Long before todays wellness influencers and vaccine skeptics, the rise of modern medicine provoked radical forms of mistrust. Nowhere was this resistance fiercer than in the German-speaking lands, where the pioneering rise of bacteriology and public health generated a powerful counter-world of vaccine opponents, homeopaths, water-cure spas, and occult experimenters. As laboratories and clinics claimed new authority over the body, these critics built rival institutions for people who felt harmed or abandoned by modern medicine. In this book, Albert Wu uncovers the long history of medical doubts, following seven dissident figures across the German imperial world-from Dresden and Vienna to Java and Suriname-to explore how and why enduring mistrust of medical authority took root.
The figures whose stories he explores include a colonial doctor who experimented with snake poison, a feminist physician who confronted professional exclusion, and a socialist naturopath who sought to turn bodily reform into mass politics. Neither cranks nor prophets, these nonconformists challenged the arrogance and violence of scientific medicine in the name of more humane healing, even as their dissent reproduced hierarchies of race, gender, and nation. Probing these contradictions, Wu situates medical dissidents in the history of global empire, and shows how their skepticism emerged from the real wounds of biomedical modernity. In vivid detail, this book tells the story of movements whose afterlives we are still living with, as mistrust continues to animate contemporary debates over health and authority.
