In a lecture given at the Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia in 1868, Charles Godlove (1820–1896), a homeopath, argued that medicine had become too fixated on objective symptoms and in the process neglected subjective experiences. Here his complaint and grievance with mainstream medicine (allopathy’) was that when patients would refer to subjective pain experience, their symptoms would have little ‘objective’ value for a biomedical practitioner, as he says, ‘For, when a patient complains of this or another pain, what does it matter to the physiological doctor! It is a mere subjective feeling, imagination, it may be – the doctor cannot see it, neither does he feel it is not worth anything, at least “for making out a diagnosis”.’ Footnote 1 He lamented that just like the physician, the homeopath too had begun to ignore subjective symptoms. He further suggested, ‘The real physician will have to pay as much attention to the one series of symptoms, as to the other’. Godlove provides a way to look at symptoms in which the mind organises matter through standard and fixed laws and is able to deduce a picture of the disease. He then posits a theoretical position about consciousness, suggesting that the individual’s consciousness had the primal faculties to receive external elements and to retain them, and then uses the famous homeopathic postulate, of like affecting like, to think about the ways in which ‘a single combination between a certain external element and a primal faculty is multiplied by repetition to an aggregate of any strength and clearness of consciousness’.Footnote 2 According to this logic, however many combinations of sense perceptions one acquires, one can delineate certain fixed patterns. Homeopathy for many by this time was not only a medical system, but also a way to grasp human beings’ innate relationship with nature. Godlove goes on to postulate that homeopathic logic also helps us understand consciousness. He summarises this proposition, ‘consciousness originates through a multiplication of similar impressions upon our senses; or, as we have otherwise expressed it, by a repeated union of similar external elements with corresponding primal faculties’.Footnote 3 Consciousness, in other words, for him, emerged through the interaction between external and primal senses. Here the ‘law of the similar’ was used to think about how older memories shape the reception of new sense perceptions. New sense perceptions had an affinity for existing aggregates, and therefore, it was the healer’s job to recognise patterns in the experience of symptoms and apply laws for successful recognition and diagnosis.
In this article, I look at the history of homeopathy in the United States and consider how it was first imagined as a spiritual science that relied on stable laws. However, under the pressure of medical orthodoxy, homeopaths began to reorganise their ideas to focus on the strictly rationalist basis of the medical system. I show how, in response to growing scientific criticisms about homeopathic remedies being effective only for placebo-like effects, they began to prove their effectiveness in scientific terms, while slowly abandoning their metaphysical vocabulary. I use the evolution of these discourses to think about how what we now recognise as medicine was shaped by the medical orthodoxy’s relationship with its ‘fringes’, where the debates that had been taking place within homeopathy tell us a larger story about the social life of medical ideas, and their receptivity to metaphysical ideas.Footnote 4 By turning to this history, we can understand not only why homeopathy eventually came to be regarded as a ‘pseudoscience’, but also the blind spots in modern medicine, when ‘belief’ is considered to have effects that are marginal or non-specific at best. I argue that homeopaths were able to straddle the boundaries of faith and science by invoking the body’s ability to heal in according with natural laws, but overtime, there were efforts to increasingly scientise the medical system, where the pressures to rationalise could possibly explain the decline of homeopathy in the early twentieth century, when it could no longer compete with the medical orthodoxy by engaging solely in a scientific language game with their physician-counterparts, losing the strength of their approaches that emphasised on the role of psychology and belief in the healing experience. In much of the article, I rely upon annual speeches given at the Hahnemann Medical College as well as publications, essays, and speeches held in the National Library of Medicine, where one can also find debates over the role of homeopathy in medical training at the University of Michigan, along with pamphlets, flyers, and information about household homeopathic remedies.Footnote 5
The historiography of homeopathy in the United States has emphasised its position at the intersection of orthodox and non-orthodox medical practice, highlighting both its social and scientific dimensions. Early studies trace the establishment, popularity, and decline of homeopathy as a medical movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, emphasising its contested relationship with conventional medicine.Footnote 6 Other works situate homeopathy within broader political and social struggles, including the formation of the American Medical Association and its efforts to marginalise alternative practitioners.Footnote 7 Scholarship has also focused on the cultural and professional negotiations that shaped homeopathic practice, examining how practitioners preserved ‘pure’ homeopathy while navigating pressures from regular medicine and evolving scientific paradigms.Footnote 8 Research exploring personal and institutional conflicts illustrates the ongoing tension between conventional and alternative therapies. Detailed accounts of the academicisation of homeopathy trace developments from 1820 to 1935, highlighting the increasing formalisation of homeopathic education and professional standards.Footnote 9 Complementing these US-centred studies, analyses of dosage debates across Germany, the UK, and the US, as well as investigations of high potencies, magnetism, and the concept of Lebenskraft (vital force), highlight the intellectual and methodological innovations that underpinned homeopathic theory and practice.Footnote 10 Taken together, this scholarship underscores the dual orientation of American homeopathy: as a system striving for scientific legitimacy while rooted in alternative epistemologies and spiritual frameworks. However, unlike many of these existing debates, I turn to the history of homeopathy in the US as a way to think about the various epistemes of rationality and faith, through the insistence on belief and respect for natural laws that homeopaths initially straddled, until finally speaking about homeopathy solely in scientific terms. This approach allows us to consider the continuous growth of complementary practices in today’s world, despite their claims of lacking efficacy, given how they help overcome the gap between patient experience, subjective suffering, and the often rigid frameworks of conventional medicine. By examining how homeopathy negotiated the boundary between spiritual and scientific authority, we can better understand the enduring appeal of alternative therapies and the ways they mediate cultural expectations, personal belief, and empirical knowledge, helping us rethink the cultural efficacies of supposedly inert and unscientific placebo-like remedies.Footnote 11
The language of natural laws
Godlove, whose lecture I have stated above, further suggested that while biomedical practitioners have been fixated on objective symptoms, it is homeopathy that has fundamentally mastered the art of minute observation of subjective symptoms.Footnote 12 This critique is held to be true by many homeopaths and alternative healers in today’s context, when they make the case for biomedicine’s neglect of people’s non-specific experiences, as physicians try to find ways to fit symptoms into established diagnostic templates. By the end of the nineteenth century, though, the conversation at the Homeopathic Medical College of Pennsylvania was much more philosophical. It was not only about cures and treatments; instead, in many of the addresses, faculty members explored the philosophy behind homeopathy that easily exceeded the bounds of a medical system proper.
