Abstract
By Dana Ullman, M.P.H.
Berkeley: North Atlantic, 2007, 386 pages, with Index, $19.95
More importantly, it is also a consummation of the author's life work, to publicize, explain, and celebrate homeopathy, that improbably effective method of healing the sick, together with the uniquely elegant and coherent philosophy that underlies it and makes it an ongoing challenge to the reigning medical orthodoxy of our time. Within the homeopathic world, Dana Ullman is himself a genuine hero, having championed both the method and the philosophy and kept them indefatigably in the public eye for more than 30 years.
Before his debut as a successful lay practitioner in California in the late 1970s, Ullman was a founding member of the Bay Area Study Group, a small but dedicated cadre of physicians, licensed health professionals, and laypeople who met on equal terms for sheer love of homeopathy. This group included students such as Bill Gray, David Warkentin, Roger Morrison, Nancy Herrick, and Lou Klein, soon to become leading thinkers and practitioners of a new generation, at a time when American homeopathy itself seemed on the verge of extinction.
It was Dana's good fortune, and ours, that he was arrested for practicing medicine without a license, which led him to change direction in spite of being acquitted of the charges. Without missing a beat, he found his true calling as author, teacher, and impresario of this discipline he has loved so faithfully.
Ullman's mastery of all things homeopathic, his talent for public speaking and public relations in the wider sense, his ease and familiarity with celebrities in many fields, and not least his love of homeopathic history, have all conspired to make The Homeopathic Revolution an authentic culmination of his professional life. Perhaps impatient with the abiding mystery and esotericism of its basic concepts, and the consequent difficulty of explaining them to understandably skeptical audiences, he has long been intrigued by the readiness of celebrities and prominent figures in society, perhaps less subject to the ruling inhibitions of their time, to embrace homeopathic medicine for themselves, and even to advocate for its acceptance by society at large. This book duly appraises the influence of homeopathic theory and practice upon modern culture, as seen through these personal experiences with it, and public utterances about it, of celebrities and prominent figures in various fields, both past and present, both here and abroad.
As such, it makes thoroughly entertaining and even fascinating reading for anyone, with or without any prior experience of, interest in, or even sympathy for the subject, purely on account of the prominent cultural status of his characters. The allure of celebrity itself is of course a staple truth of the advertising industry, since the opinions of prominent people for or against something are widely used for leading and shaping public opinion in the same direction.
But that Ullman's intention goes beyond name-dropping and big-name advertising is made clear in both the Introduction, which features a critique of modern scientific medicine, and the first two chapters, which are entitled, “Why Homeopathy Works and Makes Sense,” and “Why Homeopathy Is Hated and Vilified,” respectively, and that present a simple exposition of homeopathic philosophy, and a brief history of its persecution by orthodox medicine ever since its creation. This ulterior purpose is implicit in the book's subtitle, “Why Famous People and Cultural Heroes Choose Homeopathy.”
Yet for Ullman, as for myself and every other practicing homeopath, the great unanswered question is not why illustrious people choose and even prefer it to conventional medicine. To the contrary, it is why the general public and popular culture remain so hesitant to follow their lead, heedless of its successes, and why its concepts still seem obscure, opaque, and outdated to most people, as well as an object of ridicule to the profession that stands in direst need of it. To this riddle, alas, the book provides no answer. What it does show, quite beautifully and in magnificent detail, is that celebrities and culture heroes continue to favor homeopathy, and for perfectly good reasons. Thus, it is even more mysterious and troubling that homeopathy remains to a large extent unrecognized and unappreciated as a complement to the system now prevailing.
It can hardly fail to excite an open-minded reader who knows nothing of homeopathy that such legendary figures as Goethe, Darwin, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, and Mahatma Gandhi thought so highly of it, and in some cases used it to heal their own illnesses, or that present-day celebrities such as Ravi Shankar, Paul McCartney, Cher, Tina Turner, Tony Blair, and Prince Charles still do so. To that extent, the book does succeed to a remarkable extent, if not in solving the mystery, at least in posing it more starkly.
The author displays painstaking and careful scholarship in tracking down and tracing out the tangled skein of homeopathic history through so many famous and exemplary lives. Ullman's enthusiasm for promoting homeopathy as widely as possible sometimes leads to what seem like gross exaggerations until one reads the fine print. For example, his assertion that Darwin could never have completed The Origin of Species, had he not successfully healed himself of intense, disabling ailments with the help of homeopathic remedies many years earlier, sounds like utter hyperbole, but a careful reading of Darwin's letters does in fact warrant that conclusion.
In other cases, Ullman's zeal for the odd fact leads him to assert connections that are indeed tenuous and would better have been omitted, such as an unduly long section about the various false rumors that Hitler used homeopathic remedies on a daily basis. If true, this would not only be antithetical to the standards of good homeopathic practice, but also hardly a compliment to the method in view of the results.
But these quibbles should in no way detract from the value of the work as a whole. My only more principled reservation follows from the fact of homeopathy's precipitous decline in the 20th century, and one reason that Ullman himself cites for it, that many homeopathic physicians were quick to incorporate insulin, antibiotics, blood transfusions, and other technical achievements of orthodox medicine into their practices, and became to that extent less and less scrupulous about adhering to homeopathic principles and methods. This simple and widely acknowledged fact consigns all of his legends and tales from an earlier time, however fascinating they were and may still be, to a chapter long past in the academic history of medicine, whereas his original contention has even more pointed relevance and bite in the present, when both the critical state of the medical system and his own alternative agenda would seem to demand center stage for the celebrities and culture heroes of today. That the contemporary examples Ullman provides are neither as numerous nor as prominent as the likes of Goethe, Darwin, Twain, or Gandhi is hardly his fault, merely a sobering fact of life at the moment. But it does indicate an important obstacle in the way of his purpose for the book, that of promoting homeopathy throughout the world by trading on the fame of its adherents, that remains to be overcome in the future.