Marketplace of the Marvelous (22 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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A majority agreed with him and cast their votes in favor of women's admission the following year.
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The American Medical Association, in contrast, would not admit its first female members until 1915, almost fifty years later.
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