Letting nature run its course: Thoreau's 'Walden' as experimental cure

Many readers have interpreted Henry David Thoreau's Walden as nature writing, as an anti-capitalist treatise, as a philosophical text influenced by Eastern philosophers or Emerson and the Transcendentalists or as a social critique. In this dissertation, I argue that one way of reading Henry David Thoreau's Walden is as a health narrative that reflects American cultural concerns during the 1840s and early 1850s. I read Walden from the viewpoint of a medical historian, and show that Walden and contemporary medical texts reveal similar cultural beliefs, such as the association of immigrants with contagion and nature with health.; I propose that one of the reasons why Henry David Thoreau isolated himself at Walden Pond was to arrest the development of his tuberculosis and that his invalidism was at the core of Walden controlling his narrative voice. I place Walden into a medical and cultural context to show that Thoreau's discussions of individualism, self-reliance, and nature are discussions of self-cure and the individual's responsibility for his own health, mirroring the larger social dialogue regarding individualism and self-reliance. The associations of personal behavior with health or disease and of capitalism with illness are themes that are apparent in Walden and contemporaneous issues of the Water-Cure Journal.; Instead of utilizing therapeutic intervention to stem the course of his illness, Thoreau allowed nature to run its course in terms of his disease development. Nature and the natural were his remedies. It is my position that his therapeutic regimen was part of the nature-trusting movement taking place within the culture and regular medical practice during the 1840s.; In a culture where death from infectious disease was commonplace, Transcendentalism allowed for the healing of both body and soul and bad strong affiliations with the philosophies of the nature busting movement within hydropathy. Hydropaths and Thoreau focused upon the natural and the spiritual. I explore the thematic connections between Walden and the Water-Cure Journal and also examine how self-awareness leads to physical and spiritual well being in Walden.