THE POLITICS OF HEALING Histories of Alternative Medicine in Twentieth- Century North America docx

THE POLITICS OF HEALING
THE POLITICS OF HEALING
Histories of Alternative Medicine in Twentieth-
Century North America
Robert D.Johnston
Editor
Routledge
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Published in 2004 by
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Copyright © 2004 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The politics of healing: histories of alternative medicine in
twentieth-century North America/[edited by] Robert D.Johnston.

p. cm.
ISBN 0-415-93338-2 (Print Edition) (hardcover: alk. paper)—ISBN 0-415-93339-0 (Print Edition)
(pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Alternative medicine—North America—History—20th century. 2.
Alternative medicine—North America—Political aspects—20th century.
I. Johnston, Robert D.
R733.P65 2003
615.5'097'0904–dc21
2003011930
ISBN 0-203-50607-3 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-57521-0 (Adobe eReader Format)
FOR ISAAC
who, with his infectious laughter,
has always provided the most wonderful healing
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
INTRODUCTION
The Politics of Healing
Robert D.Johnston
1
PRECURSORS: THE YEARS IN THE WILDERNESS
NEGOTIATING DISSENT
Homeopathy and Anti-Vaccinationism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Nadav Davidovitch
9
MAKING FRIENDS FOR “PURE” HOMEOPATHY
Hahnemannians and the Twentieth-Century Preservation and Transformation of
Homeopathy
Anne Taylor Kirschmann
27

REVISITING THE “GOLDEN AGE” OF REGULAR MEDICINE
The Politics of Alternative Cancer Care in Canada, 1900–1950
Barbara Clow
41
SCIENCE AND THE SHADOW OF IDEOLOGY IN THE AMERICAN HEALTH
FOODS MOVEMENT, 1930S–1960S
Michael Ackerman
52
INTERSECTIONS: ALLOPATHIC MEDICINE MEETS ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE
“VOODOO DEATH”
Fantasy, Excitement, and the Untenable Boundaries of Biomedical Science
Otniel E.Dror
66
WESTERN MEDICINE AND NAVAJO HEALING
Conflict and Compromise
Wade Davies
77
CONTESTING THE COLD WAR MEDICAL MONOPOLY
SISTER KENNY GOES TO WASHINGTON
Polio, Populism, and Medical Politics in Postwar America
Naomi Rogers
90
THE LUNATIC FRINGE STRIKES BACK
Conservative Opposition to the Alaska Mental Health Bill of 1956
Michelle M.Nickerson
110
“NOT A SO-CALLED DEMOCRACY”
Anti-Fluoridationists and the Fight over Drinking Water
Gretchen Ann Reilly
124

CONTEMPORARY PRACTICES/CONTEMPORARY LEGACIES
ENGENDERING ALTERNATIVES Women’s
Health Care Choices and Feminist Medical Rebellions
Amy Sue Bix
144
INSIDE-OUT
Holism and History in Toronto’s Women’s Health Movements
Georgina Feldberg
171
A QUIET MOVEMENT
Orisha and the Healing of People, Spirit, History, and Community
Velana Huntington
185
THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF “MAGAZINE MEDICINE”
New Age Ayurveda in the Print Media
Sita Reddy
196
CAM CANCER THERAPIES IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY NORTH AMERICA
The Emergence and Growth of a Social Movement
David J.Hess
218
BEYOND THE CULTURE WARS
The Politics of Alternative Health
Matthew SchneirovJonathan David Geczik
231
CONCLUSIONS
CONTEMPORARY ANTI-VACCINATION MOVEMENTS IN HISTORICAL
PERSPECTIVE
Robert D.Johnston
244

FROM CULTISM TO CAM
Alternative Medicine in the Twentieth Century
James C.Whorton
272
Contributors 290
Notes 293
Index 364
vi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK, above all, my family for being willing to take a trip of personal as
well as intellectual adventure through some of the worlds of alternative medicine. Thank you,
Isaac, Sandy, and my dearest Anne!
Karen Wolny and Brendan O’Malley were critical to shepherding this project at Routledge,
while Jaclyn Bergeron has made sure that the book stayed on track even when it seemed that it
might derail. Matt Guglielmi, Bethany Moreton, Jay Nelson, and Amy Nickel provided terrific
research and logistical support for the volume.
My former colleagues in the History of Medicine section at the Yale Medical School provided me
with considerable courage and intellectual inspiration to continue with this project, and I want to
thank, in particular, Sue Lederer, Naomi Rogers, and John Warner. Also, Nadav Davidovitch has
been my mentor in many of these matters, whether in a seminar room in New Haven or on a
motorbike in the streets of Tel Aviv.
The authors deserve great credit, not just for their excellent contributions to the volume but for
their good cheer amid many uncertainties. And for helping find the authors, I very much
appreciate the efforts especially of Norman Gevitz and Charles Rosenberg.
Finally, my foremost thanks go to Greg Field. We conceived of this book together, and he
deserves credit for many of the ideas here. In the end, the pull of family, as well as the politics of
healing, drew him away from this project. But his thoughtfulness and intelligence are reflected
throughout.
INTRODUCTION
The Politics of Healing

Robert D.Johnston
OVER THE PAST DECADE, alternative medical therapies have played an increasingly prominent
role in American health care. In the nation’s grocery stores, homeopathic treatments and over-the-
counter herbal remedies crowd aisles that were once largely devoted to analgesics, sore throat
lozenges, and fruit-flavored, animal-shaped children’s vitamins. Eager to fill their beds and their
coffers, hospitals advertise—even celebrate—the inclusion of nontraditional medical practices.
Medical schools, too, embrace this development with curricular reforms aimed at teaching
prospective physicians about alternative forms of healing. With attention turning toward a range
of mind-body and holistic treatments, health care in the United States seems more full of variety
than has been the case since the establishment of modern medical authority in the early 1900s.
Indeed, the emergence in the medical lexicon of a well-recognized acronym, CAM (for
“complementary and alternative medicine”), is suggestive of how these alternatives are becoming
a visible, and increasingly significant, current within the medical mainstream.
At first glance, it would appear that the burgeoning interest in alternative healing has appeared
almost phoenix-like, at the tail end of a century that started with the near-extinction of such
alternatives. Decades had passed, it seemed, since the mainstream medical practitioners drove out
the “irregulars,” tarnishing the alternatives as—at best—based on unsound science and—at worst
—fraudulent quackery. The standard narrative of the rise of allopathic medical care in the United
States suggests that the Progressive era was the crucial period, during which physicians successfully
established their institutional and therapeutic authority. For example, in his epic and influential
award-winning account, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982), Paul Starr described
the period from the 1890s to the 1920s as a time when M.D.’s were able to sway most Americans
to their cause, thereby gaining the hegemonic control necessary for the establishment of a state-
sponsored monopoly of health care in the United States. Lacking both institutional power and
scientific legitimacy, nonorthodox therapies retreated to the margins. Few people sought out
alternatives because people came to rely on the medical model, trusting their physicians’ claims to
a regime of expert knowledge, and becoming skeptical—if not outright disdainful—of different
voices. In this grand narrative, the central issues confronting American medicine by the late
twentieth century were administrative in scope: in particular, whether doctors would be able to
maintain their professional autonomy against incursions by corporate cost accountants. The

