Selling the Nature Cure, 1890–1950: How German “Life Reformers” Shaped US Wellness Culture

This presentation will illustrate how German adherents of the “life reform” (Lebensreform) movement spread health practices like the cold water cure and fasting diets—and a wide array of related products and institutions—throughout the United States beginning at the end of the nineteenth century. I argue that while names like Sebastian Kneipp (1821-1897) and Arnold Ehret (1866-1922) enjoyed first a rapid round of public attention and then a decline in prominence following their deaths, evidence shows that the practices and products they promoted continued to grow in geographical range and influence through the mid twentieth century and beyond. This presentation—part of a larger project tracing the connection between nineteenth-century Central European hydropathy and twentieth-century commercial “wellness” culture, will illustrate this argument using a series of maps created to show how both publicity for the German nature curists and institutions (like sanatoria, health-food stores, and schools) they and their disciples founded spread throughout the US over time. It will also take advantage of the visual format to show images of the products (like special bathing apparatuses and “natural” remedies) spread by this movement.

This presentation forms part of the larger story of how health “experts” from Central Europe operating outside the bounds of formal medical education shaped the modern international medical, cultural, political, and economic landscape. The “cold water cure” pioneered by Vincenz Priessnitz (1799-1851), a Silesian farmer, spread among a network of figures in Central Europe including Sebastian Kneipp, a Bavarian priest who turned his monastery in Worishöfen into an international center for “cures,” and Arnold Rikli (1823–1906), who inspired the founding of Monte Verità, a Swiss commune and later resort and sanatorium, where Arnold Ehret (originally a German drawing teacher) promoted radical diet cures that promised to cure all ailments by ridding the body of “mucus.”

Ehret subsequently moved to Los Angeles and became part of a new network of first- and second-generation German immigrants working in the hydropathic tradition. These included Benedict Lust (1872–1945), a follower of Kneipp who in 1892 had also emigrated to the US and begun founding sanatoria, training centers, a publishing company, and naturopathic journals in which writing in German and in English promoted not only naturopathic ideas but a series of new businesses and branded wellness products. By the late twentieth century, lifestyle and diet books by these figures would become favorites of Hollywood celebrities, hippies, and Steve Jobs. I ultimately argue that these seemingly marginal practices—labeled “alternative” medicine and often associated with brief and radical movements across the political spectrum, from Dada to Nazism—in fact became a foundational part of modern consumer culture, and of mainstream ideas about health and the body. (Contemporary movements from veganism to anti-vaccinationism are highly imbricated with this tradition.)

This poster presentation will illustrate a key feature of this story: how even after explicit links to German founders like Kneipp receded from the marketing of institutions like naturopathic colleges and products like health foods, their popularity continued to grow and their relationship to German life-reform ideas persisted.