Shreya Nuli: A Political Counter-Narrative of Alternative Medicine’s Rise

Amidst tremendous technological advances, industrialization, and expansion, 19th century America found itself a new nation with a mosaic of interplaying healthcare systems. Although the new republic entered the century as only a democracy of 16 states trailing along the Atlantic coastline, it quickly became a mass spanning the entire continent, inviting more than 30 million immigrants from Europe. The resulting melting pot of social structures, cultural values, religious beliefs, and health practices all contributed to a novel way of life. Specifically, the developing American medical system reforged, enriched, and tailored the premises of old world practices to adapt to the new democracy (Baker, 2006). 

This article can be considered a counternarrative to the more common history of medicine – a common history that portrays alternative healing approaches under the 21st-century medicine lens of hopelessly naive at best. Rather, I will explain how modern medical systems still incorporate lasting ideals and consequences from the rise of homeopathy. 

During the primitive scientific age before the development of antibiotics and vaccines, medicine was a trial and error system that heavily shifted according to forces of the day. Homeopathy was one such experimentally alternative medical system that holistically emphasized a diluted treatment of natural substances, believing “like cures like”. Over the course of the 19th century, the socioculturally liberal environment and America’s normative values allowed homeopathy to flourish and challenge traditional allopathic medicine, with its transformative influences still reverberating in the way we approach modern medicine today. 

Foundationally, the medicine that arrived to the new Americas during the 19th century from Europe was coined allopathic medicine by homeopathy’s founder, Samuel Hahnemann, to differentiate alternative medicine from the mainstream traditional medical system. Allopathy in the early Americas primarily accepted curing sickness through addressing an imbalance of the body and its fluids, without necessarily understanding the biological etiology of disease. This accepted practice of treating disease utilized a Galenic pharmacopeia of venesection (bloodletting), emetics, and purgatives as invasive disease treatments, labeled “heroic” care, to oppose the state induced by disease (West, 2014). However, the main appeal of this medicine was that patients appeared to heal over time. The University of Alabama press clarified in its American culture journal that opium and its derivatives reduced pain, and bloodletting lowered fever; however, these results indicated correlation, rather than causation. Bodies naturally healed themselves despite the medication given, rather than because of it (Cravens et al., 1996). 

Therefore, in most therapeutic encounters of the early 19th century, the patients’ belief and trust in the doctor’s ability and treatment prescriptions was critical to maintaining allopathy. 

Yet during this precarious century of mass urban movements, major trading, overcrowding, poor sanitation, and inadequate nutrition, an unwinnable battle against epidemics was faced. The main killers and causes of disability were dysentery, tuberculosis, venereal disease, in flux with typhoid, cholera, yellow fever, and malaria epidemics sweeping through major cities. An explication of class disparities showed that the virulence of epidemics affected marginalized communities disproportionately, hitting destitute urban dwellers, Native Americans, slaves and soldiers. Puerperal fever, a disease that was associated with childbirth, was a major obstacle for women (Baer, 2001). Social class differences present in allopathy were clearly exposed in light of these epidemics.

In parallel, this new age, between 1825-1845, was characterized by Jacksonianism. This age, initiated by Jackson’s election, was one that placed a focus on experiential learning instead of academic learning, with a new belief of self-reliance rather than imported knowledge from Europe (Bates, 2015). Politics enabled the view that the traditional healing system had questionable therapeutics, as well as questionable practitioners. As this general sentiment spread during the mid-19th century, the efficacy of allopathy was put into question, and a search for healing alternatives like homeopathy ensued. 

In 1796, Samuel Hahnemann developed a homeopathic alternative medical system as outlined in his monumental published essay A New Principle For Ascertaining the Curative Powers of Drugs. Hahnemann was a German scholar and physician that was trained in traditional European allopathic medicine. Due to the inflicting and impairing widespread heroic treatments being blindly used in this system, he very quickly became disillusioned with it. After Hahnemann expanded his experimentation to various drugs and doses, he published on his “law of similars”, where in order to cure a disease, “We should imitate nature…and employ in the disease we wish to cure, that medicine which is able to produce another very similar artificial disease, and the former will be cured ; similia similibus” (Hahnemann, 1796). In simple terms, he stated that medicines that mildly replicated the symptoms of a disease would have a curative nature – “like cures like”. 