therapeutic authority of the mainstream apparently remained unchallenged, indeed monolithic. As
Starr himself puts it, by the end of the 1920s “[p]hysicians finally had medical practice pretty
much to themselves.”
1
Yet the apparent renaissance of alternative therapies in recent years should instead lead us to
consider that the central assumptions of this narrative are inadequate. No longer can we simply
assume a decades-long belief in the epistemological legitimacy of the medical model, to the
exclusion of therapeutic alternatives. Nor can we take for granted the marginality of non-
orthodox treatments as if their continued existence was for so many years merely a story of
vestigial curiosities, oddities to be pulled off the shelf and gawked at much like an exhibit from an
early natural history museum. These tenets now fail us, and our task no longer is to account for the
recent explosions of interest in CAM, but rather to explain unexpected continuities. Instead, only
a more complex rendering of American medical history in the twentieth century can shake off the
ahistorical surprise that accompanies so many accounts of alternative medicine’s “comeback.”
2
The Politics of Healing has two main goals. First, this collection seeks to document a number of
the ways that practitioners and laypeople conceptualized and practiced alternative medicine
throughout the twentieth century, including during the midcentury so-called golden age of
regular medicine. Examination of a range of therapies and medical ideologies—from homeopathy
through irregular treatments for polio to anti-vaccinationism— can demonstrate how alternative
healing remained vital over the decades of supposed disestablishment. This range suggests as
well how older treatments changed and new systems developed, challenging the notion that the
entire regime of alternatives was frozen in social and intellectual disrepute.
The second primary purpose of the volume is to emphasize that the survival of alternative
medicine was not merely a matter of individual choice or professional competition, but at its heart
was also a matter of politics. These essays therefore represent a purposeful step beyond the
traditional boundaries within the historical profession that have separated the study of medicine
and the study of the political realm. To be sure, part of this story is a simple matter of interest-
group rivalry, with mainstream medicine using the powers of state licensure to legitimate its
practice and criminalize irregulars. We need, though, to greatly expand our conception of the

political in medical matters. As many of the articles in The Politics of Healing show, alternative
therapeutic regimes often forged integral connections to oppositional political cultures. The
history of homeopathy, for example, is inextricably linked to the fate of feminism. Anti-
fluoridationism has intimate ties to anti-communism, but also to the movement for consumer rights.
The ferment of black nationalism nurtured Afrocentric healing methods. And we cannot separate
those who have opposed orthodox medicine over the past two decades either from radical social
movements spawned by the New Left or from conservative movements inspired by the growth of
evangelical Christianity. When ordinary people take to the streets or to the halls of Congress, they
take their bodies—and complex accompanying reflections on healing—with them.
3
Some rough and basic numbers that place the last decade in historical context should be enough
to establish the chronological fluidity of twentieth-century alternative medicine. The work of
Harvard Medical School researcher David Eisenberg and his associates has become commonplace
both in the popular media and in the scholarly literature. An initial study in the New England
Journal of Medicine jolted the medical profession to attention by reporting that a full one-third of
adult Americans used at least one alternative therapy in 1990. Eisenberg and his colleagues found
that “the estimated number of visits made in 1990 to providers of unconventional therapy was
greater than the number of total visits to primary care medical doctors nationwide, and the
amount spent out of pocket on unconventional therapy was comparable to the amount spent out
of pocket by Americans for all hospitalizations.” A follow-up study was even more dramatic,
providing evidence of a substantial increase in the number of Americans using alternative healing
methods and visiting non-allopathic practitioners between 1990 and 1997. By the latter date, an
2 ROBERT D.JOHNSTON
estimated half of all those age thirty-five to forty-nine used at least one of a host of methods
ranging from acupuncture to therapeutic touch to biofeedback.
4
Yet the absence of historical analysis in these studies—partly the result of a lack of data, but
even more the consequence of a simple inattention to the past—produced a much greater sense of
novelty than warranted. Take a look at roughly analogous studies from the age when orthodox
medicine had supposedly carried all before it. The most authoritative survey comes from 1932,

when social scientist Louis Reed conducted a study of “sectarian” medical practices for the
Establishment-oriented Committee on the Costs of Medical Care. Reed’s The Healing Cults
reported findings of broadly similar import to those of Eisenberg. Reed warned of the 36,000
nonmedical healers amid 142,000 “trained and licensed physicians.” These irregulars received
$125 million annually for their services.
5
To be sure, the first three decades of the century had witnessed a radical decline in the number
of homeopaths and “eclectic” healers. Still, according to Reed, the remarkable rise of osteopaths,
chiropractors, naturopaths, and Christian Scientists—not to mention astral healers and
practitioners of quartz therapy and Jewish Science—more than made up for the disappearance of
older forms of alternative healing. In many western states, nonorthodox healers rivaled the
number of regular physicians. Yet alternative medicine was by no means a product of the isolated
frontier. Reed also duly noted an Illinois Medical Society-sponsored investigation of six thousand
Chicagoans. A full 87 percent of respondents had at some point in their lives “dabbled in [a] cult,”
with wealthier residents more likely to use “doubtful healing practices” than less prosperous
immigrants. Windy City citizens resented physicians’ perceived “graft,” lack of responsiveness to
questions, “set[ting] themselves up as wiser and less fallible than other people,” and ignorance of
and intolerance toward alternative healing methods. No wonder that different establishment
medical figures during the 1920s commented that—in the words of the president of the American
Public Health Association—“there has never been a time when the people had less confidence” in
doctors, worried about the public’s “wholesale desertion of the medical profession,” and
despaired because “it is generally conceded that the medical profession is losing its grip upon the
people.” George Vincent, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, even warned that without
proper vigilance, “the medical profession in this country will be swamped by the cults and
societies ranged against it.”
6
Perhaps we will discover, as we continue much-needed investigations on a much-neglected
topic, that the more things changed in the twentieth century, the more they stayed substantially
the same.
Arguably the most powerful symbol of the recent coming of age of alternative medicine in the

