Marketplace of the Marvelous (23 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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