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  • The History of American Homeopathy: The Academic Years, 1820-1935
  • Norman Gevitz
John S. Haller, Jr. The History of American Homeopathy: The Academic Years, 1820-1935. New York: Pharmaceutical Products Press (Haworth Press), 2005. xiv + 444 pp. Ill. $59.95 (cloth, ISBN-10: 0-7890-2658-7; ISBN-13: 978-0-7890-2659-0); $39.95 (paperbound, ISBN-10: 0-7890-2660-0, ISBN-13: 978-0-7890-2660-6).

Over the past dozen years John Haller has written four separate volumes covering overlapping but different aspects of botanical medicine in America. Having at last exhausted this subject, he has moved on to examine another important alternative medical movement in America—homeopathy. Unlike the botanical tradition, the "academic" side of homeopathy had previously been well covered: in 1971, Johns Hopkins University Press published Martin Kaufman's path-breaking Homeopathy in America: The Rise and Fall of an American Heresy, and in 1998, Rutgers issued Naomi Rogers's excellent Making An Alternative Path: The Making and Remaking of Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital of Philadelphia. In writing a new history of homeopathy, Haller notes that he is seeking to build on existing scholarship by "studying the manner in which academic homeopathy developed [End Page 772] during medicine's introspective age of doubt and the emergent period of scientific reductionism" (p. 3). This volume, which covers homeopathy up through 1935, is far lengthier than Kaufman's book; it is organized into nine chapters, and contains two rich appendices that give brief information on all the known homeopathic journals and colleges in America in this period.

The book begins with a short, well-crafted biography of homeopathy's founder, Samuel Hahnemann, and a concise description of the development of concepts and theories that formed the core of homeopathic thought. These included the notion that the drug that causes symptoms in a well person is the ideal medicine to give to a sick individual who manifests similar symptoms (like cures like); that the more infinitesimal the dose, the stronger the effect; that the shaking or titrating of a drug unleashes its dynamic or spiritual power; that disease represents a derangement of the body's vital force; and that almost all chronic diseases are caused by the miasm known as "psora." In the second chapter the story shifts from Europe to the United States, and Haller provides a brief region-by-region history of homeopathy's spread throughout the country. In his third chapter, he examines the division within homeopathy between low and high dilutionists, the latter "attenuating" their medicines to incredibly infinitesimal amounts. He follows with a chapter on the use of statistics by European and American homeopaths and regular practitioners, each group trying to prove that patients with specific problems did better with their respective therapeutic management.

In the fifth and longest chapter, Haller finally turns to education. The first homeopathic school was established in 1835, and by 1880 there were eleven homeopathic colleges awarding M.D. degrees. Haller provides portraits of all the schools, examining their moves and internal politics. These colleges and the graduates they produced did not escape the notice of the American Medical Association, state societies, and leading orthodox physicians, and their pointed intellectual attacks and political activities against homeopathy are addressed in the sixth and seventh chapters. In chapter 8, Haller deals with self-help guides, the increasing use of lay homeopathy, and the therapeutic fads that some homeopaths introduced or with which they were associated. The final chapter, entitled "Biomedicine's Triumph," charts the institutional demise of the movement through the first four decades of the twentieth century.

Overall, this book is an excellent overview of the first hundred years of homeopathy in the United States. Haller provides great detail—sometimes too much, particularly with respect to the internal dynamics of the colleges—and sometimes loses focus, chapter 8 in particular having too many disparate themes. Nonetheless, Haller's fine volume, especially with Martin Kaufman's book out of print, is likely to become the leading source on the early development of homeopathy in the United States.

Norman Gevitz
Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine
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