[Alex3917]

@carbocation

You can call it whatever you want, but the fact remains that if homeopathy was quackery then western medicine was the whole duck.

Also, it's not really fair to say that homeopathy was better merely by accident or that it wasn't scientific, since they're the ones who pioneered evidence based medicine. It might have been completely wrong, but it was scientific. They at least tested their ideas empirically unlike western medicine at the time, which by any reasonable definition must make it more scientifically advanced than the alternative.

[carbocation]

I am surprised to see that we disagree on the facts as well as the interpretation of them.

I don't think the literature is nearly as scientific as you seem to think it is, nor do I credit Hahnemann with the shift to empiricism in medicine, which came later.

Again, just saying that medicine was harmful and that Hahnemann was observant does not make homeopathy of the time scientific.

[Alex3917]

"I don't think the literature is nearly as scientific as you seem to think it is, nor do I credit Hahnemann with the shift to empiricism in medicine, which came later."

Well I should admit that I'm not an expert on this, but if you read the JAMA book review of the book I mentioned above:

"By taking the homeopathy of that period seriously himself, Haller is able to remind readers that 19th-century homeopaths pioneered systematic drug-testing research, challenged the dangerously depleting procedures of mainstream physicians at that time, established rigorous professional standards, and valued advanced education at least as highly as their mainstream counterparts did. It was not without reason that homeopaths considered the bases of their approach to medical problems to be more logical and more promising than the inherited tradition of the ancients, upon which mainstream physicians still based their practices."

You have to remember also that 'scientific' is a relative term. Placebo controlled trials weren't invented until the 50s. And doing properly controlled placebo trials (with active placebos) is very rare even today.

Homeopathy of the 1860s and 1870s might not seem at all scientific by today's standards, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a significant advance in science at the time. (And by the way this was well after Hahnemann, who did most of his work on homeopathy in the 1810s and was already long dead by this time.)