This book traces the genesis, principles and practice of homeopathy, and discusses the reasons for its enduring popularity. Two hundred years ago, medicine had little to offer except blood letting and the administration of violent purgatives – practices which shortened the course of illness by hastening the death of the patient. Largely in reaction to what he correctly saw as the brutality and ineffectiveness of the medicine of his day, the eighteenth century German physician Samuel Hahnemann developed a system of therapeutics that he termed homeopathy. Ironically, while modern medicine has changed beyond recognition, homeopathy, with its roots in alchemy and metaphysics, continues to be practiced precisely as it was in Hahnemann’s day. Readers of this book will enjoy the story of homeopathy and its almost magical attraction, whilst learning much from the authors' rational and scientific discussion of the biological, chemical and psychological questions that this treatment raises.

This authoritative catalogue of the Corcoran Gallery of Art's renowned collection of pre-1945 American paintings will greatly enhance scholarly and public understanding of one of the finest and most important collections of historic American art in the world. Composed of more than 600 objects dating from 1740 to 1945.

James L. Machor offers a sweeping exploration of how American fiction was received in both public and private spheres in the United States before the Civil War. Machor takes four antebellum authors—Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Catharine Sedgwick, and Caroline Chesebro'—and analyzes how their works were published, received, and interpreted. Drawing on discussions found in book reviews and in private letters and diaries, Machor examines how middle-class readers of the time engaged with contemporary fiction and how fiction reading evolved as an interpretative practice in nineteenth-century America. Through careful analysis, Machor illuminates how the reading practices of nineteenth-century Americans shaped not only the experiences of these writers at the time but also the way the writers were received in the twentieth century. What Machor reveals is that these authors were received in ways strikingly different from how they are currently read, thereby shedding significant light on their present status in the literary canon in comparison to their critical and popular positions in their own time. Machor deftly combines response and reception criticism and theory with work in the history of reading to engage with groundbreaking scholarship in historical hermeneutics. In so doing, Machor takes us ever closer to understanding the particular and varying reading strategies of historical audiences and how they impacted authors’ conceptions of their own readership.