In our societies, academic medicine is a central reference. Based on the history of homeopathy, Olivier Faure provides a reading grid that allows us to consider so-called “medicines” differently. alternatives “.
Homeopathy, magnetism, acupuncture, naturism, these practices are often described as medicines. parallel », as if their therapeutic proposals were deployed in a separate world, in any case very distinct from that of academic medicine which, in our Western societies, serves as a central reference from which orthodoxy and heterodoxies can be defined. Based on the history of homeopathy, Olivier Faure provides a reading framework that allows us to renew the way we consider these practices.
Homeopathy is doing well. In India, the Ministry of Health officially promotes its practice alongside that of traditional oriental medicines. One of the world’s largest producers of generic medicines, sometimes contested for its production methods and its disregard for Western patent policy, has 250,000 homeopathic practitioners, most of whom have received academic training. In many Western countries, the use of homeopathic granules has become common use. In Germany as in France, half of the population has already used it. European and American consumption has doubled in the space of a few years.
How to explain the success of a practice born in Germany two centuries earlier, a practice whose theoretical foundations are still the subject of medical skepticism illustrated in particular by the condemnation of the French Academy of Medicine in 2004 ?
A birth in the heart of modernity
The historian’s challenge is to look elsewhere than in the evaluation of its effectiveness for the keys to the success of homeopathic practice. By writing a total history of this object, rather marginal in historiography until now, therapeutic practice can be extracted from the reduced field of science to take shape in that of a social history well anchored in its political and economic ramifications. The conclusions that can be drawn from it contribute to refocusing the doctrine and practice of homeopathy in the history of health.
These in fact arise at the heart of official structures of academic knowledge. Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), charismatic founder, is a doctor whose thesis is part of contemporary reflection on the role of fibers and whose early work respects the prescriptions of observational medicine. By becoming interested in chemistry and materia medica, he pointed out the interest in treating others like him in the 1790s. His practice evolved slowly: he manufactured his own medicines, suggested the dilution of active substances at the beginning of the XIXe century, introduced the form of granules in 1807. Homeopathy exists in the form that we know from 1810, date of publication of theOrganon of rational medicine.
This proposal, far from appearing revolutionary at its beginnings, offers a therapeutic variant in a medical market that has been expanding since the end of the XVIIIe century. It attempts to respond to a request from patients worried about invasive methods (represented by the famous bloodletting) and suffering from chronic illnesses which are of little interest to doctors.
This medicine gentle », listening to patients (individualized treatment is offered at the end of a consultation which addresses numerous aspects of the subject’s life and history), well adapted to the contemporary revival of Hippocratic methods (like the hydrotherapy) and the moderation prescriptions of the majority of family doctors, promotes the development of an alternative practice to the growing mechanical and chemical methods.
We therefore turn to homeopathy to treat ourselves in accordance with our own representation of illness and the body, but also for other reasons rarely highlighted by historians. Boosted by a fashion effect among the aristocratic elites, the practice can be adopted out of curiosity or by the effect of proximity: the territory being far from being uniformly medicalized in XIXe century, it happens that the only practitioner available is a homeopath.
But, taking place in a time of political and spiritual turmoil, it also benefits from the interest of a whole reform nebula. The Lutheran Freemason that Hahnemann is thus receives the support of Saint-Simonians, English radicals or liberal Catholics. Like mesmerism at the end of the XVIIIe century or spiritualism after 1850, homeopathy represents more than a promise of universal healing ; it is also a way of questioning the new limits of what is credible and a new attempt to establish a fraternal society. The practice does not appeal to the marginalized, but to those who are at the heart of modernity, the educated urban middle classes who are often critical of industrial and technical society, but who are heavy consumers of medicines.
The international expansion of homeopathy is rapid. Beyond its cradle, it was helped by the dispersion of emigrants and German missionaries who spread it in America and Asia. The health disaster of the cholera epidemic which traumatized Europe in the early 1830s offered him the opportunity to publicly expose his practices.
Academic medicine in its mirror
Although it was not born outside of medicine or against it, homeopathy constitutes itself as a distinct school whose emergence, in turn, consolidates the foundations of academic medicine.
In this first half of XIXe century, the professionalization of medicine is still fragile. The terrible competition in the sale and production of remedies is barely tempered by the establishment of legal monopolies. In this context, homeopathy appears as a potentially threatening new competitor and not as an emanation from the inner circle. Academic condemnations were general in Europe and the United States between 1830 and 1850. The controversy over the reception of Hahnemannian principles turned into a clash between two opposing medicines: “ homeopathy and the rest of medicine are built in the debate between them » (p. 76).
As homeopathic doctrine becomes a minority in the medical community, it must renounce becoming the pivot of the new medicine and reorient its action towards society. After all, nothing prohibits its practice, even if it is difficult to train in it. Alongside official medicine, another health system is deployed, with its own hospitals (founded in particular by Catholics), its specialized pharmacies (around 1 in 500 in France), its activist associations (especially in Germany), its rather scattered specialists (less than 2 % of the total in France and Germany) in cities and mainly in areas of strength for the medical profession.
A cyclical story
The second half of XIXe century marks a phase of decline for homeopathic practice. Proponents of the Hahnemann doctrine are excluded from universities and learned societies. The school is divided into chapels, while the number of practitioners collapses. Where this is possible (not in France), the movement is taken over by lay people. In Germany, the Bavarian clergy, farmers and artisans took over medical homeopathy. Mass activist associations (which had nearly 400,000 members on the eve of the Great War) were developing across the Rhine, which demanded the right of the people to take charge of their own health.
Far from being the fruit of medical progress still full of potential at the end of the XIXe century (there is a chronological gap between the establishment of laboratory medicine and its effective applications), this reflux is probably due to a double movement: protest radicalization on the fringes of the medical world and the formation of a new homeopathy concerned to integrate into mainstream medicine and prove its scientificity.
In the interwar period, on the contrary, a renewed interest in homeopathy occurred in medical circles doubting the direction of modern medicine which now obtained real results. It is at the moment when medical technology is progressing that the discourse on “ medical crisis » develops and encourages a return to this type of practice – this applies to the 1920s as well as the 1960s.
Alongside the practitioners won over by the neo-Hippocratic wave and the Catholics who denounced the excesses of scientific medicine, new captains of industry anchored homeopathy in the modern economy by founding laboratories which are still influential today: homeopathic laboratories of France (Vannier) and modern homeopathic laboratories (Boiron) which competed in the early 1930s, Schwabe company including the family pharmaceutical company founded in XIXe prosperous century in the world at the same time and has since diversified into the sale of herbal products.
As Olivier Faure convincingly shows, homeopathy is not a marginal object in the history of health. Its birth occurs at the heart of medical science, its practitioners are mainly doctors, its development is ensured by industrial laboratories, the expectations of its consumers are at the heart of modern society. This explains the survival of this alternative medicine which has its roots in the history of the first XIXe century.