In one address at the Homeopathic Medical College, Peter S. Hitchens approached the issue of equilibrium between human anatomy and nature. He argued, ‘Nature, herself, seems gifted with the consciousness of her defect; and in every moment she has been striving, as it were, to regain an equilibrium which she has lost, or an equilibrium which, as yet, has always eluded her. In the various steps towards the attainment of her object, she has executed experiments of the most conflicting character; and involving the most opposite results’.Footnote 13 He argues that the same vital strength then flows into animals and how they interact with one another. He posits nature as a glue that brought together beauty and strength, arguing that nature inherently consists of a vitality running through all living beings.Footnote 14 Such a language of vitality helps situate Hahnemann’s work within German Romanticism.Footnote 15
Peter H. Hitchens proposed that what made homeopathy particularly useful as a system is that it helps understand the importance of extremes and the results of their interactions, within the body and beyond. In philosophising about nature, homeopaths also posited the medical system as inherently supportive of Christian notions of the self and its relationship with the soul. In other words, as much as homeopathy in its reception in the United States represented a philosophical idea, it was also in line with the larger Enlightenment notion of the stability of natural laws, whose recognition alone could allow one to recognise God, and the burgeoning individualism espoused by Protestantism where the individual could connect with God directly without any mediation.Footnote 16 Homeopathy became influential in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century United States because of its appeal to the liberal protestant sensibility of finding a ‘healthy’ form of supernaturalism, where there was space for belief, but also a reliance on scientific phenomena.Footnote 17 Some scholars have even argued that in terming homeopathy as pseudo-scientific or superstitious, one fails to account for the role of belief in the experience of recovery.Footnote 18
This emerging form of religiosity, one can argue, did not support dogma, but required self-experimentation and personal proof. In one of the biographical sketches of Constantin Hering (1800–1880), a pioneering nineteenth-century homeopath, his Christian devotion was particularly prominent. In 1907, his daughter wrote about an incident where her father denied wearing a wig to cover his hair during his trial sermon, only to be censured for his lack of proper respect. To this, he reportedly said, ‘Why should I hide and cover God’s handiwork by that of the man?’Footnote 19 This appears as a challenge to the orthodoxy, but also in line with the larger homeopathic imagination that the God presence, felt through the minutiae of natural phenomena, did not necessarily have to be concealed, but actively revealed. This is the same principle which would later come to define his passion for homeopathy. His own journey into homeopathy was shaped by an experience of miraculous healing. Upon making an autopsy, he accidentally poured poison on an abrasion, which led to his finger becoming gangrenous. The surgeon recommended amputation. His daughter wrote, ‘He still believed it absurd to suppose that external diseases could be reached by internal remedies’.Footnote 20 He agreed to a friend’s advice to take arsenic. He was cured, almost miraculously, as his daughter would later recount him saying, ‘Hahnemann saved my finger, and I gave him my whole hand, and to the promulgation of his teaching, not only my hand, but the entire man, soul and body’.Footnote 21
In 1829, after being drawn to the United States, where the vessel in which he sailed was bound for Salem, and tired of being storm-tossed, Hering reached Philadelphia by land, where his former pupil George H. Bute had introduced homeopathy. In 1835, then with a few of the fellow German men, he established the North American Academy of the Homeopathic Healing Art. During his time at the academy, he began his relentless efforts to translate German books and to disseminate them in the wider audience. Despite his move to the United States, his daughter commented on his unwavering commitment to Germany. On numerous occasions, his daughter recounted, he had wished for a united Germany. He was part of many societies in which he rejoiced in the seeds of German thought sown in the United States, along with other immigrants. Homeopathy was Germany’s gift to the United States. Despite growing accusations, he considered his endeavour to be completely scientific rather than metaphysical, as he had once remarked, ‘There is no such thing as belief in science. A property or thing is or is not’.Footnote 22 A statement like this shows a constant tension in the work of homeopaths around whether homeopathy could be explained through independent observations, just as a lab-based experiment, or be based on a mere belief, i.e. the tension between homeopathy as a belief and homeopathy as a science. His idea of science was one in which he sought to arrive at conclusions through formal experiments, but through continuous trial and error on one’s own body.
In many lectures given at the Hahnemann Medical College, we can especially find an appreciation of nature and the importance of harnessing it for better health. Here, presenters at the Hahnemann Medical College were particularly interested in exploring nature as a site where extremes met. George Rogers Starkey (b. 1823), in one introductory note, argued, ‘This is Nature’s harvest time; the closing up of the cycle of the natural seasons. But it is the springtime of a more important cycle of seasons; I mean the mental and social seasons. And this is in obedience to a law as immutable as the law of succession among the seasons themselves – viz. extremes are always meeting. The seed germinates; and the plant passes from this, its first term, through the cycle of its life to the last term, which is also seed. Here extremes meet; for the last term or ending of this cycle is seed, which is beginning or first term of other cycles similar to itself. This is the type of all organic creation’.Footnote 23 There was a repetition of processes and a form of progress which was made possible through the meeting of extremes, almost in a Hegelian sense, where the progress was towards a form of perfection.
