ABSTRACT
The portrayal of a late-twentieth-century hospital as exemplary of an alternative health movement seems inside out. I have chosen this odd turn of phrase deliberately-and I use it here in place of upside down, backward, or even absurd-both to capture WCH’s struggles and to position these within debates over the meaning of alternative health care. Since the late 1980s, alternative health and alternative health movements have inspired considerable scholarly analysis and debate. The literature shows no consensus about the meaning of alternative, and both scholarly and popular sources use the term in many different ways. Some locate alternative healing within the literature of professions and professional ideologies. Hans Baer, for example, portrays alternative health movements as oppositional to the structures and knowledge base of biomedicine, attractive to a range of peripheral or marginal populations, and coherent in their critique if not their content. Others identify the alternative approaches to medical practice that emerged in latetwentieth-century America in terms of their ideological opposition to biomedicine. For example, Robbie Davis Floyd and Gloria St. John divide practitioners into holists, who dismiss the practices and beliefs of allopathy and replace them with an integrated form of healing based on the fundamental relationship between mind and body, and humanists, who accept the principles and practices of biomedicine but seek more personal, humanized ways of delivering care. Others, such as Rosalind Coward, adopt an epistemic or Foucauldian approach to the rise of alternative healing that is more cynical. Coward argues that though political action could transform health care,
alternative healers do not seek political goals. Rather, she suggests, they are united in a “philosophical opposition to orthodox medicine and attitudes to health” that emphasizes such virtues as nature, healing, and women’s special wisdom.2
