This book review is reprinted with the permission of the National Center for Homeopathy
The Faces of Homeopathy: An Illustrated
History of the First 200 Years
by Julian Winston
Great Auk Publishing, Tawa, New Zealand
Hardback, 634 pages, with index, bibliography
Reviewed by Richard Moskowitz, MD, DHt
In all fairness, it is politically incorrect for me to review this book, since I myself am a character in it, a friend of the author, and a recipient of an autographed copy for my pains. I decided to risk it, since my rivals for the job would have been similarly compromised, and I probably could have wangled a free copy in any case. Besides, what could be wrong with simply admitting that I love the book and will do my best to explain why you should do the same? As my mother often says, what's not to like?
The book is, in essence, the hard copy and definitive version of the slide shows and videos with which Julian has been educating and regaling audiences around the world for many years already. Handsomely bound and printed on glossy paper, with a wealth of magnificent photographs and illustrations, many in the author's own hand, it covers much the same ground and displays the same inimitable flavor and style of the man himself. Beneath a photo of Carroll Dunham, for example, we find this entry from the author's journal, dated February 13,1996, imbued with that special, personal touch for which he is perhaps best known:
I had a dream that I found Dunham's phone number I called, and it rang. Someone picked up and said, "Dunham here." I said, "I've read your works, and was wondering if you'd speculate on the future of homeopathy." There was a long pause. He said something about the new energy of electricity that holds all the secrets-that homeopathy is just a passing phase, and that electrical therapy will replace it within 50 years. Then I thought, "How can I be calling Dunham? They didn't have phones in l860!" And I awoke.
What I found most striking about the book, embodying precisely the odd mix of qualities that our art itself calls for, is its ravenous hunger for all things homeopathic, on the one hand, coupled with a gourmet's refined taste for the curious fact, the colorful anecdote, the ranting opinion, or the obsessive calligraphy on the other. As with inveterate collectors of all types, casual browsers who wander in off the street may often feel a bit of a time warp, as if finding themselves in an old attic stuffed with curios and tidbits, many seemingly of dubious value in themselves.
Thus, even a dyed-in-the-wool aficionado might not need or care to know that Dr. Gram, the first American homeopath, was a Freemason as well as a Swedenborgian; or that Hempel fathered illegitimate twins who were later found dead in his home under circumstances that suggested Aconite poisoning; or that Tullio Verdi came to America with Garibaldi's help, and treated William Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State, and other Republican politicians and socialites at a time when the G.O.P. stood for radical social change. Yet, speaking purely for myself, I treasured these little sidebars and footnotes more than almost anything else in the book, because they helped me to relate the lives of real people to the general and social history of their times.
Like the video, the book is entitled Faces of Homeopathy, and focuses on people and what they did, wrote, and said, rather than on the broad cultural themes that underlie them, or on such elaborate intellectual explanations as an academic historian might seek. This human and personal approach permits Julian to ramble freely over the subject in his own way and at a more leisurely pace than would be suitable in a formal text. How else could we discover that H.N. Guernsey, the homeopathic obstetrician who railed against vaginal examinations in his profession, also wrote for laypeople, in part to warn parents against exposing their kids to sexual arousal, e.g, by allowing them to lie prone for a long time, or slide down banisters, go too long with a full bladder or rectum, lie in bed awake at night, or do a sleep-over in the same room or bed with their friends?
On the other hand, this informal and highly readable style makes it easy to forget that Julian is also a trained and dedicated scholar, and has contributed an impressive body of documentation to future generations in the form of notes, bibliography, and appendices, compressing a long story and a vast literature into manageable form by a prodigious labor of love that has occupied him for the past fifteen years. Thus in seemingly artless fashion, a good many of the larger historical themes do in fact emerge and come to life, and the result is a truly superb history of the movement that I have every reason to believe will stand the test of time.
