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

Second, as well as differing in the treatment that they offered, the two hospitals may have differed in other important ways. For instance, the London Homoeopathic Hospital might have had a higher standard of hygiene than the Middlesex Hospital, which could easily explain its superior survival rate. After all, we are dealing with an infectious disease, so clean wards, uncontaminated food and safe water were of the utmost importance.

Third, perhaps the higher survival rate at the London Homoeopathic Hospital was not indicative of the success of homeopathy, but rather it pointed to the failure of conventional medicine. Indeed, medical historians suspect that patients who received no medical care would probably have fared better than those who received the conventional medications given at the time. This might seem surprising, but the 1850s still belonged to the era of so-called ‘heroic medicine’, when doctors probably did more harm than good.

‘Heroic medicine’ was a term invented in the twentieth century to describe the aggressive practices that dominated healthcare up until the mid-nineteenth century. Patients had to endure bloodletting, intestinal purging, vomiting, sweating and blistering, which generally stressed an already weakened body. On top of this, patients would receive large doses of medications, such as mercury and arsenic, which scientists now know to be highly toxic. The extreme bloodletting suffered by George Washington, as described in Chapter 1, is a prime example of heroic medicine and its harmful impact on a patient. The label ‘heroic medicine’ reflected the role played by the supposedly heroic doctor, but anyone who survived the treatment was the real hero.

The richest patients were the most heroic of all, because they endured the most severe treatments. This observation was made as early as 1622, when a Florentine physician, Antonio Durazzini, reported on the recovery rates from a fever that was spreading through the region: ‘More of those who are able to seek medical advice and treatment die than of the poor.’ It was during this period that Latanzio Magiotti, the Grand Duke of Florence’s own doctor, said, ‘Most Serene Highness, I take the money not for my services as a doctor but as a guard, to prevent some young man who believes everything he reads in books from coming along and stuffing something down the patients which kills them.’

Although the desperate, wealthy and sick continued to rely on doctors, many onlookers openly criticized their practices. Benjamin Franklin commented, ‘All drug doctors are quacks,’ while the philosopher Voltaire wrote, ‘Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing.’ He advised that a good physician was one who amused his patients while nature cured the disease. These concerns about medicine were also reflected by several dramatists, including Shakespeare, who in Timon of Athens has Timon advise: ‘Trust not the physician; His antidotes are poisons.’ Similarly, in Le Malade imaginaire, Molière wrote: ‘Nearly all men die of their remedies and not of their illnesses.’

Hence, if no treatment at all would have been better than conventional heroic medicine for cholera patients, then modern sceptics are not surprised that homeopathy was also better than conventional heroic medicine. After all, the sceptics feel that the homeopathic remedies were so diluted that taking them was the equivalent to having no treatment.

In short, we can conclude two things about a patient seeking treatment before the twentieth century. First, the patient would have been better off opting for no treatment rather than heroic medicine. Second, the patient would have been better off opting for homeopathy rather than for heroic medicine. The important question, however, was whether homeopathy was any better than a lack of treatment? Those who supported homeopathy were convinced by their own experience that it was genuinely effective, whereas sceptics argued that such dilute remedies could not possibly benefit the patient.

The arguments continued throughout the nineteenth century; and despite the initially positive response from the aristocracy and significant sections of the medical community, there was a gradual swing against Hahnemann’s ideas as each decade passed. For example, the American physician and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes accepted that conventional medicine had failed in the past (‘If all the medicine in the world were thrown into the sea, it would be bad for the fish and good for humanity’), but he was not prepared to tolerate homeopathy as the way forward. He called homeopathy ‘a mangled mass of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, of imbecile incredibility and of artful misrepresentation.’