Books, Arts & Manners

‘STIMULATE the phagocytes!” exclaimed Sir Colenso Ridgeon, the physician of advanced views in George Bernard Shaw’s play of 1906, The Doctor’s Dilemma. Nearly a century later, alternative-medicine gurus such as Dr. Andrew Weil and Dr. Candace Pert are saying more or less the same thing. They are the Colenso Ridgeons of their time. Of course, when Shaw—himself a monumental health faddist, who believed in the life-preserving properties of Dr. Jaeger’s woolen clothes and would wear no others—was writing, stimulation of the phagocytes was a matter of some urgency. The life expectancy of the average citizen in Western countries was somewhat below fifty years, markedly less than that of Central American peasants today. The infant-mortality rate in the London borough in which my father was born a few years later was 125 per thousand—that is to say, one in eight children died before his first birthday. And London was then the healthiest capital in Europe.

But the worldly success of doctors such as Weil—perhaps the most celebrated of the gurus—would have staggered Ridgeon. Weil’s books alone, such as Spontaneous Healing and Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, sell hundreds of thousands of copies; his site on the World Wide Web receives 83,000 hits a day. The appetite for alternative medicine’s recipes for perfect health is well-nigh insatiable. Most bookstores devote more shelf space to books about alternative medicine than to books about the entire history of the world. The American public alone spends $14 billion on heterodox remedies. Alternative medicine may be frowned upon by most of the medical profession, but it has now entered the mainstream of American (and Western European) life. To express skepticism about it has become worse than mere ignorance; it is bad taste.

About the Author

Anthony Daniels

Mr. Daniels, a retired doctor who worked in several parts of the world, is the author of Mass Listeria, a book about health scares.

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‘STIMULATE the phagocytes!” exclaimed Sir Colenso Ridgeon, the physician of advanced views in George Bernard Shaw’s play of 1906, The Doctor’s Dilemma. Nearly a century later, alternative-medicine gurus such as Dr. Andrew Weil and Dr. Candace Pert are saying more or less the same thing. They are the Colenso Ridgeons of their time. Of course, when Shaw—himself a monumental health faddist, who believed in the life-preserving properties of Dr. Jaeger’s woolen clothes and would wear no others—was writing, stimulation of the phagocytes was a matter of some urgency. The life expectancy of the average citizen in Western countries was somewhat below fifty years, markedly less than that of Central American peasants today. The infant-mortality rate in the London borough in which my father was born a few years later was 125 per thousand—that is to say, one in eight children died before his first birthday. And London was then the healthiest capital in Europe.

But the worldly success of doctors such as Weil—perhaps the most celebrated of the gurus—would have staggered Ridgeon. Weil’s books alone, such as Spontaneous Healing and Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, sell hundreds of thousands of copies; his site on the World Wide Web receives 83,000 hits a day. The appetite for alternative medicine’s recipes for perfect health is well-nigh insatiable. Most bookstores devote more shelf space to books about alternative medicine than to books about the entire history of the world. The American public alone spends $14 billion on heterodox remedies. Alternative medicine may be frowned upon by most of the medical profession, but it has now entered the mainstream of American (and Western European) life. To express skepticism about it has become worse than mere ignorance; it is bad taste.