Within this ecology of transition, extremes needed to meet to enable a change to take place, and Starkey further adds that within this approach, ‘Nature never repeats itself… there is a connatus toward a higher state of existence at each succeeding cycle’.Footnote 24 Rarely did these presenters refer to homeopathy as a system apart from this broader ecology of transitions and transformations – these explanations appear as an epistemology whose parallels one can find in German Romanticism and its influences on the philosophy of history, as in the works of Hegel.Footnote 25 These processes were not for many easily separable from larger divine forces. Indeed, homeopaths in some ways reinserted the divine into their cosmology of natural forces instead of removing Him.Footnote 26 For Starkey, natural forces imitated God’s own spirit, and homeopathy’s receptiveness for recovery that blended physical properties with psychological expectations increased its receptivity for other medical systems in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Ayurveda and in other parts of the world, especially India.Footnote 27 He adds, ‘Now, a fluid vitalized in the heart, it is ready to essay another flight into the realms of air within the lungs. And now, transcendently prepared by its rounds through all previous cycles, it begins its last, high-wrought round, the fine end of all the others, and weaves a garment wondrous in texture, exquisite in beauty and divine in form, around a immortal spirit – God’s own image’.Footnote 28 Nature, in other words, refracted God’s image, and healing entailed its recognition. In these annual lectures, the presenters are found encouraging students to recognise signs of God in nature to become successful homeopaths. In one introductory address given in 1857, the speaker said, ‘Cultivate, while students, a profound veneration for the Deity; and when, as your attention is called in the progress of our course; to the displays of the wisdom, the power, and the goodness of God, in our examination of the complicated machinery of the human body … The very contemplation of the immensity of the Supreme Being, will fit and strengthen your minds for embracing truth on other subjects’.Footnote 29 The question that we can ask then is about the type of ‘science’ that emerges in a context when it is steeped in faith and religious epistemology, and how do these debates push us into acknowledging the religious and metaphysical antecedents with which modern science continues to wrestle with, helping us go beyond simple binaries of reason and unreason in understanding the evolution of medicine, and encouraging us take seriously scientific ‘fringes’ to understand the history of modern medicine itself, and the competing epistemes the medical orthodoxy had to respond to and be in conversation with.Footnote 30
God, nature, and healing
The use of the language of natural laws by homeopaths helped place God in the overall equation for healing, while also making an appeal to science. Here it was God who created laws, and it was an individual’s task to unravel these laws to seek a cure. As one physician turned homeopath George Washington Swazey (b. 1812) who helped introduce homeopathy to Massachusetts wrote, ‘If the God of life and nature has provided a law by which his creatures may be healed when smitten down by disease, it is evident that the law will be found, if it can be found at all, in the direction of inquiry into the nature of Life and Disease’.Footnote 31 Here Swazey invoked an idea of religion in which every change followed a law, as if making a case for the absence of determinate causes would be equivalent to atheism, as he wrote, ‘A belief in accidents, in events or effects, not controlled by adequate causes, however insignificant such events or effects may seem, is little short of atheism’.Footnote 32 Meanwhile, illness was also viewed as equivalent to evil. Anything that was poisonous represented evil and disorder, for example, ferocious beasts, foul birds, venomous reptiles and the poison herb. He added to the argument that animals who hunted other animals had been created to ensure a harmony within the animal kingdom and to prevent over-population, but he qualifies this by adding, ‘We conceive the true philosophy such a permission to be, that no evil is ever permitted, except for the wise purpose of preventing the greater ones, to which a perverted life continually tends’.Footnote 33 It was homeopathy’s goal, to eliminate disorders and inequalities. Within this overall approach, Swazey argued that disease was to life what truth was to falsehood. Disease here was viewed as the ‘unbalanced manifestation of life’.Footnote 34 References to inner life and spirit and attempts to reinvigorate it were commonly cited by homeopaths like Swazey, who added, ‘The philosophy of our interior life – the life of the soul – may be considered a fitter theme for the moralist or divine than for a medical essay; but we cannot investigate the outer, or physical life, without interrogating nature of her laws at her inner court’.Footnote 35 By understanding inner life, one could also begin to make sense of the physical realm. The effects of the medicine were also meant to align closely with the spirit, or one’s inner self. The inner here was described as something that exhausted the scientific imagination of the mind, appearing as a veil, with its own set of powers. Writing about the veiling of the inner soul, Swazey wrote, ‘“They [first causes] are hid by a veil which wraps in its mazy folds him who attempts to rend it,” yet we think we may press our investigations to the inner, as well as to the outer boundaries of the finite, and learn, if possible, why any created thing or power exists as it does’.Footnote 36
To describe inner forces, Swazey turns to Newtonian explanations about matter, but here, he was also edging into purely religious explanations about the existence of an inner self that could not be comprehended or fully grasped by the human mind. This showed the extent to which the interior of the body was viewed through spiritual logics and metaphors, for example, Swazey, even goes on to say, ‘As the lifting of the hand shows the presence and determination of the mind, so the existence of the trees and springing verdure, and all the various forms of animal life, show the presence and power of an invisible force, upon which their organization, and hence that of the whole vast universe, depends and reposes; and thus matter becomes the medium by which life’s numberless forms are manifested’.Footnote 37 This invisible force was stable and also predictable, scientifically graspable, but also bearing mystical meanings. Here Swazey directly referred to the invisible being controlled by the ‘work’ of God. Life itself was viewed as existing in harmony and a form of metamorphosis, a delicate process, not without order, that was sanctioned or even controlled by God. Swazey’s understanding of cure was shaped by a specific theological standpoint about the relationship between life on this world and God’s own existence and his establishment of order. God was viewed as the supreme being who carried life, and life in all entities was possible only through God, who breathed it into the body through the soul.Footnote 38
It would be fair to say that homeopaths tried to posit the system as a scientific one, especially when the broader medical community accused them of drawing their inspiration solely from religious beliefs. In order to counter these beliefs, American homeopaths referred to homeopathy’s receptivity to an underlying natural order, and this investigation into the working of natural laws also corresponded with Protestant theology of the time that sought more healthy forms of supernaturalism, which would place an emphasis on the presence of laws and rules as shaping natural phenomena. There was an order that dictated the movement of particles and the way particles interact with one another.
The notion of soul as the carrier of life, which was refracted from God’s being, was distinct from the carnal needs of the body. Swazey argued that the soul’s nature was inherently spiritual, which extended outward into the material body. By referring to Saint Paul, Swazey created a distinction between the material and the spiritual body. Yet, in ways resembling the Goethean notion of metamorphosis, Swazey suggested that one could find the signs of the divine in every type of growth. He suggested, ‘Divine influx can be seen in every motion, in every growing hair, in every sparrow’s fall’.Footnote 39 This divine influx, however, did not represent arbitrariness but followed an order.