This is particularly true of the modern period, where the standard histories of King and Coulter leave off, and about which the dismissive and disdainful attempts of Martin Kaufman in later years have proved sketchy and inaccurate at best. It is a joy to have in hand at last an account of the subject that brings us up to date and does justice to shared and individual experiences alike. I am personally grateful to him for taking the time and trouble to give a fair and balanced account of the events leading up to the breakaway of the National Center from the American Foundation in 1981, a momentous turning point in our history, which with considerable understatement he dubs "The Great Unpleasantness." To fill in the gaps in the written record, he has interviewed the players on all sides.
Both a chronological history and an attic full of memorabilia, The Faces of Homeopathy will appeal to two distinct if overlapping audiences, and deserves to be read in two similarly complementary ways. First, as an absorbing story well told, it will reward the serious student or general reader who is prepared to start from the beginning, to proceed in order, and so catch the sweep of the movement as a whole. In addition, as a repository of lore both important and trivial, it will make a perfect gift book for the coffee table of our cured or at least grateful patients, friends, and sympathizers who are drawn to or interested in the subject but lack the patience or motivation to wade all the way through it.
Once again, I cannot resist pointing out a few of the choice bits that caught my eye and gave me food for thought. Early on he speaks of Dr. Pulte's success in treating cholera victims in 1849, a story that has been repeated many times over in connection with other epidemics and for other diseases. I have always wondered why historians have yet to document and validate these great victories of the method, as they must surely have been recounted in the leading newspapers of the time.
Elsewhere we read of the doctrinal struggle between the International Hahnemannian Association purists like Lippe and the "mongrels" then dominant in the American Institute of Homeopathy, and of Dunham's heroic efforts to make peace between them, the failure of which evidently hastened the great man's death. Most well-versed students of the method already know or should know that these internecine disputes began with Hahnemann himself and continue unabated today.
There is a wonderful account of a Fincke potency made in 1882, labeled Belladonna MM, which found its way to Dave Wember 100 years later in the still more attenuated form of a "dry graft," yet still cured his patient in a single dose. I love to tell stories like these to my patients to elicit their skepticism, and always feel a little uneasy with those who can swallow the Law of Similars and the infinitesimal dose hook, line, and sinker, as if they haven't really felt their bite. Another in the same vein was the seemingly terminal patient of Dr. Stuart Close who revived in a few minutes with a dose of Arsenicum 45M Fincke and lived in good health for 20 years after that. I could go on, of course, but you can read all about it yourself at your leisure.
Elsewhere you will also find superb diatribes by Royal Hayes on the impending demise of homeopathy, which he witnessed but refused to be a party to, and by Rudolph Rabe on the unwisdom of currying favor with the orthodox school, a temptation no less prevalent today. There are discussions of the Swedenborgian faith, which Kent, Farrington, and many other leading American homeopaths embraced, and of what I would call "experimental homeopathy" (radionics, Abrams machines, etc.) and of the work of other pioneers who were stimulated by homeopathy but later deviated from it, like Edward Bach and Rudolph Steiner. Whatever your taste, there will be plenty here to feast upon. Practitioners especially may relish and be troubled by Vithoulkas' attacks on Sankaran, which sound suspiciously like the "illuminist" criticisms once leveled by the likes of Eizayaga, Kunzli, et al., against Vithoulkas himself not so many years ago. What goes around comes around.
Since it is part of a reviewer's job to detect faults and inadequacies, and I was especially anxious to be scrupulous in this respect, I read the book carefully with blue pencil in hand, but found amazingly little of a substantive nature that the author overlooked, or that would detract from the reader's enjoyment. Partisans of this or that faction or point of view can always object that their position or champion was misrepresented or given short shrift. Except for a good deal on homeopathy in Great Britain, for example, the author freely admits to having little to say about its development outside the English-speaking world, and what he does say is relegated to an appendix. As with any other book of this size and scope, a few typos and misstatements of fact will inevitably be found.
But Julian never claims or pretends to offer more or less than his own unique, personal selection, his own guided tour through the two hundred years of our history, with its main emphasis on the United States. I can say without hesitation that he is by far the most knowledgeable and reliable guide now writing in English, and that any friend of homeopathy will find a bounty of unexpected treasures herein for both edification and delight.
October 1999
Homeopathy Today