“Homeopathy began growing in the New World shortly after Dr Johannis Gram, a Dutch homeopath, emigrated to the United States in 1825. It expanded so rapidly that the homeopaths decided to create a national medical society.” [1, 2] Or was it Danish physician Hans Burch Gram who settled in Boston, New York in 1828! [4]
On April 10, 1844 the American Institute of Homeopathy was formed, thus becoming America’s first national medical society, and was seen as a threat by Allopathic medical men. This day marks the birthday of the founder of homoeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, a year after his passing.
At the time homeopathy was popular among the “educated and upper classes,” and some hospitals and insane asylums were exclusively ran by homeopaths, most often curing those that allopathic practitioners deemed “incurable“. Homeopathy was a “significant competitor” to orthodox/allopathic medicine, which at the time still used ‘barbaric’ treatment techniques such as blood letting and use of leeches along with medicines containing toxic mercury, lead, and arsenic! [3]
The allopathic practitioners tried to attribute homeopathic success [9] to the “over-dosing of patients by the ordinary practice” [?] or “the imaginations of a susceptible class of patients” (the placebo effect), even though the evidence did not concur!
Three years later, on May 7, 1847 orthodox medicine followed suit and organised to formed the American Medical Association with the purpose of reforming medical training and establishing a code of ethics, and in turn systematically eliminated their competition!
Each organisation referred to each other as quacks! They did not get along. [5]
Have we “lost” the art of homeopathy? Was it ahead of its time, that only quantum physics could explain?