Elizabeth Cady Stanton first learned about homeopathy in the 1830s, and she quickly became an enthusiastic convert and practitioner of the system, hailing the power it gave women over their health care and their bodies. (Wikimedia Commons)
For Elizabeth Cady Stanton, homeopathy felt like nothing less than liberation. Even better: this freedom could be purchased through the mail. “Dear me, how much cruel bondage of mind and suffering of body poor woman will escape,” wrote Stanton to her friend and fellow women’s rights advocate Lucretia Mott, “when she takes the liberty of being her own physician of both body and soul.”1 Stanton had first heard about homeopathy from her brother-in-law Edward Bayard in the 1830s. Diagnosed with heart disease, Bayard had received a discouraging prognosis from his New York City doctor. Dismayed by the news, Bayard tried homeopathy at the urging of his wife. Bayard’s recovery under the care of homeopath Augustus P. Biegler, using concoctions of diluted drug treatments, so astonished Bayard that he gave up his law practice to devote himself to the study of homeopathy.
Bayard’s miraculous turnaround also convinced Stanton to give homeopathy a try. “I have seen wonders in Homeopathy,” she reported to her cousin Elizabeth Smith (she of hydropathic wet-dress fame), and “I intend to commence life on Homeopathic principles.”2 She purchased a home homeopathy kit and began doctoring her family, friends, and neighbors in Seneca Falls, New York. Stanton found taking charge of her health incredibly powerful, and she expressed great pride in her self-reliance. She nursed her children through malaria, whooping cough, mumps, and broken limbs with homeopathic therapies. She described the 1852 homeopathic birth of her daughter as an “easy” fifteen-minute labor with a quick recovery. Practicing do-it-yourself homeopathy, Stanton joined the tens of thousands of lay practitioners who, along with formally trained homeopaths, made homeopathy a real and formidable contender to radically reform the practice of medicine.3
Despite its egalitarian leanings, homeopathy did not share the populist origins of Thomsonism and hydropathy. Instead, like phrenology, it began with a regular doctor. Homeopathy developed from the experimental pharmacology of disillusioned German physician and scholar Samuel Christian Frederick Hahnemann. Born in Meissen, Germany, in 1755, Hahnemann exhibited a remarkable aptitude for languages from a young age, mastering eight foreign tongues by the age of twenty-four. He used his language skills to finance his medical education in Leipzig, Vienna, and Erlangen, teaching German and French and translating medical, historical, and philosophical works. But by the time of his graduation from the University of Erlangen in 1779, Hahnemann had begun to question the effectiveness of the existing medical system. The medicine he had learned seemed to lack the scientific rigor found in other fields, founded more on superstition than reason.4 A doctor trying to find a cure for intermittent fever, explained Hahnemann, would logically “turn his attention solely to learn what medicines the experience of bygone ages has discovered.” He searches “and to his amazement discovers that an immense number of medicines have been celebrated in intermittent fever. Where is he to begin? Which medicine is he to give first; which next, and which last? He looks round for aid, but no directing angel appears.” And even if one remedy did emerge as the clear favorite, Hahnemann complained that the same prescription sent to ten pharmacies resulted in ten different preparations. So the doctor “must hope for the best, and trust to good luck!” He examined common medical treatments for arsenic poisoning and psychiatric disorders and found them far from adequate. Contemporary medicine, declared an exasperated Hahnemann, was far too uncertain to be scientific, “founded upon perhapses and blind chance” rather than anything demonstrably provable.5 Hahnemann became so appalled by the practice of medicine that he abandoned it completely in 1782 and turned to writing and translating scientific texts full-time. He also studied botany, pharmacology, and chemistry, searching for the answers that regular medicine had failed to provide him.6
One book seemed to offer a possibility. While translating Scottish physician William Cullen’s A Treatise on the Materia Medica into German in 1790, Hahnemann became intrigued by Cullen’s explanation of how cinchona bark healed malaria. The dried bark of a South American tree, cinchona contained quinine and had been used in Europe since the sixteenth century. It also had the rare distinction of being one of few drugs in common usage with an unquestioned and demonstrative therapeutic value. Cullen claimed that cinchona also strengthened the digestive system, but Hahnemann’s own experiences taking cinchona had left him nauseated and sick. Skeptical of Cullen’s claim and curious by nature, Hahnemann decided to experiment on himself. Hahnemann hoped his experiments might provide a scientific and rational explanation for how and why this particular drug worked for malaria, which he believed regular medicine sorely lacked.7
For several days, Hahnemann ingested large doses of cinchona, taking careful note of its effects on his stomach. The cinchona left him feeling chilled, feverish, weak, and without appetite. He reported that his “feet, finger ends, etc., at first became cold. I grew languid and drowsy; then my heart began to palpitate and my pulse grew hard and small, intolerable anxiety, trembling (but without cold rigour), prostration through all my limbs.”8 The once healthy Hahnemann now appeared to have all the symptoms of malaria. When he stopped his daily dose, the symptoms disappeared. His observations soon led him to conclude that “substances which excite a kind of fever . . . extinguish the types of intermittent fever.”9 Cure a fever with a fever, or like cures like. This epiphany led Hahnemann to articulate what he called the law of similars, or Similia similibus curantur. It became the first law of his new system, one that he and later his followers hoped would revolutionize medicine.10
An approach to healing based on similars was not new. Hahnemann himself likely knew about it already. Ancient Romans advised the consumption of a raw liver from a rabid dog to cure rabies, and colonial Americans used yellow mustard seeds to ward off yellow fever and jaundice. Even today, the “hair of the dog” after a night of hard drinking could be construed as a homeopathic remedy for a hangover.11 Heroic medicine, however, saw no necessary correlation between disease and treatment. Most regulars treated fevers with bloodletting and laxatives that produced strong bouts of nausea. Rather than reproducing symptoms, regular therapy sought to eliminate—or, more often, change—the symptoms. Hahnemann argued that this “heterogenous” method attacked healthy organs and weakened the whole system rather than directly targeting and extinguishing the original disease with a similar one “in a prompt and rapid manner.”12 Mimicking the symptoms would cause the body to push out the original disease and substitute the artificial one.13
Although Hahnemann had first discovered his theory by swallowing large amounts of cinchona, he wondered if a smaller dose might actually be better. He worried that standard doses magnified a sick person’s symptoms to a potentially life-threatening degree. “In illness the body is enormously more sensitive to drugs than in health,” asserted Hahnemann.14 Hahnemann began testing smaller and smaller doses and found that he could still emulate the disease but without aggravating symptoms. In fact, it seemed that the less he gave—even doses as small as a millionth of a gram—the better he could produce an artificial disease with curative effects.15
But doses this small could barely be seen much less handled. Hahnemann found a solution in dilutions, or what he later called the law of infinitesimals, in which he dissolved one grain of drug in ninety-nine parts water, alcohol, or lactose. This mixture would then be combined and mixed again, and then combined and mixed again, and so on to the thirtieth dilution, at which point the mixture theoretically contained only 1/1060 grain of the active substance.16 Hahnemann believed that this small dose gave the body enough ammunition to reproduce the symptoms of disease but not so much that the body could not quickly rid itself of both the drug and the sickness.17
Hahnemann was not the only one to suggest the healing power of small doses. In 1796, English physician Edward Jenner demonstrated that a small amount of cowpox given to otherwise healthy people appeared to produce immunity to smallpox. Hahnemann praised Jenner’s breakthrough as an excellent homeopathic example of how a similar disease could prove effective in destroying the original disease. Jenner’s method was not exactly homeopathic since it had not undergone dilution and cowpox was a preventative measure rather than a cure for an active disease, but Hahnemann nonetheless saw smallpox vaccination as an affirmation of homeopathic ideas. Despite Hahnemann’s approval of the practice, though, vaccination would later prove a divisive and controversial issue among homeopaths wary of the consequences of giving nondilute diseases to otherwise healthy people.18
Hahnemann published his initial findings and theory in “Essay on a New Principle for Ascertaining the Curative Power of Drugs, with a Few Glances at Those Hitherto Employed” in 1796. The paper clearly laid out his central idea: “In order to cure diseases, we must search for medicines that can excite a similar disease in the human body.”19 Hahnemann named his new system homeopathy from the Greek root homoios (like) to emphasize its focus on similars. He had a new name for regular medicine, too: allopathy, from the Greek root allos, meaning different. Nonhomeopathic irregulars soon adopted the name as well, and allopathy became the common irregular sobriquet for regular medicine.
