In 1835 a public challenge was offered to the best-known Homeopathic physician
in Paris to select any ten substances asserted to produce the most striking
effects; to prepare them himself; to choose one by lot without knowing which of
them he had taken, and try it upon himself or an intelligent and devoted
Homeopathist, and, waiting his own time, to come forward and tell what
substance had been employed. The challenge was at first accepted, but the
acceptance was retracted before the time of trial arrived.
From all this I think it fair to conclude that the catalogues of symptoms
attributed in Homeopathic works to the influence of various drugs upon healthy
persons are not entitled to any confidence.


Now to suppose that any trial can absolutely silence people, would be to forget
the whole experience of the past. Dr. Haygarth and Dr. Alderson could not stop
the sale of the five-guinea Tractors, although they proved that they could work
the same miracles with pieces of wood and tobacco-pipe. It takes time for truth
to operate, as well as Homoeopathic globules. Many persons thought the results
of these trials were decisive enough of the nullity of the treatment; those who
wish to see the kind of special pleading and evasion by which it is attempted
to cover results which, stated by the "Homoeopathic Examiner" itself, look
exceedingly like a miserable failure, may consult the opening flourish of that
Journal. I had not the intention to speak of these public trials at all, having
abundant other evidence on the point. But I think it best, on the whole, to
mention two of them in a few words  the one instituted at Naples and that of
Andral. 

There have been few names in the medical profession, for the last half century,
so widely known throughout the world of science as that of M. Esquirol, whose
life was devoted to the treatment of insanity, and who was without a rival in
that department of practical medicine. It is from an analysis communicated by
him to the "Gazette Mdicale de Paris" that I derive my acquaintance with the
account of the trial at Naples by Dr. Panvini, physician to the Hospital della
Pace. This account seems to be entirely deserving of credit. Ten patients were
set apart, and not allowed to take any [homeopathic] medicine at all,  much
against the wish of the Homoeopathic physician. 

All of them got well, and of course all of them would have been claimed as
triumphs if they had been submitted to the treatment. Six other slight cases
(each of which is specified) got well under the Homoeopathic treatment  but
with none of its asserted specific effects being manifested. All the rest were
cases of grave disease; and so far as the trial, which was interrupted about
the fortieth day, extended, the patients grew worse, or received no benefit. A
case is reported on the page before me of a soldier affected with acute
inflammation in the chest, who took successively aconite, bryonia, nux vomica,
and pulsatilla, [all popular homeopathic remedies, then and today] and after
thirty-eight days of treatment remained without any important change in his
disease. 

The Homoeopathic physician who treated these patients was M. de Horatiis, who
had the previous year been announcing his wonderful cures. And M. Esquirol
asserted to the Academy of Medicine in 1835, that this M. de Horatiis, who is
one of the prominent personages in the "Examiner's" Manifesto published in
1840, had subsequently renounced Homoeopathy. I may remark, by the way, that
this same periodical, which is so very easy in explaining away the results of
these trials, makes a mistake of only six years or a little more as to the time
when this trial at Naples was instituted. 

M. Andral, the "eminent and very enlightened allopathist" [orthodox physician]
of the "Homoeopathic Examiner," made the following statement in March, 1835, to
the Academy of Medicine: "I have submitted this doctrine to experiment; I can
reckon at this time from one hundred and thirty to one hundred and forty cases,
recorded with perfect fairness, in a great hospital, under the eye of numerous
witnesses; to avoid every objection I obtained my remedies of M. Guibourt, who
keeps a Homoeopathic pharmacy, and whose strict exactness is well known; the
regimen has been scrupulously observed, and I obtained from the sisters
attached to the hospital a special regimen, such as Hahnemann orders. I was
told, however, some months since, that I had not been faithful to all the rules
of the doctrine. I therefore took the trouble to begin again; I have studied
the practice of the Parisian Homoeopathists, as I had studied their books, and
I became convinced that they treated their patients as I had treated mine, and
I affirm that I have been as rigorously exact in the treatment as any other
person." 

And he expressly asserts the entire nullity of the influence of all the
Homoeopathic remedies tried by him in modifying, so far as he could observe,
the progress or termination of the diseases. It deserves notice that he
experimented with the most boasted substances  cinchona, aconite, mercury,
bryonia, belladonna. Aconite, for instance, he says he administered in more
than forty cases of that collection of feverish symptoms in which it exerts so
much power  according to Hahnemann  and in not one of them did it have the
slightest influence, the pulse and heat remaining as before.

But these are old and prejudiced practitioners. Very well, then take the
statement of Dr. Fleury, a most intelligent young physician, who treated
homoeopathically more than fifty patients, suffering from diseases which it was
not dangerous to treat in this way, taking every kind of precaution as to
regimen, removal of disturbing influences, and the state of the atmosphere,
insisted upon by the most vigorous partisans of the doctrine, and found not the
slightest effect produced by the medicines. And more than this, read nine of
these cases, which he has published, as I have just done, and observe the
absolute nullity of aconite, belladonna, and bryonia, against the symptoms over
which they are pretended to exert such palpable, such obvious, such astonishing
influences. 

In the view of these statements, it is impossible not to realize the entire
futility of attempting to silence this asserted science by the flattest and
most peremptory results of experiment. Were all the hospital physicians of
Europe and America to devote themselves, for the requisite period, to this sole
pursuit, and were their results to be unanimous as to the total worthlessness
of the whole system in practice, this slippery delusion would slide through
their fingers without the slightest discomposure, when, as they supposed, they
had crushed every joint in its tortuous and trailing body.

-Oliver Wendell Holmes, (1809-1894) was a celebrated physician, poet, humorist
and professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard, as well as the father of
O.W.H. Junior (1841-1935) , who became a renowned justice of the U.S. Supreme
Court.
