Homeopathy 'for Mexicans': Medical Popularisation, Commercial Endeavours, and Patients' Choice in the Mexican Medical Marketplace, 1853-1872.

"Spanish homeopaths conquered the medical marketplace in Mexico City during the 1850s and 1860s because they transformed public perception of homeopathy from a therapeutic tool that doctors used to treat their patients into a domestic medicine that everyone could use to treat their own or another person’s ailments. Initially, homeopathic doctors, such as Ramón Comellas, appealed to patients’ sensibilities, emphasising homeopathy’s foreign origin, milder effects on the body, symptomatic approach to disease and convenience of consulting by mail, connecting with patients’ everyday experiences with disease, life-promoting language and exclusionary therapeutics. These characteristics contributed to homeopathy’s positive reception and adoption by literate middle- and upper-class patients, but these strategies also perpetuated the traditional doctor–patient relationship, helping homeopathic doctors retain their authority. As a result of modernising legislation, urbanisation projects and economic expansion during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the commercialisation of homeopathy through domestic manuals and first-aid kits diffused an already well-received therapeutic approach even further, reaching the larger population of illiterate, working and poor-class patients. However, these homeopathic products transformed homeopathic practice in ways that those who introduced homeopathy did not foresee. Domestic manuals and first-aid kits gave every literate person the opportunity to turn into a homeopathic practitioner, giving them the opportunity to rise to positions that formally trained doctors sought to monopolise. Homeopaths’ original efforts to make homeopathy available to the public while still preserving the authority of the homeopathic doctor turned into commercially-funded efforts to give patients access to homeopathic knowledge. The result was the blurring of the line between expert and lay practitioners, between formally and informally trained homeopaths. Domestic homeopathy, therefore, challenged the boundaries of professional medical training and practice that the medical establishment had begun to implement in the mid-nineteenth century."

"I would like to thank Dorothy Porter, Gabriela Soto-Laveaga, Elizabeth Watkins, Pablo Gómez, Alexandra Puerto, Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, Nicole Pacino, Hanni Jalil, Elizabeth O’Brien, Steve Beitler, Heather Dron, Kevin Moss, Angel Rodríguez and four anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on preliminary versions; Melissa Byrnes, for her editorial feedback; Carlos López Beltrán and Laura Cházaro García, for their initial intellectual support in Mexico. The Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología in Mexico funded this research."