Happy Wednesday Down Home Readers! Today we will highlight another Senior Project. Let’s read on to hear from Katie Erb about her work.
My project, entitled “A Priest and a Protestor: Sebastian Kneipp, Benedict Lust, and Hydrotherapy in Nineteenth-century Medicine” consisted of a historical research paper exploring the roots of naturopathic medicine in Europe and America. I focused on the wide-ranging influence of Bavarian priest Sebastian Kneipp’s hydrotherapy.
As a comparative figure to Kneipp, I studied German youth Benedict Lust, cured from tuberculosis by Kneipp, who brought hydrotherapy to America in 1896 and used it as the foundation, along with other quackery-ridden treatments, for a new system of medicine he called “Naturopathy.”
I compared Sebastian Kneipp’s successes—evidenced by the incorporation of hydrotherapy into mainstream German medicine—with Benedict Lust’s failures—evidenced by the American Medical Association’s attempts to suppress the oppositional drugless healing movement Lust had created.
