Marketplace of the Marvelous (24 page)

Stir around they had. Homeopathy's assault on heroic drugging and bleeding, not to mention its popularity among middle-class Northeastern intellectuals, had pushed many regular doctors toward milder treatments by the 1860s. Some regular doctors lessened their use of heroic doses and began using fewer interventions, depending more on nature's healing power. These regulars didn't necessarily admit that they had been wrong. Some argued, instead, that the nature of disease had changed as society changed and so now required milder treatments.
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New York doctor Dan King observed that “perhaps Hahnemann did not live wholly in vain. Although not actually a messenger from Heaven . . . he seems nevertheless to have had an important mission indirectly to accomplish. Through the use of his empty and inert means, we have been enabled to see what the innate powers of the animal organization can accomplish without medical interference. We have been taught to rely more upon these, and less upon art, and have seen the wonderful influence which the mind has over the bodily functions.” King predicted that a doctor would now “lay a gentler hand upon his patient” thanks to homeopathy.
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To be sure, the decline in heroic treatment resulted from several developments, not the least of them being the discovery of new drugs, but regulars willingly and gleefully gave homeopathy credit for showing
that patients “would very generally get well without any drugging at all.”
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Homeopathy continued to grow and change. By 1900, homeopaths were increasingly stressing their similarities with regular medicine and had refashioned their profession as a supplemental therapeutic field. Rather than seeing this as a capitulation to regular medicine, many homeopaths instead saw themselves as keeping up with the latest advances in science. Some homeopaths argued that the germ theory and laboratory evidence revealed the power of small organisms to affect the human body, which validated Hahnemann's belief in infinitesimals even if many homeopaths had abandoned the practice of small doses. But as homeopathic medical schools added new courses, laboratories, and clinical opportunities for students, the actual study of homeopathy moved into the background. The reduced attention to homeopathy and the concomitant emphasis on the same subjects taught in regular medical schools provided applicants with few compelling reasons to choose homeopathy over regular medicine. At the same time, regular medicine's continued refusal to acknowledge homeopathy as a partner or even a factor in the emergence of scientific medicine caused the number of practitioners taking up the cause to decline. By 1923, all but two homeopathic medical schools had closed or converted into regular medical schools. Homeopathy, at least on the professional and academic level, had converged with regular medicine to the point of disappearing within it by the early decades of the twentieth century.
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Professionalization and scientific advances had a hugely negative impact on female homeopaths. The shift to lab and hospital work and away from the home, small practices, and homeopathic institutions moved homeopathy into a world largely dominated by paid male administrators and physicians. Increased educational requirements for admittance to medical school also made it hard for women, who continued to struggle to attend school in a culture that did not value professional women. Women lost their voice and active role in this new order of medicine. They didn't stop practicing homeopathy, however. Women continued to diagnose and treat patients, and worked particularly hard to preserve homeopathy as a distinct medical alternative even as it faded from institutional settings.
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By the 1920s, a small group of Hahnemannian traditionalists remained dedicated to their founder's ideas. They strictly adhered to the
law of similars, the minimum dose, and the single remedy, and they saw homeopathy's fall from institutional power not as a victory for science, as regulars hailed it, but one of politics. The growing power of regular medicine, argued homeopath and birth-control advocate Mary Ware Dennett, infringed on people's freedom to make personal choices regarding their health. In 1924, Hahnemannians Julia Minerva Green and Julia M. Loos founded the American Foundation for Homeopathy to support pure homeopathy and to establish a national network of local leagues to train lay practitioners and build demand for “real” homeopathy. Women took a particularly active role in the AFH and its affiliated leagues, producing publications, teaching classes, and providing support to fellow homeopaths. In the 1960s and 1970s, as a new generation discovered homeopathy, the AFH and its leagues became primary sources of information, providing the critical link between the traditional homeopathy of the nineteenth century and the revitalized homeopathy of today. To these new followers, many of them feminists, homeopathy represented personal freedom, self-reliance, and a democratic alternative to the elitism of regular medicine, much the same values that drew women's rights leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton more than a century earlier.
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Julia Green never lost faith that homeopathy would rise again, insisting that homeopathy would thrive “when this materialistic age has passed and a better, more spiritual one arrives.”
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While few would consider the 1980s a less materialistic time, by that time homeopathy had made a comeback. Homeopathy remains one of the nation's most popular alternative therapies, even as it's unlikely to ever regain its nineteenth-century prominence and power. Today, an estimated 3.9 million adults use homeopathy, some through purchases of over-the-counter products labeled homeopathic and others through visits to a practitioner.
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Although regulars mercilessly ridiculed them for their mysticism, homeopathy was not alone in its attention to the healing power of things unseen in the nineteenth century. Mesmerists shared the homeopathic belief in invisible forces that could be activated or turned to the task of restoring a natural state of health. Hahnemann himself praised mesmerism's benign treatment, “[of] whose efficacy none but madmen can entertain a doubt.”
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He believed, like the mesmerists did, that a healer transferred his mental power to the medicine. In
homeopathy, this happened in the dynamization process of diluting remedies, where mesmerism used touch. Hundreds of thousands of people on both sides of the Atlantic fell quite literally under the spell of Franz Anton Mesmer and the invisible healing solution he called animal magnetism.