Reflecting his insistence on scientific discipline, Hahnemann went to painstaking lengths to ensure that his findings and drug trials were rigorous. His procedures presage much of what is standard in clinical trials today. Rather than rely on the superficial comparisons of common origin or physical appearance (yellow mustard for yellow fever, for example) that had informed ancient healing practices based on similars, Hahnemann found matches between the drug and disease through extensive experiments that he called provings, from the German word Prüfung, for test. He chose the word carefully. Hahnemann wanted to be sure the name illustrated his care in providing the truth to patients. For homeopathy to work, the action of all medicines had to be determined, and the only way to do that, Hahnemann believed, was to test them on healthy people. Hahnemann moved from first testing remedies on himself to testing them on his neighbors. Only after he was absolutely sure of the effects of a substance did he use it on sick patients. This method is now standard in modern medical trials, where new treatments are first used on healthy people to evaluate safety and then the sick to evaluate efficacy. Every substance was tested singly because compounds of two or more ingredients made it impossible to know the effects of the individual substance.20 To assist in the proving, Hahnemann recruited volunteers and required that they take careful and voluminous notes on every twitch, twinge, and change they experienced during the trials. He advised one of his provers testing Helleborus niger to take it “any day when you are well, and have no very urgent business, and have not eaten any medicinal substance (such as parsley) at dinner.” He directed him to “take one drop of this to eight ounces of water, and a scruple of alcohol (to prevent its decomposition), shake it briskly, and take an ounce of it while fasting; and so every hour and a half or two hours another ounce, as long as you are not too severely affected by what you take.”21 Because every person was different, many individuals needed to test each remedy and record their symptoms—mental, emotional, and physical—to create a full and accurate proving of all possible effects. “Provers” had to stick to a moderate diet free of spices and alcohol, aside from the scruple used in mixing, and to avoid extreme physical or mental exertion. Each symptom received careful attention as to whether “eating, drinking, talking, coughing, sneezing, or some other bodily function” altered its form. Based on his initial experiments, cinchona became Hahnemann’s first remedy.22
Testing remedies was an enormous task. Hahnemann and his followers ingested common herbs and minerals, plants, fungi, barks, and shellfish. They examined hops, toadstools, oyster shells, poison ivy, and ragweed. Nearly everything homeopaths added to their healing catalog had been known and used medically for centuries. In every case, they used small doses. Hahnemann came to believe that no substance was poisonous if taken in the proper—tiny—quantity.23
Hahnemann published the first compilation of his drug provings, listing medicines and symptoms caused by each, in his 1811 Materia Medica Pura. A Latin term, materia medica means the body of collected knowledge of substances used for healing—in homeopathy’s case, all of the provings. While not specific to any one form of healing, the term is widely used in homeopathy to mean all of the homeopathic remedies. Even as he released the book, Hahnemann emphasized that the testing would never be finished. Hahnemann wanted the homeopathic medicine chest to continue to grow and improve with new discoveries and time. By the end of the nineteenth century, more than seven hundred remedies had been studied and catalogued.24
Many regular doctors saw homeopathy as nothing less than absurd. Some took issue with Hahnemann’s provings. They claimed his results invalid because he did not compare the reactions of his provers with a control group not taking drugs. That no such tests likely existed for most if not all heroic therapies appears not to have bothered most regulars, who often demonstrated a hypocritical blindness to the unscientific and speculative nature of their own techniques. Regulars prescribed drugs and performed treatments without the kinds of detailed observations and studies done by homeopaths, and almost certainly did not employ control groups to determine the efficacy or benefit of their depletive methods. Hahnemann’s precise methods of observations and exactness in accumulating data, while lacking the randomization and blinding of trials today, provided a level of testing virtually unheard of in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medicine, and made homeopathy appear far more scientific than contemporary regular medicine.25
Others ridiculed the symptom lists in the Materia Medica Pura with its pages describing “yawning and stretching,” “easily falls asleep when reading,” and “an excessive liability to become pregnant.” Other remedies seemed to produce contradictory results. What was a doctor to do when faced with several drugs causing both constipation and diarrhea, impotence and excessive sexual desire? The extraordinary detail given to each symptom required an almost superhuman degree of self-awareness. Not to mention that not all provers reported the same symptoms from the same substances. The flowering plant aconite, also known as monkshood, for instance, could produce headaches that felt like your eyes might fall out or ones that felt like your brain was being moved by burning water—both headaches but with very different feelings that could be difficult to identify. It also caused “distraction of the attention when reading and writing,” and “dryness of the upper eye lids.” Each remedy produced a staggering number of symptoms, from ninety-seven on the low end to more than a thousand on the other extreme. To Hahnemann, though, the details that regulars found so ridiculous distinguished the homeopathic approach and provided the keys to its efficacy. Regular medicine was far too general to be helpful, he argued, lacking the crucial details that made each sick person’s case unique and ultimately, treatable.26
If the symptoms struck regular doctors as ridiculous, the homeopathic dilutions made them virtually apoplectic. They argued that dilutions of these magnitudes made it statistically improbable that any of the original substance even remained in the dilution. The law of infinitesimals seemed to defy Avogadro’s number, which set the point in the dilution process where a molecule in any given substance could no longer theoretically exist.27 “Either Hahnemann is right, in which case our science and the basis of our thinking is nonsense, or he is wrong, in which case this teaching is nonsense,” declared German physician T. Jurgensen.28 It comes as no surprise that the astute Oliver Wendell Holmes questioned the rationality of anyone who believed that a man with a mortar and pestle could “take a little speck of some substance which nobody ever thought to have any smell at all, as, for instance, a grain of chalk or of charcoal, and that he will, after an hour or two of rubbing and scraping, develop in a portion of it an odor, which, if the whole grain were used, would be capable of pervading an apartment, a house, a village, a province, an empire, nay the entire atmosphere of this broad planet upon which we tread.” Those who subscribed to such views, Holmes declared, were simply “incapable of reasoning.”29 Regular physician Eli Geddings was a little more generous, expressing his skepticism that small doses would work but concluding that homeopathy could prove a blessing for lessening upset stomachs.30
Small doses also jarred against a culture that expected a big effect from drugs. Regulars frequently prescribed drugs by the spoonful, not by the fraction of a gram. If patients didn’t bleed, vomit, or blister, how would they know they were getting better? Hahnemann and his followers took the radical position of arguing that healing didn’t have to hurt. They advocated for treatments that gave patients little or no feeling of physiological or physical change because healing, they argued, had nothing to do with the physical material of the remedy. Nor was disease a physical entity.31
Homeopathy, like many other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical theories, including regular medicine, was a vitalist system. Advocates believed that disease resulted from an imbalance or blockage of the body’s invisible but powerful life force. Symptoms were “the product of the disease itself,” but they were not themselves the actual disease. “There does not exist a single disease that can have a material principle for its cause,” wrote Hahnemann. “On the contrary, all of them are solely and always the special result of an actual and dynamic derangement in the state of health.”32
Hahnemann did not believe that the body could defeat disease and restore its balance on its own. He, like many of his regular contemporaries, discounted the body’s natural healing power, believing it crude and imperfect. Setting aside nature, Hahnemann claimed that the body’s “native army” could only defeat the “enemy” with the firepower of the homeopathic remedy he called the “auxiliary troops.” “It is the organic vital force of our bodies which itself cures natural diseases of all kinds,” declared Hahnemann, “whenever, by means of the proper homeopathic medicines, it is placed in a position to conquer, which, indeed, it never could do without the auxiliary force.” In other words, the homeopathic remedy gave the vital spirit the firepower to defeat illness. Small doses, Hahnemann argued, so small the material substance may not have even existed anymore, did not matter. What mattered was the remedy’s spirit-like dynamic energy that bolstered, mingled, and restored the body’s own invisible vital force, this energy being the most effective means of reaching and acting on the energy of the body.
