by Peter Morrell
Introduction
This introduction to the thesis serves two
basic purposes. Firstly it will give an introduction to the contents of the thesis and
describe the events which led up to the information which is presented in it. Secondly, it
provides a personal account of how I came upon homeopathy, all the twists and turns of the
research, as it moved along a fairly long time-period of part-time work. In both senses
therefore it provides an underpinning backcloth against which the information content of the
research can be viewed.It must be borne in mind that this
shoestring-funded research took place against a background of a full-time teaching job and a
growing family of first two, then three, then four children. If the research had been more
heavily funded and undertaken on a full-time basis, then I feel confident that it would have
achieved a much greater depth and taken only 3-4 years. Much more information from primary
as well as secondary sources, could also have been unearthed on every aspect that has been
studied. While I may not have dug very deep, I feel I have peeked down every alleyway and at
least turned every stone available.I first came across homeopathy in the
October of 1978. I had a common cold cured very quickly by one dose of Arsenicum album 6c
and being impressed, decided to learn the rudiments of homeopathy from a friend who kept a
smallholding and used remedies on his animals. He was also regularly in touch with the late
George MacLeod, the celebrated Homeopathic Vet.By 1979-80 I had become so absorbed in it
that I was beginning to practice on willing friends and relatives in order to improve my
knowledge and understanding of it; I developed pretty early-on a great interest in Dr. Kent.Quite by chance, in October 1981 I was
asked to become a part-time lay practitioner in an alternative therapy centre in Hartshill,
Stoke. This provided me with the opportunity to practice in much greater depth and to gain
greater understanding of the underlying philosophy.In spite of diligent work over the next 6
years I was very ambivalent about transferring to homeopathy as a full-time career. This was
partly due to its uncertain legal position and partly due to the hassle involved in the
registration process. So I continued to practice part-time.Then in 1987 I was offered the chance to
study for a further degree by my College. I initially wanted to study Buddhist philosophy at
Manchester but could not get the support at College for this. As I was teaching popular
courses on Alternative Medicine I was asked to re-apply but for something in that field,
which would be supported. I eventually came across Phil Nicholls at the Polytechnic and made
contact. I received funding for three years of the research.My first tentative writings were on the
comparative philosophies of allopathy, science, homeopathy and alternative medicine in
general; a critique of science and allopathy followed; and included the naturopathy
viewpoint. I was initially interested in comparing the philosophies of allopathic and
alternative medicine viewpoints and holistic vs. reductionistic views on health and the
organism. Phil Nicholls encouraged me with this but also tried to get me to make a start in
obtaining the gleanings of a fragmentary history of the lay tradition.In 1988-89 I began to formulate some
questionnaires for obtaining profiles of homeopaths and their world-views and
belief-systems. I devised some survey questionnaires with a view to investigating this more
formally. This generated an immense amount of data which was too complex to analyse with the
software I had to hand and so it has remained largely unprocessed. I had hoped to delineate
the views and beliefs systems of alternative therapists, but this was not possible and so
remained a shelved project.The results of these surveys seemed to
confirm my original ideas, which were that doctors had less interest in paranormal, New Age,
religious and fringe medicine beliefs than lay practitioners, and were generally far more
sceptical of such things than the lay practitioners. They were also more trained in and
swayed by pure science than lay persons. Much as you would expect. In broad outline the
surveys were designed to try and delineate the world views and belief systems of three
groups: homeopathic doctors, unregistered lay practitioners and registered lay
practitioners.There were large differences between
doctors also in the sense that they showed the typical scepticism of scientists towards
anything faintly New Age, whereas the lay practitioners consistently showed greater interest
and open-mindedness in such things. The two sets of beliefs about homeopathic philosophy
also showed a similar divergence. The doctors tending to be more keen on a pragmatic, low
potency and ‘curing what is there’ approach, whereas the lay practitioners were far more
idealistic, high-potency, Kentians and absorbed by holism and miasmic notions and the use of
more ‘far-out’ approaches. These findings were completely in line with my own expectations.The differences between doctors and the
other two were quite marked , but the differences between the two types of lay practitioners
were negligible. This is not what I expected. I expected bigger differences between
registered and non-registered lay practitioners than were actually there. There were other
differences like backgrounds and qualifications in science in the case of doctors, or arts
and humanities in the case of lay practitioners. The problem with this aspect of the project
was using the software to generate tables which would show these differences. Lots more time
working on the data would probably have showed that.During 1988-90 I did all my preliminary
writings on allopathy and science and the philosophies of alternative medicine. I also
started to sketch out a brief history of homeopathy to act as a vessel into which a lay
history could then be placed.In 1989-90 I conducted more surveys of
doctors and unregistered practitioners, still hoping to expand this aspect of the research.
