|
|
If you didn't feel comfortable using one of Dr. Chase's remedies, there were other options. Newspapers were filled with advertisements for all kinds of medicines - both liquid and pills. What these pills or bottles contained, however, was often a mystery. The medical profession was regulated by the government like it is today, so medicines were reviewed by a Board of Health. As a result, medicine manufacturers included all kinds of ingredients that might make us think twice before swallowing. Shortly after 1900, an investigative reporter had the contents of some medicine bottles analyzed. He discovered that one brand of bottled medicine was almost 28% alcohol. Other medicines included opium and cocaine.
If patent medicines didn't work, you could always try visiting a doctor--the question was, what kind of doctor to visit. As a glance at the Ann Arbor directory shows, in the 1800s there were a number of different schools of thought of how patients should be treated. Mainstream or regular doctors were called "allopaths" and offered a variety of treatments. Some, such as cold wet clothes to reduce a fever, are still used today. Others, such as bloodletting and leeches--which were thought to bring a fever down by letting warm blood out of the body--are no longer practiced.
A major rival of mainstream doctors was homeopathy. Homeopathic doctors (or homeopaths) thought that some diseases could be fought by giving patients mild doses of drugs that, in a healthy patient, brought about the same symptoms as the disease. The less a patient took, the larger the effect it was supposed to have on the body - sort of a medical version of trying to fight fire with fire.
Other alternatives included herbalist doctors, who only used plants and plant extracts in their treatments, and hydropathists, who promoted water cures. Typical hydropathic cures included cold baths of wrapping patients in wet sheets and then covering them with blankets. In the 1870s, the Ann Arbor Mineral Springs House offered baths of a supposedly therapeutic nature. There were even a few who turned to clairvoyants like Sophia Pierce for healing.
For most of the nineteenth century, these rival schools of medicine spent a lot of time promoting themselves and criticizing other forms of treatments as ineffective or even dangerous. Homepaths and herbalists argued that mainstream doctor's methods were too invasive and dangerous. Mainstream doctors, in turn, claimed that alternative forms of medicine were fraudulent. But the homepathic school won a victory in 1875 when the University of Michigan established a College of Homepathy (which continued to operate until 1922).