Dilution alone could not activate a remedy’s energy. Hahnemann’s experiments led him to conclude that a medication must be shaken, rubbed, and banged against a leather pad to transform from its crude form to one energized by its “inner medicinal essence.” Only then would it be ready to work with the body’s vital force. Hahnemann referred to this process of dilution and strengthening as “dynamization.” So even as the effectiveness of the diluted remedies seemed to defy logic, homeopaths believed that the solution “remembered” its former self, which gave it a liquid potency that made healing possible.33 Hahnemann’s firm belief in the unlikely power of small doses led him to call these extreme dilutions “high potencies.”34
Patients could not sit idly by and wait for homeopathy to marshal the body’s native army alone. Hahnemann expected patients to be familiar with homeopathic theory and to have read his 1810 homeopathic manual Organon of the Rational Art of Healing. Composed in 271 aphorisms, the book fully laid out his principles and theories, gave directions for use, and offered guidance for doctors on how to detail their cases. Proper homeopathic prescribing relied on patients’ awareness and articulation of their illness experiences, including their emotions. For many women, this attention during their exam was the first time medicine validated their feelings and experiences of their own bodies.35 Patients also followed certain protocols before, during, and after treatment for best results. Diets received particular attention as Hahnemann believed that certain foods could adversely affect the medicine’s power. “It may be readily conceived that everything which exercises a medicinal influence on the patient should be removed from his regimen and mode of life,” counseled Hahnemann, “in order that the effects of such minute doses may not be destroyed, overpowered, or disturbed by any foreign stimulant.”36 Acute diseases had very specific rules, while those suffering from chronic illnesses followed more general guidelines largely aimed at the elimination of foods that kindled disease. Forbidden foods included smoked meat and fish, duck, turtle, sausages, pastries of any kind, sugar, cinnamon, and alcohol. And if anyone needed a reminder to not eat rotten food, rancid cheese and butter were also prohibited.37
Hahnemann had a particular problem with coffee. He drew clear distinctions between “food” and “medicine.” “Medicinal things are substances that do not nourish, but alter the healthy condition of the body,” wrote Hahnemann. Medicine taken unnecessarily by healthy people “deranges the harmonious concordance of our organs, undermines health and shortens life.” For Hahnemann, coffee fell squarely into this category of medicinal food. Worse, many people drank coffee daily and certainly in amounts far larger than a safe infinitesimal dose. Hahnemann came to blame the beverage for nearly all chronic suffering and general ill health.38
Two decades later, in 1828, Hahnemann changed his mind. He realized that perhaps he’d been too hasty in his condemnation of coffee, as his observations revealed the inadequacy of homeopathy in treating chronic sufferers, even among the coffee abstainers. Rather than discounting what he witnessed or rationalizing his data to fit his theory, Hahnemann altered his hypothesis to account for his observations: a very scientific approach to the problem. While he wasn’t ready to fully embrace coffee, he would allow that maybe it wasn’t the principle cause of suffering. Chronic diseases, Hahnemann now explained, stemmed from deep disturbances of the body’s vital forces known as “miasms.” Contagious and hereditary, these miasms surfaced when people lived in unhealthy states for extended periods of time, and their presence pointed to a more fundamental problem in the body than the current illness. Hahnemann’s miasms bore much in common with the ancient idea of contagion from miasma, or bad air, filled with malodorous and poisonous particles much discussed by Hippocrates. Hahnemann divided his miasms into three primal types: syphilis, sycosis, and psora. Syphilis caused many diseases of the nervous system and sycosis many sexual diseases and joint infections. Hahnemann labeled psora the “oldest, most universal and most pernicious,” having existed for thousands of years and causing seven-eighths of all chronic illnesses. Characterized by skin eruptions that reflected the inner diseased state, Hahnemann blamed psora for hysteria, epilepsy, gout, cancer, impotence, mania, and countless other afflictions. Because of the deep-seated nature of these miasms, treatment could take weeks longer than acute cases and required patients to take short whiffs of diluted remedies so as to not overwhelm their severely debilitated systems.39
Hahnemann’s new theory of miasms did not sit well with many of his followers. Encouraged to think critically by homeopathic theory and Hahnemann himself, homeopaths demanded that Hahnemann further clarify its principles before they would incorporate it into their treatment regimen. Hahnemann refused. “He who does not walk on exactly the same line with me is an apostate and a traitor, and with him I will have nothing to say,” declared Hahnemann in a pompous tone not unlike that of Thomson before him. These hostile remarks led some homeopaths to split with him, declaring their old leader, now in his seventies, past his prime. But they did not abandon homeopathy. Followers pledged to stick with their original convictions and to ignore what they saw as Hahnemann’s more irrational claims.40
These internal divisions did nothing to slow homeopathy’s rapid colonization of Europe. Regular doctors from across the continent, many of them young and just starting out in the field, flocked to Hahnemann to receive personal tutorials in homeopathic therapy. They returned home and set up clinics of their own and taught homeopathy to colleagues. Homeopathy also caught on with the European aristocracy, who hungered for the newest and most scientific innovations. Members of the German and British royal families patronized several homeopaths, including Hahnemann himself.41
Though it was created to wipe out sickness, it was, ironically, epidemic disease that enhanced homeopathy’s reputation and contributed to its explosion in popularity. During an outbreak of cholera in Europe in 1831, Hahnemann advised sufferers to take homeopathic doses of camphor (from the camphor tree), cuprum (copper), and veratrum (a plant commonly known as false hellebores). He also prescribed fresh air and frequent baths for the healthy, and advised the quarantine of those who had already contracted the disease. Since the primary treatment for cholera is rehydration, Hahnemann’s watered-down cures likely helped to replace some lost fluids while isolation and his hygiene recommendation prevented its spread. These relatively benign remedies contrasted sharply with treatments by regular doctors, whose harsh and largely ineffective heroic response with purging and bleeding likely only hastened dehydration and did little to heal or win the confidence of people seeking relief. Although Hahnemann knew no more about the cause and proper treatment of cholera than regulars, the relative success of his method and higher survival rate of his patients played a major role in winning homeopathy additional friends and supporters on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1830s and 1840s.42
