Sue Young Homeopathy

The Alcott family were passionate about social reform, dietary and health reform and clean living. Vegetarianism and new philosophy was at the top of their list. They embraced homeopathy when it became established and influenced many others to do the same, both in America and in England.

Amos Bronson Alcott 1799 - 1888 was an American teacher and writer. He is remembered for founding a short-lived and unconventional school as well as a utopian community known as “Fruitlands“, and for his association with Transcendentalism. His daughter was Louisa May Alcott.

Bronson Alcott was an active supporter of homeopathy and at the centre of a social circle glittered with homeopaths and their supporters, including Caroline Wells Healey Dall, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Moncure Daniel Conway, Mercy Bisbee Jackson, Carolina Maria Seymour Severance, the Wesselhoeft family, Lucretia Coffin Mott, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Mary Gove Nichols, Mary Baker Eddy and Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis.

Ednah Dow Cheney lectured every summer for ten years at the Concord School of Philosophy founded by Amos Bronson Alcott alongside Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Caroline Healy Dall (her schoolmate) and Julia Ward Howe.

Ednah Dow Cheney was an American abolitionist, woman suffragist, reformer, philanthropist, Transcendentalist, and author. Ednah Dow Cheney became the only woman teacher. The school was superseded by the Concord School of Philosophy, where Ednah Dow Cheney was invited to speak regularly until 1888, usually on some aspect of art or literature. Her lectures were often quoted in the Boston newspapers.

As a young teacher Bronson Alcott was most convinced by the educational philosophy of the Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi.

In the spring of 1830 he married Abigail May, the sister of Samuel J. May, the reformer and abolitionist. Alcott himself was a Garrisonian abolitionist, and pioneered the strategy of tax resistance to slavery which Henry David Thoreau made famous in Civil Disobedience.

Alcott publicly debated with Henry David Thoreau the use of force and passive resistance to slavery; along with Henry David Thoreau he was among the financial and moral supporters of John Brown and occasionally helped fugitive slaves escape on the Underground Railroad….

In 1834 he opened the “Temple School” in Boston, so called because it was located in a Masonic Temple building. The school was briefly famous, and then infamous, because of his original methods.

Alcott’s plan was to develop self-instruction on the basis of self-analysis, with an emphasis on conversation and questioning rather than the lecture and drill which were prevalent in U.S. classrooms of the time.

Alongside writing and reading, he gave lessons in “spiritual culture” which often involved the Gospels. Reformers like Bronson Alcott advocate for object teaching in writing instruction.

Before 1830, writing (except in higher education) equated to rote drills in the rules of grammar, spelling, vocabulary, penmanship, and transcription of adult texts.

However, in the 1830s, progressive reformers like Bronson Alcott, influenced by Froebel, Herbart, and Pestalozzi, began to advocate writing about objects from students’ personal experiences.

Reformers debated against beginning instruction with rules and were in favor of helping students learn to write by writing.

Alcott sometimes refused corporal punishment as a means of disciplining his students; instead, he offered his own hand for an offending student to strike, saying that any failing was the teacher’s responsibility.

The shame and guilt this method induced, he believed, was far superior to the fear instilled by corporal punishment; when he used physical “correction” he required that the students be unanimously in support of its application, even including the student to be punished.

As assistants in the Temple School, Alcott had two of nineteenth-century America’s most talented women writers, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (who published A Record of Mr. Alcott’s School in 1835) and more briefly Margaret Fuller; as students he had the children of the Boston intellectual classes, including Josiah Phillips Quincy/Josiah Quincy, grandson of the president of Harvard University.

Alcott’s methods were not well received; many readers found his conversations on the Gospels close to blasphemous, a few brief but frank discussions of birth and circumcision with the children were considered obscene, and many in the public found his ideas ridiculous. (For instance, the influential conservative Unitarian Andrews Norton derided the book as one-third blasphemy, one-third obscenity, and the rest nonsense.)

The school was widely denounced in the press, with only a few scattered supporters, and Alcott was rejected by most public opinion. And Alcott was increasingly financially desperate as the controversy caused many parents to remove their students.

Finally Alcott alienated many of the remaining parents by admitting an African American child to the school, whom he then refused to expel from his classes.

In 1839 the school was closed, although Alcott had won the affection of many of his pupils. His pedagogy was a forerunner of progressive and democratic schooling….

In 1840 Alcott removed to Concord, Massachusetts. After a visit to England, in 1842, he started with two English associates, Charles Lane and Henry C. Wright, at “Fruitlands“, in the town of Harvard, Massachusetts, a utopian socialist experiment in farm living and nature meditation as tending to develop the best powers of body and soul.

