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

In 1842, Holmes delivered a lecture entitled ‘Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions’, in which he reiterated why Hahnemann’s ideas did not make sense from a scientific point of view. He focused particularly on the extreme dilutions at the heart of homeopathy. One way to think about these dilutions is to consider the key ingredient being dissolved in ever greater volumes of liquid. Each time homeopaths dilute the active ingredient by a factor of 100, they are effectively dissolving it in a volume of water or alcohol that is 100 times bigger, and they do this over and over again. Holmes used a calculation by the Italian physician Dr Panvini to explain the bizarre consequences of such repeated dilutions when applied to a starting ingredient of one drop of Chamomile:

For the first dilution it would take 100 drops of alcohol. For the second dilution it would take 10,000 drops, or about a pint. For the third dilution it would take 100 pints. For the fourth dilution it would take 10,000 pints, or more than 1,000 gallons, and so on to the ninth dilution, which would take ten billion gallons, which he computed would fill the basin of Lake Agnano, a body of water two miles in circumference. The twelfth dilution would of course fill a million such lakes. By the time the seventeenth degree of dilution should be reached, the alcohol required would equal in quantity the waters of ten thousand Adriatic seas. Swallowers of globules, one of your little pellets, moistened in the mingled waves of one million lakes of alcohol, each two miles in circumference, with which had been blended that one drop of Tincture of Camomile, would be of precisely the strength recommended for that medicine in your favorite Jahr’s Manual, against the most sudden, frightful, and fatal diseases!

In the same spirit, William Croswell Doane (1832–1913) also took a swipe at homeopathy. As the first Episcopal Bishop of Albany, New York, he penned a piece of doggerel entitled ‘Lines on Homoeopathy’:

Stir the mixture well

Lest it prove inferior,

Then put half a drop

Into Lake Superior.

Every other day

Take a drop in water,

You’ll be better soon

Or at least you oughter.

In Europe Sir John Forbes, Queen Victoria’s physician, called homeopathy ‘an outrage to human reason’, a view that was consistent with the entry for homeopathy in the 1891 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: ‘Hahnemann’s errors were great…He led his followers far out of the track of sound views of disease.’

Part of the reason for homeopathy’s decline in popularity was that the medical establishment was transforming itself from heroic and dangerous into scientific and effective. Clinical trials, such as those that exposed the dangers of bloodletting, were steadily differentiating between hazardous procedures and effective cures. And, as each decade passed, there was an increased understanding of the true causes of disease. One of the most important medical breakthroughs took place during the previously mentioned 1854 London cholera epidemic.

The disease had first hit Britain in 1831, when 23,000 people died; this was followed by the 1849 epidemic, which killed 53,000. During the 1849 epidemic the obstetrician Dr John Snow questioned the established theory that cholera was spread through the air by unknown poisonous vapours. He had been a pioneer of anaesthesia and had administered chloroform to Queen Victoria during the birth of Prince Leopold, so he knew exactly how gaseous poisons affected groups of people; if cholera was caused by a gas, then entire populations should be affected, but instead the disease seemed to be selective about its victims. Therefore, he posited the radical theory that cholera was caused by contact with contaminated water and sewage. He put his theory to the test during the next cholera outbreak in 1854. In London’s Soho, he made an observation that seemed to support his theory:

Within 250 yards of the spot where Cambridge Street joins Broad Street there were upwards of 500 fatal attacks of cholera in 10 days. As soon as I became acquainted with the situation and extent of this eruption of cholera, I suspected some contamination of the water of the much-frequented street-pump in Broad Street.

To investigate his theory he plotted the location of every death on a map of Soho (see Figure 4) and, sure enough, the suspicious pump was at the epicentre. His theory was further backed by his observation that a local coffee shop that served water from the pump had nine customers who had contracted cholera. On the other hand, a nearby workhouse with its own well had no cases, and employees at the brewery on Broad Street had been unaffected because they drank their own produce.