Potions, principles, and the power within: healing between science and spirit in nineteenth-century America.

Abstract

US-based homeopathic practitioners in the latter half of the nineteenth century made a case for the efficacy of homeopathic remedies by invoking the scientific nature of their therapeutic approach, while also employing notions of spiritual efficacy. This simultaneous use of religion and science helped highlight the body's proclivity to heal in slow and sustainable ways that could be activated with the help of homeopathic remedies. By making a claim to adherence to natural laws and the body's innate ability to heal, homeopaths demonstrated the structured and rational ways in which the body healed. However, over time, by engaging with the medical orthodoxy in strictly scientific terms, it gradually lost its emphasis on psychology and belief in the healing experience, which explains why it would be relegated to a subordinate position, as a fringe or a pseudoscience, by the twentieth century.