Sane Asylums: The Success of Homeopathy before Psychiatry Lost Its Mind - Softcover

Kantor, Jerry M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1644114089 ISBN 13: 9781644114087

Verlag: Healing Arts Press, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

• Examines the success of homeopathic psychiatric asylums in the United States from the 1870s until 1920

• Focuses on New York’s Middletown State Homeopathic Hospital for the Insane, which had a treatment regime with thousands of successful outcomes

• Details a homeopathic blueprint for treating mental disorders based on Talcott’s methods, including nutrition and side-effect-free homeopathic prescriptions

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, homeopathy was popular across all classes of society. In the United States, there were more than 100 homeopathic hospitals, more than 1,000 homeopathic pharmacies, and 22 homeopathic medical schools. In particular, homeopathic psychiatry flourished from the 1870s to the 1930s, with thousands of documented successful outcomes in treating mental illness.

Revealing the astonishing but suppressed history of homeopathic psychiatry, Jerry M. Kantor examines the success of homeopathic psychiatric asylums in America from the post–Civil War era until 1920, including how the madness of Mary Todd Lincoln was effectively treated with homeopathy at a “sane” asylum in Illinois. He focuses in particular on New York’s Middletown State Homeopathic Hospital, where superintendent Selden Talcott oversaw a compassionate and holistic treatment regime that married Thomas Kirkbride’s moral treatment principles to homeopathy. Kantor reveals how homeopathy was pushed aside by pharmaceuticals, which often caused more harm than good, as well as how the current critical attitude toward homeopathy has distorted the historical record.

Offering a vision of mental health care for the future predicated on a model that flourished for half a century, Kantor shows how we can improve the care and treatment of the mentally ill and stop the exponential growth of terminal mental disorder diagnoses that are rampant today.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Jerry M. Kantor, L.Ac., CCH, MMHS, is a faculty member of the Ontario College of Homeopathic Medicine and owner of Vital Force Health Care LLC, a Boston-area homeopathy and acupuncture practice. The first acupuncturist to receive an academic appointment at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Anaesthesiology, Kantor is the author of Interpreting Chronic Illness, The Toxic Relationship Cure, and Autism Reversal Toolbox. He lives in Dedham, Massachusetts.

Eric Leskowitz, M.D., is a retired Harvard Medical School-affiliated psychiatrist who practiced pain management for more than 25 years at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston. He has published more than 50 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and is the author/editor of four books. His documentary about group energies and sports, The Joy of Sox, aired nationally on PBS in 2012. He lives in Western Massachusetts.

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From “Introduction: The Dead Sea Scrolls of Homeopathy and Psychiatry”

Has psychiatry gone astray? It appears so, with corporate greed as the primary cause. Despite what some consider state-of-the art psychiatric treatment, rather than declining, the number of identified disabled mentally ill has tripled in this country in the last twenty years. Ever more patients with intractable and increasingly dire diagnoses requiring medication continue to appear. In turn, the need to counter the side effects of these same medications has escalated.

As Robert Whitaker shows in Anatomy of an Epidemic, simply not using psychiatric medication enables the poorest and least developed countries in the world to consistently outperform the United States across all measures with regard to short- and long-term schizophrenia outcomes. Need one doubt that a craving for market expansion propels the skyrocketing census of depressed and bipolar individuals? Or that this is the reason why healthy youngsters are suddenly earmarked for psychopharmacology’s tender mercies?

Psychiatry need not have gone down this road. In fact, for a quarter of a century throughout much of the United States, alternate and well-traveled routes for humane and effective psychiatric care existed. Whether mentally or physically ill, people flocked to homeopaths because these physicians listened to, rather than condescended to their patients. Whereas conventional physicians of that era prescribed on the basis of often dubious biological suppositions directing them to ply a patient with toxic mercury or bleed them repeatedly, their homeopathic counterparts prescribed gentle medicines attuned to the stresses and influences responsible for their patient’s symptoms. Which doctor would you have chosen?

Are the utopian homeopathic asylums of the turn of the nineteenth century a myth? One might think so based on a dearth of their mention in contemporary historical medical literature. Readers of influential texts such as Madness: An American History of Mental Illness and Its Treatment will puzzle over why author Mary de Young’s chapter on asylums declines to mention homeopathy’s numerous mental hospitals. The omission fosters a preferred reality in which the hospitals never existed. In fact, many American hospitals and medical schools had homeopathic founders and boasted countless homeopathically directed activities, mention of which has been scrubbed from most history.

