In the 1820s and 1830s, acolytes of New Hampshire autodidact Samuel Thomson fought the imposition of medical licensure requirements, arguing that people should be allowed to pay practitioners who advised lobelia, cayenne pepper, and steam baths to treat sickness rather than those who followed the more orthodox courses of bleeding and dosing with calomel.
In the 1890s, philosopher William James campaigned against a medical registration act before the Massachusetts Legislature, arguing that the bill is “too grandmotherly, and goes against the best habits and traditions of our state.”
In the 1950s, American right-wingers battled the FDA, arguing it should not have issued public warnings against the use of the Hoxsey treatment, an herbal remedy for cancer developed and marketed by a former coal miner.
All of these activists are, as Lewis Grossman argues in his book Choose Your Medicine: Freedom of Therapeutic Choice in America, part of a deep tradition of American advocacy for what some would describe as “medical freedom.” Today’s COVID anti-vaxxers, Choose Your Medicine shows, are drawing on a deep well of rhetoric developed over a couple centuries of activism on both the left and the right. Maybe that’s why they’ve been so successful.
