In the latter half of the nineteenth century, American homeopaths made a double argument for their remedies. They claimed their treatments followed natural laws and could be described in the structured, rational terms of science. At the same time, they insisted that healing drew on spiritual forces and the body's own innate capacity to mend itself. The surprise in a new paper by Sanaullah Khan is that these two registers were not rivals. Practitioners used them together, and the combination was the point.
This matters because it reframes a familiar story about why homeopathy fell out of medical respectability. The usual account treats its spiritual and belief-based claims as the embarrassing baggage that doomed it. Khan argues close to the opposite. The dual appeal to religion and science, he writes, let homeopaths emphasize the body's tendency to heal in slow and sustainable ways that remedies could activate. The psychological and spiritual dimension was woven into how healing was supposed to work, not a marketing flourish layered on top.
The evidence is historical and rhetorical. Khan analyzes how nineteenth-century American homeopathic practitioners framed their arguments, tracing how they paired claims about natural law with claims about innate bodily healing to present their practice as both orderly and rational. His central historical claim is a story of transformation over time: as homeopathy began engaging medical orthodoxy in strictly scientific terms, it gradually shed its emphasis on psychology and belief in the healing experience. That shift, he argues, explains its relegation to fringe or pseudoscientific status by the twentieth century.
The limits here are real and worth stating plainly. This is a qualitative, interpretive argument published in a peer-reviewed venue, Medical History, but it rests on a reading of historical discourse rather than clinical or quantitative data. The abstract does not specify the primary sources or archives that anchor the analysis, so a reader cannot yet weigh how broad or representative the source base is. The claim is also causal in a way that history makes hard to test. If homeopaths had in fact kept scientific and spiritual language strictly separate, or had held onto their belief-based emphasis and still been marginalized, the thesis would weaken considerably.
Still, the argument opens a question that reaches past the archive. Homeopaths spoke of the body's proclivity to heal, activated by remedy and expectation together. Modern medicine knows that belief and mindset can shape physiological outcomes, and that the experience of being treated is not separable from the body being treated. If a system of healing really did carry its therapeutic power partly in its psychological dimension, then dropping that dimension in the name of scientific rigor may have discarded something that worked. Where exactly expectation stops being mere framing and starts being cause remains unsettled, and this history sharpens rather than answers it.
Source: https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2026.10080