The experiment quickly collapsed, and Alcott returned in 1844 to his Concord home “Hillside” (later renamed “The Wayside” by Hawthorne) near that of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Alcott removed to Boston four years later, and again back to Concord after 1857, where he and his family lived in the Orchard House until 1877.

He spoke, as opportunity offered, before the “lyceums” then common in various parts of the United States, or addressed groups of hearers as they invited him. These “conversations” as he called them, were more or less informal talks on a great range of topics, spiritual, aesthetic and practical, in which he emphasized the ideas of the school of American Transcendentalists led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was always his supporter and discreet admirer.

He often discussed Platonic philosophy, the illumination of the mind and soul by direct communion with Spirit; upon the spiritual and poetic monitions of external nature; and upon the benefit to man of a serene mood and a simple way of life….

In his last years, his daughter, the writer Louisa May Alcott, provided for him. He was the nominal, and at times the actual, head of a summer “Concord School of Philosophy and Literature”, which had its first session in 1879, and in which, in a building next to his house, he held conversations and invited others to give lectures during a part of several successive summers on many themes in philosophy, religion and letters.

Alcott’s published books, all from late in his life, included New Connecticut, Tablets (1868), Concord Days (1872), and Sonnets and Canzonets (1882). Earlier he had written a series of Orphic Sayings which were published in The Dial as examples of Transcendentalist thought

The sayings, though called oracular, were considered sloppy or vague by contemporary commentators as well as twentieth-century ones. He left a large collection of journals and memorabilia, most of which remain unpublished. He died in Boston on 4 March 1888.

Bronson Alcott was a patient of homeopath William Wesselhoeft and he was attended in this last illness by his homeopathic physicians Ballou (?impossible to trace - the only homeopathic Ballou found is Harry Ballou Bryson) and Hosmer… (?Alfred Hosmer of Watertown, ?George Hughes Hosmer, ?Frederick Lucien Hosmer - all homeopaths - or Laura Whiting Hosmer ‘who becomes a physician in a city hospital‘ and is a correspondent and close friend of Louisa May Alcott)

Bronson Alcott had known the Hosmers since 1840:

Bronson Alcott and his family moved into an unoccupied cottage on the Hosmer estate in April, 1840, Ralph Waldo Emerson paying the rent. Abby May Alcott was born there in July…

In 1844:

Charles Lane left Fruitlands, as did Bronson Alcott’s wife and children, who went to live with the Lovejoy family in Still River, Massachusetts. They would return to Concord in November, boarding at the Hosmer Home.

William Andrus Alcott converted his cousin, Bronson Alcott, to vegetarianism in 1835 and it was Bronson whose ideas inspired the Concordium community in Richmond (England).

The Alcott House Concordium (England) had existed since 1843 and its members were utopian socialists, influenced partly by Robert Owens, founder of the Co-operative movement , the Bible Christians, James Pierrepoint Greaves and the American Vegetarian Society…

The Concordium was a vegetarian community established in the late 1830’s at Alcott House, Ham Common, near Richmond (England), by a group of followers of James Pierrepoint Greaves.

It stands here as the principle example of a number of such communitarian and socialist experiments of the period aimed at the establishment of a new order for society, one based on harmony and co-operation rather than competition and antagonism…

The American Transcendentalists were very influential and there were a number direct links with leading figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott in America.

Bronson Alcott, after whom Alcott House was named, visited the Concordium and addressing a gala in the garden summed up some of their ideas:

‘Our trust is in purity not vengeance. Together with pure beings will come pure habits. A better body shall be built up from the orchard and the garden . . .

“From the fountain shall we slake our thirst, and our appetite shall find supply in the delicious abundance that Pomona offers. Flesh and blood we will reject as “the accursed thing”.

“A pure mind has no faith in them”.

Louisa May Alcott 1832 - 1888 was an ardent student of homeopathy and she consulted homeopaths Conrad Wesselhoeft, president of the American Institute of Homeopathy, and Rhoda Lawrence who was her companion. Together, these two homeopathic friends enabled Alcott to write.

Aged 17, Alcott caught smallpox and was completely cured by homeopathy. Alcott distrusted the orthodox medical practices, blaming the heavy doses of mercury prescribed for her in 1860 when she contracted thyphoid fever for ruining her health, so she relied on Conrad Wesselhoeft for her medical care for the last twenty years of her life.

