ABSTRACT
The conceptual instability of liberal-democratic health policies is studied through health reform in fin-de-siecle Belgium. The emergence of so-called alternative cultures of health from the 1890s was partly a reaction against the tightening-up of medical liberalism. This chapter focuses on the Belgian practitioners of classical hydrotherapy and so-called natural healing an offspring of the natural healing methods practised by medical laymen in Germany. Their emphasis on individual liberty in medical matters sheds light on the paradox of medical liberalism. After 1870, the government expanded the council's competences, enabling it, for instance, to prepare the first legislation on children's and women's labour. As homeopathy was often considered suitable for self-treatment, it easily found its way into pastoral medical lay practice. Naturopaths' therapeutic identity was dependent on the relationship with the Belgian medical profession, was based on an oppositional identification. In the 1930s, the new marching orders were the final result of the physicians' striving for the internal regulation of their profession.
