A Vital Force

Book excerpt: Homeopathy, as a medical system, presented a significant institutional and economic challenge to conventional medicine in the nineteenth century. Although contemporary critics portrayed homeopathic physicians as part of a sect whose treatment of disease was beyond the pale of acceptable medical practice, homeopathy was in many ways similar to established medicine. In this book, the author offers a new interpretation of women{19}s roles in both mainstream and alternative modern medicine. She strengthens and clarifies the history of homeopathic women physicians, and creates a framework of comparison to "regular," or orthodox, physicians. Linked to social reform movements in the nineteenth century, antimodernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and countercultural ideals of the 1960s and 1970s, women's advocacy of homeopathy has been intertwined with broad social and cultural issues in American society.