Alcott was inspired by Emanuel Swedenborg, and Swedenborgians were staunch advocates of homeopathy. Living in Boston, Alcott had many neighbours who were also advocates of homeopathy, including Julia Ward Howe and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (who wrote Dr. Zay, which tells the story of a homeopath who attended the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women).

Alcott assisted in the establishment of the Boston Female Medical College which was founded with the help of local suffragists by homeopaths Israel Tisdale Talbot, David Thayer and Conrad Wesselhoeft. (Conrad’s father William Wesselhoeft was also an eminent physician and homeopath. Conrad’s uncle Robert Wesselhoeft was also a leading homeopath, and Robert had two sons, Conrad and Walter, who were both professors at the homeopathic medical school at Boston University).

Alcott was not fooled by every new cure, testing each to see if it worked, but then returning to homeopathy, her tried and tested method.

The film version of Little Women is true to Alcott’s homeopathic principles when Marmee heals Beth with homeopathic remedies. Alcott’s novel Jo’s Boys was dedicated to her homeopath Conrad Wesselhoeft. In this book, its lead character, Nan, is portrayed as a bright, scientifically minded, young girl who is able to keep calm in a crisis. Nan becomes a homeopathic physician who is also dedicated to women’s equality.

Her father Bronson Alcott was a Transcendentalist and an abolitionist, lending assistance to the Underground Railroad. Bronson Alcott was a member of the Transcendental Club and a friend of homeopathic supporter Ralph Waldo Emerson (who was infatuated with another homeopathic supporter Nathaniel Hawthorne - an Alcott family friend) and Henry David Thoreau, a life long abolitionist and advocate of vegetarianism.

Louisa was also close to Ednah Dow Cheney.

William Andrus Alcott, Alcott’s paternal uncle was one of the founding members of the American Vegetarian Society, and he was associated with homeopathic supporters Harriet Beecher Stowe and Amelia Bloomer.

Alcott’s uncle Samuel Joseph May was also a noted abolitionist.

In her later life, Alcott became an advocate of women’s suffrage and was the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts.

During her childhood and early adulthood, she shared her family’s poverty and Transcendentalist ideals. In 1840, after several setbacks with the school, her family moved to a cottage on two acres along the Sudbury River in Concord, Massachusetts.

The Alcott family moved to the Utopian Fruitlands community for a brief interval in 1843-1844, and then, after its collapse, to rented rooms, and subsequently a house in Concord purchased with her mother’s inheritance and help from Emerson.

Alcott’s early education had included lessons from the naturalist Henry David Thoreau but had chiefly been in the hands of her father. She also received some instruction from writers and educators such as homeopathic supporters Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller, who were all family friends.

She later described these early years in a newspaper sketch entitled “Transcendental Wild Oats“, afterwards reprinted in the volume Silver Pitchers (1876), which relates the experiences of her family during their experiment in “plain living and high thinking” at Fruitlands.

As she grew older, she developed as both an abolitionist and a feminist. In 1847, the family housed a fugitive slave for one week; in 1848 Alcott read and admired the “Declaration of Sentiments” published by the Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights.

Due to the family’s poverty, she began work at an early age as an occasional teacher, seamstress, governess, domestic helper, and writer. Her first book was Flower Fables (1854), tales originally written for Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

James T Fields, one of America’s most famous publisher of American writers, and a partner in Ticknor and Fields, had a bookstore known as Parnassus Corner on Old Corner.

His literary salon was packed with the influential people of the time, including Louisa May Alcott, John Greenleaf Whittier, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, James Russell Lowell, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Julia Ward Howe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Bret Harte, Bayard Taylor, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edwin Booth, and Nathaniel Parker Willis, who described Parnassus Corner as ‘the hub in which every spoke of the radiating wheel of Boston intellect had a socket.. ‘

Ednah Dow Cheney wrote Reminiscences of Ednah Dow Cheney (born Littlehale), Louisa May Alcott: her life, letters, and journals with Louisa May Alcott and Louisa May Alcott, her life, letters and journals, Louisa May Alcott, the children’s friend, The story of the Alcotts.

Alcott’s Home Orchard House website

William Andrus Alcott 1798 - 1859 was an advocate of health reform and his prolific outpouring of advice to embrace vegetarianism, natural health care, hydrotherapy and preventative live style became a ‘Health Crusade‘ which paved the way for homeopathy in America with his diatribes against the methods of the old school physicians.

In truth, William Andrus Alcott didn’t like any medicine at all! He advocated sound education and Christian Physiology instead.

