The midcentury was marked by a healthy scientific skepticism of drugs, particularly of the all-service calomel which, together with the lancet, had been the badge of the old “heroic” practitioners. The Massachusetts Medical Society announced that a prize would be offered in 1857 on the theme, “We would regard every approach toward the rational and successful prevention and management of a disease, without the necessity of drugs, to be an advance in favor of humanity and scientific medicine,” a theme which a distinguished Harvard clinician a century later thought might profitably be revived by his generation.⁶³

The founder of homeopathy, Hahnemann, himself had held that diseases were the immaterial alterations of an impalpable vital principle and must be combatted by forces of the same kind—by what one commentator on his system called the spiritual essences and virtues of medicine.⁶⁴ That vigorous English homeopathist and Swedenborgian, J. J. Garth Wilkinson, in a book which he dedicated to his good friend, the elder Henry James, stated that the efficacy of drugs rested in part on “the smallness of the doses, or we would rather say, the use of the spirit and not the body of the drugs.” Drugs so attenuated, he added, “are more like ideas than material bodies,” and “we are obliged to desert the hypothesis of their material action, and to presume that they take rank as dynamical things.”⁶⁵

Mrs. Patterson’s homeopathic experiments carried her further toward a mental theory of disease. In Science and Health is an account of a sick woman who came to her at North Groton, a woman in a dropsical condition who “looked like a barrel” and for whom she prescribed “the fourth attenuation of Argentum nitratum with occasional doses of a high attenuation of Sulphuris.” The woman improved, but Mrs.  ● ● ●