A Revolution in Small Doses: Homeopathy, the Medical Profession, and the State in Mexico, 1895-1942

FAIN: FT-264900-19

Jethro Hernandez Berrones
Southwestern University (Georgetown, TX 78626)

Writing two chapters of a history of homeopathy and the regulation of the medical profession in Mexico, 1895-1942.

A Revolution in Small Doses examines the integration of homeopathic institutions into the Mexican medical profession after the revolution of 1910. It analyzes how Mexicans shaped the boundary between professional and popular medicine in the process of national reconstruction in the 1920s and 30s. The book demonstrates that the boundary was more flexible than regularly assumed for Mexican medicine and that even during a period when science dominated public health and medical education projects, homeopaths negotiated a place within state institutions as very few other countries did in the 20th century. Homeopaths’ case in Mexico constitutes an experiment on medical pluralism in a time of biomedical hegemony. Homeopathy’s success reflects the continuous presence of plural medical beliefs in a stratified society, a society that struggled to reconcile elitist medical science with popular demands for health, its Porfirian past with its revolutionary present.