Horrid disgrace of the human MIND

Silly as they considered Thomson’s steaming-and-puking regimen to be,
nineteenth-century physicians thought of another irregular system as still
more unlikely. Indeed, homeopathy’s practices were so remarkably at
odds with all accepted notions of how nature worked, of how nature conceivably
could work, that they were only to be regarded as utterly impossible. It
was “a stupendous monument of human folly”; it represented “the crowning
exploit of pseudo-scientific audacity”; it constituted a fabric of “astounding
absurdities” and “nonsensical trash.” “This horrid disgrace of the human
mind” was such “a confused mass of rubbish” as to make sense only to
“simpletons” possessed of “imbecile credulity.” All in all, “the fact that men
of sense and character should become its dupes, is one of the most striking
exhibitions of intellectual stupidity and moral obliquity which the history of
fanaticism itself can furnish.”1 Homeopathy was also the most popular of all
alternative systems of practice from the 1850s to the beginning of the twentieth
century.