Late in his life, Hahnemann surprised his followers by marrying French artist Marie Melanie d’Hervilly and moving from his German home in Kothen to Paris in 1835. Hahnemann established a lucrative practice in an elegant mansion and taught homeopathy to his new wife, who soon began practicing by his side. Controversial until the end, even with his aristocratic clientele, Hahnemann found himself defending his theory and his method until his death in 1843.43
Homeopathy arrived in the United States with Hans Burch Gram in 1825. Born in Boston but trained in Europe, Gram first learned of homeopathy while studying medicine at the Royal Medical and Surgical Institute in Copenhagen. Returning to the United States, Gram established a successful homeopathic practice in New York City and created an apprenticeship program to train the first generation of American homeopaths. But Gram’s New York City enterprise was soon eclipsed by activity in Philadelphia, which emerged as the first true center of American homeopathy thanks largely to the efforts of several German immigrants.44
By far the most influential of these immigrants was Constantine Hering, who became known as the father of homeopathy in America. Hering first learned of homeopathy as a medical student at the University of Leipzig in the 1820s, where he received a commission to write a book refuting Hahnemann and his theories. Rather than disagree with Hahnemann, though, Hering found himself impressed with Hahnemann’s work and homeopathy’s potential. His convictions strengthened after he contracted a severe infection in his finger after an autopsy. The wound became so bad that amputation seemed all but necessary until a friend persuaded Hering to try a homeopathic dose of arsenic as a last resort. His infection resolved and led Hering, grateful for his ten fingers, to declare, “The last veil that blinded my eyes to the light of the rising sun was rent and I saw the light of the new healing art dawn upon me in all its fullness. I owed to it far more than the preservation of a finger. To Hahnemann, who saved my finger, I gave my whole hand and to the promulgation of his teachings not only my hand, but the entire man, body and soul.”45 He soon abandoned regular medicine for homeopathy and joined a zoological expedition to South America, where he carried out provings on a variety of plants and animals on the side, including a particularly risky trial with snake venom.46
Hering first heard stories about the bushmaster, the largest poisonous snake in the New World, while encamped in the Amazon Basin in Suriname in 1828. A zealous convert to his new system, Hering reasoned that the snake’s lethal venom might be beneficial in infinitesimal doses, so he paid locals to capture a snake so he could collect its deadly saliva for observation. The venom was so toxic that even the process of preparing and diluting the poison for homeopathic dosing made him delirious. Hering mixed the venom with lactose and conducted a proving on himself while his poor wife recorded the results. He woke up the next morning lucky to be alive. Fever, delirium, and a “frantic struggle for breath” were just a few of the symptoms she listed. The venom Hering collected became the first snake poison ever researched for medical purposes. Even today, doctors and researchers continue to study the usefulness of snake venom and poisonous animals in medicine.47
Hering and his alcohol-preserved bushmaster arrived in Philadelphia in 1833. Finding a handful of like-minded immigrant homeopaths in his new city, he quickly organized the Hahnemann Society, the nation’s first homeopathic medical organization. Two years later, he became president of the world’s first homeopathic medical school, the North American Academy of the Homeopathic Healing Art, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Instruction, conducted entirely in German, included lectures on medical botany, dietetics, surgery, obstetrics, anatomy, physiology, and the history of medicine. Financial difficulties forced the school to close in 1842, but not before sending out a host of evangelistic graduates eager to carry the homeopathic faith to the rest of the country.48
Hering went on to found several other homeopathic schools, including the Homeopathic Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1848, which became the national leader in homeopathic education. Twenty years later, in 1869, the school merged with another homeopathic school to become the Hahnemann Medical College of Philadelphia with Hering as dean and chair of materia medica. Homeopathic instruction continued at the school into the 1950s, a lasting vestige of the school’s origins and a reflection of the strength of homeopathy as a medical practice into the twentieth century. Besides his educational endeavors, Hering continued to experiment with remarkably risky provings. In 1849, he experimented with the newly discovered explosive nitroglycerine, curious about its possible therapeutic value for headaches after learning of Italian scientist Ascanio Sobrero’s observations that it produced throbbing, violent head pain when placed on the tongue. He confirmed the effect in his volunteers with dilutions of less than one three hundredth of a drop. Hering also reported changes to the pulse, observing that nitroglycerin caused “contraction” and “oppression” of the chest. Decades later, regular doctors adopted nitroglycerine as a treatment for the chest pains associated with heart disease, for which it is still widely used today. Hering also wrote more than forty books on homeopathy, the most important of which was the popular home-health manual The Homeopathic Domestic Physician. The book found a wide audience among regular doctors interested in learning about homeopathy as well.49
The number of homeopaths in the United States expanded rapidly. By 1860, the nation had more than two thousand practitioners. They formed local and state organizations and in 1844 established the first national medical organization, the American Institute of Homeopathy (AIH), to improve the quality of the field. Constantine Hering became its first president. It surely wounded many regular doctors’ pride to see one of their supposedly unscientific rivals forming an organization to implement standards and improve medical practice before they had organized to do the same.50 Three years later, in 1847, regular doctors established their own national organization, the American Medical Association.
