Carried away by my enthusiasm for Nature Cure," Lindlahr wrote, "I explained to the friends the difference between natural and medical treatment. They both insisted that I should give him the water treatment." Lindlahr may have gotten in a little over his head, but he went ahead and gave a wet sheet pack followed by a cold ablution, then put the man to bed. After the man generated a good sweat, Lindlahr gave him another cold ablution, a brisk towel rub and then let him sleep. The next morning Lindlahr "found him working in the meadow. The family doctor, who called early in the morning, was greatly surprised to find the bird had flown . . . .
It was my first experience of treating a serious case of acute disease" (H. Lindlahr 1981, 41-42).
Lindlahr's record with chronic conditions was necessarily less spectacular, yet good.
"Certainly we fail," he wrote, "but our failures are usually due to the fact that sick people, as a rule, do not consider Nature Cure methods except as a last resort" (H. Lindlahr 1922, 223). He realized that he had gotten himself into the unenviable situation of trying to prove the value of natural healing methods on chronic, terminal cases. Certainly he had opened the sanitarium in hopes of proving the viability of natural methods against chronic disease, but he obviously got more than he had bargained for. Patients sometimes arrived at the sanitarium in a dying condition, and seventy-five of the patients were of the "so-called hopelessly-incurable kind" (V. Lindlahr 1973, 27). He was especially rankled by patients with chronic disease who wanted to be cured right away. "To cure you quickly," he liked to quote Priessnitz, "I should have started with your grandmother" (H. Lindlahr 1918, 123).
Lindlahr soon realized that prevention was the answer to his predicament. If disease had causes, so did health. Natural therapeutics have "something better to give than the treatment of disease," he wrote, "and that is prevention of disease" (H. Lindlahr 1981, 191). He lucidly articulated the principles of prevention.
The preventive method does not wait until diseases have fully developed and gained ascendancy in the body, but concentrates its best endeavors on preventing, by hygienic living and by natural methods of treatment, the development of diseases. By these, it endeavors to put the human body in such a normal, healthy condition that it is practically fool-proof against infection and the inroad of germs, bacteria and parasites (V. Lindlahr 1973, 28).
He was encouraged that others were acknowledging his message that it was "cheaper and more advantageous to prevent disease than to cure it." "The successful doctor of the future," he wrote," will have to fall in line with this plan and do more teaching than prescribing" (ibid., 29).
It is hard to assess the impact of Lindlahr's emphasis on prevention, but the success of the sanitarium bespeaks a certain level of success of his treatment methods; even in the face of so many difficult chronic cases. Over a twenty-year period he treated 50,000 patients.
During that time he wrote fewer than one hundred prescriptions and never used aspirin. The sanitarium was generally full to its 200-bed capacity. As one writer said, the Lindlahr Sanitarium was "the most eloquent testimony possible to the potentialities of Nature Cure" (Davidson 1923, 454). The same writer felt that Lindlahr himself was the best proof of his methods: "There is no better testimonial to the efficiency of Nature Cure than the inexhaustible vitality and unfaltering endurance with which Dr. Lindlahr bears up under this tremendous burden of responsibility and labor" (ibid., 456). Lindlahr arose at 5:30 each morning and performed a full day's work by noon. He lectured daily for over twenty-five years and personally supervised all departments of the sanitarium.
He had absolute faith in nature cure methods. This was illustrated in 1914 when his son Otto was struck by a car while playing ball in the street. Lindlahr discovered the accident minutes after it had happened, walking home from the sanitarium. He found the boy unconscious and barely alive. He examined his son's skull and found a large mid-line swelling at the back of his head which he diagnosed as a blood clot. He consulted with several allopaths who recommended trephining, i.e. cutting a piece out of the skull to relieve the pressure on the brain caused by the clot and administering stimulant drugs, such as strychnine, to rouse the boy from his unconsciousness. Lindlahr rejected their advice and gave his son cold salt water rubs and osteopathic manipulation. After eighteen hours, his son partially revived only to fall into a raving delirium which lasted for several days. The consulting physicians urged sedative drugs such as morphine to quiet the boy's hysteria, but Lindlahr chose to give him wet packs, cold ablutions, "inhibitive manipulation," and soothing suggestive and magnetic therapy.
