The United States saw a wide dissemination of popular literature dealing with various medical problems including marriage and family ones in the nineteenth century. Much of it was written by unorthodox medical practitioners who appeared in great numbers. The more traditionally trained physicians founded the American Medical Association in 1846 to assert professional standards for medicine, but it was not until the twentieth century that they gained the control over medicine that they long sought. Until they did, all kinds of medical practitioners appeared. Many Americans in much of the nineteenth century resented officially trained physicians, believing them to be an elite group monopolizing knowledge that would best be widely diffused.
Among the largest of the medical sects that flourished in the nineteenth century were the Thomsonians, a system patented by Samuel Thomson in 1813. Thomson was opposed to the “heroic” blood letting and other interventionist practices of orthodox medicine and urged instead natural botanical remedies taken according to a strict regimen. He also advocated regular douching and his agents sold douching syringes and spermicides among other things. There were also strong advocates of hydrotherapy. They encouraged Americans to drink more water, to use a variety of sitz baths, and to wrap themselves daily in wet sheets for an hour or so. Other popular healers emphasized colonic enemas. Still others, such as John Harvey Kellogg, developed special diets (e.g., corn flakes) at their sanitaria. There were homeopaths, naturopaths, chiropractors, and many others. Many of the newly emerging American religious groups were also concerned with health. Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Science church with its own practitioners, the Seventh Day Adventists with their dietary restrictions, and the Mormons with their Word of Wisdom, which discouraged the use of alcoholic beverages all helped popularize the new campaign for health. The result was a plethora of popular health manuals, many of which by the 1850s included references to contraception, menstrual regulation, and even abortion. Titles such as A Confidential Letter to the Married; The Wife’s Secret of Power; Science of Reproduction and Reproductive Control; The Marriage Guide; How Not To and Why; and Conception:The Process, Method of Prevention without Any Expense or Any Hindrance to Perfect Intercourse were widely available. Much of the newly available literature was pamphlet sized and focused specifically on contraception and abortion, although the lines were increasingly blurred between sober advice tracts and lengthy advertising booklets for birth control products or services. Interestingly many of the pamphlets are no longer available and their existence is known only by their titles in card catalogues or by references to them in court records.
As reproductive control became commercialized after 1850, and as some women became increasingly able to assert a degree of independence over their fertility, a reaction set in, playing upon the ambivalence that many felt about any kind of control of reproduction. The social purity movement became a crusade that resulted in state laws altering two hundred years of American custom and public policy toward abortion and toward contraception, with the result that both went underground.