United States was the establishment of the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM) within the
National Institutes of Health. The two legislators with the greatest responsibility for the growth of
this office, and for the overall nurturing of alternative medicine within the vast medical-
governmental complex, have been Senators Tom Harkin and Orrin Hatch. Such a seemingly
strange pairing—an extremely liberal agricultural rebel from Iowa and an extremely conservative
Mormon free-enterpriser from Utah—should, in turn, help provide us with crucial insight into the
complex politics of healing in America.
7
This leftist and rightist team remains unapologetic in its advocacy of unconventional medicine.
Because of the relief that it has provided for his allergies, Harkin is a fervent promoter of bee
pollen, and he credits acupuncture with making his terminally ill brother more comfortable.
Hatch is a strong supporter of chiropractors, and even more of the dietary supplement industry.
INTRODUCTION 3
In 1994 the two senators pushed through Congress the Dietary Supplement and Health Education
Act, which helped keep the regulatory hands of the Food and Drug Administration off
supplement makers. Harkin and Hatch then successfully sought the upgrade of the OAM into a
wealthier and more powerful “center”; in 1998 it became the National Center for Complementary
and Alternative Medicine. The dynamic duo combined again in 2000 to lobby for the creation of a
White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Once again, their efforts
were crowned with victory.
8
Why are such ideological non-bedfellows working so closely, and so well, together? Sociologist
Michael Goldstein provides an elegant answer that clarifies the distinctive politics of alternative
healing in America. As he argues, a
potentially pivotal characteristic of alternative medicine is that it draws on ideologies
associated with both the political “right” and “left” thereby transcending common political
categories. Many of its basic criticisms of mainstream medicine emerge from a left
perspective that opposes the dominance of professionals as well as excess profit-making in
medicine. Alternative medicine also encompasses a strong countercultural component
whose roots are on the left. Yet, the strong focus on enhanced individual responsibility for

health, along with an emphasis on nongovernmental solutions to health problems, often
gives alternative medicine a distinctly rightward cast.
In other words, Harkin and Hatch are by no means loners or eccentrics who literally got a bee in
their bonnet and decided to run with their own crankish agenda. Rather, they are expressing a
basic pattern in modern American civic life, one that moves “beyond left and right” and expresses
a powerful politics of the body that we need to grapple with and not simply dismiss.
9
Another pair of curious companions further reveals the promise of moving beyond left and
right as we seek to understand the complex political roots of alternative medicine: Phyllis Schlafly
and Michael Lerner. Schlafly has been one of the most powerful women in postwar American
politics. Most of her efforts have been directed not within the realm of the politics of healing, but
rather at forging a modern and militant conservatism. One of the most important of Barry
Goldwater’s publicists, breaking onto the national scene with the 1964 publication of A Choice Not
an Echo, this Catholic housewife and activist became even more famous when she—more than any
other single individual—helped to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment. Schlafly then went on to
found the Eagle Forum, a right-wing grassroots women’s organization that fights against cultural
and political liberalism and for American military strength.
10

Yet Schlafly has in recent years also come into her own as a crusader against the medical
establishment. For example, Schlafly rails against Ritalin, seeing this medicine not as a benign aid
helping children with attention deficit disorder to live more normal lives. Rather, Ritalin is, to
Schlafly, a government-mandated drug that is overprescribed and that is leading many children
toward drug addiction. Schlafly is even more opposed to compulsory vaccination. She views
mandated immunizations as the hand of a Big Brother government, reaching into the lives of
citizens who should be able to decide for themselves how to treat themselves and their families.
Schlafly indicts what she sees as the poor science behind vaccination testing, and she accuses
government regulators of conflicts of interest because of their relationship with vaccine
manufacturers. Both Schlafly’s Web page and that of her son Roger contain many links to
4 ROBERT D.JOHNSTON

organizations resisting compulsory vaccination, and hers also includes a section titled “How to
Legally Avoid School Immunizations.”
11
In terms of mixing oppositional politics and nonconventional medical perspectives, Phyllis
Schlafly has an avid counterpart on the left side of the political spectrum. Again, Michael Lerner’s
politics primarily revolve around nonmedical issues. Lerner is arguably the most prominent left-
wing Jewish intellectual in the United States. Or, rather, he is the most identifiably Jewish of left-
wing intellectuals, seeking to integrate a renewed brand of Jewish spirituality with progressive
politics. Since 1986 editor of Tikkun magazine, Lerner has been at the center of debates about how
to honor Palestinian rights while working for a secure Israel, and also (through a highly
publicized partnership with Cornel West) how to help reconcile African Americans and Jews.
Lerner’s primary season in the sun, though, came when First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton
adopted his phrase “the politics of meaning” to suggest the need to bring a greater concern for
ethical issues into the public realm. Conservative commentators such as Rush Limbaugh attacked
Lerner as Hillary’s dangerous left-wing guru, and the Clintons soon distanced themselves from
the radical rabbi.
12
In invoking a “politics of meaning,” Lerner actually went far beyond Clinton. Lerner sought
something that might, on the surface, please Schlafly and Hatch: a “politics in the image of God”
that would recognize “our connection to a higher ethical and spiritual purpose that gives meaning
to our lives.” Lerner decried fundamental leftist materialist assumptions that focused only on
bringing more prosperity to more people. Instead, using feminism as a model for bringing
together the public and private dimensions of politics, Lerner emphasized the need to make all
areas of life meaningful, in order to satisfy the “hunger to serve the common good” that he found
among “middle Americans.” Lerner sought above all to make everyday work more purposeful by
challenging the economic and political power of corporations, by providing employees with a
much greater voice in the workplace, and by reducing the workweek to thirty hours—all thereby
allowing ordinary citizens to escape “a world governed by a money-oriented ethos” and
presenting the possibility of a renewed “alliance between middle-income people and the poor.”
13

