Yellow mustard

An approach to healing based on this “law of similars,” Hahnemann
decided, should be called “homeopathy” from the Greek roots homoios (like)
and pathos (suffering). Yet whether spelled “homeopathy” or “homoeopathy”
(a version popular in the nineteenth century and still encountered occasionally),
the notion that like cures like was not an entirely new concept. As a
hunch about nature’s way of healing, it is as old as the human race and has
been applied in every form from the ancient Roman’s faith in the power of
raw dog’s liver to ward off rabies to the seventeenth-century Englishman’s
use of pomegranate seeds to relieve toothache to the eighteenth-century American’s
trust in yellow mustard seed as a preventive of yellow fever. For that
matter, the still popular recommendation of “the hair of the dog that bit you”
as the surest hangover remedy might be thought of as homeopathy