While the AMA may not have explicitly formed to fight homeopathy, it’s not hard to imagine that motivation behind the organization’s actions. One of the AMA’s first orders of business was to effectively ban homeopaths from ever becoming members by rejecting a homeopathic education as unscientific and inadequate to the task of training doctors. This despite the fact that the content of homeopathy’s two-year training program was nearly identical to that of regular medicine. Homeopaths’ understandings of bodily function and how to find and study disease did not differ from those of their regular peers. Even more, before 1860, the majority of homeopaths were regulars who had converted or those who offered a mixed practice of heroic and homeopathic therapies.51
Education was a serious matter for homeopaths, who organized the American Institute of Homeopathy in part to improve training and standards. They particularly wanted to reign in “physicians from pretending to be competent to practice homeopathy who have not studied it in a careful and skillful manner.”52 Homeopathic schools opened all over the country, more than twenty by the end of the nineteenth century. The majority also admitted women, unlike regular medical schools, though some homeopaths did share the conviction of regulars that women were better served by female medical colleges. Only a year after its founding, the AIH resolved to admit only members who had completed a “regular course of medical studies,” homeopathic or regular, and who had passed an examination, far stricter criteria than existed for membership in the AMA.53
Soon after forming, the AMA passed a code of ethics barring members from even consulting or associating with homeopaths at the risk of expulsion from the organization. It was no idle threat. “No one can be considered as a regular practitioner, or a fit associate in consultation, whose practice is based upon an exclusive dogma, to the rejection of the accumulated experience of the profession,” read the code.54 One Connecticut doctor was ousted from his local medical society after talking over a case with his wife, who was studying to become a homeopath. One observer wryly noted that his error might have been overlooked “had he consulted with another man’s wife upon topics not purely medical.” Another was expelled for purchasing milk sugar, a standard dilution ingredient, from his local apothecary.55 Anyone calling him- or herself a homeopath was deemed “unfit” for consultation on patient care, even if it came at the patient’s request. At the same time, no regular doctor could serve a patient under the care of a homeopath until the homeopath was dismissed, no matter how desperate the situation and need for assistance. Local and state medical societies held meetings to determine if regular doctors who had converted to homeopathy should be allowed to retain their membership; most voted no. The Medical Society of the County of New York, which had gone so far as to give Hahnemann an honorary membership in the organization, rescinded the honor a few years later as homeopathy’s ideological and financial threat to regular medicine grew more apparent.56 From the 1850s onward, medical societies used the consultation clause to successfully keep homeopaths from practicing in publicly funded medical institutions, medical schools, and the medical departments of the military.57
The AIH took a far more restrained and tolerant approach to regular medicine. That’s not say that some members did not want to extinguish regulars, but the AIH never became a vehicle for launching attacks. Most of the first AIH members graduated from regular medical schools and considered themselves equal to their regular peers. They tended to view homeopathy as a specialty requiring additional training on top of the basic medical education in anatomy and body function rather than a wholly separate form of medicine. Homeopaths also avoided confrontation with regulars to set themselves apart from other irregular healers who routinely derided regular medicine as a matter of course. Continually denigrating regular medicine, determined the leaders of the AIH, would not further homeopathy’s mission. To maintain the dignity of homeopathy, the AIH passed resolutions urging respect in speeches and writing and discouraging actions and words unbecoming to members of a professional scientific field. Dr. Jabez P. Dake reminded members at an 1858 AIH meeting in New York that “we can never expect charitable and kindly treatment from others unless we exhibit it ourselves.”58
Most Americans, however, did not know or did not care that there was any difference between the two types of doctors. They cared only who made them feel better, and if they could do so without the painful side effects, all the better. Homeopaths advertised better cure rates for all diseases than regular medicine. Whether or not their cures actually worked, homeopathy likely did far less to inhibit recovery than regular doctors with their courses of bleeding, purging, and blistering. Homeopathic remedies also tasted better and cost less despite the labor involved in mixing and diluting, so more people could afford to try them. The mildness of Hahnemann’s remedies made them especially useful for treating young children. Constantine Hering observed that children would no longer need to be bribed with money or cookies to “drink the nasty dose.”59
Homeopathy’s style proved as attractive as its pleasant flavors. Patients loved the personal attention they received from homeopaths in appointments that often lasted an hour or more and frequently covered everything from medical symptoms to sleep patterns, clothing preferences, exercise regimens, and eating habits. Hahnemann encouraged homeopaths to develop interview techniques to construct vivid pictures of their patients and to learn the peculiarities of each medicine by experimenting on themselves. “The key to the individuality of each patient is not found in the symptoms he has in common with others, but in those which distinguish him from others,” wrote Hahnemann.60 Doctors listened attentively to every patient complaint so they could prescribe remedies tailored to every symptom down to its finest subtlety. A gnawing hunger called for a different remedy than a gnawing in the stomach; a shooting pain in the left arm differed from a twitching of the same arm. Thorough examinations set the homeopath apart from the regular doctor, who, according to Hahnemann, did not “deign to investigate the case of disease thoroughly, but generalizes it in an off-hand way to suit his own convenience, labels it with one of his systematic names, and invests a treatment to correspond.”61 Homeopaths faulted regular doctors for cramming as many appointments into a single day as they could to maximize profits, which led to hasty, one-size-fits-all prescribing rather than the individualized medicine that made homeopathy so attractive and, they claimed, so effective.
Perhaps even more than the personal attention, though, Americans loved that homeopaths gave them the power to treat themselves. Taking a page from Samuel Thomson’s botanic book, homeopaths offered home health tools to lay practitioners in the form of instructional manuals and medical kits. Home health guides and kits produced by both regular and irregular healers became fairly common by the middle of the nineteenth century. Most contained laborious instructions for preparing and consuming medicines made from roots, herbs, or common household products. The homeopathy kit was different: it came with bottles of ready-to-use remedies. Unlike Thomsonism, which approached nearly every sickness with the same six-step regimen, homeopathy provided a specific remedy for specific complaints. The accompanying guide helped users identify symptoms and corresponding remedies. The kits cost between two and ten dollars and ranged in size from a small pocket case for individual use to large chests for treating the whole family. Having prepared medicines right at hand, like today’s over-the-counter remedies, allowed anyone to diagnose and treat quickly. These kits were not intended to replace doctors, however. Unlike the Thomsonians who disdained formal medical training and wanted to put doctors out of business, or even the hydropaths, who drew no distinction between formal and self-taught practitioners, homeopaths intended their kits for use on uncomplicated illnesses or in the absence or unavailability of trained homeopaths.62
Thousands of homeopathy kits were sold, most from local pharmacies. Typical of his prominence in American homeopathy, Constantine Hering produced the first and most popular homeopathic text and kit in the 1830s. Hering’s kit cost five dollars and came with a copy of his book The Homeopathic Domestic Physician and a small box of forty-six numbered remedies keyed to the book. He instructed users suffering from multiple complaints to look up every symptom before deciding on a remedy. He then offered directions for administering doses and the health regimen to follow, including regular baths and exercise, to ensure best results. Homeopaths embraced hygiene and dietary reform as both complements to healing and good preventative medicine. Most of these practices came from outside homeopathy, but the additions made homeopathy much more appealing and relevant to patients, many of whom were already practicing vegetarianism, temperance, hydropathy, and other lifestyle reforms. In all, Americans had their choice of more than thirty homeopathic manuals and kits, reflecting the immense interest in and popularity of homeopathy among the public.63
Homeopathic kits served as advance agents and popularizers of homeopathic principles. The authors and creators of domestic texts and kits became household names and their services were highly sought after by patients. This was particularly helpful for winning converts among women, who had long served as the caretakers of family health. The kits seemed to work. In 1869, the American Institute of Homeopathy estimated that nearly two-thirds of homeopathy’s adult patients were women. The benefits were not completely one-sided in favor of the homeopaths, though. Armed with a homeopathic kit, women found an empowering public role beyond their immediate homes as health providers for their communities, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton discovered in her own life.64
Not every homeopath supported the sale and use of home medical kits, however. Even as they recognized the importance of the kits in attracting followers, some homeopaths worried that the kits made them look like quacks rather than medical professionals. Some wondered if the use of vials of premixed remedies to popularize domestic homeopathy had degraded their true mission to personalize medical science. They also recognized that too much self-reliance on the part of their patients had a detrimental effect on their pocketbooks. By the mid-nineteenth century, some homeopaths encouraged the publication of guides for use by professional homeopaths only.65
