The History of American Homeopathy: From Rational Medicine to Holistic Care (review)

Given the contentious place of homeopathy on the medical landscape, it should be no surprise that its historiography has often been shaped by its sharpest critics and most sympathetic advocates. As Michael A. Flannery notes in the Foreword to The History of Homeopathy: From Rational Medicine to Holistic Health Care, crusaders have sought to "vilify it as unmitigated quackery," while partisan apologists and thinly veiled hagiographers have been "eager to justify nearly everything and/or anything in its name" (xii). It is also true, however, that the history of alternative medicine has enjoyed a recent surge of interest, and scholars have responded by illustrating the richly diverse and complex history of homeopathic institutions, practitioners, and lay advocates. Nevertheless, it is hard to dispute Flannery's assertion that John S. Haller's latest book should still be considered "the second volume of what will undoubtedly become the standard history of this heterodox system of health care in the United States" (xi).

The opening chapter encapsulates the narrative from Haller's first book in the series, The History of American Homeopathy: The Academic Years, 1826-1936 (Binghamton, New York: Haworth, 2005). Haller argues the burden of persecution by regular doctors who vigorously opposed legitimizing homeopathy forced reformers into organizing their own freestanding homeopathic medical colleges. Nevertheless, the faculty of the first homeopathic medical college in the world, incorporated in Pennsylvania in 1836, still had a goal to make homeopathy a legitimate option or specialty within regular medicine. Over time, the pursuit of this option became what Haller refers to as the "holy grail" of homeopathy.

By the late nineteenth century, homeopaths faced a wide range of external and internal challenges. Externally, the raising of educational standards created difficulties for homeopaths since the legislation creating state examining and licensing boards gave a clear majority to mainstream or regular medicine. Internally, the lines were drawn between progressive proponents of scientific homeopathy and the conservative champions of a strict Hahnemannianism who emphasized allegiance to homeopathy's founder. Neither group could agree on a common set of principles. Disagreements persisted over educational standards, methods of practice, and the fundamental understanding of disease processes. The progressive wing had chosen to use the medical school curriculum as its vehicle for change as it "moved from rational system-building to empirical science," while the conservative wing held that homeopathy was a "therapeutic system with exclusive principles, rules, and methods that were as unchanging as Newton's law of gravitation" (8).

Haller suggests that bitter fighting between and among the progressive and conservative wings of homeopathy subsequently had three closely related, major influences on the history of homeopathy for the remainder of the twentieth century. First, disputes precipitated a steady exodus of students from internally divided homeopathic colleges to reorganized orthodox medical schools, which resulted in the closing of homeopathic institutions along with allopathic mergers. Second, in failing to obtain the holy grail of making homeopathy a specialty within conventional medicine, the number of homeopathic fads and heretical perspectives escalated, along with the intensity of disputes between and among homeopathy's well-organized and influential interest groups. These two failures resulted in a third major impact, which forms Haller's central argument in the book: as progressive homeopaths failed to accomplish their goals and academic homeopathy died at the hands of both progressive and conservative wings, a more esoteric "American homeopathy advocated a more spiritual or metaphysical view of healing that repudiated reductionist science and its gold standard of randomized double-blind clinical trials—thus preventing it from garnering a place within mainstream medicine" (2).

Haller expertly utilizes the voices of his protagonists to support a complex narrative of multiple emergent twentieth-century homeopathies. In fact, "there seemed to be no end to the expansiveness of esoteric homeopathy's beliefs and practices," which were alternately shaped in the pre-World War II period by adherence to the principles of vitalism...