Homeopathy and women
Homeopathy and womenHomeopathy and Women
Over the course of the past several decades feminist scholars, in company with medical historians, have developed a sophisticated framework for identifying the ways in which Western medicine, as a system of social control, tends to reproduce and legitimate the construction of gender in the wider society. Wielded by physicians holding positions of power, the notion that "anatomy is destiny" can become a potent ideological weapon, labelling actions that violate "natural law" as unhealthy and their perpetrators as unsound. For the most part these critical inquiries have not bothered to distinguish biomedicine from alternative healing traditions, the latter having been regarded until recently as a mere fringe phenomenon. But it there is any truth in the notion that these traditions embody not just different treatment modalities, but also more "holistic" approaches to the medical encounter, then it is worthwhile investigating the extent to which they have actually repudiated conventional gender practices. Being rid of stereotype and domination would make these traditions "alternative" in the deepest sense.
At the focus of this paper are the life and works of Dr. James Tyler Kent, an eminent 19-th century American homeopath. Kent himself would never have used the word "alternative" for his personal brand of homeopathy, which he presumed was blessed by God; but with the distance that time affords, we can permit ourselves to use the term as a convenient approximation, recognizing that there was more social overlap and shared ideology linking mainstream with periphery than either sector in those days could allow.
In any discussion of 19th-century homeopathy Kent's name would invariably be mentioned, whether in his role as a brilliant clinician, a prolific writer, or an influential teacher. Yet Kent, as a privileged male professional, was also thoroughly representative of his own times. Kent articulated a set of beliefs about gender that can be fairly summarized as "androcentric."1
If confronted (as he may well have been by the female students of his inner circle), Kent would likely have relinquished some of these beliefs as so much cultural debris. But in other instances they appear to be central to the doctor's worldview, and would therefore have been strongly defended. Overall, Kent's homeopathy constitutes but one strand in a wider discursive formation which may be termed "Victorian American;" yet it also departs from its cultural matrix enough to suggest that in his constructions of gender Kent drew upon sources other than popular culture and medical orthodoxy. Assuming this to be so, then a close analysis of Kent's intellectual career ought to shed light upon the way in which "irregular" physicians positioned themselves at a time when the customary gender roles were undergoing fundamental transformation.
As the theorist most concerned to link the experiences of the body with the long contours of civilization, Michel Foucault necessarily becomes our point of departure. In several of his early works, such as Discipline and Punish and The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault argued that the...
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