Yet Lerner also made a new orientation toward medicine an integral part of his larger political
message. At a time when a great variety of schemes for socializing the cost of medicine were in the
air, Lerner insisted that the kind of care available was just as important as its availability.
Proclaming that “[t]hroughout history, much human sickness has been produced by the
disruption of the spiritual and ethical ecology of the universe,” Lerner railed against the
“mechanistic and materialistic principles” of modern medicine. Seeking to reunite mind and body
in the service of healing people—not just fighting particular diseases—Lerner called for a
dramatic overhaul of medical education. “Practicums for medical professionals,” he announced,
“should focus as much on how to develop one’s own inner spirituality and healing capacities as
on how to master various medical techniques.” Lerner proposed that hospitals hold “a daily
gathering of the healers to take some time for meditation, and for ritual recommitment to the
patients’ health and to the nobility of the healing enterprise.”
14
There surely are countless different paths into the politics of alternative medicine other than
through the specific ideas of Tom Harkin or Orrin Hatch, Phyllis Schlafly or Michael Lerner.
Continued exploration of the strong feminist strains within the historical tradition of North
American alternative medicine would, for example, certainly prove valuable. So would a focus on
populism as a mode of political thinking and action that challenges elites of all kinds. Yet the
examples of Harkin, Hatch, Schlafly, and Lerner—all powerful political figures even though they
INTRODUCTION 5
inhabit the margins of the political mainstream—should begin to suggest the critical significance
of the politics of healing to the general politics of democracy.
15
The Politics of Healing contains five parts. The first, “Precursors: The Years in the Wilderness,”
explores, for the most part, the decades before World War II. These were the years when
established medicine was supposedly taking all before it, the years when the tremendous ferment
of the nineteenth-century alternative medicine world sickened and died. Yet as Nadav
Davidovitch, Anne Kirschmann, Barbara Clow, and Michael Ackerman compellingly
demonstrate, alternative medicine survived this mean era, laying an impressive foundation for
those who would take up its legacy later in the century. But alternatives did not just survive; they

often thrived. Davidovitch and Kirschmann, for example, explore the ways that homeopathy—
supposedly the classic case of the co-optation of nineteenth-century heterodox medicine—
continued to provide many occasions for dissent across the twentieth century. Ackerman, in turn,
reveals how our current celebration of whole foods has roots more than a half century deep. And
Clow shows that those who opposed established medicine had deep popular support and
significant political power. These essays, in particular, will dramatically reshape the chronology
of North American alternative medicine.
In the second section, “Intersections: Allopathic Medicine Meets Alternative Medicine,” Otniel
Dror and Wade Davies make it clear that we can draw no effective intellectual, cultural, or
political dividing lines between orthodox and heterodox medicine. Whether on the Navajo
reservation or in the august halls of Harvard University, both laypeople and intellectuals wrestled
with the relationship between the visible and the invisible, the “Western” and the “non-Western.”
In the process, they created legacies that speak forcefully to the ways we might think about race
and power, as well as the ways we might think about the relationship between the body and the
mind.
“Contesting the Cold War Medical Monopoly” is the book’s third section. Here politics, in the
more standard sense of politicians fighting it out in the halls of Congress or citizens fighting it out
in their local communities, becomes most evident. During the supposed postwar nadir of
alternative medicine, according to Naomi Rogers, Michelle Nickerson, and Gretchen Reilly, a
wide variety of activists struggled against the medical establishment over issues such as mental
health, polio, and fluoridation. Sister Elizabeth Kenny forged a remarkable popularity, as well as
significant political support, with her populist crusades against the polio establishment. Right-
wing California housewives deluged Congress with mail expressing their fears that liberal
psychiatrists and government officials would set up an American Siberia to silence political
opposition. Anti-fluoridationists won referendum after referendum in communities concerned
about a supposed poison in their water supply, but even more about a loss of their political
liberties. Scholars have written these battles off as the product of extremist cranks. But these Cold
War anti-establishment activists were much more powerful, and in fact considerably more rational,
than we have been led to believe.
The largest section of the volume, “Contemporary Practices/Contemporary Legacies,” places

the renaissance of alternative healing practices over the last three decades in full historical and
political perspective. The unity in the essays of Amy Sue Bix, Georgina Feldberg, Velana
Huntington, Sita Reddy, David Hess, Matthew Schneirov, and Jonathan Geczik comes from their
authors’ thorough embedding of alternative medical practices and ideologies within vigorous—
and generally oppositional—political and cultural movements. Feminism has effectively
institutionalized many alternative medical practices, as Bix shows for the national level and
6 ROBERT D.JOHNSTON
Feldberg for the local. In turn, changing political cultures of race have, according to Huntington
and Reddy, been crucial to the development of Orisha and Ayurveda healing practices. Finally,
Hess, Schneirov, and Geczik emphasize the ways that a democratic public culture influences
alternative healing practices, often in ways that break down traditional political divides.
Two concluding essays take us back through the twentieth century and up to the very present.
Populist crusades against compulsory mass vaccination have changed in fundamental ways,
Robert Johnston shows, even as they have retained many similarities to movements a century
ago. So-called anti-vaccinationists have, for instance, become much more favorably disposed
toward science, even to some extent accommodating themselves to vaccinations themselves. In
the process, those we can now call “vaccine safety advocates” have found a new, quite remarkable
legitimacy in the eyes of the media and political establishment. Whorton, in turn, supplies an
elegant synthesis of the coming of age of alternative medicine. Whorton, the most influential
historian of alternative medicine, shows that therapies such as osteopathy, chiropractic, and
naturopathy have become so successful that they have veered toward becoming mainstream
themselves. Indeed, one might conclude that in the coming decades it will become increasingly
difficult to distinguish any genuine alternatives within medicine, as the buzzword of the day
becomes “integrative.”
All of the authors in this volume are respectful toward their subjects; most are overtly
sympathetic to medical pluralism. Yet this does not mean that the scholars’ attitudes are by any
means predictable. For example, Michael Ackerman is skeptical of his food reformers, while Anne
Kirschmann clearly cheers for her homeopathy advocates. Sita Reddy finds substantial fault with
the tendency within the New Age Ayurveda community to use long-established Orientalist ideas
of an exotic and mystical “East” to further goals that are as much insular as communitarian, while

