A Vital Force: Women In American Homeopathy

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Homeopathy, as a medical system, presented a significant institutional and economic challenge to conventional medicine in the nineteenth century.

Although contemporary critics portrayed homeopathic physicians as part of a sect whose treatment of disease was beyond the pale of acceptable medical practice, homeopathy was in many ways similar to established medicine.

In A Vital Force: Women in American Homeopathy, Anne Taylor Kirschmann offers a new interpretation of women’s roles in both mainstream and alternative modern medicine. Kirschmann strengthens and clarifies the history of homeopathic women physicians, and creates a framework of comparison to 'regular', or orthodox, physicians.

Linked to social reform movements in the nineteenth century, antimodernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and counter-cultural ideals of the late 1960s and 1970s, women's advocacy of homeopathy has been intertwined with broad social and cultural issues in American society.

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Author

Anne Kirschmann

Anne Taylor Kirschmann received her Ph. D. in American history at the University of Rochester in 1999. A historian of medicine, she has published on the history of alternative medicine and women in medicine.

She is currently a lecturer in history at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and is re-examining the role of social reformer Mart Ware Dennett in the early-twentieth-century birth control and sex education movement.

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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements -- ix
Abbreviations -- xiii
Introduction - Homeopathy as 'Other' -- 1

Chapter 1
The New School of Medicine,
1820s to 1880s -- 7

Chapter 2
Women Physicians, Lay Healers,
and the Choice of Homeopathy -- 29

Chapter 3
Becoming Physicians:
Women's Homeopathic Medical Education,
1852-1900 -- 55

Chapter 4
Adding Women to the Ranks:
Nineteenth-Century Medical Societies
and the Admission of Women -- 74

Chapter 5
'Women's Diseases'
and Homeopathic Patients, 1850-1900 -- 90

Chapter 6
The Transformation of American Medicine
and the Decline of Homeopathy, 1890-1920 -- 113

Chapter 7
Struggle for Survival
1920-1930 -- 132

Epilogue
Twentieth-Century
Transformation and Rebirth -- 159

Appendix A
Women in Homeopathic Medical Societies -- 169

Appendix B
Enumeration of Homeopathic and Regular Physicians,
1886, 1890-1893, and 1900 -- 175

Notes -- 177
Manuscript Sources -- 213
Selected Bibliography -- 215
Index -- 223

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