The Success of Homeopaths Without Borders (S3033)

1M: a Homeopath's Podcast

Today I’m bringing you an interview I did with Lauren Fox and Holly Manoogian, of Homeopaths Without Borders.

HWB is a volunteer run organization that was founded in 1996.

Their mission-from the website- is to introduce or advance the understanding and use of homeopathy in areas where it does not yet exist or is minimally available, as well as to promote and provide homeopathic care and healing in emergency situations.

To date they have provided service in Cuba, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Haiti.

There is much more to the history and evolution of the organization at their website, hwbna.org. You can visit there and read all about the visionary individuals who have been a part of its beginnings and subsequent success.

Please especially check out the information about their clinical curriculum-Essential Curriculum for Learning Homeopathy- which is available to purchase in English, or French. It’s a thorough, compact training thats’ making its way around the world, perfect for study groups, homeopathy schools, practitioners wanting to integrate homeopathy, and more. It’s one of the resources used in the first-year program at the Baylight Center for Homeopathy in Portland, ME, where I teach. Again, you can find more information on the website.

I’ve brought to the podcast before representatives from other non-profit homeopathic efforts, like Camilla Sherr and Jane Davy from HHA, and just last month Carla Marcellus from HTSF, working in Honduras. There are many other efforts, most of which are much less well known than these projects, or are quite local to the country of their organizer’s origin.

Homeopathy lends itself so well to taking it abroad and sharing it in areas of need, to people of little means, in geographic areas that can’t support hospitals and such other challenges, that it had me thinking- when were the first such efforts on behalf of homeopathy?

As many of long-time listeners know, I have a strong interest in our history and often bring archival readings to the show.

So for this episode-before I bring in my interview with Holly and Lauren- I wanted to share a bit of what I found in my sleuthing efforts to find the earliest mention possible of homeopaths working outside of their own communities and intentionally bringing homeopathy to an area of need.

When I do these searches, I confine them to my own personal access to old journals in my software. So it is by no means an exhaustive or definitive research effort.

But-

As you can imagine, it’s not easy to find. In the earliest years, mid- late 1800s, homeopathy was truly in its infancy, and though it was gaining support and popularity through epidemics and the like, homeopaths needed to make a living just as we do now, they also faced strong criticism and resistance, and not to mention, travel - I have to assume- was much more costly and difficult than our current ease of booking online, and networks of hostels, airbnb’s, and the other ammenities for the international traveler. Not that our homeopathic volunteers are staying in airbnb’s per se, but I’m sure you catch my drift.

In anycase, many homeopaths were more… advanced, enlightened, complex thinkers—- however you want to consider it- than the allopathic physicians at the time, that I think it was definitely possible and probable that some were seeing the potential of homeopathy to affect parts of the world in need.

So, I looked for references in the oldest journals I have access to. Mostly I went through the table of contents for titles that were suggestive of what I was looking for.

Definitely documentation of efforts in epidemics are very wide spread, though most of these efforts were reported by homeopaths working within their own cities and communities.

I did find an interesting letter coming out of the early days of India, and a series of letters from an anglo homeopath working in an African American community in Virginia, shortly after the Civil War and emancipation.

Listen to the episode to hear me read Letter from India and especially Holly and Lauren's passion for their work in Haiti!