In some of the annual addresses at conferences, homeopathic practitioners would talk about their desire to tap into this underlying order. At the eighteenth meeting of the Annual Institute of Homeopathy, William Woodbridge Rodman (1817–1885), an American homeopathic physician who served as a prominent figure within the American Institute of Homeopathy, considered the revolutionary impact of homeopathy on medicine more generally by asking, ‘The laws of medicine were not then studied with the purpose of imitating nature’s processes? Are they yet to the studied?’ Then he goes on to add, ‘Symptoms were not held as indications of the efforts of nature to excite reaction, and therefore to be cooperated with by the physician, but were regarded as something to be opposed’.Footnote 40 Here the real remedy did not include going against nature as much as to listen to the disharmony caused by disease, between the body and its natural surroundings, and then allowing exposure to nature to correct the course taken by the body; the solution in other words, was not to reduce exposure to nature, but to enhance it. Rodman added that the emphasis in much of the mainstream medical treatment was to give shocks to the healthy parts of the body in order that the symptoms of illness were suppressed. By doing so, he argued that the physician typically sought to suppress nature itself, ‘It would seem to be the aim not to favor the intentions of nature, but to thwart them; not to prescribe mild remedies coincident with the line of the nature’.Footnote 41
Many critics were making the point that homeopaths were mainly focused on symptoms and could neglect the underlying disease, to which homeopaths responded by saying that symptoms were merely signposts that directed the physician to the underlying disorder. Despite the fact that they were drawing upon Christian epistemologies to think about the constitution of life, they were also invoking scientific discourses comparing homeopathy to the transmission of electricity and the hydraulics system occasionally. Still, homeopaths would not shy away from positioning themselves in opposition to the so-called ‘rationalists’ whose practices were viewed as ‘occult’, simply because they employed reasoning that did not account for phenomenal experience that was beyond the comprehension of the observer, as homeopaths did. Homeopaths continued to make a claim about tapping into the sensuous and the obvious and digging deeper as the most rigorous form of inquiry.Footnote 42 Despite homeopathy’s increasing reliance on religion to conceptualise the soul, it also had to make a claim to being ‘scientific’, perhaps even more than physicians, in order to remain relevant. Yet homeopaths would often differentiate their practice from that of ‘empiricism’ practiced by mainstream physicians, arguing that empiricism merely represented experience without law, whereas their own observation was guided by law established by experience.Footnote 43
Scientising the spirit
Homeopaths have historically employed an idea of medical efficacy that was very metaphysical in nature, where both the disease had spirit-like qualities, but also the remedies for it. In 1810, Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843), the founder of homeopathy, wrote that homeopathic treatment could best be described according to the maxim, ‘To effect a mild, rapid, certain, and permanent cure, choose, in every case of disease, a medicine which can itself produce an affection similar to that sought to be cured’.Footnote 44 For example, while tobacco could cause vertigo and anxiety, when people suffered from the latter symptoms, tobacco could also help in making the patient feel better. The same elements can thus both cause and reduce illness. According to this logic, medicine which produced side-effects was not capable of effectuating real improvement. The first line of action against illness within this framework was to neutralise the primary aggravation before giving the next remedy.Footnote 45 The primary contention according to this logic was that ‘allopathic’ medicine disregarded the principle of ‘likeness’ in that it cured a disease through a completely different set of chemicals than the ones that caused the disease.Footnote 46 Why this concept of similia similibus curentur may have made sense to the patient population can partly be understood through a longer history of apothecaries from nineteenth-century Europe, who were widely perceived as prescribing toxic materials to their clients.Footnote 47
Within such a view of therapeutics, there was a need to assess the exactness between the symptoms caused and symptoms redressed. If the symptoms were different, this meant that the chemical provided would not be of a homeopathic character. The object that causes illness also becomes the cure. There is perhaps also an element of sympathy which has been particularly persuasive in shaping medical imagination, particularly to think about how illness in one organ is shaped by illness in another based on the principle of resemblance.Footnote 48 Homeopaths would usually compare the ‘drug picture’ with ‘symptom images’, frequently referring to Hahnemann’s materia medica as a standard go-to textbook.Footnote 49 Practitioners tried to address all the multiple symptoms in one go or tackled each symptom individually. Here, one can consider the logic of the infinitesimal – power residing in weakness – deployed in the preparation of cures. According to Hahnemann, it was necessary to dilute doses. Whereas undiluted doses could be dangerous, it is also necessary to overcome the excessive dilution by vigorous shaking, a process known as succussion. The process of succussion showed how potency increased with each step of dilution. Hahnemann employed a method in which he would dilute the substance by a factor of 100. Physicians and scientists have historically argued that on the centesimal scale, the last particle of the substance to remain in a diluent is at the twelfth round of dilution. Beyond this, the diluent loses any physical presence of the remedy. Yet for homeopaths, the fact that the final product is indistinguishable from the diluent is what paradoxically gave the remedy greater strength. It would be fair to say that Hahnemann was borrowing from analogical thinking that was widely used in many neighbouring disciplines. His description of homeopathic effects draws upon a combination of magnetism and magic. When physicians made the claim that homeopaths would attenuate the potency to an extent that its impact became insignificant, some homeopaths like William Boericke, an Austrian-born American physician who became a prominent exponent of homeopathy and another homeopathy Adolf J. Tafel in the late 1880s, challenged the widely held notion of medical efficacy by arguing that the concentration of substances alone did not determine the power of medicines, ‘Power does not always depend on size; a tiny wood-worm will eat up a man-of-war quicker than a whale would… the quantity of medicine in a homeopathic globule may be infinitesimal – indeed it is so small that the finest chemical test fails to detect even a trace of the medicine; but, shall we say that the remedy ceases to exist in the third, fourth, and thirtieth potency, simply because we cannot detect it!’Footnote 50
The idea of medicinal ‘power’ therefore among homeopaths has always been different compared to that of mainstream medicine, and this is what made it open to notions of spiritual efficacy. Molecules create an element of excess, despite their absence in the diluent. In Organon, Hahnemann described elements as having a certain degree of spiritual power. There was something about elements coming into contact with the diluent that would imbue the diluent with the effects of the newly introduced particles. Hahnemann himself, too, had straddled between spiritual and scientific reasoning. For example, he wrote, ‘Only after (a) bar of steel is dynamized, rubbing it with a dull file in one direction, will it become a true active powerful magnet, one able to attract iron and steel to itself and impart to another bar of steel by mere contact and even some distance away, magnetic power and this in a higher degree the more it has been rubbed. In the same way will titrating a medicinal substance and shaking of its solution (dynamization, potentiation) develop the medicinal powers hidden within and manifest them more and more or if one may say so, spiritualizes the material substance itself’.Footnote 51 Dynamisation would unlock the hidden powers of a medicine.