I also began to extract data from ‘Books in Print UK’ for different years to chart the
growth of interest in homeopathy and alternative medicine in Britain.In 1990 I embarked on a major programme of
interviews and letters in an attempt to retrieve some fragments of the ‘lost history’ of
British lay homeopathy: Brown, Danciger, Tomkins, Sheldrake, Withers, Whitney, Kovaks,
Norland, Ainsworth, Twentyman, Samuels, Wilcox; Derham tape from New Zealand. This was very
successful and paved the way for all my later work. What I chiefly obtained from these
discussions was a clearer idea of what lay homeopaths believe and also much hard data about
its past.I also wrote letters to radionic people and
got a huge backlog of Radionic Quarterly journals covering 1950-90 which was an extremely
useful resource. From this burst of activity I realised that there was a lot of detail to be
gleaned and that homeopathy in Britain had undergone at least three phases of rapid
expansion: firstly in the last century, especially 1850-70; in the 1930-50 period and again
in the late 70s up to present.During 1989-90 I also wrote to Phyllis
Speight, but I was dismissed as an irrelevance as she ‘was too busy to help’. I later
discovered from Tomkins the reason behind this secrecy about her homeopathic past.In 1990-93 I received continuing generous
help from the octogenarian Geoffrey Brown of Bradford who also donated to me a complete set
of Heal Thyself 1932-54 which has proved to be an immensely valuable resource. In January
1991 came the Keele Conference for which I was very ill-prepared. It was my first attempt to
summarise and present to a wider audience my findings. I prepared and delivered an interim
paper. I was disappointed in that I had a lot of data but it was still in an ill-organised
state.While searching catalogues of theses I
discovered Withers’ and Squires’ theses. These proved to be very valuable as sources of
ideas. I also spoke to and taped conversations with Bob Withers. He was very helpful about
the Thomas Maughan study group of the 1970s which he used to attend.In an attempt to expand more deeply my
knowledge of the history of the lay tradition, in 1991-92 I visited the BHA Library and
Faculty retrieving data and adding to the Who’s Who database I had been compiling, mainly
information about lay practitioners and also a list of all books and authors of those books
from its beginnings.During 1991-2 I also began to receive help
from John Pert, a retired Nelson’s pharmacist, and a friend of Geoffrey Brown for many
years. He gave me some valuable information about Nelson’s, about Otto Leeser and about
Scottish homeopathy in general.During 1991-3 I received a lot of help from
Mary Gooch in the Glasgow Homeopathic Library re Scottish homeopathy and their library
register and a lot of early books which I borrowed. This served to greatly expand my
knowledge of the early 19th century history and many of the figures who published books and
pamphlets at that time.In 1992 I added Ian Townsend’s ‘Who’s Who
History of Homeopathy’; adding in a chronology of British homeopathy; adding BHA and Faculty
data, plus ‘Creal’, plus Glasgow register; this data I then re-sorted to form a chronology
of British and American homeopaths. ‘Creal’ was my nickname for the data which I had pulled
from Heal Thyself for the 1932-54 period. It just consists of all names set in
alphabetical order and the date(s) of their appearance and subjects, publications, etc.During 1992 I made contact with the retired
homeopath Mr. Smith-Gunst in Suffolk, and Arthur Jenner in Wimbledon; compiling Boericke and
Allen and Minerva and Praxis lists to add to my Who’s Who. Again, this was a fleshing-out
exercise which provided me with valuable new ideas.In 1993-4 I visited the BT Archive in
London retrieving a lot of information from directories; also Blackfriars India Office
Library for data on Puddephatt and his family background in India. This was immensely
valuable as the telephone directories helped to back up the fine detail of places and dates