I consider the information Sane Asylums presents to be a corollary to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which illuminated a wide spectrum of ancient beliefs and practices; this information, however, is only a few centuries old, as opposed to two thousand years. It was not smuggled from the caves of Qumran but secreted in wilted letters and journals; the minutes of physician organizations; bygone texts; rare offerings of publishers Forgotten Books, Kissinger Publishing L.L.C., and the Wentworth Press; and the University of Michigan Library’s digitalization of dusty archives. Still, the material will enlighten.

Medical historians accustomed to hailing French physician Philippe Pinel as the first doctor to replace brutal care of the mentally ill with psychologically oriented humanitarian (or what Pinel called “moral”) care will have to reconsider. What I am terming the “Dead Sea Scrolls of homeopathy” reveal these contemporaries must share credit. Pinel made human changes in treatment, but it was Samuel Hahnemann who pioneered homeopathic remediation in an asylum in Georgenthal, Germany in 1792.

Online searchers, unaware that shills for the pharmacology industry have commandeered the Wikipedia homeopathy page, take the website’s disparaging account as gospel truth.1 Shown otherwise they will scratch their heads. So too might visitors to the website of the American Medical Association (AMA), where an exalted account of the organization’s origins is given the lie by economist Dale Steinreich’s sordid revelation: “AMA’s initial drive to increase physician incomes was motivated by increasing competition from homeopaths. . . . In the year before AMA’s founding, the New York Journal of Medicine stated that competition with homeopathy caused ‘a large pecuniary loss’ to allopaths.”2 And in 1872, one allopath embroiled in the controversy at the University of Michigan, where a professorship in homeopathy had been established since 1855, argued that the university was “throwing discouragements in the path of the graduates in scientific medicine and rendering the struggle for existence more arduous and unremunerative.”3

FURTHER REVELATIONS

Homeopathy’s popularity in the nineteenth- and early twentieth century is evident from its celebrated advocates, including luminaries William James, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathanial Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Daniel Webster, William Seward, Horace Greeley, Louisa May Alcott, and journalist William Cullen Bryant (who served for a time as president of the Homeopathic Medical Society of the State of New York).4

There have been more than one hundred homeopathic hospitals and twenty-two homeopathic medical schools in the United States. These included forerunners of Drexel University College of Medicine (representing the legacies of two historic medical schools, Hahnemann Medical College and the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania), Boston University, Stanford University, New York Medical College, University of Michigan, and more than a thousand homeopathic pharmacies.

HOMEOPATHY AMID PANDEMICS

Amid today’s Covid 19 pandemic, historian Julian Winston’s disclosures concerning homeopathy’s effectiveness during other major epidemics are relevant. From his introduction to “Influenza-1918: Homeopathy to the Rescue” article published in 1998:

It was called “the Great White Plague.” It is hard to imagine the devastation caused by the flu epidemic of 1918-19. People who lived through it reported that someone who was up and well in the morning could be dead by evening.

Winston goes on to quote the following testimonials compiled by Dean W. A. Pearson of Philadelphia and included in a 1920 article by W. A. Dewey, M.D. entitled “Homeopathy in Influenza--A Chorus of Fifty in Harmony,” which appeared in the Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy. Pearson recorded 26,795 cases of influenza treated by homeopathic physicians with a mortality of 1.05 percent, while the average mainstream medicine mortality was 30 percent.

In the transport service I had 81 cases on the way over. All recovered and were landed. Every man received homeopathic treatment. One [non-homeopathic] ship lost 31 on the way. --H. A. Roberts, M.D., Derby, Connecticut

In a plant of 8,0 workers we had only one death. The patients were not drugged to death. Gelsemium was practically the only remedy used. We used no aspirin and no vaccines. --Frank Wieland, M.D., Chicago

I did not lose a single case of influenza; my death rate in the pneumonias was 2.1%. The salicylates, including aspirin and quinine, were almost the sole standbys of the old school and it was a common thing to hear them speaking of losing 60% of their pneumonias. --Dudley A. Williams, M.D., Providence, Rhode Island

Fifteen hundred cases were reported at the Homeopathic Medical Society of the District of Columbia with but fifteen deaths. Recoveries in the National Homeopathic Hospital were 1%. --E. F. Sappington, M.D., Philadelphia

I have treated 1,0 cases of influenza. I have the records to show my work. I have no losses. Please give all credit to homeopathy! --T. A. McCann, M.D., Dayton, Ohio

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Healing Arts Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1644114089
• ISBN 13: 9781644114087
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland