The Homeopathic Revolution: why famous people and cultural heroes choose homeopathy

• Dana Ullman
  North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA, USA, 2008 and Homeopathic Educational Services, Berkeley, CA, USA, 2007. Price: £18.99, ISBN-10: 1556436718; ISBN-13: 978-1556436710

In these troubled times, it is helpful for supporters of diversity in medicine, and homeopathy itself to be reminded quite how many people’s lives were touched for the better by homeopathy in the past. Given the focus of the new fundamentalism on the figure of the ‘prophet Darwin’ it is particularly cheering to think that were it not for the care provided by a hydrotherapist and homeopath, Gully of Malvern, Charles Darwin might not have managed to pursue his groundbreaking research to the point of being able to publish Origin of Species. Given that campaigners against CAM in the UK and Europe view their efforts as a proxy effort for the ‘great fight’ between creationism and evolutionary biology raging in the USA, this is the sort of rich irony that can do much to sustain us.

Dana Ullman’s compendium of the fragments of great lives does much to remind us that the war waged on Hahnemannian medicine has been a constant feature of the last 200 years, despite the well-meaning efforts of physicians of all kinds and lay people to broker some sort of pragmatic peace. It was particularly surprising to find for instance quite how close the great benefactors of North American medicine such as Rockefeller came to sponsoring homeopathic education and research until blocked by the American Medical Association. Or to discover that the great British-Canadian physician, William Osler, late in life acknowledged the huge debt owed by medicine as a whole to the work of homeopaths in general and Hahnemann in particular.

The book also illustrates the relationship between homeopathy and the movements to emancipate women and black people, the longstanding relationship between homeopathic theory and practice and religious movements, and the fascinating history of the introduction of homeopathy into India in the context of the cholera epidemics that so facilitated its uptake in Europe in the mid 19th century.

The advantage and disadvantage of Ullman’s book is its structure. After a brief introduction outlining the nature of homeopathic medicine and describing the campaign against it, the bulk of the book it divided into sections dealing with different categories of ‘great people’. Thus we learn about categories of figures from Science, Medicine, Politics, the Arts and so forth. In some of these categories important themes emerge: a huge swathe of the literary greats of the 19th century including people like Twain and Thackeray were users and apologists for homeopathy. We also learn a little about the reception of homeopathic ideas by fair-minded doctors and scientists in the 19th century. Less persuasive are the entries for figures such as Catherine Zeta Jones and David Beckham, although this might simply indicate a lower level of interest on my part. Nevertheless, it is clear that homeopathy in the hands of its proponents in the 19th century was part and parcel of significant social movements, it is less clear what the role of homeopathy is in the hands of its more well-known supporters today.

Readers hoping for a coherent historical account of the reception and perpetuation of homeopathic theory and practice since Hahnemann will not find it in this volume. It is now 35 years since Harris Coulter published his great history of western medicine and homeopathy Divided Legacy. Since this time the History of Medicine itself as a discipline has been through an enormously reviving period of engagement with the methods of social history, and a thoroughgoing social history of homeopathy would make fascinating reading.

Thus, much like Julian Winston’s Faces of Homeopathy we have another very accessible but not particularly coherent collection of narratives, anecdotes and glimpses of the past which will do much to initiate an understanding of the history of homeopathy for those are curious to begin to learn about it. What we never learn however, is what, if anything Ullman feels are the features, causes and drivers behind what he has titled the ‘homeopathic revolution’. This makes the book very accessible but ultimately leaves the reader to synthesise their own understanding of the whole which the parts illustrate.