After a week, the delirium went into spinal meningitis, complete with high fever and opisthotonos, i.e. spastic backward bending of the body. The other doctors recommended antipyretics, such as belladonna and potassium bromide and a lumbar puncture so that spinal fluid could be let out and meningococcal serum injected. Instead, Lindlahr fasted the boy and continued with wet packs, cold ablutions, manipulation and magnetic therapy. In another week the boy's temperature fell below normal, and he was found to be completely paralyzed and totally blind. At this time the allopathic physicians suggested powerful stimulants and a nourishing diet of meat, eggs, etc., which Lindlahr did not follow. He continued with a light diet and natural treatments. For six weeks there was no change in the boy's condition. Then one morning when Lindlahr examined his eyes, the boy said that he could see something moving in front of him. From that time on his vision and paralysis improved. After another year he was able to go back to school. He grew up to be "the proverbial 'picture of health.'" Lindlahr admitted it was his most challenging case. "The greatest difficulty," he said, "was to maintain an attitude of 'masterful inactivity'—to be able to look on patiently and allow nature to have her way in and throughout the most serious reactions" (H. Lindlahr 1981, 37-38).
In 1914, Lindlahr acquired the Lathrop family homestead, an eight-acre, park-like country place in Elmhurst, Illinois, which would become "one of the most beautiful 'back to nature places' in this country." He remodeled the manor into the "Lindlahr Health Resort" and made additions in the way of cottages, bungalows, tent houses, treatment rooms, water works, and electrical equipment. To enhance the property, Lindlahr successfully transplanted full-grown elm trees at the expense of $400 each. Like the earlier facility, this one was a success. During one mid-winter season there were over 500 outpatients taking two to six treatments per week.
By this time, Lindlahr had started his own college to train doctors in natural health methods. During 1922 a fireproof three-story building was erected for the growing school and the Lindlahr Health Institutes, consisting of the Lindlahr Sanitarium and college, occupied two hundred and fifty feet and nine separate buildings on 509-529 S. Ashland Boulevard in Chicago. There were some 200 employees at the sanitarium and school, including twenty-five clerical workers such as typists and stenographers. Lindlahr was a responsible, "exceedingly democratic" employer and always saw to it that his employees were treated with dignity and fairness. Lindlahr continued his literary pursuits. He had inaugurated The Nature Cure Magazine early in his career and authored a number of noted nature cure texts. During 1922, over 10,000 books and 63,000 magazines were produced and distributed at a cost of $30,000 (Davidson 1923, 452-455).
The school was originally called Lindlahr College of Nature Cure & Osteopathy, and later became the Lindlahr College of Natural Therapeutics. Finally it was changed to the Progressive College of Chiropractic, "chartered and operating under state regulations." Lindlahr assembled a solid faculty. He himself taught iridology, natural therapeutics, dietetics and Nature Cure philosophy. The dean of the school was a Harvard graduate and medical doctor. The college boasted graduates practicing throughout the United States as well as Canada, Argentina, Chile, Australia, India, Japan, China, Portugal, England and the Philippines (ibid., 456-458). Lindlahr frequently advertised his school and sanitarium in Benedict Lust's magazine, The Naturopath. In 1926, the Lindlahr College was purchased by the National School of Chiropractic, the liberal rival of the Palmer School of Chiropractic. In 1930, it changed its name to the National School of Drugless Therapy. Later renamed the National College of Chiropractic, it granted its last N.D. and D.D.T. (Doctor of Drugless Therapy) degrees in 1952.