Among the most outspoken of American health reformers of the mid-nineteenth century was Dr William A. Alcott of Boston. The health reformers offered an alternative to a public dissatisfied with the heroic practice of most physicians of this period by emphasizing that the individual had it in his or her own power to keep all members of the family in good health by forgoing most of the drugs prescribed by allopathic physicians.

Alcott was particularly concerned with the huge extent of infant mortality caused by “maternal dosing and drugging.” He wrote:

“But whether ignorant or somewhat enlightened, the vast majority of our mothers doctor, more or less, their own children. At least, if they refuse to call it doctoring, they give them a vast amount of small elixirs, cordials, etc. The closets of not a few house-keepers are a complete apothecary’s shop.

“They may, it is true, have smaller parcels then the regular apothecary; but they have almost as great an assortment. And they not only keep it; they administer it. They may not intend it; they do not mean to give much; sometimes they really think they do not give much.

“But it comes to pass, in the course of the year, that much is given by somebody; and I greatly fear that the mother must be held responsible for it….

“But now for the consequences of this maternal dosing; for this it is with which medical men have chiefly to do. Next to bad food and wretched cookery, as I have before intimated, this error is productive of more sickness and premature death than any other.”

William Andrus Alcott was one of the founding members of the American Vegetarian Society, and he was associated with homeopathic supporters Harriet Beecher Stowe and Amelia Bloomer. Alcott was the first President of the American Vegetarian Society and he was influenced by Sylvester Graham and William Metcalf.

He had grown up very close to his cousin, Bronson Alcott, co-founder of the Fruitlands vegetarian commune (later made famous by the presence of Bronson’s 10 year old daughter - Louisa May Alcott).

Bronson Alcott was a strict vegetarian and in contact with Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Herald-Tribune. He was also in contact with the new society and wrote to some of their meetings… Henry David Thoreau was also very close to Bronson Alcott and a friend of Horace Greeley…

Cousin and co-worker of Bronson Alcott, William Andrus Alcott worked for better schools and better teaching in 19th-century America. He wrote on health and nutrition issues, and was an early advocate of birth control.

He was the apparant inventor of a student desk with individual shelves and a hinged blackboard that could swing forward or back, used in the School of Human Culture opened by his cousin Bronson Alcott in 1834.

ALCOTT, William Alexander, author, was born at Wolcott, Conn., August 6, 1798. He first attended a district school in winter, and worked on a farm during the summer, and subsequently by teaching he obtained a primary education and means to study medicine at Yale College.

Completing his medical course he began to practise and also to write upon hygiene, confining his work chiefly to dietary subjects. With William Woodbridge he prepared school geographies and maps, and edited Annals of Education and Juvenile Rambles, the pioneer juvenile weekly in America.

In 1832 he removed to Boston and there published a book entitled the “Young Man’s Guide,” treating of physiological principles, that was widely read. This success induced him to write other similar books. In all, he wrote about one hundred works, which have been influential in reforming educational methods, and improving the physical and moral well-being of mankind. He died in Auburndale, Mass., March 29, 1859.

William Andrus Alcott, educator, physician and prolific writer of advice literature, was born in Wolcott, Connecticut. Cousin to Bronson Alcott and Bronson’s daughter Louisa May Alcott, Alcott was the only son of John Alcox, a farmer. His great-grandfather, John Alcock, was the first settler in Wolcott in 1731 and his paternal grandfather, John Alcox, fought in the Revolutionary War as a captain. Alcott’s mother, Anna Andrus Alcox, was descended from the first settlers in Waterbury.

A year older than Bronson Alcott, William grew up with his cousin in Wolcott. Together they attended the district school, shared a love of books and reading, and agreed to change the spelling of the family name to Alcott. As Bronson Alcott writes in his autobiography,

“William Andrews [sic] Alcott. He was my cousin and a little older than myself. Living in sight, we sought each other’s society whenever we could steal away from our home duties, hoping to find conversation and reading food for our minds not accessible to us at school . . .

“We read the same books, borrowed any within our reach that promised to be interesting or instructive; formed a Juvenile library, as we called it; corresponded by letters, delivering these at each other’s doors; cherished like dreams of the future.

“Teaching was a desirable occupation and possible for us; we even aspired to authorship . . .”

