Wash and Be Healed: The Water-Cure Movement and Women's Health
secondary literature · 1991
LINK
SUMMARY
Academic history of the American water-cure movement by historian Susan E. Cayleff (Health, Society, and Policy series, Temple University Press), based on her Brown University doctoral dissertation. Cited by Wikipedia's James Caleb Jackson article as discussing Jackson specifically at pp. 94-95 of the 1991 edition (pp. 114-115 of the 2010 reprint, ISBN 9781439904275); this bundle was not able to fetch those specific pages directly (Google Books preview and archive.org do not expose the book's body text), so no page-specific quotation from Cayleff's discussion of Jackson is used here. The publisher's own description of the book's thesis (Temple University Press / Google Books listing, fetched 2026-08-04) states that Cayleff's central argument is that the water-cure movement was overpowered by allopathic (orthodox) medicine, which viewed hydropathy as a fringe, crackpot-style therapeutic largely because of its close association with nineteenth-century social activism. A 1988 Journal of American History review (Judy Barrett Litoff, vol. 75, no. 2, pp. 613-614, doi:10.2307/1887916) confirms the book's scope and publication details but was accessible only as a bibliographic abstract, not full text.
NOTES
Cayleff’s book is the standard modern academic history of the water-cure movement Jackson’s institution belonged to, and per Wikipedia’s own citation it discusses Jackson directly. It is used here only for what could be independently verified: contemporary orthodox medicine’s dismissal of hydropathy as a “crackpot therapeutic,” reported by Cayleff as part of her broader thesis that the movement’s marginalization was substantially social and political rather than purely a verdict on its medical claims — a nuance this case preserves rather than overstates.