Natural Environments and Human Health. Alan W Ewert
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would prescribe walks in the garden to help disturbed royalty calm themselves. Throughout the struggle for the control of medicine, gardens remained popular through the evolving history of hospitals. Hospital comes from a Latin root meaning host (also the root for hostel, hotel, and hospitality). Throughout the Middle Ages, hospitals were often almshouses and resting places for pilgrims. Hospitals often were situated near monasteries so that guests and patients could receive relief through walking in the gardens growing medicinal and culinary herbs and sitting in the outdoor courtyards of the monasteries (Irvine and Warber, 2002). Other hospitals were attached to a church as part of their charity mission as they embraced a charity doctrine. A binding force during the feudal period, a medieval monastery by the 12th century was a farm, an inn, a school, a library, and a hospital. Some historians note that monasteries created elaborate gardens to bring pleasant, soothing distraction to the more well-to-do ill (Gierlach-Spriggs et al., 1998). There was an understanding that this contact with nature increased wellness. The church allowed certain women to be midwives, though by the Middle Ages that was their only legal access to healing.
Gardens and plants remained as prominent features in European and American hospitals into the 1800s (Nightingale, 1996). The hospital gardens provided fresh air, restful physical activity, and a place to socialize as they had in past centuries. In the US during tuberculosis epidemics there was a shortage of hospital beds and the concern of infection. Therefore some hospitals decided to move tuberculosis and some mentally ill patients outside. It turned out to be fortuitous as these patients tended to recover faster and more fully. By the late 1800s the Quakers’ Friends Hospital purposefully used nature in the treatment of mental illness and tuberculosis through the use of a greenhouse as well as outdoor sanitariums where people lived in order to recover. It is debated if the canvas and wood ‘tents’ used by the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society, Colorado (opened in 1904) or the Firland Sanatorium in Seattle (opened in 1911), combined with the state-of-the-art ‘heliotrope’ treatment of fresh air, sunshine, and good food, was a successful treatment for tuberculosis. Nevertheless, Colorado and other western states advertised heavily for ill people to recover in the dry air and sun so successfully that by 1920 it is estimated that 60% of Colorado’s population were ill people and their families who migrated there from the east coast (Anon., 2009).
Box. 3.1. Women healers were caught in the cross-fire between nature-based healing and a physician system based on patriarchal values
Women in many cultures traditionally have been healers and used nature in their healing most significantly through the use of herbs, many of which are still used today. These women, called wise women, used centuries of empirical evidence gained though practice-based research in prescribing their medicinal cures and healing tonics. Humans’ connection to nature in terms of benefiting from the healing use of plants and other materials was evident. This history continues to be uncovered: ‘It was witches who developed an extensive understanding of bones and muscles, herbs and drugs, while physicians were still deriving their prognoses from astrology and alchemists were trying to turn lead into gold. So great was the witches’ knowledge that in 1527, Paracelsus, considered the father of modern medicine, burned his text on pharmaceuticals, confessing that he had learned from the Sorceress all he knew’ (Ehrenreich and English, 1973). We know that by the 14th century, though, many women, possibly in the millions, were persecuted and put to death for practicing their healing arts (Murray, 1921). A sample case follows.
The establishment of medicine as a profession, requiring university training, made it easy to bar women legally from practice. With few exceptions, the universities were closed to women (even to upper-class women who could afford them) and licensing laws were established to prohibit all but university-trained doctors from practice. It was impossible to enforce the licensing laws consistently since there were only a handful of university-trained doctors compared with the great mass of lay healers. But the laws could be used selectively. Their first target was not the peasant healer, but the better-off, literate woman healer who competed for the same urban clientele as the university-trained doctors. Take, for example, the case of Jacoba Felicie, brought to trial in 1322 by the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris, on charges of illegal practice. Jacoba was literate and had received some unspecified ‘special training’ in medicine. That her patients were well off is evident from the fact that (as they testified in court) they had consulted well-known university-trained physicians before turning to her. The primary accusations brought against her were that she would cure her patient of internal illness and wounds or of external abscesses. She would visit the sick assiduously and continue to examine the urine in the manner of physicians, feel the pulse, and touch the body and limbs. Six witnesses affirmed that Jacoba had cured them, even after numerous doctors had given up, and one patient declared that she was wiser in the art of surgery and medicine than any master physician or surgeon in Paris. But these testimonials were used against her, for the charge was not that she was incompetent, but that—as a woman—she dared to cure at all (Ehrenreich and English, 1973).
The concept of gardening for health extends past the monastery and hospital grounds to gardening by lay people. The 1699 book, English Gardner, tells readers that there is no better way to preserve your health than spending time gardening. In the 16th and 17th century gardening became popular, especially by the more well-to-do class as a way to relate to nature (see Thomas Hill’s The Gardeners Labyrinth (1577) or Hugh Platt’s Floraes Paradise (1608)). In her book, Green Desire, Rebecca Bushnell (2003) writes about the pleasures of garden labor, which she also notes was strictly divided by gender. The gardening fad may have been a way to reclaim some relationship with nature and it seemed to stimulate a social outlet. Gardening continues in popularity as a means to interact with nature and current research shows that people being together in nature leads to stronger social bonds. Many manuals were about the artistry of plant propagation to get a certain color or shape. Gardens were mostly cultivated by upper-class people and they used the garden as an artistic and poetic outlet. While there were books and manuals that described the asymmetrical gardens of China, most English gardens were symmetrical which Bushnell believes was a sign of a need to control the plants or a need to put order in an unpredictable world. However, the irregular placement from the Chinese style was eye-catching and beautiful, causing some gardeners to plant an asymmetrical arrangement. In a sense these early books helped define humans’ relationship with nature by creating a WorldView that included relating this gardening relationship to nature with health.
Homeopathy, naturopathy, and Bach flower remedies: newer medical systems relying on nature
In 1796 another medical system relying on nature was developed. Using theory from the 16th century, Samuel Hanhnemann, a German physician, developed principles for a medical system in which remedies from plants, animals, and minerals in non-material doses stimulate the body to heal itself and cure symptoms in ill people, while these same substances often would cause ill symptoms in healthy people. This medical practice used observation and an understanding of the characteristics of the plants, animals, and minerals to connect the natural item to healing, demonstrating a belief and practice in humans’ connection to the natural world. Hahnemann, followed by others, developed over 3500 remedies. Homeopathy was brought to the US in 1825. A number of hospitals in the US were homeopathic hospitals, such as the Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia affiliated with Drexel University College of Medicine, the Massachusetts Homeopathic Hospital that combined with the Female Medical College of Boston in 1873 to become the Boston University School of Medicine, and the Minnesota Homeopathic Medical College established in 1886. By 1862, 110 hospitals were homeopathic in practice as well as over 30 nursing homes, 62 orphan asylums and retirement homes, and 16 insane asylums. By 1888 there were over 2400 homeopathic physicians in the US. The American Institute of Homeopathy was founded in 1844 as the first national medical organization in the US and many medical schools in the US taught homeopathy well into the 20th century. However, homeopathy was almost eradicated in the US after the American Medical Association (AMA), founded in 1847, created a charter containing specific language against what they labeled alternative practices and forbid consultation with homeopathic physicians. While homeopathy struggled with the AMA in the US, it has been practiced beside allopathic medicine in many countries, including the UK, and is seeing a revival since the late 20th century in the US. It has come back into some