Yasgur's Homeopathic Dictionary and Holistic Health Reference

Thirty years ago, in a used bookstore in Michigan, I came across Samuel Payne Ford’s three-volume American Cyclopaedia of Domestic Medicine and Household Surgery (1889). Each volume brought hours of enjoyment, and more important, a window into a world of arcane topics, many of whose histories have since been retold. For the medical historian and those interested in homeopathy and other alternative healing systems, this fourth edition of Yasgur’s dictionary offers a similar window.

Intending his dictionary to be informative and educational, Yasgur has succeeded in providing the interested reader with a rewarding look into alternative medicine, and into medical history in general. Drawing from older texts, he has identified approximately forty-five hundred terms used by physicians and pharmacists in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which in turn draw from earlier periods. From an abattoir (slaughterhouse) to anthroposophical medicine (which regards disease as somehow connected to the biography of the patient), from the doctrine of signatures (the theory that the external characteristics of a substance indicate its possible therapeutic effects) to functional medicine complexes (homeopathic remedies based on theories of resonance), from Henshaw’s flocculation test (determining the ideal potency of a homeopathic remedy) to imponderabilia (remedies that have no mass) and Jenichen/”Jenichen potencies” (remedies gain their curative power from the succussion and not the dilution), from Kentian (higher centesimal) potencies and olfaction (the administration of remedies by smelling) to physiomedicalism (a form of independent Thomsonianism) and potency chord (a combination of homeopathic remedies from different potency scales), and from tapis (a term meaning “under consideration”) and theomania (religious insanity) to Thomsonianism (a herbal system founded by Samuel Thomson) and volo-therapy (a method of treatment based on telepathy), Yasgur has brought together a wonderful cache of present-day concepts and little-known medical artifacts.

I was hoping the dictionary would list canker and canker rash, and would offer a fuller definition of constitutional remedy and of crasis. I looked in vain for physianthropy, a plan of medical study based on the ideas of William Barnwell and used as the pedagogical template for some of the alternative medical colleges of the nineteenth century. I was pleased, however, to find mnemonical delineation (a memorization device), a popular Thomsonian method of teaching the method behind a “course” of medicine. In an age of poetry, when family members memorized whole stanzas for fun and enjoyment, the mnemonical poem became a quick and painless method of memorizing medical instructions.

Yasgur errs in his explanation of the historical origins of Thomsonianism and its relationship with eclecticism. Thomsonianism and eclecticism were separate systems of medicine: both branched out of the broader botanical tradition in American medicine and both fed on regular medicine’s self-doubts in the early nineteenth century, but the two differed significantly in philosophy and in practice. Thomsonianism represented a distinctive system grounded in empiricism, strengthened by Hippocratic theory, and practiced via a patented “course” of medicine. Eclecticism, like Thomsonianism, was botanic in its choice of medicines (although less so) and nativistic in its attitude toward European medical philosophies. However, eclecticism owed its intellectual origins to the French philosopher Victor Cousin (1792–1867), who explained truth as episynthetic, or cumulative, drawing from all systems those features that best served the needs of the patient and that were not attended with bad consequences.

Besides the dictionary, Yasgur provides a list of nearly 700 homeopathic remedies and homeopathic terms; birth and abdominal charts prepared by Samuel Hahnemann; a dictionary of 140 common homeopathic terms; a glossary of 316 alternative and holistic health-care therapies; and a select list of 500 homeopathic obituaries. Medical historians will find this a delightful and useful reference.