Naturopathy and Nature Cure Founders

Founders, popularizers and practitioners of naturopathy and the nature cure movement, the system of medicine that treats illness by restoring the body's own healing capacity through diet, fasting, fresh air, sunlight and abstention from drugs and surgery rather than pharmaceutical or surgical intervention. This covers the movement's direct founders and early popularizers in Germany, Switzerland and the United States, dietary and fasting reformers whose work fed into or ran parallel to the naturopathic tradition such as breakfast cereal and whole grain advocates, raw food and juicing pioneers, and vegetarian health reformers, together with later writers who continued the nature cure line into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A figure whose own naturopathic or nature cure identity is explicit in their record belongs here even when their specific claims were later discredited; a figure whose primary tradition is a distinct alternative system such as homeopathy, chiropractic or a named cancer protocol is grouped instead under fringe and alternative medicine founders.