for many lay practitioners of the 1930-70 period and to enable me to see where they were for
certain time-spans and to track any movements they made, changes of address, etc. I wish I
had had more time to do a complete and exhaustive analysis of the data that is in these old
telephone directories. They contain a vast wealth of data which can add weight to the ‘HEAL’
list I had built up from the 1930-55 period. It was a further method of gathering data and
confirming or cross-checking information taken from other sources –always a valuable tool
in any historical work. One of the key areas for future research would be a complete
cross-checking of the Heal and the BT Archive databases.During 1994-5 I began compiling a whole
thesis for perusal by Phil. This also served the purpose of giving myself an overview of the
whole project at that time.In November 1994 I attended the Student
Homeopath Conference at UCL in London and presented a paper on education in homeopathy. It
was quite well received and we all had very friendly discussions afterwards. It became
apparent that I would never have the whole story about the London groups of the 60s and 70s,
but at least I was gathering more information with each conversation I had. I had some very
valuable talks with Jerome Whitney and Barbara Harwood about the Thomas Maughan group. Yet
they remain rather vague and secretive about details of those Druid study groups. I guess
that is part of their tradition, which I can respect.In the summer of 1994 I started to search
current telephone directories for people with the same name and in the same town as some of
the people listed in the ‘Heal’ lists –as an attempt to ‘retrieve a lost history’. I found
many people and wrote to them asking for help. Little came of this but what did emerge was
of interest. The limited responses added precious little as this really was a ‘lost
history’. It was too late to retrieve much useful material from living relatives of 60 years
ago.In 1994-5 I added HTH (Health Through
Homeopathy, an official 40s journal of the BHA) and Heal data mainly about homeopathic
groups and the Thomas Maughan lectures. This was data from the 1940s about the activities of
lay homeopaths at that time.In April 1995 Phil and myself attended the
Stuttgart conference in Germany, which was very stimulating. It was interesting to see such
a wide range of research into homeopathy around the world. It was also of interest to see
that Britain has been the only country worldwide that has had a lay tradition of any size.In 1995 I borrowed by post from the Faculty
in London many Registers of Faculty lists for this century. I photocopied them all, thus
enabling me to expand my database on the growth of UK homeopathy throughout the last 150
years in much greater detail.During 1995-96 I was studying potency and
Hahnemann’s use of potency over time; also writing to herbalists for information on that
aspect. Also compiling a detailed profile of homeopathy in Stoke-on-Trent.In Feb. 1996 I attended the second Student
Homeopath conference in London and had many chats and useful conversations with homeopathic
contacts. In Aug-Sept I made contact with and interviewed Ian Railton in Doncaster about Da
Monte and Frank Parker Wood, an important Home Counties lay homeopath of the 40s, 50s and
60s; he died in 1965. He taught and encouraged others and ran correspondence courses for
homeopaths in the south of England during the 40s and 50s. Railton had been a patient of
John Da Monte and his mother had personally known many homeopaths of the 1940-60 period.1996-7 letters and calls to Norland,
Haggiag and Railton re Da Monte; use of internet for ideas and exchange of views and
information. Further work was undertaken to polish, refine and cut down to size the work I
had already accumulated. In 1997-98 I became increasingly interested in Hahnemann’s final
years in Paris and bought a copy of one of his casebooks from 1840-43 from the IGM in
Stuttgart which I can then study at my leisure and extract data from about the nature of his
Paris practice.