Meanwhile, homeopaths attended to and won converts among some of the most prominent members of American society. Businessman John D. Rockefeller; President Grant’s vice president, Schuyler Colfax; Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Seward; and President James Garfield all used homeopathy. Many were drawn to the scientific foundation of homeopathy, even if they could not explain how or why it worked. All that really mattered was their positive experience with homeopathic remedies. New England transcendentalists such as educator Bronson Alcott, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, educator Elizabeth Peabody, and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow became some of homeopathy’s earliest supporters. They liked its metaphysical emphasis on sense perception as well as physical pain in the process of discovering and determining patient care. Transcendentalists as a group tended to oppose institutions that fostered inequalities in education and status and to support those that encouraged self-direction and self-knowledge, which made them, in many ways, natural allies of irregular medicine. Hahnemann’s attention to the mental and physical symptoms of disease and the spiritual essence of his healing substances, as well as homeopathy’s domestic use, seemed to mesh perfectly with the transcendental worldview. Homeopathy’s connections and relationships with these well-known Americans made for lucrative practices and proved marketing gold for well-connected practitioners.66
Among the many writers to seek help from homeopathy was Louisa May Alcott, who relied heavily on Boston homeopath Conrad Wesselhoeft (the son of Brattleboro hydropath Robert Wesselhoeft) for her chronic pain. Given mercury for typhoid fever in the early 1860s, Alcott believed, not unreasonably, that it had ruined her health and caused her near continuous pain. Alcott experimented with a variety of forms of pain relief, including mesmerism and botanicals, but found the most consistent and lasting relief in homeopathy. Alcott kept careful track of symptoms throughout her life, and more recent studies of her illness have suggested that she may have actually had systemic lupus erythematosus, the most common form of the disease. The relief she found in homeopathy was likely a placebo effect as the disease has no cure, though the remedies may have helped lessen inflammatory flare-ups if she did have lupus. So enamored was she with homeopathy’s powers, Alcott even wrote it into her stories. When Beth falls ill with scarlet fever in Little Women, her older sister Jo prescribes homeopathic Belladonna, one of the earliest homeopathic remedies, as treatment. Regular doctors usually treated scarlet fever with bleeding in an attempt to relieve the flush of the patient’s skin that gave the disease its name. Alcott also dedicated her final novel, Jo’s Boys, to Wesselhoeft. In the book, Jo’s student Nan treats a dog bite with a homeopathic remedy. A bright and “scientifically minded” girl, Nan later decides to use her skills to pursue a career as a homeopathic physician.67
That’s just the kind of message author Elizabeth Stuart Phelps hoped to send to other women as well. In 1867, the twenty-three-year-old Phelps decried the misery of the American woman burdened with unrewarding housework or leisured idleness. Her writings posed the arguments of The Feminine Mystique nearly a century before Betty Friedan. “Next to ill-health, the principal cause of women’s unhappiness—for women are not happy—is the want of something to do,” she wrote. “Whether for self-support, or for pure employment’s sake, the search for work—for successful work, for congenial work—is at the bottom of half the feminine miseries of the world.”68 Phelps’s essay proposed some potential career paths for women to consider—a few less than thrilling options like filling out insurance policies and trimming bonnets among them—but she saved her greatest praise and encouragement for women in medicine: “Be a doctor? And be sure that you could be few things more womanly or more noble.”69 Phelps returned to the topic of women in medicine again and again in essays, columns, letters, and short stories; few were as vocal in their call to increase the number of women in medicine. Homeopathy’s receptiveness to aspiring women practitioners drew Phelps’s enthusiastic praise and personal devotion to its tenets. Her 1882 novel Dr. Zay featured a strong and capable woman who dedicates her life to homeopathic medicine and social reform. So great was Phelps’s love of homeopathy that she even named her dog after Hahnemann.70
But while many women practiced homeopathy, membership in the American Institute of Homeopathy remained closed to them for several decades. That had not stopped women from applying for admittance to local and state societies, where membership validated their professional skills and more generally granted them full participation in their professions. American homeopaths tended to see women as useful allies in their fight against regular medicine, so many male homeopaths encouraged, or at the very least tolerated, the greater activism and involvement of women in homeopathy, while regular doctors remained largely unwelcoming to female practitioners. Even so, many male homeopaths worried that admitting women into the AIH would discourage men from joining the field and harm its reputation among the general public. Finally, in 1869, George W. Swazey, president of the Massachusetts Homeopathic Medical Society, put the “woman question” up to a vote at the annual meeting of the AIH. Only two years earlier, members had denied a woman’s application for membership by a close vote. Rather than let the issue continue to hang over them, Swazey pushed for an official decision. Swazey chose not to frame the issue as a matter of equality but rather as an official recognition of the prominent place women already had attained in the field. “The question is whether, after having encouraged women to enter the profession, educated them, taken their money, permitted them to practice, and fraternized with them, we shall now debar them from the privilege of our larger institutions,” declared Swazey.71 A majority agreed with him and cast their votes in favor of women’s admission the following year.72 The American Medical Association, in contrast, would not admit its first female members until 1915, almost fifty years later.73
Once the doors to the AIH opened to them in 1871, women became active participants in the organization, presenting papers, chairing committees, and enlarging the materia medica with drugs specifically tested on women. American homeopaths had begun calling for more comprehensive testing on women in the 1830s and 1840s to improve and upgrade the provings. Homeopaths believed that sexual differences made men and women react differently to the same medications, so to treat women effectively, women had to be enlisted in the essential work of testing. It was an unprecedented step at a time when women’s health was rarely discussed, much less seriously considered and extensively researched. The provings gave women a specific framework in which they could make important contributions to the science of the profession. The inclusion of women in testing homeopathic drugs from its early days made homeopathy particularly appealing to twentieth-century feminists, who were often critical of women’s exclusion from drug trials in the United States. Not until 1993 did the National Institutes of Health mandate the inclusion of women in clinical trials, more than a century after homeopathy.74
Among the first women to join the AIH was Philadelphia homeopath Harriet Judd Sartain. Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1830, Sartain enrolled at the American Hydropathic Institute in New York City at the urging of her aunt and uncle. There, she fell under the instruction and counsel of Mary Gove Nichols, who likely encouraged her pursuit of a medical career. After her term at the Hydropathic Institute, Sartain went on to Cincinnati’s Eclectic Medical Institute. One of the country’s best-known and largest medical schools outside of New York and Philadelphia, the school was also one of the few places where women could earn a medical degree in the 1850s. It was here that Sartain likely learned about homeopathy, the field in which she would ultimately take a leading role. If anyone doubted Sartain’s commitment to her career, it was certainly not her eventual husband, Samuel, whom she rebuffed after his initial offer of marriage in July of 1854. “Now my plans for the future. First to outlive the objections against me here [in Waterbury] as a Physician and to establish myself in my profession,” she declared. “I must be an independent woman, able to stand alone.”75
Although she eventually gave in to Samuel’s proposal, Sartain did not relinquish her professional ambitions. She soon had a thriving homeopathic practice in Philadelphia, the largest of any female medical practitioner in the city and one of the most successful operations in the city, male or female, regular or irregular. She became one of the founding members of her county homeopathic medical society and, one year later, the first woman elected to the Pennsylvania State Homeopathic Society. Even with her successful practice and membership in these organizations, Sartain, and women like her, continued to face some discrimination from her homeopathic peers. In 1883, Sartain founded the Women’s Homeopathic Medical Club of Philadelphia, largely in protest of the all-male Hahnemann Medical College of Philadelphia, which remained closed to women until 1941 despite repeated appeals from female homeopaths. School administrators recognized the importance of women in the profession but feared that coeducation would discourage male applicants and cause a decline in the financial support they depended on for survival. Separate organizations for female homeopaths were the exception, though, and by the 1880s, nine of the nation’s eleven homeopathic colleges admitted women. Most women preferred direct involvement in coeducational homeopathic institutions and found acceptance, albeit begrudgingly in some cases, in their profession’s formerly all-male medical organizations.76
The battles within homeopathy paled beside the growing war against it in regular medicine, though. Besides barring homeopaths from membership in their medical organizations, regular doctors attempted to cripple homeopathy with words, so much so that the anti-homeopathy screed became virtually its own literary genre. One of the earliest and most famous attacks came in 1842 from irregular medicine’s most eloquent and ardent foe, the irrepressible Oliver Wendell Holmes. Over the course of two lectures on the subject of “Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions” delivered before the Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, Holmes dealt a devastating blow to homeopathy as he picked apart Hahnemann’s theories and found them lacking, to say the least. “When one man claims to have established three independent truths [like cures like, high dilutions, and the psora] which are about as remote from each other as the discovery of the law of gravitation, the invention of printing, and that of the mariner’s compass, unless the facts are overwhelming and unanimous,” he proclaimed, “the question naturally arises, Is not this man deceiving himself, or trying to deceive others?” Hahnemann’s claim that smaller doses exerted larger effects was to Holmes like saying that a “pebble may produce a mountain.” Homeopathic doses were so dilute, he argued, as to be the equivalent of doing nothing at all. Fortunately for homeopaths, Holmes noted that the vast majority of patients under any form of treatment will eventually recover. So advocates of every system, homeopathy included, asserted Holmes, could thus claim to cure a large number of patients regardless of scientific proof of efficacy.