According to Hahnemann, disease had a spirit-like quality, just as the remedy for it, as he wrote, ‘disease is spirit-like, and cannot be cured except by spirit-like power concealed in drugs’.Footnote 52 This is a useful provocation and would explain why homeopaths provide one remedy after another. There is an understanding among practitioners that the disease is inherently complex and cannot easily be mapped onto any single diagnostic framework, and that it changes shape, which is why the treatment for it also has to be dynamic. It is important to understand the role of the vital here, as Hahnemann considered that the body typically consisted of a vital energy and the purpose of any treatment was to help renew or reinvigorate it. He wrote in Organon, ‘Our vital force, that spirit-like dynamis, cannot be reached or affected except by a spirit-like process resulting from the hurtful influence of hostile agencies from the outer world acting upon the healthy organism and disturbing the harmonious process of life. Neither can the physician free the vital force from any of these morbid disturbances – i.e. disease – except likewise by spirit-like, alternative powers of the appropriate remedies acting upon spirit-like vital force’.Footnote 53 Referring to homeopathy as God’s gift with the promise that the patient would always be able to enjoy his life, Hahnemann said that the disease’s appearance alone could not be used for treatment as that could lead to frequent recurrence of symptoms. In other words, to cure a condition, it was necessary ‘to discover all the ailments and symptoms inherent in the unknown primitive malady’. The primitive or the original disease, he argued, owed its existence to some chronic miasms. The fundamental point made by Hahnemann was that this primitive condition could later reemerge in a much more dangerous form. For example, ‘syphilis could never become extinct of itself; in spite of the best mode of life and the most robust constitution, it increases from year to year, and assumes new and more dangerous symptoms to the end of life’.Footnote 54 For Hahnemann, disease was a type of internal enemy, often shape-shifting and caused by miasms. He proposed that all successive ailments were manifestations of the primitive chronic psoric miasm, in which the numerous symptoms together constitute a single, integrated cause – the presence of the miasm in the body.Footnote 55 Treatment was considered an art: it required carefully disentangling symptoms to identify the root cause. Hahnemann warned of the danger of addressing only imaginary causes or phantoms – treating symptoms in isolation without attending to the underlying aetiology could prove ineffective or even harmful.
While a spiritual element was there, the critique of homeopathic principles by physicians led homeopaths to adopt a more scientific vocabulary, as I will now consider. William W. Browning (1826–1904), a physician in 1894, wrote an essay which won a $100 prize handed out by a physician named Dr. Geo M. Gould. This prize was designated for physicians involved in disseminating ‘more enlightened views’. This essay was circulated widely, and given its high demand, its price was also reduced to increase its sales. In this essay, Browning pointed out the inconsistencies of homeopathic remedies: ‘The minute subdivision, or so-called “dynamization,” of drugs was an after-thought of Hahnemann; it was, in reality, a plank thrown out to rescue from destruction his system of medicine, which, otherwise, would have been shipwrecked by its inherent defects’.Footnote 56 Browning challenged the homeopath’s invocation of ‘nature’ as the only safeguard against recovery by stating that in fact it was not the homeopathic remedy that helped patients recover, but the fact that diseases had ‘an intrinsic tendency to recover’, which explains why patients may recover even in the absence of medical care or supervision.Footnote 57 Here he argued that homeopaths were confusing placebo effects, as we now call them – or the body’s natural tendency to heal – with the remedy’s real therapeutic effect. Here the physician did not deny the language of ‘nature’, as homeopaths themselves had venerated, but invoked the concept to challenge the notions of healing in homeopathy, arguing how it was in fact mainstream medicine that supported nature. Browning argued that medical practice had always been the handmaid of Nature, and in fact, physicians had followed natural rules much more closely than homeopaths, quoting Hahnemann for saying ‘Nature is powerless in the presence of a disease, which can only be cured by the means of medicines’.Footnote 58 Here the physician says that medical doctors were much more appreciative of the powers of nature than homeopaths. William Browning argued that homeopathy represented a weak imitation of Greek medicine, ‘As early as 400 years B.C., Hippocrates the father of medicine, made the observation that some diseases are best treated by similars. Nevertheless, upon this doctrine, as a cornerstone, Hahnemann erected the superstructure which he christened Homeopathy’.Footnote 59 William Browning also critiqued Hahnemann’s idea by giving the example of a drug overdose. Browning suggested that according to Hahnemann, if a person suffered from opium overdose, the solution would be to introduce more opium, when in reality doing something like this was only likely to aggravate the patient’s symptoms. He criticised homeopaths for abandoning their own art, especially in moments when they were left without a cure. William Browing also critiqued the reliance of homeopathy on perceptible symptoms alone, suggesting that for homeopaths, just because disparate symptoms appeared to be similar sensibly, the remedy would mistakenly also remain similar.Footnote 60
While homeopaths had traditionally relied upon case-taking to get to the root of the illness, there was also an understanding that the underlying disease had a shape-shifting and dynamic quality. Frustrated with the dynamic view of disease, and homeopaths’ fascination with the epistemology of illness as dynamic and spirit-like, William Browning wrote in his critique, ‘The business of the physician is not to pry into the secrets of Nature, but to cure his patients of their ailments as “easily and promptly” as possible’.Footnote 61 Responding to the criticisms of Hahnemann that the so-called allopaths were often only tackling the effects and not the causes of illness, Browning wrote, ‘If by cancelling its signs and disturbances, disease itself is removed, why concern ourselves with its internal causes’.Footnote 62 In other words, why worry about the shape-shifting quality of the disease, when a medical remedy could cure the disease? Fundamentally, Hahnemann, in addition to creating a medical system, was also presenting a different philosophy of illness where the craft of the physician was to interpret disease as an artist looks at an art object, an idea that could have possibly received greater reception from physicians but was shunned for complicating the process of diagnosis. For Browning, it was not the healer’s job to philosophise about the constitution of nature, but to provide immediate care.
For Hahnemann, it was difficult to point to a single symptom simply because the symptoms had a spirit-like quality, as he wrote, ‘They [allopathic doctors] fancied that they could find the cause of disease, but they did not find it because it is unrecognizable and not to be found since by far the greatest number of diseases are of a dynamic (spirit-like) origin and nature; their cause, therefore remaining unrecognizable’.Footnote 63 One predominant way in which homeopaths responded to criticisms like Browning’s was by expanding earlier understandings of dynamisation, some of whom tried to provide a compelling scientific basis for the principle, mainly by resorting to the therapeutic effects caused by the interaction of molecules. One homeopathic doctor, Felix MacManus (1866–1953), stated at the seventeenth annual meeting of the American Institute of Homeopathy held in Philadelphia, ‘The intrinsic principle of a medicinal substance resides in its atomic constituents or particles, and, by overcoming the attraction of aggregation or cohesion in these ultimate atoms, this active (dynamic) principle is developed’.Footnote 64 He used this to support the principle of attenuation, which for many critics represented a weak link in homeopathy. As the debate over whether the university could allow for homeopaths and medical practitioners to share the same space, the reinterpretation of Hahnemann’s ideas continued within the larger homeopathic community. One homeopath, Charles Julius Hempel (1811-1879), added a twist to the idea of potentisation by saying ‘that it is the drug-force which effects cures. By drug force we mean the morbid essence which materializes itself in the plant and develops pathological lesions in the organism’.Footnote 65 He provides the example of stramonium, ‘Here is the stramonium disease, the creative stramonium-force having invaded the organism where it meets a kindred recipient faculty. We act upon it by means of material molecules, for which the stramonium force or essence has a stronger attractive affinity than the organic tissues. If the drug molecules are not endowed with sufficient force to draw the disease to themselves… the cure fails (ibid)’.Footnote 66 This explanation showed that there was much more at stake than the idea of dynamisation, but undergirding both Hahnemann and Hempel’s theorisation was the idea that molecules impacted others in the vicinity to create certain therapeutic effects.