Robert Johnston celebrates anti-vaccinationists as populist democratic reformers. Amy Bix even
combines these viewpoints within the same essay. On one hand, Bix celebrates the many crucial
victories won by feminists opposed to orthodox medicine. Yet she also warns that an uncritical
embrace of alternative medicine could ultimately victimize as much as empower women.
In the end, regardless of their own perspectives, all the authors who have contributed to this
volume believe that the historical study of alternative medicine is crucial to understanding the
development not just of medicine but of democracy in our current age. They thus seek to provide
a contribution to public culture, as well as to scholarship. Therefore The Politics of Healing, while
designed primarily for a scholarly audience, should also be of considerable interest to healing
professionals and ordinary citizens alike. Each essay is accessible to both general and academic
audiences. For all, then, who are concerned with the development of the multiple choices
historically available to North Americans as they have tried to live the healthiest lives possible,
these pioneering essays could even help empower us—citizens and scholars alike—as we
ourselves engage in today’s politics of healing.
INTRODUCTION 7
PRECURSORS: THE YEARS IN THE WILDERNESS
NEGOTIATING DISSENT
Homeopathy and Anti-Vaccinationism at the Turn of the Twentieth
Century
Nadav Davidovitch
I
The hegemonic status of vaccinations in the world of medicine today is an impressive feat.
Vaccinations occupy a place of honor parallel to achievements such as antibiotics as well as
improvements in sanitation and water quality, considered as a leading cause of the drop in death
rates from contagious diseases and the rise in longevity that has been registered in the course of
the twentieth century.
1
Yet while vaccinations are considered a paradigm of success, at the same
time they have encountered fierce criticism and unparalleled opposition throughout the history of
medicine. In many places opposition to vaccination has reached the scope of civil insurrection,

with closure of schools and places of employment. Massive political mobilization against these
medical interventions has also been common.
2
To this day, especially with the recent
reintroduction of immunization against smallpox, vaccination continues to be an issue steeped in
controversy.
3
The history of opposition to vaccination is protracted and can be traced back to Edward
Jenner’s publication in 1798 on the possibility of immunization against smallpox. Jenner’s
suggestions raised immediate and strong controversy both in the medical community and among
the public at large.
4
Still, one cannot regard opposition to vaccination as a uniform phenomenon.
Vaccinations themselves have undergone many changes, both in manufacturing techniques and in
the social and legal context of their administration. The character of opposition has varied over
the years and from country to country. Yet despite this, those opposed to vaccination have
generally been portrayed in monolithic terms as irrational groups, tied primarily to the radical
fringes of alternative medicine. Such a tendency is in fashion not only in current medical
publications, but also in writings within the realm of the history of medicine.
5
Yet as of late there
has finally been recognition of the great intellectual and civic potential embodied in historical
research on opposition to vaccinations, as well as in the ability of this issue to serve as a vehicle
for gaining a better understanding of the politics of the body and of the relations among health,
culture, and society.
6
This article focuses on the discourse of vaccinations at the turn of the twentieth century, a
period when public health officials deepened their influence in the medical world and in daily life.
My discussion does not focus on the “regular” perspective of conventional medicine; rather, it
seeks to examine the attitude toward vaccination of one of the medical establishment’s chief

alternatives, homeopathy. Homeopaths, who constituted an important and powerful force in the
medical world of the nineteenth-century United States, had to grapple—as did conventional
doctors—with significant changes in matters of health and society in their attempts to establish
their professional status and define their professional identity. Homeopaths vigorously discussed
the place of vaccination in their practices, along with the more general question of the proper
social role of public health.
Too often, though, scholars have treated homeopaths in monolithic terms, assuming a clear and
intimate connection between unconventional medicine and opposition to vaccination.
7
A closer
look, however, demonstrates that there was no uniform homeopathic “voice” in the question of
vaccinations, just as there was not a clear uniform voice in conventional medicine. The closing
years of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth century were a period in which the
worlds of medicine and public health as we know them today were still in their formative stages.
In this era’s medical world, the laboratory and its products did indeed gain considerable stature.
As scholars have shown, however, this was a complex process, and we still know far too little
about the contests that were at the very center of the process by which regular medicine gained its
dominance in twentieth-century America. By putting our focus on homeopaths, we can begin to
see modern medicine as having a plurality of perspectives and being a place where the boundary
between alternative and orthodox becomes much more difficult to establish.
8
The debates among homeopaths over vaccination were important not only in the realm of
medicine and its history. They speak to questions of democracy that we continue to grapple with.
How, for example, should the state intervene in the lives of its citizens? How can it inculcate
practices that it deems to be for the greater public good? Indeed, how can a government claim
custodianship over the bodies of its citizens in the first place? Homeopaths during the early
twentieth century provided responses to these difficult issues that went far beyond the standard
caricature of them as irrational and deluded. Analyzing their reaction to the rising power of
vaccination and public health can inform our understanding of the proper role of a democratic
citizenry in the formulation of public health policy.

II
What is vaccination? It is the introduction of the crude morbific products of disease
into the tissue of the healthy organism.
9
This all absorbing topic of vaccine, toxin, and serum therapy to my mind is a version
of Hahnemann’s “psora” and “vital force” theories. It is all summed up in one word:
“immunity.”
10
These comments on vaccination, read by homeopaths during discussion of vaccination in
homeopathic societies, exemplify the wide spectrum of opinions expressed by homeopathic
practitioners. Most historical analyses of the resistance to vaccination tend to characterize
alternative healers indiscriminately as anti-vaccinationists.
11
Indeed, a significant number of
members in anti-vaccination movements were alternative practitioners—including homeopaths.
However, a deeper look at homeopathic discussions on the issue of vaccinations reveals a more
complex picture—both in terms of differences of opinion regarding the nature of the practice, and
in terms of different ways of positioning vaccination in the wider context of the rise of the
laboratory.
10 NADAV DAVIDOVITCH
As Eberhard Wolff has demonstrated, homeopathic treatment of the vaccination issue has always
varied. Attitudes among homeopaths toward vaccination ranged from enthusiastic embrace to
total rejection. Some homeopaths viewed vaccination as proof of the homeopathic law of similars.
Others accepted vaccination as an effective treatment irrespective of homeopathic principles. Only
a minority of homeopathic physicians totally rejected the principle of vaccination, not only
because they viewed vaccination as a medical procedure opposed to homeopathic principles, but
also because it was considered a dangerous practice involving serious side effects.
12
Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, in fact regarded vaccination in a positive
light. In the first four editions of the Organon, the homeopathic bible, he viewed the procedure as,