In 1923, at the very pinnacle of his career as a naturopathic practitioner, Lindlahr decided that he was "at the wrong end" of his work. He had just hosted one of the greatest naturopathic conventions of that era. His sanitarium, with $50,000 of newly installed equipment, was an "unqualified success." It frequently had a waiting list of one hundred patients. The outpatient department consumed the efforts of five doctors and regularly handled 200 patients every day. But Lindlahr was dissatisfied, because people, in their ignorance, "live a lifetime of mistakes. They violate every law of Nature and then come to us expecting to be freed of so-called incurable disease in a few weeks or a few months." To act on his conviction that prevention was the best form of natural medicine, he decided to liquidate his practice and devote all his efforts to teaching preventive health methods to the public through lectures, books, and other publications. However, within a year of this fateful decision Lindlahr would be dead, the victim of "a fatal bit of carelessness" (V. Lindlahr 1973, 217-218).
Lindlahr planned to kick-off his new crusade with an extensive lecture tour. En route to his first stop in Mobile, Alabama, he slipped on the steps of a train and stubbed his toe.
Lindlahr did not realize that he had sustained a flesh wound in his foot until he removed his shoe at the end of his busy day. Then he merely wrapped it in a clean handkerchief. He proceeded with his lecture the next afternoon but was soon forced to cancel the rest of his engagements and to head back to Chicago. By the time he arrived home, the toe showed signs of blood poisoning. The next day the leg was so swollen that amputation seemed imperative. Lindlahr died March 27, 1924, two hours after the operation.
As Lust wrote in his obituary, Lindlahr "died in the saddle" (1924, 359). The immediate cause of his death was "post-operative pneumonia and shock." These circumstances may have come to pass because of Lindlahr's semi-exhausted state "due to his unceasing labor and total disregard of his own comfort" (V. Lindlahr 1924, 1009). Death from such a neglected wound is ironic, to say the least, for someone who wrote: "The natural and most efficient treatment for wounds and open sores consists of exposure to air and light, and . . . the best of all antiseptics is lemon juice diluted with water" (H. Lindlahr 1918, 124).
Lindlahr's unexpected death was a shock to the naturopathic profession. His son, Victor, an osteopathic and medical doctor, carried on the work for a number of years. Although he was a successful practitioner, curing over 350 "rheumatic" cases in 1928, and would become well-known for his popular radio health shows, Victor never achieved the profound influence and authority of his father.
Henry Lindlahr was a family man and despite his busy schedule always had time for a rich family life. The indulgence and assistance of his family also played a big part in his success as a doctor and teacher. His wife, Anna, was "able and energetic," and her "sacrifices and loving labors made possible many things not otherwise to have been considered." She was modest and unassuming yet "most gracious and charming." She "adapted herself with the sweetest possible grace to the unusual demands upon her time and talents as dietician, hostess and adviser." She frequently had to put up with having her home converted to a hospital and office for weeks at a time.
Without the patient and loyal co-operation of Mrs. Lindlahr and the entire family, Dr. Lindlahr's most important work would have been impossible (Davidson 1923, 457).
But Anna Lindlahr was not just another sweet disposition. Her knowledge of nature cure was "peculiarly extensive" (Davidson 1924, 1014). Interestingly, Mrs. Lindlahr had not always been so "able and energetic." In fact, she had been an invalid for years before she married Henry. And after they were wed, she was rejected by the New York Life Insurance Company, because she had Bright's disease. As Lindlahr described it: "The examining physician for the company assured me it was no use to try again and pronounced her case incurable." Of course, having already embarked on the nature cure, Lindlahr could not accept this verdict, and he challenged the insurance doctor saying, "you will take her within two years." "Never," the doctor insisted. "Once albumin, always albumin." Of course, the doctor had to retract his prognosis.
After another year of natural living, not a trace of albumin was to be found and the New York Life Insurance accepted the risk without hesitation. I may add that she has ever since enjoyed perfect health (ibid., 440).
