Michael T. Saler (Advisor)
Draper, Melvyn Lloyd (Author)
University of California, Davis
Michael T. Saler
This dissertation examines how it came to be that a small group of specialist homoeopathic hospitals found their way into the newly formed British National Health Service in the summer of 1948 and how this helps illuminate the complex tensions inherent in British modernity. Homoeopathy, a philosophical and therapeutic system of medicine predicated on a vitalist conception of health and sickness, competed unsuccessfully with orthodox medicine throughout the nineteenth century to determine what would be the dominant mode and method of medical treatment. Nevertheless, for reasons to be outlined in this dissertation, homoeopathy in Britain survived, notably in the institutional form of more than a dozen homoeopathic hospitals. These British homoeopathic hospitals were integral to the survival of this heretical medical system. Heretical, because all British medical homoeopaths were fully trained, qualified, and registered orthodox doctors who chose to subvert that medical orthodoxy from within. The homoeopathic hospitals, a small part of the sprawling network of independent voluntary hospitals that provided treatment in the century before 1948, were the institutional heart of British homoeopathic heresy. As such, their continued existence remained a matter of tremendous concern for both supporters and opponents during the first half of the twentieth century. By combining the methodologies of cultural, intellectual and institutional history and applying these to the analysis of a broad set of sources, ranging from hospital annual reports, Parliamentary debates, and professional literature, this dissertation highlights the contested nature of the modern British medical marketplace in which increasing State control and the ideology of laissez-faire collided. What this account reveals, however, is that contrary to the fears of many contemporaries, the postwar planning and rationalizing project was not a totalizing one. Instead the medical marketplace that took shape was accommodating and flexible, guaranteeing the survival of an anomalous and, to some, anachronistic medical system in the pluralist postwar world.
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