Private and institutionalised patients' use of homeopathy in the early nineteenth century

Abstract

Medicine underwent a major crisis in the 18th century and several approaches, including homeopathy, were formulated to fill the void left by the fall of traditional Galenic medicine. While most of the literature deals with the reasons doctors had to shift to homeopathy, the patients' views became the focus of increasing scholarly attention along the past 20 years. In this article I present and discuss the current knowledge about the socio-demographic characteristics and medical complaints of patients who sought homeopathic care in the early 19th century in both private and institutional settings. The results show that not only patients from the higher and more educated classes sought homeopathic care, but a considerable number of individuals from the middle and lower strata did so too, even though they also had access to conventional hospitals. As to the clinical complaints, the reasons to seek homeopathic care were the typical ones for any general practice or hospital in the period considered.

La Gioconda Effect and Self-Organizing Factors of Biofield

“…Eventually, there are different opinions about them, which is healthy to the development of any area. Movements and statements are noted in favor and contrary Homeopathy, sometimes by fragments of the general society, others specifically by fragments of academic groups of other areas, but that not necessarily covers the total opinion of society, population, or specialized researchers [1,2,[4][5][6][7][8][9][11][12][13][14][15].…”

“…For an example, Homeopathy and Jesus are the only two controversial web pages of Wikipedia in four languages simultaneously. Today, it is considered the second therapeutic system more used in the world, but, maybe, the most discussed between the several areas and professional specialities, the society and scientists, queens and kings [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14].…”

“…However, to strengthen the area, notoriously multiprofessional and interdisciplinary, the use of the word Homeopathy in lato sensu should be considered when we refer to the therapeutic methods that use dynamized medicines, created from the disciples of Hahnemann. An example of this evolution would be the methodologies of the 12 Schüessler Tissue Salts, use of biotherapeutics, application of the dynamized medicines by anthroposophy, homotoxicology, and the Self-Organizing Factors of Biofield (BioFAO) [10,11,[32][33][34][35]39].…”

“…Motivated by context of use of the classic method with a single medicine, known by unicism, emerges the will for a robust and consensual therapeutic platform. So, the methodology currently described as BioFAO was developed during the clinical practice of the Doctor Miria de Amorim and her team of collaborators in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), coherent with the phenomenon described in the La Gioconda effect in the beginning of this chapter [11,12,[39][40][41].…”

A green method for determination of ethanol in homeopathic medicines using thermal infrared enthalpimetry

“…In the last years, homeopathic medicine has been the focus of several studies about consumption (Clarke et al 2015, Relton et al 2017, Waisse 2017 and therapeutic action (Shang et al 2005, Mathie et al 2014, Dowhring & Sundrum 2016, Unlu et al 2017. There are few studies in literature related to quality control in these pharmaceutical dosage forms (Ravishankara et al 2001, Tumir et al 2010, Gorlowska et al 2015, Holandino et al 2017, Jadhlav et al 2016) but none of them with regard to determination of ethanol.…”