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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76.3 (2002) 614-615



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Book Review

Historical Aspects of Unconventional Medicine:
Approaches, Concepts, Case Studies


Robert Jütte, Motzi Eklöf, and Marie C. Nelson, eds. Historical Aspects of Unconventional Medicine: Approaches, Concepts, Case Studies.Network Series, no. 4. Sheffield, U.K.: European Association for the History of Medicine and Health, 2001. xii + 288 pp. £19.95 (EAMH members), £34.95 (nonmembers, U.K.), £37.62 (nonmembers, Europe), £41.76 (nonmembers, elsewhere) (0-9536522-2-X).

The European Association for the History of Medicine and Health Professions actively promotes international networks of researchers in the history of homeopathy, hospitals, malaria, medical ethics, pathology, physiology, and public health. Representative of that effort is this set of papers on alternative therapies delivered at a 1998 seminar in Sweden organized by the Department of Health and Society at Linköping University, in cooperation with the Institut für Geschichte der Medizin in Stuttgart. The purpose of the seminar and the objective of the presenters was "to provoke a general rethinking of the causes and origins of the formation of boundaries between regular and unconventional medicine and marginalisation in medicine" (p. 1). The participants sought to depict the full breadth and complexity of so-called unconventional nineteenth-century health-care systems in northern and western Europe, and the political and professional impact that the biomedical sciences had upon these practices.

The editors approached their choice of papers on the assumption that while there was not as yet sufficient research to enable a comprehensive synthesis of alternative medicine, evidence did suggest that many of Western medicine's unorthodox movements were of more than "minor significance" (p. 3) in the eventual acceptance of the biomedically trained practitioner. Despite economic, social, political, gender, semantic, and linguistic strategies designed to police the boundaries between orthodox and unconventional medicine, more interaction existed between the two than was generally thought.

Although there is some unevenness to these papers, many are well worth reading. Robert Jütte and Claudine Herzlich place the study of semantics at the center of medicine's professionalization. Terms such as "regular," "fringe," "orthodox," "unorthodox," "irregular," "heterodox," "conventional," "unconventional," [End Page 614] "scientific," "marginal," "holistic," "alternative," "fringe," and "complementary" take on ideologically charged assumptions in biomedicine's quest to draw boundaries between itself and competing health practices. The choice and frequency of terms take on special meaning once they are harnessed to specific social and political objectives. The authors state, however, that when biomedically trained physicians introduce unconventional therapies into their practices, they do so as a result of liberating changes occurring in the physician-patient relationship, indicating that the two systems constitute a more unified medical world than their semantic differences would suggest.

Martin Dinges points out three particularly misguided approaches in the historiography on homeopathy: those insiders who confuse wishful thinking about the future of homeopathy with the tools of historical research; those insiders who project a resurgence or victory for homeopathy out of a perceived crisis of regular medicine; and those whose linear teleology depicts alternative healing systems as ending with the triumph of scientific medicine. The nonlinearity of homeopathy's history is evident within individual countries as well as between countries, due to the varying influences of lay healers, immigration, cost-benefit ratios, the openness of the medical marketplace, and national health systems.

Several papers focus specifically on European folk healers, midwives, pharmacists, and barbers, and their relationship with priests, county prefects, academically trained physicians, public health officers, and medical boards. Once again, the authors suggest the presence of informal relationships that intersected in many ambiguous and nonjurisdictional ways. As academically trained physicians gained legislative legitimacy, however, even homeopathic physicians lost much of their appeal. Nevertheless, the authors challenge the assumption of "a dichotomic opposition between official medicine and alternative healing systems" (p. 152). Such conclusions, they suggest, are presumptive and overdrawn.

The editors are the first to admit that historiographic work in alternative medicine still lacks a truly comparative perspective. As a consequence, these papers, albeit provocative and suggestive, remain...

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