Hahnemann later theorized the second law of homeopathy, known as the law of infinitesimals. By this law, the more diluted a drug, and the smaller the dose, the more potent and effective the substance would be in stimulating the body’s “vital energy” (now known as immunity) in warding off the disease. 

In less than two decades from its full inception, homeopathy was introduced to the United States in 1825 by German immigrants, perfectly fitting in with the republic’s new Jacksonian ethos. The alternative medical system appeared to be a new hope in light of the endless epidemics, maintained a veneer of science, and most importantly, was not an elitist practice. Homeopathy held that illness was specific to the individual, and its personalized care was rooted in the theoretical basis of democratic self-reliance to ward off disease. In this way, patients weren’t stereotyped or placed into a broader population classification, since each person was thought to react uniquely. The complementation of the sociopolitical fad of the time, with this medical thought, led to the rapid establishment of homeopathic medical schools across all the major American cities. 

It was clear that homeopathy was a force “for the people” and common man. Within this early 1840s liberalism movement and popular acceptance of homeopathy, the medical system’s characteristics infiltrated social movements and incorporated itself within allopathic practices. Women, specifically mothers, flocked to homeopathy’s gentler therapeutics that disagreed with the allopathic indifference which used more drastic heroic medicines. Homeopathy had specific cures for children given their smaller build, as well as different dose optimizations of treatments for each sex. In a sense, homeopathy clearly laid out an understanding of gender and age differences in medicine. 

In many ways, then, the hegemony of White male allopathic medicine was expanded and transformed in conjunction with new alternative medicines. Homeopathy admitted women into their medical schools, and established a liberalist structure and systematic scientific method to drug research. Many female homeopathic physicians were produced, including President James Garfield’s personal physician herself, Susan Edson (Kirschmann, 2004).

This idea was adopted by allopathic medical schools, who became more tolerant to the idea of accepting women, and establishing women’s medical institutions. 

Nevertheless, it is important to note that there was opposition and resistance to homeopathy due to its questioned efficacy. In 1842, Oliver Wendell Holmes published Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusion, where he outlined his grievances against homeopathy. He challenged the validity of homeopathic research results, usage of case studies/anecdotal examples as supporting data, and the futility of diluted drugs in inducing a biological change. As an American physician and eventual dean of the Harvard Medical school, Holmes criticized homeopathy by calling it akin to "astrology, palmistry and other methods of getting a living out of the weakness and credulity of mankind and womankind" (Holmes, 1842), and warned against the placebo effect. While this can be considered Old School medicine's continued scorn for reform, homeopathy still does foundationally have questionable efficacy from a 21st-century perspective as well. 

Regardless of a persistent debate on homeopathy’s efficacy, it is undebatable that homeopathy cultivated a supportive environment for healthcare, positively contributing to healing. As Irvine Loudon claims in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, homeopathy begins foundationally with a physician and patient collaboration, to holistically understand a disease, and “take the case” of each illness. This interaction entails the physician characterizing his technical knowledge and experience by what he sees, while the patient provides tailoring insight by what he feels. This medical discourse addressed and prioritized the individual, by respecting each patient’s own mind and body, rather than using a generalization. This was undoubtedly, a positive step in comprehensive healing in history. 

Today, this intimate “doctor-patient” relationship is exceedingly emphasized and prioritized. Such considerate medical conditions are, themselves, inherently healing to patients. With homeopathy, the patient was granted the privilege of being attuned to their own bodies, and were able to take ownership of their treatment rather than being funneled into a generalized system that originally existed in allopathy. 

The Jacksonian political and social agent of change that emphasized the “common” man and woman drove the acceptance of this alternative care of medicine, introducing a new structure and science to allopathic medical care. With many of the origins of homeopathy developing in opposition to orthodox heroic medicine, this dichotomy changed the definition of societally normal medicine, defining healthcare as we know it today in the 21st century. 

Shreya Nuli is a junior at Yale University in Grace Hopper College

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