Homeopathy

Homeopathy is a form of alternative medicine developed by Samuel Hahnemann, first published in 1796 and based on a "law of similars" where "like cures like". The system's efficacy is controversial. One of the most controversial aspects is the dilution of medicines to a point where less than one molecule of active ingredient would remain.

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• [I]f another citizen preferred to toy with death, and buy health in small parcels, to bribe death with a sugar pill to stay away, or go to the grave with all the original sweetners undrenched out of him, then the individual adopted the "like cures like" system, and called in a homeopath physician as being a pleasant friend of death's.
  • Mark Twain, in Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays 1852-1890, New York: The Library of America; 1992:228-30 Official Physic April 21, 1867]

• HOMOEOPATHIST, n. The humorist of the medical profession.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911), p. 139

• HOMOEOPATHY, n. A school of medicine midway between Allopathy and Christian Science. To the last both the others are distinctly inferior, for Christian Science will cure imaginary diseases, and they can not.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911), p. 139

• As I understand it, the claim is that the less you use Homeopathy, the better it works. Sounds plausible to me.
  • David Deutsch, Israeli physicist

• The NHS recently spent £10m refurbishing the London Homeopathic Hospital. The equivalent of 500 nurses' wages, blown on a handful of magic beans. That was your tax money. It was meant for saving lives.
  • "Screen Burn". The Guardian. 11 August 2007. Retrieved on 2007-08-19. 

• I do not expect that homeopathy will ever be established as a legitimate form of treatment, but I do expect that it will continue to be popular.
  • James Randi, magician and opponent of pseudoscience

• [Homeopathy] is a subject which makes me more wrath, even than does Clair-voyance: clairvoyance so transcends belief, that one’s ordinary faculties are put out of question, but in Homœopathy common sense & common observation come into play, & both these must go to the Dogs, if the infinetesimal doses have any effect whatever. How true is a remark I saw the other day by Quetelet, in respect to evidence of curative processes, viz that no one knows in disease what is the simple result of nothing being done, as a standard with which to compare Homœopathy & all other such things.
  • Charles Darwin, in a letter to William Fox, September 4, 1850

Unsourced

• There have been two great revelations in my life; the first was bebop, the second was homeopathy.
  • Dizzy Gillespie, jazz musician

• To like things like, whatever one may ail; / There is certain help.
  • Referring to the "law of similars"
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: The Second Part of the Tragedy, act 1, scene 4

• It is not a matter of theory or belief or opinion … Homoeopathy must rest upon facts.
  • James Tyler Kent, homeopath