Boron Elgar > wrote:

> >Victor Sack wrote:
>
> >> One has to consider the historical perspective, not just the dogmatic,
> >> ideological excesses.
>
> The historical perspective is an interesting story only, and lends no
> credence whatsoever to the modern quackery that is homeopathy.

You ought to pay attention to what is actually being said, not to your
imagination. If you want to argue against modern practice of
homeopathy, you'll have to find another opponent.

> >> The debt owed by the modern medicine to homeopathy, particularly to
> >> Hahnemann, its founding father, is truly enormous.
>
> There is no debt owed by modern medicine to homeopathy.

You say so; it is not the view of impartial medical historians.

> > Mainstream medicine
> >> used to rely on such treatments as venesection, emetics, calomel,
> >> purgatives and also on complex drug mixtures in extremely high doses.
> >> It was nothing if not dogmatic and had little to do with modern
> >> medicine. Homeopathy dispensed with the torture and introduced low
> >> doses of single, "proven" drugs.
>
> No it did not. You are incorrect.

You say so; it is not the view of impartial medical historians.

> >> It was Hahnemann who first introduced
> >> scientific medical experimentation and everything he did, including his
> >> conclusions, were based on science.
>
> This is also untrue.

No, it is true.

> >> He could not help it if medical
> >> science of the time - which he effectively founded - was not even in its
> >> diapers yet. In his "Organon" he wrote that none of his conclusions
> >> should be accepted unless "confirmed by experience." His aim was always
> >> to find a cure with the lowest dose possible, an aim not all that
> >> foreign to modern medical science. Again, from the "Organon": "Pure
> >> experiment, careful observation and accurate experience can alone
> >> determine the smallness of the doses required for homeopathic cures".
> >>
> Hogwash. Quite a lot of it, too.

Those are direct quotations from the "Organon". Arguing that they are
not won't get you anywhere. Shouting out slogans won't either.

I have already posted a link to a comprehensive historical overview:
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1297514/pdf/neh141.pdf>.

Here, also, is a link to _The Rise and Fall of Homeopathy_, an article
by Morris Fishbein who, among other things, was considered a number one
enemy of homeopathy: <http://www.homeowatch.org/history/fishbein.html>.

Quotation:

"Compared to the general medical practice of the age, the system of
Hahnemann, though quite fallacious, had two things in its favor: it
replaced mixtures of powerful drugs in large doses by small doses of
simple ones. Thus a widely used prescription was Rush's Thunderbolt,
developed by Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence.
It gave ten grains of jalap and ten of calomel at a single dose. A
patient who had just tried it thereafter craved weak medicine. Moreover,
homeopathy carried with it, as any new and revolutionary system always
does, a powerful appeal to the lay imagination. Professors
Meyer-Steinheg of Jena and Sudhoff of Leipzig, two of the world's
greatest medical historians, assert that the influence of Hahnemann was,
on the whole, certainly for good. He emphasized the individualization of
the patient in the handling of disease, he stopped the progress of half
a dozen or more peculiar systems of treatment based on a false
pathology, and he demonstrated the value of testing the actual virtues
of drugs by trial. It is probably true that any criticisms which might
be brought against him in the light of later and better knowledge apply
equally well against a large part of the other medicine of his time.
Moreover, we must not hold against him the vagaries and exaggerations
into which some of his disciples drifted."

By the way, this thread has to be named "Quackery in Cookery"; one has
to be consistent...

ObFood: The recent Accademia Italiana della Cucina recipe collection
mentions a very simple bread soup which used to be typical of
Friuli-Venezia Giulia. It made use of the excellent native Istrian
olive oil, which would impart a particular flavour to the soup, along
with fennel or cumin seeds. Stale bread would be boiled with water, the
oil, and seeds to make a dense, rustic soup, traditionally enriched with
egg yolks.

Victor