The Birth of Homeopathy out of the Spirit of Romanticism by Alice A. Kuzniar (review)

Historical studies in English on homeopathy mostly tackle the topic against the backdrop of "irregular" versus "regular" medicine. These analyses from Britain, Canada, and the United States, one way or another, address the nineteenth-century controversies and acrimony between "alternative" and mainstream doctors. Occasionally, despite high standards of scholarship, these works may be positional: Harris Coulter's series of studies about homeopathy in America, for example, remains useful, but when reading such texts his open advocacy for this medical practice must be considered. Another strand of this historiography is gender based. As many homeopathic medical colleges, particularly in America, admitted women, other studies have focused on the career paths and impact of these female practitioners; but, again, the main historical thrust, while grounded in homeopathy, is the larger issue of professional interactions. Contrasting with this research agenda is a European tradition of historical writing about homeopathy that studies it more or less in its own medical right. One example is Olivier Faure's work on homeopathy published in French (about this, see CBMH/BCHM 33 [2016]: 254–56). Most of this work, however, has appeared through the efforts of Robert Jütte and Martin Dinges of the Institut für Geschichte der Medizin der Robert Bosch Stiftung (IGM) in Stuttgart, which holds the largest collection of primary and secondary documents related to homeopathic practice and history. While often published in German, many of these important works are also available in English.

Alice K. Kuzniar's The Birth of Homeopathy out of the Spirit of Romanticism is soundly situated in the latter European historiographical tradition. Kuzniar is a University Research Chair and a professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Waterloo, thus having the linguistic facility she delved deeply into the rich resources of the IGM. The result, based on close reading of the published corpus of Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843), along with the thousands of letters and other published materials written between him and his patients, is a novel and important book that that has been needed for a long time. This book, although in English, might have more easily been written in German as there are numerous and generous quotations from original documents. As such, we should be grateful for the author's sensible translations into English, which make her work accessible to a larger audience. Although The Birth of Homeopathy might be a tough slog for junior undergraduate students, it is certainly the stuff of reading lists for senior and graduate seminars in history of medicine, history, philosophy, Germanic studies, and eighteenth-century studies. It is also a book that its author hopes will be read by persons with an interest in current homeopathic practice: those who are its proponents might gain insights into why they believe it works, while those who are skeptical might realize why gauging it against current biomedical standards is problematic. All classes of readers, then, can profit by understanding Hahnemann's "invention of homeopathy within the cultural, medical, and semiotic framework of its day" (5).

The core of The Birth of Homeopathy out of the Spirit of Romanticism is structured around three chapters, each addressing one of the three main principles of classical homeopathy: the law of similars, the law of the single remedy, and the law of minimums. But is the term law appropriate? Kuzniar believes so, for she explains that Hahnemann's use of the term must be understood intellectually in a post-Kantian way in which "Nature" (and medicine) could be comprehended as a science if properly observed and interrogated, and could be expressed mathematically. This is where the spirit of Romanticism enters the medical picture. Hahnemann and his invention were both representative of their times – and those times were shaped by contemporary thinkers such as Kant, Novalis, Goethe, Herder, Schelling, and Ritter. Thus the homeopathic principles/laws of similars, or like can cure like (similia similibus...