Homeopathy

HOMEOPATHY

HOMEOPATHY, a system of medicine developed by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann in the 1790s, was introduced in the United States in the 1820s by Hahnemann's colleagues and students. One of these, Constantine Hering, founded the world's first homeopathic medical school in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1835. With Hering and his students in the vanguard, American homeopathy became the world leader in the field for the rest of the nineteenth century. After falling into relative obscurity after the 1910s, homeopathy has enjoyed a significant revival among consumers and medical professionals since the 1970s.

Homeopathy is based on an ancient medical principle, the law of similars, from the observation that a sub-stance that causes a particular set of symptoms in a healthy person can cure those symptoms when they arise in the process of an illness. Homeopathic medicines are investigated in provings, standardized trials in healthy human subjects; information from accidental overdoses and poisonings and from verified clinical cures is also included in the profile of a medicine's sphere of action. A second fundamental principle is the minimum dose: homeopaths have found that the most effective medicinal dose is the smallest one capable of causing a curative response. Homeopathic medicines are manufactured by potentization, a process of serial dilution and agitation that produces microdoses of the natural substances from which the medicines are derived. A final principle is holism and individualization: the medicine is selected on the basis of the total symptom picture of the particular case.

Professionalizing early through the establishment of schools and hospitals, homeopaths formed the first national medical organization in North America, the American Institute of Homeopathy, in 1844. Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, homeopathic medical schools in Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland, Chicago, and cities as far west as San Francisco produced a steady stream of practitioners, with a high of almost 500 graduates in 1897; on average, 12 percent of graduates were women. Resistance from orthodox physicians continued throughout the century in the form of professional ostracism, although by 1902 it was estimated that 15,000 licensed American physicians included homeopathy in their practices.

Homeopathy's success in the nineteenth century can be attributed to several factors. Its efficacy in epidemics of cholera, yellow fever, and influenza as well as in the treatment of chronic and intractable diseases was striking and converted many physicians; its adaptability for home care attracted mothers, who carried it into their communities; and its perceived affinities with Swedenborgianism, a mystical Christian philosophy, made it popular among the intellectual and social elite. Many prominent figures used homeopathy, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, James Garfield, and the family of William and Henry James.

Historians have argued that ideas derived from homeopathy influenced the direction of conventional medicine in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the concept of the minimum dose encouraging the turn away from the drastic treatments of conventional medicine and the law of similars leading, in a creative misreading, to the development of vaccination. The assimilation of certain aspects of homeopathy by orthodox physicians is one factor cited for its decline, others being controversy among homeopaths about therapeutic techniques, the growing acceptance of empiricist laboratory science and especially bacteriology as medical authority, and the economic dominance of the orthodox medical-pharmaceutical industry. The 1910 Flexner Report on American medical education may have hastened the closing of some homeopathic colleges. It seems clear that the homeopathic medical schools, employing orthodox practitioners among their faculty, produced a hybrid profession that could not maintain a separate identity in the face of an increasingly powerful orthodox medical system.

Homeopathy's eclipse during the twentieth century is measured by a steep decline in its number of practitioners and by the homeopathic colleges' closing or conversion to conventional training. Still, professional organizations provided education for practitioners and consumers, and a handful of physicians kept the discipline alive. In the 1970s, disenchantment with the conventional medical system led consumers and practitioners to explore homeopathy among other forms of alternative and complementary medicine. Since then the shift from crisis intervention to preventive medicine, the concern over increasingly prevalent chronic disease, the search for cost-effective treatments, and the rejection of materialist philosophies in health care have fueled homeopathy's swift growth in popularity.

Developments since the 1980s include the establishment of postgraduate and comprehensive training programs throughout the United States; the 1991 founding of the Council for Homeopathic Certification, a profession-wide board that sets standards and conducts testing of practitioners; and the steady growth of membership in the National Center for Homeopathy, an educational organization for consumers and professionals. An increase in the amount of legal action against practitioners has paralleled the rebirth of the profession, as some licensing boards consider homeopathy to be outside their licensees' scope of practice. However, leading medical journals have published articles on clinical and scientific research in homeopathy; the number of medical schools offering some exposure to homeopathy is increasing; and many states have moved to license naturopathic physicians, making homeopathy more widely available. Its cost effectiveness has attracted some insurance companies' attention, but homeopathy's ultimate position in relation to the conventional medical system remains to be seen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Coulter, Harris. Divided Legacy: A History of the Schism in Medical Thought. 4 vols. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1994. See especially vols. 3 and 4 for treatment of homeopathy in the United States.

Rogers, Naomi. An Alternative Path: The Making and Remaking of Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital of Philadelphia. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

Winston, Julian. The Faces of Homeopathy: An Illustrated History of the First 200 Years. Tawa, N.Z.: Great Auk Publishing, 1999.

Ann Jerome Croce

See also Medicine, Alternative ; Swedenborgian Churches .