Lindlahr had an interesting relationship with his son, Victor, whom he groomed to carry on and expand his work by sending him to osteopathic school and medical college. Victor was an apt student but he was more inclined toward the modern orthodox medicine than the old-fashioned nature cure he saw practiced at home. With typical filial skepticism, often marked by "the scoffing of youth" and the "contempt of familiarity," he would challenge his father's quainter beliefs, but he was up against the most formidable nature doctor of his day. As Victor later confessed:
I saw him prove in countless cases the wisdom of his teachings, and I saw the awe and respect I held for orthodox medicine crumble before the simple truths he espoused (V. Lindlahr 1924, 1010).
There are those who suggest that Lindlahr was deeply disappointed in Victor, but if this is true, he apparently never vented any dissatisfaction to his son. As Victor related:
When I made mistakes he would say, "that's all right, I had to learn." When I came to him in trouble—no rebuke, just, "I went through the same things," and when I failed to comprehend his ideas in the higher philosophies there was not impatience, only this, "Well, I didn't see these things until my thirties. I guess you won't either." Such a father was he! (ibid.).
Although his temper was evident when patients did not follow his instructions, Lindlahr generally showed the same kindly indulgence to others that he did to his son. He wrote:
"Serenity, patience and cheerfulness are the primary requisites of the Nature Cure physician" (H. Lindlahr 1981, 236).
If any jealousy existed between Lindlahr and Lust, it didn't keep Lindlahr from publishing and advertising in Lust's publications, or keep Lust from always giving Lindlahr good press. Lust referred to Lindlahr variously as "our true friend and hearty co-worker" (Davidson 1924, 1013), "a Naturopathic Physician of the first order" (Lust 1908, 94), and, at Lindlahr's death, "a personal friend for the last 25 years . . . a very able man who cannot be replaced" (1915, 54). Lust called the Lindlahr Sanitarium "the greatest center for the Nature Cure movement in America" (1924, 359), and referred to Lindlahr's school as "great," noting that it was "phenomenally successful" (1922, 500). After visiting Lindlahr during a 1912 lecture tour, Lust wrote:
Dr. Lindlahr is a man who has the necessary enthusiasm and vigor and works without getting tired. His personal qualities fit him especially for this great work. His institution is a model institution where all the different agencies of the nature cure are used and the best proof of his success is the large business that is going on at his two establishments. Patients and students are so numerous and prosperity is all over the place. It is wonderful what Dr. Lindlahr has accomplished in the eight or nine years since he has been in this work (1909, 2).
Lust's assertion that Lindlahr was introduced to nature cure through his magazine does not square with Lindlahr's autobiographical account which credits the book by Kuhne, but this is the only suggestion of a possibly self-serving intent in any of Lust's associations with Lindlahr. A curious fact is that Lindlahr never used the term "naturopathy" in his writings but preferred the older German terms "nature cure" or "natural therapeutics." A less flattering view of Lindlahr and his work came from Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, in his book, Fads and Quackery in Healing.
The evidence available indicates that Henry Lindlahr fell early in life for the strange notions of health and disease exploited by Bernarr Macfadden in the moron's bible, Physical Culture, and also for the schemes of Benedict Lust (Fishbein 1932, 118-119).
The fact that Lindlahr came to nature cure in his thirties, rejected Macfadden's physical culture as ineffective, and had no business interests in common with Lust suggests Fishbein had very little "evidence available." Fishbein went on to call the treatments at the Lindlahr Sanitarium "ridiculous," and, to prove his point, he offered the following list which he apparently considered self-evident:
The methods of treatment used include strange diets, air baths, water cures, light treatments, chiropractic, osteopathy, homeopathy, herbals, psychoanalysis, and other monkey business that any strange healer might bring temporarily into the limelight (ibid., 119) As noted earlier, Eugene V. Debs was once a patient at the Lindlahr Sanitarium. After one of his stints in federal prison, Debs fell sick and entered the sanitarium for treatment and eventually died there. Fishbein felt that Debs' susceptibility to weird ideas made him an easy mark for Lindlahr's weird health ideas. Fishbein said he visited Debs at the sanitarium on two occasions and claimed to have witnessed improper treatment which contributed to his demise (ibid., 119). Victor Lindlahr gave a different version:
The famous leader [Debs], suffering from a variety of chronic degenerative ailments, made a satisfactory recovery but left the Sanitarium under strict orders to take things easy. The injunction was disobeyed, and in spite of his subsequent return after a breakdown, Debs' health had been so severely impaired that he passed away at the Sanitarium after a long period of coma, on October 19, 1926 (V. Lindlahr 1973, 83).
