Oliver Wendell Holmes...Intellectually Dishonest
Speaking of intellectual dishonesty, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes won the prize for this in the 19th century. Although skeptics of homeopathy at that time and even today (!) consider Dr. Holmes' book to be one of the strongest critiques of homeopathy ever written, I will be curious what the seemingly smart and seemingly hyper-vigilent participants at this site will say about his knowledge of and criticisms about homeopathy.
It is more than a tad ironic that you "defenders of the scientific paradigm" maintain such an unscientific attitude towards homeopathy. This is not a homeopathic dose of chutzpah...it is a very crude dose of it...read for yourself...
Oliver Wendell Holmes and His Attack on Homeopathy
The most famous anti-homeopathy book written in the 19th century was by Oliver Wendell Holmes, MD (1809-1894). Called Homoeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions, this book was written just six years after Dr. Holmes graduated from medical school. Before Holmes went to medical school, he authored a famous poem in 1830 called Old Ironside as well as two articles in 1832 and 1833 entitled Autocrat at the Breakfast Table (published in The Atlantic Monthly), which gave him a national reputation as a leading American writer and scholar.
Although Holmes had become a professor at Harvard Medical School and although he was a respected poet and author, he actually had very little direct experience practicing medicine before he wrote this attack on homeopathy. Dr. Holmes’ essay on homeopathy gained a lot of attention, and this book today is commonly referred to as a “strong” critique of homeopathy. However, this book should actually be a significant embarrassment to its author and to those who are seriously antagonistic to homeopathy because it is so full of obvious errors of fact, which authors today still quote as though this book was factual.
It is amazing to note, first, that Dr. Holmes wrote that the one physician who typifies the good American medical thinking and practice of that time was Benjamin Rush, MD (1745-1813), a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the surgeon general of the Continental Army. Dr. Rush was one of the leading advocates of “heroic medicine,” that is, the frequent and aggressive use of including bloodletting, intestinal purging (with mercury), vomiting (with the caustic agent tartar emetic), and blistering of the skin.
Dr. Rush recommended bloodletting for virtually every patient, and he considered it quackery if a physician did not bloodlet his patients. He even once boasted that he had drawn enough blood to float a 74-gun man-of-war ship (Transactions, 1882).
Rush was also an advocate of forced psychiatric treatment, which in part explains why his portrait is on the emblem of the American Psychiatric Association. One of Rush's favorite methods of treatment was to tie a patient to a wooden board and rapidly spin it until significant amounts of blood flowed to the head. He placed his own son in one of his insane asylum hospitals for 27 years until he died. Rush also believed that being black was a hereditary illness which he referred to as “negroidism.”
In addition to Dr. Holmes’ glorification of Dr. Rush’s heroic medicine, Holmes had the audacity to say that homeopathic medicine is “barbaric” because it uses various snake venoms (p. x). This statement is more than a tad ironic when you consider that one of Dr. Holmes’ most famous quotes was his own critique of conventional medical drugs when he said, “I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica (materials of medicine), as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind,--and all the worse for the fishes” (Holmes, 1860).
Dr. Holmes’ primary attack was on the extremely small doses that are used in homeopathic medicine. However, Dr. Holmes had seemingly never read a single book on homeopathy or had any meaningful dialogue with a homeopath because he committed a classic error of calculation. When a homeopathic pharmacy makes a medicine, they take one part of the original substance and dilute it in nine or 99 parts water (considered a 1:10 or 1:100 dilution); the glass bottle is then vigorously shaken approximately 40 times, and then, the medicinal solution is again diluted 1:10 or 1:100. Ultimately, to make a homeopathic medicine to the 30X or 30C (“X” is a Roman numeral for 10, and “C” means 100; the letter next to the number refers to the type of dilution), the total amount of water needed is 30 test tubes of water (considerably less than a simple gallon of water).
However, Dr. Holmes got his calculations confused, and he incorrectly assumed that the homeopathic manufacturer had to have 10 times or 100 times more water than in the previous dilution. Dr. Holmes estimated that the 9th dilution would require ten billion gallons of water and the 17th dilution required a quantity equal to 10,000 Adriatic seas. Dr. Holmes could have easily corrected his error if he had simply gone into one homeopathic pharmacy or had a simple short conversation with a homeopath. Sadly and strangely, Dr. Holmes and other conventional doctors of that age prided themselves on never talking with a homeopath. What is even more ironic is that Dr. Holmes arranged for the reprinting of this article in various books from 1842 to 1891 without changing a single word, despite this and numerous other errors of fact in his work.
Dr. Holmes explained in his book that the growth of homeopathy was primarily because conventional physicians tended to over-medicate their patients, even though Holmes later wrote that the public itself “insists on being poisoned” (Holmes, 1860, 186).
Dr. Holmes also attempted to “prove” that homeopathic medicines do not work by quoting a “scientific study.” To do this, Holmes referenced a “study” by a Dr. Gabriel Andral, professor of medicine in the School of Paris. Holmes referred to Andral “a man of great kindness of character…of unquestioned integrity.” Holmes reported on Andral’s experiment on 130-140 patients using homeopathic medicines, and Holmes quoted Andral saying, “not one of them did it have the slightest influence” (Holmes, 1842, 80).
Although Dr. Holmes and others have asserted that Andral’s experiment provided strong evidence for disproving homeopathy, it must be noted that later in his life, Andral himself acknowledged the serious problems in his study. Although Andral claimed to have used Hahnemann’s Materia Medica Pura as his guide, he neglected to mention at the time that the book was in German and that he could not read German. One other book by Hahnemann was translated into French at the time of this study, but Andral did not prescribe any of the 22 homeopathic medicines in this book for any patients in his study. Even Andral’s assistant for this study acknowledged that Andral did not know how to select homeopathic medicines for patients and that he “excuses his ignorance by saying it was unavoidable” (Dean, 2004, 112).
Additional evidence of Andral’s complete ignorance of homeopathy was revealed in a review of each of his prescriptions and his use of dosages. He never prescribed any homeopathic medicines for any patient’s unique syndrome of symptoms. Instead, he selected a single symptom of his own idiosyncratic choosing and then guessed at the medicine for it. For instance, his prescriptions of Arnica for one woman with painful menstruation and for one man with tuberculosis were guesses that were not based on any homeopathic textbook. Further, 75% of the patients were given just one dose of one remedy without any follow-up remedy (Irvine, 1844). If patients were not immediately cured by this one dose, he considered homeopathy a failure and then referred the patient for conventional medical treatment.
Andral later asserted that he had never formally granted anyone permission to publish his report on homeopathy, and further, by 1852 he had changed his mind about homeopathy and asserted that it deserved the closest examination by every physician (Dean, 2004, 112). Despite these facts, Dr. Holmes never changed a word of his essay on homeopathy to avoid misinformation.
When you consider that this book by Dr. Holmes was considered the best critique of homeopathy written in the 19th century, one must rightfully acknowledge that serious or sophisticated criticism of homeopathy at this time was neither rational nor accurate.
In 1861, Dr. Holmes finally confessed that homeopathy “has taught us a lesson of the healing faculty of Nature which was needed, and for which many of us have made proper acknowledgements” (Holmes, 1891, x, xiii-xiv). However, he still never instructed his publisher to change a word of his previous writings on homeopathy.
