Introduction xvii medicinal, behavioral/dietary, and spiritual. It is a regimen that demands attention to the subtleties of health and illness and, often, an ongoing effort by patients to maintain the proper balance. Each of these ancient traditions has had a modest presence in Western culture since the mid-19th century. However, they became especially popular in the sec- ond half of the 20th century as part of the New Age movement and other devel- opments. In the present work, we consider two of them—Chinese and Native American traditional medicine—in the context of their “pre-1900” existence, with comments provided about their “rebirth” in later decades. Ayurvedic medicine, on the other hand, is positioned as part of the 1960s–1970s New Age movement, because it tended to be less well known in the West until that time. Mental Health A separate overview should also be provided here regarding mental health and illness, because this subject has followed a somewhat different trajectory over the years and tells a slightly different story. Both mainstream and alternative approaches have played a part in that story, even though the line between them, again, is rather fuzzy in some instances. As with “organic” illness, in the Colonial era mental illness was thought to result from both supernatural and natural causes. Protestant ministers and ordinary town folk were likely to blame mental and emotional troubles on “demons” inhabiting a person the opportunity was thought to be given them by lapses of personal faith and poor moral judgment. Folk healers and midwives were sometimes accused of being sorceresses themselves, given that their trade required them to traffic in alchemical potions and the mysteries of the body. Meanwhile, doctors tended to attribute mental disturbances to the same four bodily humors that affected ­ physical health and worked to restore balance as a means of treating patients. (­Preacher-physicians, one supposes, took both approaches, moral and humoral.) With the Enlightenment of the 18th century, mental illness—“madness” or insanity—came to be regarded as a problem with the individual’s faculty of reason in other words, illness was rooted in an inability to think logically and coherently, particularly in moral matters. One possible solution at the time was moral edu- cation, and for this reason various mental asylums were created to impart moral knowledge to patient populations instead of simply locking them up as hopeless “lunatics.” One of the nation’s founding fathers, Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, was one of the first people to look at the mentally ill “compassionately” in this way. Doctors working in psychiatric asylums in the 19th century had no standards of diagnosis and employed a variety of labels for different categories of illness, chief among them mania (hyperactivity and wild thoughts), melancholia (sad- ness or depression), dementia (incoherent or inconsistent thinking), and idiocy (gross mental/behavioral lapses). Various labels arose and fell over time, however, depending on the symptoms counted as definitive and the latest understanding about the sources of illness. In 1869, for example, a neurologist in New York,
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