In annual meetings, attendees and notable homeopaths continued to give rich homage to Hahnemann, with one homeopath, F.R. MacManus referring to Hahnemann as an ‘instrument of God’.Footnote 67 In some lectures, one can also find that homeopaths were also referring to the nervous system as the supreme originator of illness.Footnote 68 Homeopathic remedies acted through the nervous system, and many used this as proof to counter the growing criticism about how homeopathy could be effective at all in curing illness, given the infinitesimal amounts in which it is provided. These can all be seen as attempts by the homeopathic community to situate their practice on more certain grounds of science to avoid criticisms about the superstitious nature of their practice.
One major criticism that had been levelled at homeopathy was that it resembled something like a placebo, where the power of the psyche (specifically its expectations about cure) enabled remedies to effect a cure. This criticism had been levelled in earlier days of homeopathy as well, to which JC Peterson, a homeopath with a religious sensibility, responded by asking the question, ‘But how can diet and imagination act upon a person in an insensible and delirious state? How does diet and imagination cure the young infant, who has not the power of imagination, and whose diet is not in the least changed?’Footnote 69 For homeopaths, there was clearly more at play in the uses of homeopathy than mere psychological investment in the effectiveness of medicine, as the effectiveness of remedies was informed by uniform laws of nature. While homeopaths took up the Enlightenment discourse on the uniformity of natural laws, contrary to physicians who were able to dissociate divine agency from natural laws, homeopathic practitioners continued to make the claim that these laws were created by God, and therefore to recognise these laws was to become religious; therefore, many did not invoke a distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘religion’. This also helped make the case that homeopathic remedies had efficacy far beyond being mere placebos, as they acted mainly by activating inner strength in combination with the specific temperaments of the remedies.
There are historical accounts of homeopaths trying to establish departments for the study of homeopathy, as in the case of Michigan, like other states.Footnote 70 There are also similar histories in the case of Iowa when in 1872, the Society of Homeopathic Physicians petitioned to the Board of Regents for ‘representation in the Medical Department’ of the university, noting the backing of patrons who supported homeopathy and had a history of generously contributing to the institution and ‘now insisted that an institution serving all of the citizens should not restrict its medical education to the practitioners of a single system’.Footnote 71 Historians have previously considered the participation of women in US homeopathy from its emergence to its decline in the late twentieth century.Footnote 72
Within American universities, there was an extensive debate about whether homeopathy was diverting students away from scientific medicine.Footnote 73 For example, in one case, homeopaths at the University of Michigan raised concerns about not being able to teach in the same classrooms as medical doctors, which physicians like Abram Sager strongly rejected. Sager would eventually even resign because of the space granted to homeopaths in the university. Sager was also responding to the pressure homeopaths created for not being able to sit in meetings with medical doctors, and certainly, it seemed that the pressure was too strong to even create the conditions for Sager’s own eventual resignation from Michigan.Footnote 74 Sager would insist on the creation of a homeopathic college on a distinct and independent basis, which would eventually also prevent hostilities. The proposition which was eventually accepted by the regents was to establish a homeopathic university with faculty consisting of the university president and professors to teach materia medica and therapeutics, with students continuing to attend lectures on subjects such as organic chemistry, anatomy, surgery in the department of medicine and surgery.Footnote 75 Sager’s reaction to the homeopathic community was based on what he felt was a compromise on ‘professional honor of the faculty’.Footnote 76 The fusion of the two eventually took place, to which Sager regretfully said, ‘Whatever of merit or obloquy may, in the estimation of the regular profession, attach to such union for the promulgation of the absurd dogmas of homeopathy, the faculty of the old school will be entitled to a full share’.Footnote 77 In this debate, faculty members were also frequently changing their positions. Many faculty members were also changing sides in the debate, such as A. B. Palmer, whose position was challenged by a critic who asked why, according to Palmer, homeopathy had suddenly become more scientific than before.Footnote 78
Physicians of the time were also refuting parallels that had been made between the body’s resistance to infection and the working of homeopathic medicine, where both implied that the disease could be prevented by introducing the very substance that caused the illness. This debate had direct implications for the competition for greater intellectual space unfolding between faculty members at the University of Michigan. While A. B. Palmer’s position was ambiguous, he still presented his critique. He challenged the argument that homeopathy was not very different from principles of immunology. The analogy that homeopaths drew between vaccination and similia similibus curentur was explicitly rejected by physicians as a major error rather than a minor empirical disagreement. As one critic noted, the ‘most plausible’ homeopathic argument rested on ‘the apparent analogy between the preventative influence of the vaccine disease over small-pox, and the alleged curative influence of medicines similar in their effects to the phenomena of disease’, but this plausibility dissolved once the underlying mechanisms were examined. Physicians emphasised that vaccination operated through identity rather than resemblance, stressing that ‘inoculation with its own virus produces a modified form of the affection’, whereas homeopathy relied on abstract similarity divorced from material continuity. The effectiveness of small quantities of vaccine matter, they argued, could not legitimise infinitesimal dosing because the virus was ‘living and germinating’, capable of multiplying within the body during incubation, while homeopathic medicines lacked any such capacity. Most decisively, vaccination was framed as temporally and conceptually distinct from therapy, as Palmer wrote, ‘Vaccination is preventative, not curative, and is from identity, and not similarity’. In this way, physicians sought to foreclose homeopathy’s rhetorical appropriation of immunology by redefining vaccination as a biological process grounded in living matter, reproduction, and prevention, rather than as evidence for a general therapeutic principle based on analogy.Footnote 79
Palmer then goes on to say that an attack from an unrelated disease did not increase the body’s defences against an incoming pathogen. He then added, ‘medicines are not living matters, and require not period of incubation to produce their effects’.Footnote 80 Arguing that medicine acted in a predictable manner, he posited homeopathy in opposition to it, which, because of its so-called vital force, had a shape-shifting element, in which one medicine could counter multiple illnesses, where cause and effect could easily be confused. He ended by saying that either the entire system had to be true, or the system risked becoming something like fiction. In other words, if the doctrine of similia similibus curantur and of the efficacy of infinitesimal doses were not true, the entire system would collapse like a house of cards.
