Nature Cure, Gandhi, and What Wellness Once Meant
In 1942, from the inside of a prison cell, Mahatma Gandhi wrote, “The human body is the universe in miniature.” If one knows the workings of the physical earth, he suggests, then one can apply that knowledge to achieve harmony with their body: “The universe within reflects the universe without,” he wrote.
I am compelled by the worldview that uplifts the natural world as a guide to understand what’s happening inside our bodies. It’s a concept that speaks to me because it resists the modern and increasingly common urge to pathologize our own bodies or assume that there is something originally fraught about the way in which they operate. Boob jobs, nose jobs, the majority of the cosmetics industry, the majority of the skincare industry, Ozempic, spirinolactone, the ubiquity of braces — in short, the overprescription of pills or surgeries for virtually any discomfort imaginable — are all examples of the way in we believe that we can manipulate our bodies, sometimes even master and discipline our bodies, which are always, somehow, at fault.
Gandhi’s words are the antithesis of this urge. As it turns out, there’s a western name for his outlook. It’s called Nature Cure, a type of health philosophy that emerged as such in Europe in the 1800s. Nature Cure was the term given to a medley of practices that emerged in the 1800s as a response to increasingly dangerous forms of conventional medicine, such as bloodletting, mercury therapy, and heroin as a cough reliever.
Nature Cure sought to philosophically link medicine and nature. The idea was that the body can naturally heal itself, encouraged by the stimulation of outside elements: taking a bath in a spring, sitting in a sauna, sitting in the sun, eating whole, unprocessed foods, and more.
In other words, Nature Cure was the original wellness culture. These days we use words like “Andrew Huberman,” “sunlight first thing,” and “cold plunge,” but really what we’re talking about is the general guiding principle of Nature Cure, described in 19th century parlance as the act of “acknowledg[ing] openly the supreme power of nature…giving her fair-play in performing her cures.”
Of course, the practices espoused by “Nature Cure” were not new: they were in many ways inspired by the ways our ancestors operated for tens of thousands of years. But in the context of the 19th century, Nature Cure was branded in opposition to the dominant medical procedures of the day.
I first learned about Nature Cure in the context of Gandhi, who popularized the philosophy in India: in his ashrams, Nature Cure (as well as institutionalized poverty) was the primary way of preventing and fending off disease. In time, Nature Cure took off to such an extent in India that, even now, there are now dozens of “nature cure” hospitals scattered across the state.
As Joseph S. Alter writes, “Nature Cure as a system of medicine defies categorization as either traditional or modern, Eastern or Western. Although its origins can be traced back to eighteenth century central Europe, it was very popular in both India and the United States during the early 20th century.”
In India, Nature Cure goes hand in hand with yoga, as both focus on the powers of detoxifying and purifying the body. But unlike yoga in the West, Nature Cure has now been relegated to the domain of pseudoscience or the more subtle pejorative “alternative medicine.”
And, in the western tradition of maligning eastern medicine like Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine, Nature Cure and its offshoots are still often relegated to the domain of pseudo-science. This was happening in 1800s as it happens now: in 1850, a doctor in New York wrote a book called Quackery Unmasked (an iconic title) in which he called out all of the supposed pseudo-scientist doctors: homeopaths, hydropaths, botanics, and other masquerading “doctors.” Included on that list was “Female Physicians.”1
So Nature Cure stands out to me for a few reasons: 1) spiritually, it resists the modern urge to pathologize our bodies, 2) historically, it’s a transnational health philosophy that originated in the west and was taken up in the east, and 3) philosophically, it pokes at something interesting about what we consider legitimate versus illegitimate forms of medicine, and how that very distinction is often social in nature, not empirical.
I’m not here to tell you that we should wholeheartedly embrace Nature Cure or even that Nature Cure is more effective, more human-centered, or even preferable to modern medicine. To be sure, Nature Cure often encompasses a number of eclectic practices that strike me as unfamiliar and strange: enemas, friction sitz baths, raw vegetarianism, and more.
But the specifics of Nature Cure are beside the point, for Nature Cure is perhaps most compelling not as a physical regimen as much as an idea: an invitation to reconsider the way we apprehend our bodies and the earth.
What would it mean to consider our bodies as reflective of the universe? How does our way of apprehending them change? What are the implications of this thought — and what are its failings? If not Nature Cure, what does it look like to de-pathologize our bodies, if we choose to do so at all?
I’m not sure of the answers to these questions, but I will be searching for them for a long time. Gandhi — an imperfect man, to be sure — offered us a definition of health that might begin to chip away at the answer. In the same prison cell, he wrote:
“Health means body ease. He is a healthy man whose body is free from all disease; he carries on his normal activities without fatigue. Such a man should be able with ease to walk ten to twelve miles a day, and perform ordinary physical labour without getting tired. He can digest ordinary simple food. His mind and his senses are in a state of harmony and poise.”2
James C. Wharton, Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America, xii.
M.K. Gandhi, Key to Health, page 6.
Thank you for this one, Surya. The idea that our bodies are not inherently broken things that need fixing but rather, they are reflecting our pace and actions in the world is something I have been thinking a lot about. It's something that's given me more curious questions than answers, like yourself.