Lynn itself was no longer the idyllic town where European visitors used to be told that shoe operatives were fit to be United States senators. The old artisan cobblers had given way to a postbellum factory system which was rapidly widening the gap between manufacturer and employee, while the floating population of part-time workers and the overcrowding of men and women in confined quarters led to deplorable moral conditions. Here was a labor situation that was soon to spring up in organized protest. Here too were the nervous restlessness and poor health that attended the new urbanization of America.

Orthodox medicine, by the standards of a century later, was in a very crude state. So far as results were concerned, there was often little to choose between it and the various patent-medicine cures to which millions of people turned. The line between orthodox and quack systems was often scarcely visible, and it was taken for granted by the general public that anyone who set himself up to heal should be endowed with the title of “doctor,” as Quimby had been a decade earlier and as Kennedy now was.

This was the period when medical practice was popularly defined as “scientific guessing” and when one of the most respected physicians of the day, Oliver Wendell Holmes, told a class at the [Massachusetts Medical Society]: “I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica . . . could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind,—and all the worse for the fishes.”⁴ In this state of chaotic laissez faire, the best and the worst existed side by side, and only time would be able to sort out the genuinely progressive from the venally fraudulent.