A Vital Force: Women in American Homeopathy (review)

Homeopathy entered American medical discourse at a time when other, less polished alternatives to orthodox medicine were already making inroads. Homeopathy was different from other insurgents. Despite a definitely populist strain in its early years, its practitioners, all of whom were medical doctors, by the 1850s began directly competing with orthodox medicine, founding medical schools, societies, and journals, and attacking so-called Old School regulars as "allopaths." Orthodox physicians, in turn, characterized homeopaths as sectarians and charlatans who should be shunned.

Anne Taylor Kirschmann tells this story from the perspective of the women who practiced homeopathy and the women who were patients. For many women, homeopathy seemed like a golden opportunity. Not only did most homeopathic medical schools admit women (after a struggle), but many women believed that they were becoming part of a truly scientific school of practice. (Homeopathic drug provings have been characterized as the first systematic drug trials, for example.) For women patients, too, homeopathy's affinity for progressive ideals and its gentler therapeutics were powerfully attractive. That women flocked to women homeopathic practitioners in turn gave the latter a strong claim on admission to homeopathic medical societies.

In succeeding chapters, Kirschmann compares women's relatively swifter acceptance into homeopathic schools and medical societies with the less successful efforts of women regulars. Finally, she describes the denouement of homeopathy as the new, bacteriological, laboratory-informed medicine of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries claimed the public's respect. By World War I, the defense of homeopathy was left to a remnant of physicians and laity—mainly women—who valued its individualized treatments as much as its explanatory theories. Kirschmann also depicts the attempts by the American Foundation for Homeopathy, founded in 1924, to perpetuate "pure homeopathy" through the use of laymen and -women as fundraisers and boosters. Suffragist and birth control advocate Mary Ware Dennett worked for two years as its field representative but couldn't manage to raise money for scholarships. Today homeopathy largely functions as one of the "complementary" health care modalities presided over by healers of many kinds.

A Vital Force gives many examples of the role women played in American homeopathy, such as the highly successful, all-women's medical college founded by notable homeopath Clemence Lozier in 1863 in New York City. Lozier's school and its neighbor, the Blackwells' Women's Medical College of the New York Infirmary, were fierce rivals for decades, despite efforts by Elizabeth Cady Stanton to mediate a rapprochement. One point on which Kirschmann and others have not reached consensus is that of the overall relations between women regulars and homeopaths. Apparently they often collaborated amicably within the sphere of Victorian social reform yet maintained less cordial relationships within the medical profession. No systematic study of this has been conducted, although studies for individual cities such as Washington, D.C. (by Gloria Moldow) and Chicago (by Eve Fine) seem to bear out this generalization.

A few small concerns: From this reviewer's perspective, at times, Kirschmann overreaches in her claims for the influence of homeopathy on the fortunes of women physicians generally. She astutely comments that homeopathic women comprised a larger percentage of homeopathic doctors than did women regulars of the regular profession, and that homeopathic women played a much more visible role in homeopathic medical institutions. She believes, too, that the pressure to exclude homeopaths per se from regular medical societies and medical consultations forced the regulars to reevaluate their institutional exclusion of regulars who were women. She writes, "Directly and indirectly homeopathy played an essential role in recasting the physician from a medically educated male to a practitioner of either sex, shifting debates away from gender toward proper education and practice" (p. 75). This is an ingenious argument, but it remains unproven. Discrimination against women physicians remained rampant from the nineteenth through three quarters of the twentieth century, despite women's nominal admission to medical...