Hydropathy took the radical step of naturalizing women’s life stages. For hydropaths, puberty, menstruation, childbearing, and menopause were not dread diseases needing intervention but natural processes in a woman’s life. Women did not become weak and ill because of their gender but because of some outside cause, just like men. Hydropaths celebrated women’s nature and exalted rather than denied their historic role as family and community caretakers. They urged women to take an active role in their own health, and to maximize their health and happiness through diet, exercise, and other hygienic practices, all of which dramatically expanded women’s power to determine and control their own lives within the hydropathic worldview. As a result, hydropathy provided a refuge for progressive women, and many of America’s first generation of women doctors came out of hydropathy.
- Erika Janik, Marketplace of the Marvelous: The Strange Origins of Modern Medicine (2014)