Even while a student, Lazarus had visited the water-cure boarding house of Dr. Joel Shew and his wife Mary, major proponents of hydropathy and "natural hygiene."
[1] Along with his medical interests, Lazarus was attracted to radical social concepts, including the "free love" movement and "Associationism," an American utopian socialist version of Fourierism, which came to consume more and more of his time.
He contributed articles to the Fourierist journal The Harbinger (previously The Phalanx), also writing ten books in 1851-1852, where he espoused, in the words of scholar Emily Bingham, "a combination of Fourier's communalism, Emanuel Swedenborg's mysticism, and American transcendentalism.
A review by Henry James, Sr., whom Lazarus had cited in the book and himself a promoter of Swedenborg's theology, touched off a heated debate in the pages of the New York Tribune.
[1] Through his adult life, Lazarus tried to cope with apparent mental and physical disturbances, in particular what seemed to be chronic nocturnal emissions, a condition that at the time was labeled "seminal incontinence" or "spermatorrhea," believed to be detrimental and even fatal to the mind and body.
In 1855, Lazarus shocked some of his fellow Fourierists and free love advocates by marrying a 19 year old woman from Indiana, Mary Laurie (or "Lawrie).
In 1861, Lazarus, was staying with relatives in Columbus, Georgia and joined the local City Light Guard when war broke out, later serving as company physician for the Wilmington, NC Artillery.