in essence, a homeopathic treatment since it is based on the principle of administering a remedy
similar to the disease, which can then intervene in physical processes. In a letter to Dr. Schreeter
of Lemberg on December 19, 1831, Hahnemann wrote: “In order to provide the dear little Patty
with the protective cow pox, the safest plan would certainly be to obtain the lymph direct from
the cow; but if this cannot be done… I would advice you to inoculate another child with the
protective pox, and as soon as slight redness of the punctures shows it has taken, I would
immediately for two successive days give Sulphur l-30, and inoculate your child from the pock that
it produced.”
13
Dr. Schreeter, in a note to this letter, commented that he found this advice “to be
true and acted upon it in vaccination with good results.”
14
Yet not all homeopaths agreed. Even
while Hahnemann was still alive, several of his followers in Europe came out against the use of
vaccinations.
During the first decades of homeopathy in the United States, there was almost no public
mention of vaccination among homeopaths. In 1880, only after several British antivaccinationists
directly questioned Constantine Hering, one of the most outstanding homeopaths in the United
States, did Hering published a letter on the issue of vaccination. Hering did not believe in
vaccination and considered it detrimental mainly because of its debilitating influence on
otherwise healthy children. Yet he did not work publicly to oppose the procedure, and in a later
edition of his widely published self-help book Homeopathic Domestic Physician he regarded it as the
“lesser of two evils.”
15
Some homeopaths did not want to raise an unneeded controversy with the
“regular” profession. As D.H. Beckwith commented:
I am sorry that any paper should have been read or any idea should have been introduced
into this institute unfavorable to vaccination. It will bring odium on the homeopathic
profession at large. All kinds of things will get into the newspapers. It will be bruited abroad
that the members of the American Institute of Homeopathy are opposed to vaccination.

16
Indeed, since vaccination was founded on using cowpox to prevent a similar disease— smallpox—
many homeopaths praised vaccinations, regarding them as confirmation of the homeopathic
maxim Simila similibus curentur (“Let like be cured by like”). Several texts written by homeopaths
on the history of vaccination compared the affliction and isolation suffered by Edward Jenner
with the affliction visited upon Samuel Hahnemann, the father of homeopathy.
17
Many
underscored that it surely was no coincidence that the date given to the “birth of vaccinations”—
1796—was the same year of the publication of the Organon. There were even some homeopaths
who went so far as to turn Pasteur into a homeopath after his discovery of the vaccinations against
anthrax and rabies: “In truth, if Pasteur is a physician, he should be elected to membership of the
American Institute of Homeopathy for the patient but brilliant, unconscious confirmation of the
NEGOTIATING DISSENT 11
truth which Hahnemann promulgated.”
18
After Koch published his discovery of the use of
tuberculin to treat tuberculosis, he too entered the homeopathic shrine. Not only was tuberculin
made in keeping with the homeopathic principle of attenuation of the disease matter, Koch also
proved his virtue “by courageously proving the poison on himself,” as had Hahnemann, who was
purported to have initially tested his homeopathic treatments on himself.
19
A recurrent question in homeopathic discussion of vaccination was whether vaccination is a
homeopathic practice. In contrast to homeopathic remedies, vaccines contained material that did
not fulfill the basic principles of homeopathic thinking. They had not undergone “dilution” and,
especially, had not undergone the process of “proving” (being given to healthy people in order to
test what symptoms it produced). As a result, many homeopaths viewed vaccination as isopathic,
not homeopathic—meaning that it was an effective treatment, using disease matter to cure, but not
based on homeopathic principles. As a consequence, homeopaths developed what they called
“homeopathic vaccinations”—extracting a substance from a diseased tissue, preparing the

remedy by dilution and potentiating the material according to homeopathic methods, and then
administering it via the mouth. The attractiveness of this last practice was that homeopathic
principles were applied, and the procedure did not lead to blood poisoning—a major concern
among anti-vaccinationists. Some homeopaths were in fact so convinced of the success of their own
oral vaccinations that they issued certificated verifying vaccination, should they be required for a
child’s entry to school.
20
In contrast to orthodox medical writing, even pro-vaccination homeopaths were well aware of
the side effects of vaccination. A perusal of homeopathic domestic health manuals shows that the
side effects of the smallpox vaccination were known and were generally allocated a chapter
entitled “Vaccinosis.” One homeopathic author, favorable to vaccination, wrote, “Vaccination…
has been sufficiently tested…to demonstrate, beyond all reasonable question, its efficacy in
altogether modifying the course and severity of smallpox in those who contract that disease, and
in acting as a distinct preventive against it.” Yet he admitted, “Vaccination unquestionably, in
some constitutions, has the effect of rousing dormant dyscrasia; and, as a result, we have skin
disease, and sometimes, but very rarely, some scrofulous affection, the fault being not in
vaccination, which, after all, has only anticipated what the course of years would unfailingly have
developed.”
21
Others, while still recommending the practice of vaccination, tried to keep their objectivity. The
widely circulated book Vaccinosis and Its Cure by Thuja, with Remarks on Homæoprophylaxis, by
J.Compton Burnett, starts with the following clarification: “Fear not, critical reader, this is not an
anti-vaccination treatise, for the writer is himself in the habit of vaccinating his patients.”
22
Indeed,
Thuja Occidentalis, a homeopathic remedy, is still recommended today to counteract the side
effects of vaccinations.
23
James Tyler Kent, the preeminent American homeopath and a known
anti-vaccinationist, considered Thuja as a “strong medicine when you have a trace of animal

poisoning in the history, as snake bite, small-pox and vaccination.”
24
Further evidence of openness in regard to the issue of vaccinations was the fact that at the turn
of the twentieth century, homeopaths often organized vigorous discussions on the subject of
vaccinations. Some of these forums were open well beyond the homeopathic community, so that
all sides of the debate could present their positions. In just one example, the Homeopathic Medical
County of Philadelphia organized a symposium on smallpox. In this forum a homeopath, a
regular physician—a medical inspector from the board of health—and a bacteriologist opposed to
vaccination, all were invited to speak.
25
This example of respectful engagement was quite rare in
12 NADAV DAVIDOVITCH
American medical discourse, where orthodoxy tried to erect clear boundaries between scientific
medicine and heresy. Homeopaths, however, could take advantage of their unique intermediary
position in the American medical scene at the time, especially in the big cities of the East Coast
such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. We should not overestimate the extent of these
interactions; after all, on both sides, many disapproved of the possibility of an open dialogue
between the old enemies. Yet an interaction did exist, giving a voice to several factions within
homeopathy in the broader American medical discourse through the vaccination debate.
26
But in my estimation, we must not examine the attitudes of homeopaths to vaccination as
simply an internal professional dispute. In order to better understand the reaction to vaccinations
at the beginning of the twentieth century, one must first understand the changes—both in terms
of medical praxis and discourse—that vaccinations had undergone over the previous century.
Until the last third of the 1800s, the smallpox vaccine was the only vaccine in existence.
27
Controversy accompanied the introduction of smallpox vaccinations in various countries. Not all
physicians or laypeople approved of the idea of infecting a healthy person with purulent material
from a cow. The theoretical foundations behind vaccination were not yet clear, and it would be
decades before the germ theory would substantiate the “biological foundations” of vaccination in

