In the height of the 19th century, homeopathy
undoubtedly ruled the day. It was the medicine of choice of intellectuals, the
upper class, and the growing middle class on both sides of the Atlantic, and its
influence spread all over the world. Many homeopathic medical schools and
hospitals were founded, with some of the most famous examples being the
Hahnemann Medical College and Hahnemann University Hospital (now both
affiliated with Drexel University), as well as the London Homeopathic Hospital,
now the Royal London Hospital for Integrative Medicine. Celebrities ranging
from Beethoven to Charles Darwin to Mark Twain to the Royal Family were all
under the care of homeopathic doctors and there’s even a memorial to Dr Samuel
Hahnemann just a few blocks from the White House in Washington DC. It’s no
distortion to say that many of the finest minds of the generation were engaged
in the practice of homeopathy.
In the early 20th century, however, the system
was brought crashingly down. Many colleges and hospitals were closed, and
homeopathy lost favor. Currently, most medical doctors and many NDs consider
homeopathy to be unsubstantiated nonsense.
How did this change occur? How did a system rise from non-existence
to the pinnacle of society and then plummet just as quickly? Were all of these
seemingly smart people deluded? Are there lessons to be learned, and is there a
place for homeopathy in modern medicine? These are all questions I hope to
answer in the next several weeks. I won’t be talking much about the practice of
homeopathy, that having been discussed in another blog post, but rather
focusing on the history of the system from the 18th century until
today.
The Setting
Allow me first to set the scene. Homeopathy arose in the
late 18th century, in a time when the Enlightenment was in full sway
in Europe. Newton was discovering gravity and calculus, chemistry and physics
were racing forward in leaps and bounds, America was developing modern democracy,
and on the whole, science was displacing superstition. Carl Linnaeus was an
exemplary figure of the age – he developed modern taxonomy in an effort to take
the colorful variety of the natural world and order it in a logical and
scientific way. Even European cities were changing from knotted tangles of
misdirected streets into ordered grids of long straight avenues and boulevards.
Everything seemed to be gaining order except one crucial
field – medicine. Medicine hadn’t changed significantly since the time of
Galen, 1500 years previously, and modern medicine as we know it wouldn’t really
emerge until the 1860’s, when Louis Pasteur, aided by a microscope, would
observe and document infective organisms. At the time, diseases were believed
to be caused by poisonous gasses called miasma, which emanated from swamps and
decomposing matter – those familiar with 18th century literature
will perhaps remember references to ‘night vapors’ and similar phenomena as
causes of disease. Indeed, the name malaria arises from the Medieval Italian
term ‘mala aria’, meaning ‘bad air’ – a testament to the belief that poisonous
airs from swamps were the cause of what is now known to be a mosquito-borne
illness. These miasma caused illnesses which disrupted the humors, four liquid
substances in the body which, when imbalanced, caused illness.
All was not bad, however. Some areas of medicine that had
seen real progress during the Renaissance and Enlightenment were anatomy and
physiology, in large part because of the return of dissection to science.
Scientists and physicians were finally starting to document how the body was put
together and how it worked, though this was frequently driven by a desire to
find fame, rather than promote real scientific understanding – just as
explorers named islands and mountains after themselves, so too did these
scientists name body parts after themselves.
However, even though the body was slowly being understood,
the area of therapeutics lagged behind substantially – even if they were
beginning to understand what the body looked like, and were able to name a
disease, they had little idea of what to do with it. George Washington,
famously, was bled to death in an effort to fight an infection he’d developed.
Bleeding, either by leeches or razors, was common, as was the practice of
herbalism by the doctrine of signatures – a practice in which the appearance of
a plant was taken to indicate its usefulness in treating disease. In addition
to this, developments in chemistry had allowed for the production of a variety
of minerals and compounds previously unknown or unavailable in significant
quantities, and doctors took to using these compounds medicinally, without much
knowledge of how they would affect the body. The classic example of this
practice is undoubtedly the use of mercury to treat syphilis.
So this was the milieu in which homeopathy arose – modernity
was dawning and people were turning increasingly towards science and reason,
but medicine was decidedly medieval and clearly behind the times. It was
natural, therefore, for someone to attempt to bring order to the hodgepodge
that was medicine, and as we’ll learn in future weeks, that was exactly what
happened.
(Note: I am heavily indebted for my knowledge of homeopathic
history to Drs Paul Herscu and Amy Rothenberg of the New England School of Homeopathy.)