In contrast to orthodox critiques that rejected analogy as epistemologically misleading, defenders of homeopathy such as Charles Fisher (1816–1871) mobilised analogy as a strategy of professional rapprochement, emphasising shared evidentiary foundations while preserving therapeutic distinction. Fisher insisted that homeopaths and biomedical practitioners operated within the same scientific universe, rhetorically collapsing disciplinary boundaries by asserting, ‘We study the same books; read the same periodicals… their bacteria are our bacteria… their toxins are our toxins, their palliatives are our palliatives and their surgery is our surgery’. This claim reframed homeopathy not as an alternative science but as a divergent mode of interpretation grounded in the same empirical materials, helping justify demands that homeopathic students be allowed to attend medical lectures. Yet Fisher simultaneously reasserted homeopathy’s distinctiveness by locating it in therapeutics rather than aetiology, drawing a sharp contrast between modes of clinical reasoning: ‘Homeopathy particularizes; allopathy generalizes’. While allopathic medicine treated disease categories as the primary object of intervention, homeopathy, Fisher argued, individualised treatment on the premise that ‘drugs do not affect all alike, even when afflicted alike’. The argument thus revealed a dual rhetorical move – claiming epistemic parity at the level of scientific facts while preserving ontological difference at the level of therapeutic action – through which homeopaths sought legitimacy without surrendering the core principle of individualisation, i.e. the fact that disease affected every person uniquely.Footnote 81
Within the US, therefore, the debate about the effectiveness of homeopathy was a long and contentious one. In 1849, two homeopaths, Joseph H. Pulte (1835–1884) and Benjamin Ehrmann (1824–1907), claimed that they had treated 1116 patients, stating that for those patients who had been improperly treated by opiates, success in treatment was relatively difficult. They stated that the main remedy they used was ‘camphora, the tincture of which was prepared in the proportion of one part of the gum to six parts of alcohol, as advised by Hahnemann himself, who first recommended this remedy in 1829’.Footnote 82 This was also the context in which ‘allopaths’ and homeopaths were promoting their practices to suggest best ways to address the ravaging impacts of cholera. Critics of homeopathy suggested that it was ‘undignified’ and ‘unprofessional’ to appear in public prints in praise of oneself. The criticism continued, ‘According to their own showings, they had adopted allopathic rather than homeopathic treatment, administering the strongest tincture of camphor, in doses of one or two drops every five minutes’.Footnote 83 It continued, ‘The infinitesimal doses, as well as the fundamental principle, according to the showings of Drs. Pulte and Ehrmann, have been abandoned, and yet they ascribe their cures to homeopathy; but we doubt if they succeed in gulling the intelligent in the community much longer by a system of quackery so palpably absurd – so grossly immoral’.Footnote 84 The criticism continued, ‘We have no doubt that camphor, administered in ten or twenty doses, would secure a reasonable share of success, whether employed by homeopathic or allopathic practitioners’.Footnote 85 Then they add, ‘We have long believed that homeopathic doctors were practicing allopathy in disguise – employing the “samsons” of the system, such as calomel, corrosive sublimate, arsenic, camphor, belladonna, pulsatilla, and many other powerful articles, in full doses – but now we have proof which sets the question forever to rest’. The onslaught on homeopathy was therefore strong from within the community of American physicians.
Between science and superstition
Eventually the position that homeopaths would adopt would be one in which they would draw simultaneously both from allopathy and scientific discourses and spirituality, while insisting on a new epistemological approach towards healing. The supporters of homeopathy would respond to criticisms from physicians by arguing that homeopathy was important not only because it offered a system of healing, but also because it presented a consolidated philosophy for the existence of nature. This also entailed the recognition of the universal laws of nature, as had also been the case among early homeopaths as I have shown above. In one address delivered in the forty-third annual session of the American Institute of Homeopathy held in 1890 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, the President Jirah Deway Buck (1838 – 1916), also prominent for his contributions to the Theosophical Society made the case, ‘The name of Hahnemann stands for the reign of law, and the recognition of dynamics in modern life, and in all that concerns the nature of man or the apprehension of nature. The entire progress of the age is away from superstition, away from blind chance or caprice, away from unsupported authority, and towards the recognition of universal law as underlying all phenomena, and as determining all results. This progress necessitated a recognition of Homeopathy as the one principle of practice, the one law of therapeutics which repudiated both precedent and empiricism. Strictly speaking, the progress of homeopathy has been largely in its application and recognition. Its method was from the first strictly scientific, and its foundations were laid in its absolute law’.Footnote 86
Homeopathy then was not construed only as a medical system per se, but also as an epistemology that, with the evolution of society, simply turned out to be true. It followed the same scientific rigor and empirical approach, except that it disproved of morbid anatomy, and only focused on how the human body responded to specific medicines. Just as homeopathy could serve as a system supported by religious belief, it was also a system that was supported with the help of existing scientific theories. Given his interests in theosophy, J. D. Buck compared existing laws in physics with the law of cure followed by homeopaths, adding, ‘Newton’s first proposition in regard to force declared that action and re-action are equal and opposite. This equation, or the problem of the parallelogram of force, is by no means confined to the sun and the planets; to cosmic movement, and terrestrial phenomena; but it obtains in all life, and lies at the basis of every molecule of protoplasm, of every tissue cell, and of every drop or blood of man. Drugs, whether medicines or poisons, act on man according to this principle; for in man it is the basis for all action, the law of all life’.Footnote 87
Employing the idea of there always being the presence of equal and opposite forces, Buck suggested that medicine too works on the body through the same law. Buck considered Hypnotism and Christian Science as two contenders to homeopathy, and suggested that what differentiated homeopathy from the two was that ‘neither discern[ed] clearly an underlying law’. This law, Buck argued, was based on a uniform universal law. Here he argues that according to the underlying law, situations could vary, but all principles behind the application of medicine remained the same. Buck argues that what makes homeopathy unique is that at times a homeopath, unlike a physician, did not even need to rely on the use of medicine, because a homeopath might use simple ‘suggestion’ as a form of cure. This helped Buck make the case for the psychological effects of homeopathic treatments. This therapeutic use of homeopathic remedies, however, would usually not be used as a defence in disagreement with physicians.