general.
28
The techniques for manufacturing vaccinations against smallpox did, however, undergo
a number of changes during the nineteenth century. Up until then, vaccines were usually
“produced” from the arm of an immunized person. Poor levels of sterilization only contributed to
side effects, which included tetanus, syphilis, and scrofula.
29
Also, the procedure of vaccination
itself was considered as an operation, with various instruments, from scalpels to needles, causing
substantial scarification.
With the advent of the germ theory in the 1870s and 1880s, vaccination against smallpox ceased
to be the sole subject of immunization, and the context of the debate subsequently changed. The
scope of vaccinations enlarged not only to encompass a growing list of bacteria, but also to cover a
larger territory of action. Vaccines entered the clinical and preventive medicine realm and also
became a hot topic of discussion among public health officers, politicians, and legislators. During
this period, in the framework of the bacteriological revolution, researchers such as Pasteur and
Koch developed several new vaccines. However, these were not “random” vaccines discovered
empirically; they were laboratory-created vaccines based on the germ theory. Vaccines therefore
became one of the most significant links between the laboratory and medical practice, part of the
paradigm that perceived the world of the laboratory, animal research, and the treatment clinic as
a continuum.
30
Vaccines did not, however, remain solely within the inner domain of the medical
world. Together with the germ theory, they gradually entered the public sphere. Moreover, they
were integrated into popular culture through far-reaching practical implications for everyday life.
One of the new vaccines that dramatically captured public attention was the rabies vaccine. In
1886, for instance, American newspapers reported on several children who had been bitten by rabid
dogs and were then sent to France in order to receive the brand-new “miracle cure” against rabies
from Pasteur. As historian Bert Hansen has noted, the impact of the extensive publicity the event
received went beyond the humanitarian angle, for the newspapers “were also elaborating a story

of medical discovery as something useful and exciting to ordinary people. In the process, they
were cultivating a sensation about medicine’s being newly powerful, about scientific knowledge
that makes a difference in a public arena beyond the walls of the medical school and the
laboratory.”
31
Even John Sutherland, dean of the homeopathic Boston University School of
Medicine, wrote on the subject of vaccination in 1901: “Such has been the influence of newspapers
NEGOTIATING DISSENT 13
and literary-magazine articles on the mind of the laity, that now in the majority of cases a
physician is looked upon as culpable by the friends and relatives of the patient if he fails to use
‘anti-toxin’ as soon as the diagnosis of ‘diphtheria’ is made.”
32
But during the latter half of the nineteenth century, particularly when attempts were made to
make vaccination compulsory and as specific vaccines multiplied, opposition to vaccination
gained momentum.
33
A number of anti-vaccination associations mobilized, primarily to fight
against the increasingly compulsory nature of vaccination. In 1855, Massachusetts became the
first state to enact a law obliging vaccination for every child entering public school. Parents who
failed to comply risked a fine or even imprisonment. Other states quickly followed suit. This
encroachment of the state into the private domain inspired substantial opposition, as many
citizens considered vaccination a harmful intrusion into the body. Opponents described
vaccinations as “blood poisoning” and “morbific materials from animal sources.”
34
Frequently,
the anti-vaccinationists compared vaccinations to bloodletting. Just as bloodletting had earlier
served as a potent symbol of the brutal qualities of allopathic medicine, so vaccination now became
a barbaric and anachronistic manifestation of the “insanity” of established medicine.
35
The lancet

—the very symbol of the bloodletting doctor—became also the symbol of the vaccinating doctor,
only this time the physician was penetrating the body of healthy individuals, under the power of
the law.
III
As the nineteenth century came to an end, the vaccination issue became more and more
controversial within homeopathic circles. A group of homeopaths, mainly university-based, tried
to combine the ethos of the laboratory and homeopathic practice. They perceived vaccinations and
serum treatments as a golden opportunity to integrate homeopathy, as a respectable scientific
discipline, into the world of medicine. A group of homeopathic practitioners, mainly from the
Boston University School of Medicine, enthusiastically embraced the research paradigm of the
“allopathic” physician and bacteriologist Sir A.E. Wright. Wright, a well-known and respected
figure in the world of research and immunology at the beginning of the twentieth century,
promoted the theory of the opsonic index. According to Wright, the body secretes material in
coping with contagious diseases, and this reaction is measurable. Wright labeled the secretions
“opsonin,” and the quantitative index of opsonin was termed the “opsonic index.” The higher the
opsonic index, the better the body’s immune system is responding to the illness and the better the
patient’s chances of recovery.
36
Several homeopaths eagerly adopted the opsonin theory. Homeopathic researchers such as
W.H.Watters of Boston and Eldridge C.Price of Baltimore claimed that use of vaccines prepared
from secretions of a patient, and subsequently diluted, would raise the opsonic index of the
patient and thus the chances of recovery.
37
This method of preparation was presented as more
homeopathic than, and thus far superior to, the use of ready-made and less-diluted vaccine.
Examining the writings of these homeopaths, one can discern a clear desire to mobilize
vaccination as a platform to enhance the homeopathic image and even transform homeopathy
into a leading force in scientific medical research.
38
At the annual meeting of the American

Institute of Homeopathy in 1909, Dr. Frank L.Newton of Boston went so far as to introduce a
resolution stating that “to the homoeopathic school precedent belongs the credit for introducing
the serums, toxins and vaccines in the treatment of disease.”
39
This he claimed to be warranted by
14 NADAV DAVIDOVITCH
the fact that “the homoeopathic school was the first to do systematic work in the proving of drugs,
that the treatment of opsonins is based on the infinitesimal dosage, which is presented in the
principles of the similia.”
40
W.H.Watters, another Boston homeopath, went even further. In an
essay discussing “what is homœopathy?”—a burning question among homeopaths in the early
twentieth century—Watters made a clear relation between homeopathic practice, scientific
homeopathic research, vaccination, and immunology:
The question may now be asked…what is your idea of homoeopathy? It will be answered as
follows: Homœopathy is the term given to a distinct method of using medicinal agents, a
method that is based upon sound theories, and one that is yearly becoming more
demonstrable by exact science. It is perfectly consistent with known facts, and is probably
merely a way of expressing the means employed in reaching the goal of all medicine, the
production of immunity.
41
According to this view, the writings of Samuel Hanhemann on the issue of vital force and its
importance in healing processes could be translated scientifically into the languages of
immunology and antitoxins.
42
This homeopathic approach did not remain solely in the theoretical
realm. In the first decades of the twentieth century, homeopaths in institutions such as the
Massachusetts Homeopathic Hospital—a facility tied to the medical school of Boston University—
were using vaccines and serums as an integral part of their homeopathic treatment. They believed
that vaccination could not only prevent disease, but treat it as well. Reports indicated success