Franz Anton Mesmer and his followers held patients literally entranced as they directed the flow of an invisible force they called animal magnetism through the bodies of their patients. (Wellcome Library, London)

 

In 1862, Mary Patterson entered the Portland, Maine, office of mental healer Phineas Quimby in tatters. Pale, weak, and emaciated, the forty-two-year-old Patterson, her wavy brown hair pulled back from her face, could barely carry herself up the stairs into the waiting room. She had been sick her entire life, missing much of school as a child and writing despairing poems from her bed about death and the meaninglessness of life as a young adult. Low in energy, emotionally unstable, and subject to spells of pain, Patterson tried regular care, homeopathy, hydropathy, and a Grahamite vegetarian diet, but nothing worked. Most of her life had been consumed by a constant search for someone who could provide her with lasting relief. She desperately hoped that someone might be Quimby.

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, or “Park” to his friends, had experimented with mesmerism and magnetic healing since 1838. Concluding that a patient's trust and rapport with the healer led to cures, Quimby attempted to connect with his patients mentally and physically. He talked over their disease, massaged their hands and arms, tried to adopt and feel their symptoms himself, and encouraged them to think differently about life and health. His success with this method made him a national figure.

After only a week in Quimby's care, Patterson's health improved dramatically. The woman so enfeebled she could not step out of her carriage alone was, only days into her treatment, climbing the 182 steps to the dome on top of Portland's city hall unassisted. No one was more astonished than Patterson herself, who before long was devoting her days to the practice and further study of Quimby's method. Only a few years later, Patterson, soon to be known through another marriage as Mary Baker Eddy, would introduce her own new medical system. She called it Christian Science, and it quickly became the largest homegrown healing faith in American history, following in the long and potent path of mental cures and magnetic fluids that had begun more than a century earlier in Europe as mesmerism.
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Like phrenology, mesmerism began in late-eighteenth-century Vienna with the experimentation of an established regular physician. In the 1770s, Franz Anton Mesmer began to test an idea he'd first had in medical school about the body's vital force. Just as gravity affected
the behavior of the sun, moon, and planets, Mesmer proposed that the “nervous fluids” that coursed through the body made humans as susceptible as the tides to the universe's invisible gravitational forces. He based his theory on those of the sixteenth-century alchemist Paracelsus, who had suggested that the human body could attract corresponding planetary effects. The idea of bodies influenced by unseen and unexplainable powers was nothing new in medicine, nor even unusual in an eighteenth-century world that seemed alive with powerful unseen forces. Isaac Newton's gravity, Benjamin Franklin's electricity, even the miraculous hot-air balloons of Jacques Charles and the Montgolfier brothers that lifted humans into the air were just a few of the powerful new forces turning heads and firing scientific thought in Europe.

The idea of nervous fluids had an even longer lineage. Roman physician Galen had speculated in the second century ce that bodily movement and sensation resulted from animal spirits that formed in the brain and flowed outward through hollow ducts in the nerves. This idea dominated thinking about the function of the nervous system for centuries even as the composition of those spirits and the mechanics of actual nerve function adapted to the latest scientific trends and discoveries. Gradually, the idea of animal spirits came to be replaced with “nerve fluid,” though the general concept of a substance moving through the nerves remained much the same. Like vitalism's core concept of a life force that animated all living beings, it was widely believed that disruptions in the free flow of this nervous fluid caused disease.
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Unlike his predecessors, though, Mesmer suggested that a physician could learn to control the flow of these invisible forces from outside the body. It was a startling idea. Not only that, he believed he could also restore the internal harmony that signaled health. He theorized that illness might be cured with magnets. Since they, like celestial bodies, could influence other physical entities without actual contact, he wondered if magnets could also redirect the body's nervous fluid. In 1774, Mesmer tested his theory on twenty-nine-year-old Franziska Oesterlin, a “hysteric” who experienced convulsions with vomiting and fainting. Mesmer treated and observed Oesterlin for two years. During an attack, Mesmer placed one magnet on her stomach and another on each of her legs. Almost immediately, Oesterlin reported feeling “painful currents of a subtle material” moving
within her that eventually traveled downward to her extremities. Her spells soon subsided and did not return for hours. Mesmer repeated the treatment many times over the following weeks with the same success. He finally declared her entirely cured.
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Mesmer was unique among irregular healers for starting with a theory rather than a treatment. He assumed that some force did act on the body, and modified his therapy based on the results of his empirical tests. At first, Mesmer thought the magnets cured. But he soon found that he could provoke the same reaction in other patients that he had with Oesterlin using wooden objects and other nonmagnetic materials—even the simple stroke of his finger. Magnets could cure, but so, it seemed, could a lot of other things. Mesmer determined that the effects he witnessed must not be the ordinary magnetism known since ancient times but something else entirely: a separate imperceptible natural force that he called “animal magnetism.” Modern slang associates animal magnetism with sexual attraction, but Mesmer conceived of his force as the compelling power behind all kinds of interactions and attractions. Animal magnetism transmitted influence from and between all physical objects, from metal rods to water, food, and even the hat on a patient's head. Once magnetized through touch or simply the wave of a hand, the object became indistinguishable from a real magnet, which Mesmer became convinced was merely a conductor of animal magnetism.
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