The History of Inpatient Care in German Departments Focussing on Natural Healing

Abstract

We describe historic developments of inhouse facilities for natural healing in this paper, which were mainly located in German speaking regions. The naturopathic movement is a relabeling of the hydropathic movement in Germany, which was supported by a considerable proportion of the population in Germany during the mid 19th century. Due to the fact that hydropathic treatments were provided by nonmedical healers, discriminated as “quacks”, there was continuous hostility between hydropathy/naturopathy and medicine. However, among the many establishments providing inhouse treatment for acute and chronic diseases over weeks there were some which were controlled by medical doctors in the 20th century and some which were implemented by government. In many of the establishments there were approaches for measuring usefulness of the treatments, some of which have been initiated explicitly for that purpose.