primarily in the use of immunization in the treatment of typhoid patients (Figure 1).
43
The
growing involvement of Boston University Homeopathic Medical School in vaccine research led
to the updating of its curriculum, probably conceived as a way to attract potential students: “In
view of the rapidly increasing use of bacterial products in the treatment of many diseases,
particularly those of an infectious nature, it seems wise to incorporate into the curriculum a
course of instruction in the preparation of vaccines…antitoxins, to bacteriolysis and to haemolysis,
including the Wasserman reaction and complement fixation test.”
44
These homeopaths still viewed themselves as operating within the homeopathic profession, and
it remained important to them to conduct their dialogue in accordance with homeopathic
principles: “to find the homeopathic indications for the various serums and toxins in the
individual case.”
45
And above all, the medical care given to their patients, other than serum and
vaccines, consisted of homeopathic remedies. These principles, according to this view, kept the
agenda as homeopathic in character. Another “proof” of their homeopathic loyalty was their
criticism of high dosages of vaccine and drug companies that combined vaccines, reminiscent of
the basic homeopathic criticism Hahnemann had voiced: that medications needed to be highly
diluted and materials should not be mixed.
But beyond treatment with “homeopathic” vaccines, homeopaths were also attracted to vaccines
by the opportunity they presented to steer their field into the research path of laboratory-based
scientific medicine. For these homeopaths the immunological and bacteriological paradigm
provided fertile grounds for homeopathic research. This group of mainly university-based
homeopaths frequently emphasized its desire to be distinguished from currents within
homeopathy and other “irregular” medical practices that they perceived as too extreme,
unscientific, and prone to employing overly vociferous rhetoric in their criticism of “organized”
medicine. They even believed that collaboration with various parties opposed to “regular”
NEGOTIATING DISSENT 15

medicine could harm homeopaths.
46
In a typical expression in the New England Medical Gazette, a
homeopathic journal representing mainly the Boston University Homeopathic Medical School, the
editor in 1917 referred to an anti-vaccinationist article published in the Homœopathic Recorder.
An interesting, though painful example of the anti-scientific attitude so frequently
encountered in some homoeopathic periodicals, especially, we regret to say, in the
Recorder… After delivering himself of this bit of Galenic dogmatism, the author bursts into
diatribe against all such “foul mixtures” as sera and vaccins [sic] as the causes of
innumerable ills (cancer and trachoma inter alia) and the cure of none. When our writers can
produce case-reports worthy of respect instead of indulging in recriminations and ex
cathedra statements, we may reasonably look for a modicum of respect from our
alkœopathic brethren, but not one moment before.
47
As can be seen, these homeopaths wanted to remain very cautious, preserving the fine balance
between them and conventional doctors. They wanted to operate within the realm of homeopathy,
yet be ready to explore new scientific theories and incorporate them into homeopathy. Several
homeopaths were even part of campaigns to promote vaccination.
48
FIGURE 1. From The New England Medical Gazette, 1917.

16 NADAV DAVIDOVITCH
In turn, other “sectarians” strongly condemned the homeopathic interest in vaccination as
illegitimately “courting the favor” of conventional doctors. The idea of homeopathic vaccinations,
or the trials to integrate serum and vaccine treatments into homeopathic practice, did not impress
them: “The homeopathic school has rather straddled the question and wavers between internal
vaccination and the real thing—the latter so not to offend their bigger brethren of the drug
faith.”
49
Naturally, this approach carried its own price, as the tensions within the homeopathic

community escalated as a result of the conflict over vaccination. The price was also social: the
voice of homeopathy as an alternative approach, partner to social reforms in matters such as
women’s status, abolitionism, and freedom of expression, characteristic of the “homeopathic
voice” in the mid-nineteenth century, became progressively weaker.
50
The involvement of
homeopathy in boards of health or in health legislation, together with conventional physicians,
took away much of the radicalism and “alternative” fervor of homeopathy’s earlier days. As
Naomi Rogers argued, by the end of the nineteenth century “public debates by homeopaths about
links between medical and political liberty largely disappeared as neither medical conservatives
nor liberals found them a potent symbol in professional debates.”
51
The integration of scientific
ideology into homeopathic practice, by the promoters of the “new homeopathy,” meant that
homeopathy should be progressive not so much in the social realm but in its belief in the progress
of science.
IV
Indeed, during this period homeopathy produced many vigorous voices that viewed the
homeopathic embrace of vaccines as dangerous, leading to the assimilation and destruction of the
homeopathic profession. Despite the fact that a significant number of homeopaths supported
vaccinations, either enthusiastically or with only slight reservations, a number of homeopaths
remained prominent in anti-vaccination associations. Their opposition to vaccinations flowed
from sources similar to those that caused the resistance of other anti-vaccinationists: vaccinations
did not protect; they caused various diseases, from syphilis to cancer; and they poisoned the
blood of the people with animal pollutants. They also argued that vaccinations had not
undergone basic homeopathic processes such as “dilution” and “dinamization.” Anti-vaccination
homeopaths were especially concerned about the administration of vaccinations by injection into
the body. In their view, homeopathic vaccination—using diluted disease matter given by mouth—
was the only worth-while vaccination that complied with genuine homeopathic principles. As
Stuart Close wrote concerning one of the homeopathic vaccinations:

In a case requiring the administration of Psorinum…shall we use the original crude pus from
the sore of a diseased negro, introducing it directly into the circulation, or shall we use a
high potency… What havoc should we produce if we used Psorinum, Medorrhinum,
Syphilinum…or any other poisonous drug in the same manner as Vaccininum is used! What
wrecked lives; what suffering and death; what outraged feelings; what suits for
malpractice.
52
Beside the clear-cut racism evoked in this piece, not uncommon in both regular and homeopathic
American medical circles at the turn of the twentieth century, Close called for a return to original
NEGOTIATING DISSENT 17