Dr. Alcott’s writings on hygiene and primary education were numerous; they had a wide popularity for a time, and might be read still with profit. He was a pioneer in reforms, in methods of teaching and discipline. As a teacher in his district his reputation was second to none . . . Few men have lived lives of more untiring industry. His modesty was the only impediment to a wide and just appreciation by his contemporaries.
Alcott himself describes his early education as consisting of

“attending the district school near my native home from three to four months every winter . . . and a few months every summer from (the age) of four to eight.”

His father needed his help on the farm the rest of the year, though from age thirteen to seventeen, Alcott did attend

“a kind of high school every winter, in all about six months.”

He admits to scarcely having had one serious thought of school teaching until his father was appointed to the local school district committee, which took an interest in the young man who had “good learning”, lived near the school, and could board at home.

From these farmhouse beginnings, Alcott began a career in education and writing that would bring him to the forefront of the educational reform movement of his day.

After teaching school for several years, Alcott began suffering from what was probably a tubercular infection. The illness would tax him for the rest of his life. He attended Yale Medical School and received his diploma in 1827.

He intended to establish a model school, incorporating his knowledge of physiology and health to aid his teaching. His condition made teaching very difficult, however, and Alcott practiced medicine near Wolcott, gaining strength from the outdoor hours spent on horseback necessary to make house calls.

He received an invitation to start a school near Hartford, Connecticut; the schedule allowed for ample outdoor activity and adequate sleep, and Alcott, in better health, began his voluminous writing.

His essay on the construction of school-houses won an award by the American Institute of Education. He published small volumes on educational subjects, and began lecturing. In 1831 he began editing and writing for journals and magazines, editing the first magazine for children in the United States, the Juvenile Rambler, and contributing to the Annals of Education, Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, and others.

An untiring author, over the course of his 61 years he wrote 19 books on education, 31 books on physiology, physical education and health, 14 family and school library texts, and 44 Sunday school library texts.

Much of Alcott’s work stressed the moral basis for health and education. In The Young Housekeeper, he posits:

“The grand question, in short, is, What are the kinds of food which are best for healthy persons — best for their whole being, here and hereafter? . . .

“We have no more right in physical than in moral matters, to slumber on doubtful ground. We are to do good even by our eating and drinking; and not merely to do good, but do the most good in our power.

This lofty aspiration influenced every attitude Alcott held about food. His chapter headings in The Young Housekeeper reveal a preacher’s demeanor towards common foods: “Chapter XXIII: The Apple . . . One of the Creator’s noblest gifts . . . Chapter XXIV The Pear — Quality of pears. Bad ones . . . Chapter XXXIV The Cucumber — Evils of the cucumber overrated.”

He objects to butter and cheese not so much for health reasons, but because at this time women were the chief manufacturers of these foods, and he felt that their time could be better spent in the moral education of children.

“What can be more valuable than female labor, applied to the physical and moral management and early instruction of children?”

This middle-class sentiment expressed an increasingly common imperative to define women’s work in terms of moral education, away from the traditional domestic production of household goods.

Alcott’s aim in writing The Young Housekeeper was to “elevate” housekeeping. Echoing cookbook author and contemporary Catharine Beecher, he writes in the Preface,

“The elements of the nation, nay, of the world itself, are prepared, to a very great extent, in our nurseries, and around the domestic fireside.”

William Alcott married Phebe Bronson in 1836, and had two children. His last years were spent in the town of Newton, Mass, where he died of pleurisy in 1859, and was buried in the Newton cemetery.

William Andrus Alcott wrote American Annals of Education and Instruction, and Journal of Literary … with William Channing Woodbridge and William Russell, The Vegetable Diet As Sanctioned by Medical Men and By Experience in All Ages, The Young Mother, The Young Wife, Or Duties of Woman in the Marriage Relation, The Use of Tobacco: Its Physical, Intellectual, and Moral Effects on The Human System, Adventures of Lot, the Nephew of Abraham, Tea and Coffee, The Young Man’s Guide, The Moral Reformer and Teacher on the Human Constitution, The Young Husband: Or, Duties of Man in the Marriage Relation, The Young Wife, Or Duties of Woman in the Marriage Relation, Confessions of a School Master, The Young Woman’s Guide to Excellence, The Physiology of Marriage, The Young House-keeper: Or, Thoughts on Food and Cookery, Essay on the Construction of School-houses: To which was Awarded the Prize, The Moral Philosophy of Courtship and Marriage, Letters to a Sister, Or, Woman’s Mission: Or, Woman’s Mission, Forty Years in the Wilderness of Pills and Powders, The Mother’s Medical Guide in Children’s Diseases, and many, many more…

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Sue :: Apr.05.2008 :: American History, British History :: 1 Comment »

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