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

A key piece of evidence was the case of a woman who died of cholera, even though she lived far from Soho. Snow learned, however, that she had previously lived in Soho and had such a fondness for the sweet pump water that she had specially asked for some Broad Street water to be brought to her house. Based on all these observations, Snow persuaded town officials to take the handle off the pump, which halted the supply of contaminated water and brought an end to the cholera outbreak. Snow, arguably the world’s first epidemiologist, had demonstrated the power of the new scientific approach to medicine, and in 1866 Britain suffered its last cholera outbreak.

Figure 4

John Snow’s map of cholera deaths in Soho, 1854. Each black oblong represents one death, and the Broad Street pump can be seen at the centre of the epidemic.

Other major scientific breakthroughs included vaccination, which had been growing in popularity since the start of the 1800s, and Joseph Lister’s pioneering use of antiseptics in 1865. Thereafter Louis Pasteur invented vaccines for rabies and anthrax, thus contributing to the development of the germ theory of disease. Even more importantly, Robert Koch and his pupils identified the bacteria responsible for cholera, tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid, pneumonia, gonorrhoea, leprosy, bubonic plague, tetanus and syphilis. Koch deservedly received the 1905 Nobel Prize for Medicine for these discoveries.

Without any comparable achievements attributed to homeopathy, and without any rigorous evidence or scientific rationale to support it, the use of these ultra-dilute homeopathic remedies continued to decline into the twentieth century in both Europe and America. For example, American homeopathy was dealt a severe blow in 1910 when the Carnegie Foundation asked Abraham Flexner to investigate ways of establishing higher standards for the admission, teaching and graduation of medical students. One of the key recommendations of the Flexner Report was that medical schools should offer a curriculum based on mainstream conventional practice, which effectively ended the teaching of homeopathy in major hospitals.

Homeopathy continued its steady decline, and by the 1920s it seemed that it was destined to become extinct around the world. Then, in 1925, there was a sudden and unexpected revival in Germany, the country where homeopathy had been invented. The man behind the resurgence was an eminent surgeon called August Bier, who used the homeopathic principle of ‘like cures like’ to treat bronchitis with ether and to cure boils with sulphur. His patients responded well, so he wrote up his findings in a German medical journal. This was the only paper on the subject of homeopathy to be published in Germany in 1925, but it triggered forty-five papers discussing homeopathy the following year, and over the next decade there was a renewed enthusiasm for the potential of ultra-dilute medicines.

This was a timely development for the Third Reich, whose leaders sought to develop the Neue Deutsche Heilkunde (the New German Medicine), an innovative medical system that would combine the best of both modern and traditional medicine. The first hospital to implement fully the Neue Deutsche Heilkunde was founded in Dresden in 1934 and was named after Rudolf Hess, who was Hitler’s deputy at the time. Hess was strongly in favour of incorporating homeopathy within the Neue Deutsche Heilkunde, partly because he believed it to be highly effective, and partly because it had been invented by a German. Furthermore, he viewed homeopathic remedies, most of which were cheap to manufacture, as a low-cost solution to meeting the needs of German healthcare.

Meanwhile, the German Ministry of Health was keen to test whether or not homeopathy was genuinely effective. The Third Reich’s chief medical officer, Dr Gerhard Wagner, instigated an unprecedented programme of research, which involved sixty universities and cost hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks. The research effort started immediately after the 1937 Homeopathic World Congress in Berlin and it continued for the next two years, with a particular focus on treating tuberculosis, anaemia and gonorrhoea. The team behind the homeopathy research project included pharmacologists, toxicologists and, of course, homeopaths, who together designed a series of detailed trials and then implemented them rigorously. It is worth noting that those involved in the trials were among the most respected people in their fields, and they maintained the highest ethical and scientific standards in their research.