Homeopathy and the treatment of mental illness in the 19th century.

In the 19th century, when bleeding and purging were widely used in mainstream medicine, homeopathy was warmly embraced by some U.S. practitioners as a more humane alternative. Developed by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann, homeopathy sought to cure symptoms of disease by use of drugs that induced similar symptoms and restored the patient's "vital force." This paper describes the general principles of homeopathy and recounts specific treatments of mental illness from the homeopathic literature. It also describes the application of homeopathic principles to the institutional care of mental illness, using New York's Middletown Homeopathic Asylum for the Insane as an example.