Holmes also investigated the validity of Hahnemann’s use of ancient authors and texts to support and give lineage to his doctrines. A cursory examination led Holmes to conclude that Hahnemann had cherry-picked and exaggerated the evidence. Worse, he cited texts inappropriate for medical use to prove his points. Taking Hahnemann’s assertion that the smell of a rose can both cause and cure fainting as an example, Holmes noted, with obvious disbelief, that Hahnemann quoted that fact “from one of the last sources one would have looked to for medical information, the Byzantine Historians.” Hahnemann’s reference to how Princess Eudosia restored a person who had fainted with rosewater struck Holmes as “pedantic folly” if Hahnemann saw “confirmation of his doctrine in such a recovery as this.” To Holmes, homeopathy was a “pretended science” comprised of little more than a “mingled mass of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, of imbecile credulity, and of artful misrepresentation.”77
Much of the ink and anger aimed at homeopaths came from the growing threat that the field posed to regular medicine. Homeopathy’s popularity among middle- and upper-class Americans decreased the earnings and influence of regular doctors among the very people they most wanted as patients. It also incensed regulars that educated Americans with common sense and money to spend would chose homeopathy over them. Homeopaths themselves were not the poorly educated—and thus easily dismissed—frontiersmen who practiced Thomsonism. While regulars lambasted homeopathic theory as absurd, they were not blind to the popular appeal of its painless approach to healing. Even Holmes, troubled by the slow progress of medical science, could acknowledge the deficiencies of his own brand of medicine. “I firmly believe that if the materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be better for mankind, and all the worse for the fishes,” he wrote in the 1870s. While he still believed homeopathy ridiculous, Holmes did offer backhanded praise. Homeopathy’s dilute “no remedy” remedy served as a “lesson of the healing faculty of Nature,” an important and much-needed reminder to regular doctors.78 Moreover, homeopathy took an approach to investigation and research that had a better claim to science than the mostly trial-and-error assessments of bloodletting and calomel. Until regular medicine offered more effective treatments, homeopathy only continued to gain adherents and power.79
By the 1880s, some regular doctors had begun to ignore the AMA’s ban on consulting with homeopaths. A few even suggested the ban should be lifted. Some homeopathic remedies also made it onto the prescription pads of regulars in the second half of the nineteenth century. Popular remedies in both regular and homeopathic fields included arnica for pain relief; rhus for rheumatism and skin disorders; nux vomica for digestive disorders, heart disease, and nerve conditions; and pulsatilla for menstrual cramps, testicular swelling, insomnia, and tension headaches. Regulars routinely gave rhubarb and ipecac for dysentery, aconite for fever, and nitric and muriatic acid for chronic stomach inflammation, treatments common in homeopathy, though usually in diluted form.80 At the same time, though, several scientific discoveries began to change the medical playing field. The germ theory of disease, the introduction of sterile surgery, advances in lab science more generally, and the discovery of a bacterial cause for diseases such as anthrax, conjunctivitis, and tuberculosis seemed to prove that illness did not spring spontaneously from bad air or from spiritual disruptions.81 Many regulars hoped that these new discoveries would finally separate the legitimate doctors—themselves—from what they considered the obvious quackery of homeopathy in the public eye.
