Elizabeth Peabody, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and the Transatlantic Homeopathic Politics of Reform.
Résumé
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s “Foreign Library” at 13 West Street in Boston sat at the heart of a transatlantic network of ideas on reform. Here, one could buy volumes in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Greek, and Latin, as well as English translations of foreign titles. It is less well-known, however, that next to the book section, Elizabeth’s father’s homeopathic medicines were also sold and were part of the success of Elizabeth’s overall enterprise. To present, the politics of homeopathy and, more importantly, its role in creating an alternative and immanent vision of the political remain underestimated. This article investigates how the European origins of homeopathy in an age of revolution and empire nourished a transnational and transatlantic politics of bodily and social healing. Peabody’s 1859 Memorial of Dr. William Wesselhőft (the German-born founder of the first homeopathic medical school in the US), for example, refers as much to European politics as to medicine. What was at stake in this conversation between an American woman of letters and a German-born revolutionary was a transatlantic dialogue on how to heal society from within, without resorting to an intrusive external governance, how to strengthen the social body through kinship and acquaintance – issues to which Peabody, as a woman in the nineteenth century, nourished a deep commitment. Relying on the privileged links between an American woman of letters and the foreign-born school of homeopathic medicine, this chapter explores the homology between an alternative empirical practice of the body and the political empiricism of a transatlantic community of reformers.