Royal Copeland

This book review is reprinted with the permission of the National Center for Homeopathy
801 North Fairfax Street, Suite 306
Alexandria, VA 22314
(703) 548-7790, Fax (703) 548-7792
E-mail address: nch@igc.apc.org (Internet and e-mail).

Copeland's Cure: Homeopathy and the War Between Conventional and Alternative Medicine
by Natalie Robins
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 330 pages, hardcover, $24.95
ISBN 0-375410-90-2

Reviewed by J.P. Borneman

Dynamic Tension
Royal Copeland, physician, eye surgeon, politician, educator, and driven achiever, is essentially unknown. Save for an unpublished doctoral thesis from 1967(1) and a well-received article appearing in a prominent legal journal in 2000(2), the liter­ature is uninformed about his life and influences. This is astonishing given Copeland's achievements.

Born in 1868 in rural Michigan, Copeland grew up in a society that embraced homeopathy as well as what would later come to be called naturopathy, including hydrotherapy and heat-cures. (For an. interesting perspective on the health culture in Michigan in the late nineteenth century, see T.C. Boyle's 1993 novel, The Road to Wellville, chronicling the Kellogg brothers.) An early achiever, Copeland was greatly influenced by E.F. Chase, his family's physician, who was a homeopath.

Copeland attended the University of Michigan School of Medicine and later taught at the Homeopathic Medical School (in Michigan) with WA. Dewey. Elected Mayor of Ann Arbor in 1901 at 33, he thereafter moved to New York to become dean of the New York Homeo­pathic Medical College. He was tapped by Tammany Hall to become Health Com­missioner of the city of New York during the 1918 flu epidemic. In 1922, Copeland was a compromise candidate for the U.S. Senate from New York; his campaign manager was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Copeland was a tireless legislator who still found time to write a popular news­paper column for William Randolph Hearst and several health books for con­sumers. His crowning achievement was the passage of the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) in 1938 after the sulfanilamide tragedy. It was the simple act of listing The Homoeopathic Pharmacopoeia of the United States as an officiail compendium in the FDCA that would forever establish the legality of homeo­pathic medicines in the U.S.

Copeland was an educator and politi­cian, but he was also a homeopathic physi­cian. So his story is essentially homeopathy's story in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Borrowing heavily from Paul Starr's Social Transformation of American Medicine(3) and Harris Coulter's Divided Legacy(4), Robins writes a compelling history that reads like a novel. As she follows the parallel paths of the growth of the American Institute of Homeopathy (AIH) and the American Medical Association (AMA), then the decline of the AIH and the emerging pri­macy of the AMA, Robins tracks not only Copeland's path, but that of homeopathy in general.

Although her bias in favor of homeopa­thy is clear from her "Author's Note;' Robins' book is no paean to homeopathic medicine. She presents the opposing view in full color, including criticism from the AMA and from "quackbusters" Wallace Sampson and Steven Barrett. She states clearly her opinion that until a plausible mechanism of action for homeopathy is understood, the critics will have full voice. And yet, her heart seems to be with the patient-centric aspect of homeopathy that she finds with homeopaths Michael Carl­ston and Jennifer Jacobs. She lets them have their say as well, and the way Robins tells the story, one can almost hear a dialog.

Robins almost gets it right. She relies on Martin Kaufman's account in Homeopathy in America(5) for a description of the revision of the Homoeopathic Pharmacopoeia in 1982, an account that is factu­ally incorrect-this is an error quite noticeable to me as I attended the meet­ings in question. Nonetheless, Robins' story is compelling and informative. If Santayana was correct when he said that "those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it," then Copeland's Cure should be required reading for anyone involved with the practice or politics of homeopathy.