Against these new scientific discoveries homeopathy began to question itself and its practices. Was the psora the same as germs? How did the vital force relate to the germ theory? What role did lab tests play in diagnoses? Some homeopaths did not think any revisions or reconsiderations of homeopathic theory were necessary. If the remedies worked, and they felt they obviously did, why should homeopathy change? Communication between the doctor and patient structured the examination and determined the therapy. Nothing else was necessary or important, pure homeopaths argued. More practically, though, these medical advances did pose challenges to certain structural elements of the field. Lab science seemed to threaten the very methods and therapies that made homeopathy distinct (and so attractive to patients) by turning attention away from the individual and toward impersonal and reductionist test results. They also put rural homeopaths at a disadvantage. Rural practitioners seldom had the technology and facilities available at urban clinics and hospitals, not to mention the fact that one of homeopathy’s selling points had been the simple and affordable equipment necessary to get started. These medical developments had the potential of lessening the overall number of homeopaths and patients.82
Many more homeopaths, perhaps because of their background in regular medicine, embraced scientific advances in medicine. These “mixers” saw themselves as part of a progressive field that would evolve with new medical knowledge and technology. They pushed for the incorporation of new discoveries to improve healing but also to maintain their professional status and to counter the belittlement of regular doctors who declared homeopathy so weak and ineffective that it had no place in academic institutions and was best left to home practice. In truth, most homeopaths had long employed a combination of homeopathic and regular therapies, sometimes mixing in some hydropathy, mesmerism, or other irregular methods as well. They honored and respected Hahnemann’s work but did not accept all of his ideas. While nearly all subscribed to the law of similars, the doctrine of infinitesimals had never garnered uniform support among American homeopaths, and more abandoned the idea as the century went on.83 Louisiana homeopath William Holcombe argued that dosage, “from the crude natural substance up to the highest infinitesimals, should be open to the choice and the practice of every candid and sensible man.”84
By the 1870s, some homeopaths joined regulars in seeking specialized medical training in Europe, and homeopathic medical schools began to incorporate bacteriology, microscopic pathology, and other laboratory sciences into the curriculum. Similar efforts were under way in regular medical schools. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, both homeopathic and regular medical schools raised standards for graduation, lengthened training sessions, and increased tuition. Medical students now had to have completed at least two years of high school for admittance and then nine months of medical school classes spread over four years. At some homeopathic medical schools, students demanded the same education as their rivals so that by the 1890s, the curriculum at homeopathic schools in urban areas nearly matched those of regulars. The founder himself also got a makeover to fit the newly scientific times. The new Hahnemann was painted as a cool clinical scientist who searched for truth based on empirical research in a lab.85
The AIH took an open-door approach to the divide over pure and mixed homeopathy. In an 1870 speech before its members, AIH president Carroll Dunham, a professor and dean at the New York Homeopathic Medical College, asserted that mixing remedies, alternating and rotating them, and even giving massive doses did not indicate a disregard for homeopathic principles. A traditional homeopath himself, Dunham nonetheless argued against placing restrictions on medical practice and vigorously supported accepting anyone who sincerely applied for membership in the AIH. He reminded his colleagues of the struggles they had all faced against restrictive laws imposed by regulars that had interfered with their own investigation and experimentation, shutting out all new thoughts and insights that might have been gained from such work simply because of competition and a differing viewpoint. Four years later, the AIH voted to remove the word “homeopathy” from its membership requirements.86
By 1891, the United States had approximately fourteen thousand practicing homeopaths. Most major US cities had homeopathic medical colleges. The University of Michigan taught both regulars and homeopaths under one roof, with regulars teaching those intending to practice regular medicine and homeopaths teaching the remedies of the materia medica to future homeopaths. In 1890, Mark Twain wrote in the pages of Harper’s Magazine that Americans should be “grateful that homeopathy survived the attempts of allopathists to destroy it.” Homeopathy, Twain declared, had “forced the old school doctor to stir around and learn something of a rational nature about his business.”87
Stir around they had. Homeopathy’s assault on heroic drugging and bleeding, not to mention its popularity among middle-class Northeastern intellectuals, had pushed many regular doctors toward milder treatments by the 1860s. Some regular doctors lessened their use of heroic doses and began using fewer interventions, depending more on nature’s healing power. These regulars didn’t necessarily admit that they had been wrong. Some argued, instead, that the nature of disease had changed as society changed and so now required milder treatments.88 New York doctor Dan King observed that “perhaps Hahnemann did not live wholly in vain. Although not actually a messenger from Heaven . . . he seems nevertheless to have had an important mission indirectly to accomplish. Through the use of his empty and inert means, we have been enabled to see what the innate powers of the animal organization can accomplish without medical interference. We have been taught to rely more upon these, and less upon art, and have seen the wonderful influence which the mind has over the bodily functions.” King predicted that a doctor would now “lay a gentler hand upon his patient” thanks to homeopathy.89 To be sure, the decline in heroic treatment resulted from several developments, not the least of them being the discovery of new drugs, but regulars willingly and gleefully gave homeopathy credit for showing that patients “would very generally get well without any drugging at all.”90
Homeopathy continued to grow and change. By 1900, homeopaths were increasingly stressing their similarities with regular medicine and had refashioned their profession as a supplemental therapeutic field. Rather than seeing this as a capitulation to regular medicine, many homeopaths instead saw themselves as keeping up with the latest advances in science. Some homeopaths argued that the germ theory and laboratory evidence revealed the power of small organisms to affect the human body, which validated Hahnemann’s belief in infinitesimals even if many homeopaths had abandoned the practice of small doses. But as homeopathic medical schools added new courses, laboratories, and clinical opportunities for students, the actual study of homeopathy moved into the background. The reduced attention to homeopathy and the concomitant emphasis on the same subjects taught in regular medical schools provided applicants with few compelling reasons to choose homeopathy over regular medicine. At the same time, regular medicine’s continued refusal to acknowledge homeopathy as a partner or even a factor in the emergence of scientific medicine caused the number of practitioners taking up the cause to decline. By 1923, all but two homeopathic medical schools had closed or converted into regular medical schools. Homeopathy, at least on the professional and academic level, had converged with regular medicine to the point of disappearing within it by the early decades of the twentieth century.91
Professionalization and scientific advances had a hugely negative impact on female homeopaths. The shift to lab and hospital work and away from the home, small practices, and homeopathic institutions moved homeopathy into a world largely dominated by paid male administrators and physicians. Increased educational requirements for admittance to medical school also made it hard for women, who continued to struggle to attend school in a culture that did not value professional women. Women lost their voice and active role in this new order of medicine. They didn’t stop practicing homeopathy, however. Women continued to diagnose and treat patients, and worked particularly hard to preserve homeopathy as a distinct medical alternative even as it faded from institutional settings.92
By the 1920s, a small group of Hahnemannian traditionalists remained dedicated to their founder’s ideas. They strictly adhered to the law of similars, the minimum dose, and the single remedy, and they saw homeopathy’s fall from institutional power not as a victory for science, as regulars hailed it, but one of politics. The growing power of regular medicine, argued homeopath and birth-control advocate Mary Ware Dennett, infringed on people’s freedom to make personal choices regarding their health. In 1924, Hahnemannians Julia Minerva Green and Julia M. Loos founded the American Foundation for Homeopathy to support pure homeopathy and to establish a national network of local leagues to train lay practitioners and build demand for “real” homeopathy. Women took a particularly active role in the AFH and its affiliated leagues, producing publications, teaching classes, and providing support to fellow homeopaths. In the 1960s and 1970s, as a new generation discovered homeopathy, the AFH and its leagues became primary sources of information, providing the critical link between the traditional homeopathy of the nineteenth century and the revitalized homeopathy of today. To these new followers, many of them feminists, homeopathy represented personal freedom, self-reliance, and a democratic alternative to the elitism of regular medicine, much the same values that drew women’s rights leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton more than a century earlier.93
Julia Green never lost faith that homeopathy would rise again, insisting that homeopathy would thrive “when this materialistic age has passed and a better, more spiritual one arrives.”94 While few would consider the 1980s a less materialistic time, by that time homeopathy had made a comeback. Homeopathy remains one of the nation’s most popular alternative therapies, even as it’s unlikely to ever regain its nineteenth-century prominence and power. Today, an estimated 3.9 million adults use homeopathy, some through purchases of over-the-counter products labeled homeopathic and others through visits to a practitioner.95
Although regulars mercilessly ridiculed them for their mysticism, homeopathy was not alone in its attention to the healing power of things unseen in the nineteenth century. Mesmerists shared the homeopathic belief in invisible forces that could be activated or turned to the task of restoring a natural state of health. Hahnemann himself praised mesmerism’s benign treatment, “[of] whose efficacy none but madmen can entertain a doubt.”96 He believed, like the mesmerists did, that a healer transferred his mental power to the medicine. In homeopathy, this happened in the dynamization process of diluting remedies, where mesmerism used touch. Hundreds of thousands of people on both sides of the Atlantic fell quite literally under the spell of Franz Anton Mesmer and the invisible healing solution he called animal magnetism.
