Reality Check by Donald R. Prothero

Author:Donald R. Prothero
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2003-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

HOMEOPATHY: THE “WATER CURE” REVISITED

It’s a miracle! Take physics and bin it!

Water has memory!

And while its memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is Infinite

It somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it!

Tim Minchin, Storm

Charles Darwin spent most of his adult years wracked by a mysterious debilitating illness that caused him to have nausea, headaches, stomachaches, indigestion, and vomiting almost every day from 1838 (shortly after he returned from the voyage of the HMS Beagle a strong and vigorous man who had climbed the highest mountains in the Andes) until he died in 1882. During that time, Darwin sought one cure after another. One of the strangest was Dr. Gully’s Water Cure, which Darwin followed from 1849 to 1866. It involved drinking lots of water, along with being heated by hot lamps until he sweated profusely, then being doused with buckets of cold water, followed by vigorous rubbing with cold wet towels and cold foot baths. The cure also mandated a strict diet and taking long walks.

No one knows for sure what caused Darwin’s mysterious illness. Scholars think it was probably stress and anxiety from constant work on his dangerous and controversial ideas, or possibly Chagas disease contracted when he was in South America. Whatever the reason, the water cure apparently got his mind off his stressful work, and gave him a good diet and regular exercise, which would help anyone, sick or not. The plunging between sweating sessions and cold baths probably did not hurt him, although there was apparently no medicinal value, either. Later, Darwin brought his dying ten-year-old daughter Annie to Dr. Gully, but the water cure could do no good for her scarlet fever, and by the 1860s, Charles Darwin was getting no benefits as well and stopped traveling the long distance to Dr. Gully’s clinic in Malvern.

Gully’s water cure was popular not only with Darwin, but also with many other prominent Victorians, including Archbishop Wilberforce (an early foe of evolution) and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, but by the 1870s it was out of fashion. But another nontraditional cure practiced by Dr. Gully and many others of the time was homeopathic medicine. It was first developed by the German doctor Samuel Hahnemann in 1796, and based on the old Greek and medieval Principle of Similars, or the idea that like cures like. For example, Hahnemann observed that cinchona bark helped treat malaria in sick people, and caused similar symptoms in healthy people, so he reversed the logic and reasoned that whatever causes similar symptoms can be used to treat it. (Cinchona bark does contain natural quinine, a cure for malaria.) He argued that if poison ivy causes skin rash, then diluted poison ivy is a cure for skin diseases. But his theory of likes cure likes was pure medieval alchemy and mumbo-jumbo, completely invalidated when modern chemistry developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This archaic version of premodern medicine has persisted virtually unchanged until today. The ingredients used in homeopathy sound like those of

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