The idea that homeopathy relied on psychological treatments alone was indicative of the ways in which homeopathy as a medical system transformed overtime, as the placebo-like effects were not only suppressed, but also actively endorsed, as Buck wrote, ‘When merely for sport or pastime people are thrown into syncope or catalepsy by persons entirely ignorant of physiology and the laws of life, when a glance of the eye, or the shimmer of a coin, or a mere “suggestion” is shown to act as powerfully as the strongest drug, it is high time for those who know something beyond mere empiricism to discern and apply both mental and moral hygiene’.Footnote 88 He argued that homeopathy concerned itself with dynamics rather than drugs. Homeopathy was also posited as an interpretive science where the healer was involved in understanding the totality of symptoms before coming up with a cure. It is also important to note that in the reception of homeopathy in American circles, there was also a transformation to make it equilibrium-based, where illness was viewed as caused by the disruption in the body’s internal balance in an almost humoral sense. Buck, however, does not turn to Galenic explanations; instead, he turns to magnetism to show how just as metals can attract and repel each other, so too ‘a remedy will both cause and cure a given disease manifesting as a group or totality of symptoms. The drug remaining unchanged and the polarity of organ or body being reversed, the effects are also reversed’.Footnote 89 This then justifies the premise that the same thing that causes illness can also serve as the cure. Drawing parallels from hypnosis, he states that what hypnosis allowed for was the altering of consciousness and argued that such techniques simply could not be ignored, citing the ridiculing of such efforts as a sign of human ignorance rather than intellect.Footnote 90 Buck therefore invoked a psychological explanation to explain therapeutic effects, directing attention towards the functioning of the mind and its centrality for healing.
Homeopaths in the United States continued to wrestle with the question as to whether homeopathy was meant to be supported as a belief or a rational system of medicine. By 1880, a lot of homeopaths became resistant to the demand among homeopathic societies to declare ‘belief’ in the system of medicine. The newer generation of homeopaths resisted an emphasis on belief rather than scientific reasoning. In this vein, Conrad Wesselhoeft (1834–1904), a German-born American homeopathic physician, wrote an essay in 1880 titled ‘The method of our work, not faith, is the basis of organization of medical societies’. The contents came from a lecture delivered at the thirty-second session of the American Institute of Homeopathy in 1879, in which Wesselhoeft, who was the president, thanked members for participating in a commission to study what homeopathy could have done to provide a cure to yellow fever, and then remarked on some of the qualifications required for the entry of people into local homeopathic societies. Some homeopathic societies in the US required professional homeopathic training, whereas others required ‘good moral character’ and for a member to subscribe to the doctrine of similia similibus curantur. Wesselhoeft remarked on how the homeopathic society of Massachusetts required ‘belief’ in similia similibus curantur as a pre-requisite. He added that while the aims of such clauses were meant to be liberal and inclusive, this was far from being the case, as individuals trained in a different strand of medicine would not be able to hold membership, with members of homeopathic societies even expelled for their dissention. He then made a case for differentiating the ‘scientific’ discourse of homeopathy from the obedience required by religion, ‘Shall we all sign a “declaration of homeopathic principles” or belief in a method of practice, as was lately proposed to us, in order to be enrolled in the “Legion of Honor,” as those who have subscribed call themselves? Your creeds seem to demand the course. Why not follow it, and place yourself under the command of a few who presume to rule over the faithful flock of believers? Religions may require such a course. No rod of terror, no excommunication or anathema can terrify the free man of thought’.Footnote 91 This shows the degree of frustration expressed by the president for not allowing dissent and excluding those who did not believe in the principles of homeopathy by suspending reason. Once homeopaths would begin to give into scientific logics, it would be only a matter of time, that homeopathy would find itself losing any legitimacy it had, especially with new medical discoveries of the twentieth century, but the story of homeopathy’s engagement with medical orthodoxy tells us about a broader experience of how mainstream medicine itself evolved, negotiated with, established boundaries with as well as distanced itself from alternative ways of understanding the body – and how in the process, what we understand as medicine, also transformed.
In 1880, one prominent homeopath, Jabez Philander Dake (1827–1894), who was elected as the president of the American Institute of Homeopathy, aimed at reminding sceptics of homeopathy that the ‘grand cloud of mysticism’ that was thrown around homeopathy concealed the grand truths of homeopathy.Footnote 92 This was an attempt to show that homeopaths were more scientific than critics suggested. Meanwhile, an internal debate was taking place among homeopaths about whether specific titrations were more effective because Hahnemann himself had used a combination of high and low potencies in his therapeutic approaches. As Breyfogle noted in 1873, who was a tailor by trade, but later trained in medicine and would go on to become the president of the American Institute of Homeopathy, there was also some confusion within Hahnemann’s work about the extent to which the dilution had to be shaken, ‘He first advised that each dilution be shaken for a moment or two only; afterwards warns us against too much shaking, as calculated to increase the power to a dangerous extent, and that only two shakes should be given each dilution. He afterwards loses his dread of shaking and appoints ten shakes for each dilution, as a standard; and again he allowed twenty, fifty, or more shakes, and half a dozen before each dose’.Footnote 93 Among homeopaths, then, there was a debate about cataloguing through a numerical logic the right methods of titration and dynamisation. Despite these ambiguities, one can also find exhortations, such as the use of high potencies creating inauthenticity in practice, and therefore the need to return to the basics and to retrace steps to enhance the credibility of the system, as Breyfogle wrote, ‘We must rally again around the old flag of homeopathy, and although she is soiled and battle worn, we will bear her aloft in our efforts for new victories and fresh laurels’.Footnote 94
Under the threat of losing legitimacy, homeopathy would begin to mimic orthodox medicine, and when they began engaging with physicians within the narrow language game of scientific efficacy, it was only a matter of time that homeopathy would find itself largely dismissed as a ‘faulty’ science in the twentieth century, largely relegated to the status of a pseudoscience. One can still attend to the history of homeopathy to challenge established notions of efficacy and to think about the importance of ‘belief’ and ‘faith’ in the experience of healing – not necessary as a mark of superstition – but as actual determinants of the healing process even within ‘scientific’ and ‘clinical’ realms. By considering the different modes of engagement with mainstream medicine, this article has considered the language of natural laws, which could enable homeopathists to have a foot both in science and religion, even as some homeopathists began responding to criticisms from physicians by proving efficacy in narrow scientific terms, i.e. in terms of the right titrations or method, but in doing so, they often risked losing their unique ability to straddle various epistemologies. In times when suspicion towards medicine has intensified, rehabilitating the centrality of belief might better help us account for why medical systems survive not despite their epistemological inconsistencies, but because they remain embedded in moral worlds of trust, meaning, and experiential validation that exceed scientific verification.
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