[Images of gender and gender-specific therapies in German homoeopathic and naturopathic guidebooks (c. 1870-1930)].

Abstract

In the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century sex and gender became crucial categories not only in the medical discourse of German speaking countries. At the very centre of this discourse was the idea of women as the weaker sex. Because of the paradigm shift in the history of medicine (due to the discovery of the cytopathology) the principle of a weaker sex seemed to be corroborated by scientific research, a fact which impacted on medical practice in many ways. "Nervous" disease evolved as the major threat "of our times," with urban girls, young women and "weak" young men being most at risk. At the same time homoeopaths and naturopaths challenged modern medicine, offering alternative health practices, cures and drugs for people who could not afford the help of physicians or distrusted them. An analysis of several alternative medical guidebooks printed between c. 1870 and 1930 showed that homoeopaths and naturopaths shared the "sexualization" of medical discourse and practice only to an extent. On the one hand they believed that disorders such as hysteria, masturbation, chorea Sydenham and anaemia were nervous in nature and that the chances of curing them were poor. With the exception of masturbation these "deadly" threats were considered to be typically female. The general approach of alternative physicians, on the other hand, was unisex. The cures they offered to the public used unisex scales of constitutional characters. They even ignored the gender specificity of sick headaches. Gender-specific problems such as difficult deliveries and childbed fever were treated as "natural" and mild cures were favoured. The conclusion is that the influences of upper and middle class discourse on common health practices should not be overestimated.