Adolf Just (1859-1936)

Adolf Just wrote Return to Nature in 1896, five years after Louis Kuhne published his momentous book, The New Science of Healing (1891). These two books together would revolutionize health forever, especially impacting on the meaning of health in America. The arrival of these books were foundational, galvanizing a growing group of health care enthusiasts into the naturopathic medical profession, enhancing the credibility of their convictions and practice. In fact, Kuhne and Just without knowing that they had done so, provided the template for the naturopathic movement to emerge with a much needed theoretical and philosophical foundation and framework. On such a substantial platform, our forebears forged ahead in America.

Adolf Just published his first edition, Return to Nature (1896) in celebration of the opening of his German Jungborn.¹ Just described his Jungborn as “a model institution for the true natural life, where those who wish to make arrangements for such a life at home in their own gardens can find the pattern.”¹ In the final chapter of his book, Just provided a blueprint for anyone to replicate a Jungborn, wherever he or she may have lived. Many did follow Just in his vision for a natural life. Mahatma Gandhi, for example, modeled his communities upon Just’s Jungborn.

What exactly does Just mean when he says, “Return to Nature”? Lust explains: “Return to a natural diet, allow water, light and air to influence your system and all ailments will disappear, as well as all misfortune and discontent.”² Just concluded that people, like animals in nature, could recover from illness if they would “heed again the voice of nature, and thus choose the food that nature has laid before him from the beginning, and to bring themselves again into the relation with water, light and air, earth, etc., that nature originally designed.” ¹ Just came to the conclusion that “all healing is done by nature and that science can only assist nature.”²

Long before the “earthing movement” of Stephen Sinatra, Adolf Just embraced the earth and recognized the inherent natural currents that fortified and healed living beings by being in direct contact with Mother Earth. Just saw men merely as highly evolved “moving plants,” still needing to draw strength from the earth.¹³ He observed that animals in the wild following instinct would “remove all the leaves and branches when lying down, to be in immediate connection the earth in their repose.”³ Just recognized that there was an electrical current inherent in the earth and that “this electrical connection is much more complete when the entire body is in direct contact with the earth.”¹⁴ Dr. C. W. Young, an Osteopath who was endeared to the Just earthen cure comments, writes in this regard,

It is indeed a fact that the effect which the forces of the earth have upon man during the night is quite incredible. Whoever has not himself tried it and convinced himself of it can have no conception of how refreshing, vitalizing and strengthening the effect of the earth is on the human organism at night during rest.⁴

People would sleep naked, directly upon the ground, with a feather duvet covering them. Those who slept on the ground spoke exultantly of their experiences.

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