Emily Dickinson's Love for Homeopathy...and Taylor Swift's Love for Emily Dickinson
...and which other literary greats were also passionate about homeopathic medicine
Taylor Swift photo By iHeartRadioCA, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=137551448
Taylor Swift’s newest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” will drop on April 19, 2024. The title of this album is an obvious reference to Emily Dickinson who Ms. Swift just happens to be a distant relative (6th cousin, three times removed).
Swifties have noted that Taylor Swift’s 9th album was entitled, Evermore, which was released on December 10, 2020 (December 10th is Dickinson’s birthday!).
One potential reason that the date “April 19th” was chosen as the release date is that historians think that the American revolution actually began on that day. Also, April 19th “just happens” to be “Poetry and Creative Mind Day.”
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) is considered, with Walt Whitman, as one of the two greatest American poets of the nineteenth century. However, early in her life, between 1846 and 1852, Emily Dickinson experienced serious health problems, specifically a chronic cough, fatigue, and significant weight loss. Extracting clinical clues from her correspondence, some historians have suggested that she was suffering from tuberculosis (Hirschhorn, 1999).
Tuberculosis was and is a very serious disease, and epidemics of it have erupted at various times in human history. In 1851 it was the cause of one-third of all deaths in Boston, and Emily had many relatives who had died from it. That year, Emily sought treatment with a highly respected homeopath, Dr. William Wesselhoeft [1] in Boston (St. John, n.d.; Hirschhorn, 1999).
Emily wrote that he prescribed two homeopathic medicines for her. She didn’t think that the medicines were effective, but her older and more practical sister, Lavina, thought otherwise. Lavina (who originally referred Emily and their brother Austin to Dr. Wesselhoeft because he was her homeopath) asserted just two weeks after homeopathic treatment: “I think Emily may be very much improved. She has really grown fat.” Because Emily was always extremely thin, this statement of her gaining weight suggests some health improvements.
Her brother Austin wrote Emily’s closest friend, Susan Gilbert: “He [their father] says Emily is better than for years since she returned from Boston” (Thomas, 1988, 219). And lending further support to the real benefits from the homeopathic treatment, within several months, she no longer complained about the chronic cough that she had experienced for five years.
Other biographers of Emily Dickinson said that Wesselhoeft’s treatment “brought not only a noticeable improvement in her health but a certain buoyancy of spirit as well” (Bingham, 1955, 175).
Despite the serious health problems that Emily Dickinson experienced in the 1840s and early 1850s, she lived considerably beyond these decades. She died in 1886.
Other Literary Greats Who Loved Homeopathic Medicine…
The esteemed medical historian William Rothstein acknowledged that “early American homeopaths were all well educated and cultured physicians … and manifested an erudition rarely found in regular medical journals of the period” (Rothstein, 1972, 160). He continued, quoting the editor of a leading conventional medical journal who begrudgingly admitted that many homeopaths were “persons of the highest respectability and moral worth.”
It is not surprising to learn that many of America’s leading literary figures in the nineteenth century were also advocates of this “new medicine,” including Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, and William James. Likewise, several renowned European literary greats were also homeopathic supporters, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Charles Dickens, W. B. Yeats, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Bernard Shaw.
The stories about each of these literary greats and their experiences with homeopathic medicine are described in my book, The Homeopathic Revolution: Why Famous People and Cultural Heroes Choose Homeopathy. This book also provides truly amazing stories about the use of and advocacy for homeopathy by many of the most famous and respected cultural heroes of the past 200 years, including 10 U.S. Presidents and dozens of other world leaders, seven different Popes and numerous other religious leaders from all faiths, world-class musicians and artists, sports superstars, women’s rights leaders, physicians and scientists, and corporate leaders too.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] William Wesselhoeft, MD, was an eminent physician and homeopath. It wasn’t unusual for his patients to experience relief from their physical complaints along with improvement in their emotional and mental state. In fact, in his last address before the Homeopathic Society of Boston, he described the goal of a physician to do more than improve physical health: “The art of awakening and increasing the vitality of the human body, that is our highest aim” (Bingham, 1955, 175). Wesselhoeft was not the only member of his family involved in homeopathy. His brother Robert Wesselhoeft was also a leading homeopath, and Robert had two sons, Conrad and Walter, who were professors at the homeopathic medical school at Boston University. Conrad Wesselhoeft, MD, was Louisa May Alcott’s homeopath.
REFERENCES:
Bingham, M. T. Emily Dickinson’s Home. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955.
Hirschhorn, N. Was It Tuberculosis? Another Glimpse of Emily Dickinson’s Health. New England Quarterly, March 1999, 72(1):102–118.
Rothstein, W. American Physicians in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972.
St. John, T. Emily Dickinson Daguerreotype (no date), www.geocities.com/seekingthephoenix/d/emily.htm
Thomas, H. K. Emily Dickinson’s “Renunciation” and Anorexia Nervosa, American Literature, May 1988, 60(2):205–225.
I hope for a resurgence of ancient homeopathic/holistic medicine as people wake up to what has been perpetrated on us over the past 4 years by the Pharma-Medico-Government Complex.
As for Swift, her beau has flogged the poison, so there is some disconnect there, perhaps
I can not believe that Taylor Swift is worth talking about she is a satanic witch not only this she is a man