Trick or Treatment—The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine (Electronic book text)

Signs of Hahnemann’s growing influence ranged from opening the world’s first homeopathic hospital in Leipzig in 1833 to the use of homeopathy to treat Napoleon’s pubic lice. Homeopathy became particularly fashionable in Paris in the 1830s, because Hahnemann set up home in the city after marrying a beautiful Parisian socialite named Marie Mélanie d’Herville-Gohier — he was eighty years old and she was in her early thirties. With her patronage and his reputation, they were able to run a lucrative practice for the wealthy elite, with Mrs Hahnemann assisting her husband in the afternoon and running her own clinic for the poor in the morning.

Elsewhere in Europe, Hahnemann’s disciples spread the gospel of homeopathy with their master’s voice ringing in their ears: ‘He who does not walk exactly on the same line with me, who diverges, if it be but the breadth of a straw to the left or right, is a traitor and I will have nothing to do with him.’ Certainly Dr Frederick Quin, who had studied with Hahnemann in Paris, was no such traitor, for he established homeopathy in London in 1827 strictly according to Hahnemann’s principles. It soon became highly popular among the British aristocracy, and within half a century it was being practised across the country, with large homeopathic hospitals being founded in London, Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool and Glasgow.

Although welcomed by many doctors and patients, this rapid growth was not without controversy. When William Henderson, Professor of General Pathology at Edinburgh University, began to support homeopathy in the 1840s, a colleague wrote: ‘The consternation manifested by the Medical Faculty in the University and by the College of Physicians was such as might be exhibited in ecclesiastical circles if the Professor of Divinity were to announce that he had become a Mohammedan.’

At roughly the same time, homeopathy was also establishing itself on the other side of the Atlantic. Dr Hans Burch Gram, a Bostonian of Danish descent, learned about homeopathy during a visit to Copenhagen and then brought the idea back to America in 1825. Just as had happened in Britain, homeopathy gained both ardent supporters and fervent critics. The result was that there were 2,500 practitioners and six homeopathic colleges by the outbreak of the American Civil War, but homeopaths were still largely denied the opportunity to serve in the army. A professor at the Homeopathic Medical College of Missouri argued that this infringed a soldier’s right to receive the medical care of his own choice:

Are personal rights abrogated by the Constitution in time of war? Has a soldier no right to think for himself, and to ask for that relief from suffering and death which his experience for years has taught him is best? Has Congress a right to establish a privileged order in medicine in violation of the spirit and genius of our government?

In order to deal with their critics, homeopaths would often point to the successes they had achieved in dealing with major epidemics. As early as 1800, Hahnemann himself had used ultra-dilute Belladonna to combat scarlet fever; then in 1813 he used homeopathy to treat an epidemic of typhus spread by Napoleon’s soldiers after their invasion of Russia; and in 1831 homeopathic remedies such as Camphor, Cuprum and Veratrum were apparently successful in central Europe in tackling outbreaks of cholera, a disease that conventional medicine was unable to treat.

This success was repeated during a cholera epidemic in London in 1854, when patients at the London Homoeopathic Hospital had a survival rate of 84 per cent, compared to just 47 per cent for patients receiving more conventional treatment at the nearby Middlesex Hospital. Many homeopaths therefore argued that this was strong evidence in support of homeopathy, because it was possible to construe the results from these two hospitals as the outcome of an informal trial. The percentages allow us to compare the success rates of two treatments on two groups of patients with the same illness, and homeopathic remedies clearly did better than conventional medicine.

However, critics later pointed out three major reasons why these percentages did not necessarily mean that homeopathy was effective. First, the patients at the two hospitals had the same illness, but that does not necessarily mean that the two hospitals were competing on a level playing field. It could be, for instance, that the patients who attended the London Homoeopathic Hospital were wealthier, which would mean that they were in a better state of health before catching cholera and were better fed and cared for after leaving hospital — all of this, rather than the homeopathic treatment itself, might account for the higher success rate.