It should be noted that these incidents occurred after Henry Lindlahr was dead.
In evaluating Lindlahr's career, one must acknowledge Lindlahr's apparent self-doubt about his own effectiveness. He seemed never to have doubted nature cure or his abilities to employ it effectively, but he made a number of significant shifts in his career strategy because he felt he was failing to have a big enough impact on the general quality of health care in this country. His goal was to demonstrate that chronic ailments were indeed curable so that all doctors would learn how to prevent and treat them.
At first he hoped to influence the orthodox medical community directly because he was a legitimate medical doctor, one of them. But he was soon dissuaded from that notion by the ridicule and enmity with which he was welcomed into the medical community. Then he decided that a better tactic was to train young doctors in natural methods before they were indoctrinated in the usual fashion. He put about forty through medical school, but once they completed their studies, many went their own way.
That is when he started his own school, but eventually found that this was not effective on any meaningful scale because his graduates had no real standing in the ranks of regular medicine. In 1918, he wrote of these educational efforts, "It has been a very slow, arduous, and from the worldly standpoint, a thankless work" (1918, 123). Finally, he set upon the idea of teaching the public directly. How satisfied he would have been with the results of those efforts we do not know because his death intervened. Drugless practice, which included naturopathy, chiropractic and other natural methods, did gain considerable popularity during Lindlahr's lifetime. One writer claimed that at least fifty percent of the United States population of that era went to drugless practitioners (Davidson 1923, 450).
If Lindlahr's work did not achieve the hoped-for changes in American health care, it did have a tremendous impact on naturopathic medicine. His accomplishments in the scientific practice of naturopathy on a large scale were unprecedented. His writings, including Nature Cure, which went through at least twenty editions by 1922, were clear, concise and comprehensive expressions of naturopathic philosophy. In 1914, Nature Cure was advertised as "the best work ever published in Nature Cure literature," and this statement may still be true. Lindlahr's emphasis on the mental and emotional aspects of health made naturopathy one of the most complete approaches to health, decades before the concept of "holism" evolved.
His insistence on prevention as the ideal form of health care was a timely innovation that continues to be validated. The distinction he made between organic diseases, full blown pathologies such as diabetes and cancer, and functional illnesses, disturbances in metabolism which presage the organic changes, is still usefully employed by naturopathic physicians and other holistic practitioners to guide them in preventing diseases during their incipient phases.
His 1919 statement, "I would also warn strongly against amalgam fillings," may have been one of the earliest expressions of concern about the nature of dental material, which has recently emerged as an important health care issue (1981, 273). Lindlahr was an early enemy of circumcision, another health issue of current concern; to him "the mutilation of the sexual organ seems inexcusable" (ibid., 147). Lindlahr was also a champion of bowel regularity and cleanliness, and he suffered ridicule for the notion that toxins can be absorbed into the body from the bowel, a concept which has long since been verified and currently represents one of the most intense areas of research in gastrointestinal medicine. Modern atomic theory was being formulated during Lindlahr's era, and he appears to have been influenced by it. He regarded life and matter as vibratory, defining disease as "disturbed polarity" and health as "satisfied polarity" (1922, 38, 44). The validity of these concepts remains undisputed, and they continue to guide some of the most forward-looking medical research today, especially in the field of cancer.
NATURE DOCTORS Pioneers in Naturopathic Medicine Friedhelm Kirchfeld & Wade Boyle
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