Homeopathy in America: The Rise and Fall of a Medical Heresy

Abstract

Reviews company with Charles I and Henrietta Maria is still to be seen in the King's Rooms at Hampton Court.The fascinated respect in which court artists held court dwarfs from the days of ancient Egypt down to the seventeenth century is remarkable.It is exemplified by Velasquez who has at least seven portraits of dwarfs at the Court of Spain hanging in the Prado.The portrayals of most scenes of sickness represent miraculous cures; one of the richest in medical content is the fresco attributed to Taddeo Gaddi or Andrea da Firenze in the Spanish Chapel of Santa Maria Novella in Florence which contains illustrations of patients with radial palsy, oedema of the legs, blindness, and a cripple, all appealing to St. Dominic.Amongst many vivid illustrations of the plague perhaps the most celebrated is the picture by De Gros of Napoleon visiting the plague-stricken victims of Jaffa.A final section devoted to artists' studies of death reveals the effect of contemporary tradition and the artists' representation.In antiquity death seems to have come to apparently healthy people, like sleep.In medieval times the dead body of Christ changed through the centuries from the depiction of a clothed, painless departure to the agonised rigor mortis of Roger Van de Weyden's Descent from the Cross, or the green putrefaction of the body in Holbein's Death of Christ.This trend towards the increasing horror of death reached its extreme in a picture at Seville by Vallas de Leal entitled Finis Gloriae Mundi, in which the rotting dead body of a mitred bishop is covered with worms and beetles.Many of the pictures illustrated and described in this book have been reproduced in subsequent works on Medicine in Art, and of course a very great enrichment of this field has occurred since Charcot opened it up.Particularly noteworthy are Eugen Hollander's volumes on Medicine in the Classical and Plastic Arts (1903)(1904)(1905)(1906)(1907)(1908)(1909)(1910)(1911)(1912).It has been greatly advanced too, by the publication of illustrations from medieval manuscripts such as those compiled by P. Giocosa (1901), Sudhoff (1914-18) and more recently, MacKinney (1965).This reprint will help greatly to maintain the growth of this interesting facet of medical history.Producing them 'unchanged' however, involves one grave defect.A number of the illustrations reproduce the imperfections of 1887 and 1889 so perfectly that it is difficult, if not impossible, to see the detailed features of the disease illustrated.This is tantalisingly so in Murillo's picture of St. Elizabeth of Hungary treating patients for ringworm of the scalp and in some of the illustrations of St. Roche's buboes.Much as one appreciates conscientious historical accuracy in reprinting these works without alteration, it could be made even more valuable by adding in a clearly denoted form (perhaps as an appendix) illustrations the details of which are enhanced by the use of modem processes of reproduction.

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