Heil Hahnemann: Globuli in the Third Reich

Just in time, Spiegel has a cover story on homeopathy called The Great Illusion (g) here's the English version. Not much new here: homeopathy can't possibly work as described, doesn't cure illnesses; yet millions spend billions on it (interestingly, it's most popular, in Europe, among female college graduates). Both articles provide a list of amusing base ingredients for homeopathic remedies, including: "[a]phids, ovary extract from cows, hornets, cockroaches, woodlouse, toad poison, mercury, saliva from rabid dogs or skunk secretion, ... Coca-Cola, rotten beef, canine excrement, condom rubber, human testicle extract and horse hair."

New to me was the strength and sophistication of the homeopathic remedies lobby and the fact that homeopathy was praised and intensively investigated by National Socialist researchers as an alternative to "Jewified school-medicine" (verjudete Schulmedizin). The National Socialists even hosted a 1937 World Congress of Homeopathy in Berlin, at which Rudolf Hess was an eager observer. The Nazis conducted fairly sophisticated studies (some, alas, on concentration camp inmates) whichshowed that homeopathic remedies had only a placebo effect. Basically prayer in pill form. So the studies were suppressed for decades, until the "Donner Report" (written by one of the participating doctors) was released in the mid-1990s.

Looking for a bit more information, I came across this interesting site (g) from 'Praxis Frauenweise', a homeopathic practice 'for women and children' in Nuremburg run by Gudrun Barwig. The site reprints a 1996 article called 'Homoepathy and National Socialism' which Barwig wrote for a natural-healing magazine. Just to make things clear, the author of this page is a homeopathic practitioner. The article contains some fascinating quotations from Nazi-era publications showing how the homeopathic worldview was embraced by the Nazis and wrapped up in the Third Reich's very own eerie vocabulary. Here's a sentence from a 1933 article: "Thus, the Nordic man Hahnemann again brought German order and clarity in to the jumbled teachings about sickness that the chaotic South had lulled us into believing." At left is a group of homeopathic practitioners at a meeting in Chemnitz, gathered under a poster saluting Samuel Hahnemann, founder of homeopathy.

The article also notes that Third Reich doctors, although somewhat wary of homeopathy as a treatment, nevertheless appreciated it on two important political levels: it was already hugely popular among millions of Germans, and it was quite cheap. Thus, the Nazis supported homeopathy in many ways, including the creation of the Robert Bosch Hospital near Stuttgart, a 300-bed facility billed as the world's first exclusively homeopathic hospital. The homeopaths, as the Frauenweise article makes clear, repaid the favor with cringeworthy adulation of Nazi health functionaries, as well as ludicrous explanations of why homeopathy was truly, deeply völkisch. One even noted that homeopathic medicine would not have to be "de-jewified", since almost no homeopaths were Jews. According to Robert N. Proctor's Racial Hygiene, one homeopathic doctor, Rudolf Tischner, noted in 1937 that "in the Third Reich, organic medicine has found a respect that it never, not in its wildest dreams, imagined it might achieve." (233)

I'm not suggesting that homeopathy is discredited because the Nazis were fans, of course, since the Nazis were also fans of things that worked (highways) and things that were quite scientific (V2 rockets). Nevertheless, most aspects of German culture which were enthusiastically adopted and supported by the National Socialist dictatorship lost prestige after World War II -- yet homeopathy seems to have been spared.

Interesting, that.

Comments

[Cleo Pascal]

That's what I've been pointing out to my friends. If that natural health therapy doesn't really work, then why has it lasted this long? Homeopathy is a culture in its own right because it has been passed on from generation to generation. Anyway, I think homeopathy was popular among the Germans at that time because of the war. The turmoil caused so much anxiety among the people that they developed all sorts of illnesses that had to be cured right away. Good thing homeopathy was available then.

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I enjoyed your article. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

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[Tioma]

They take it because it works. Welcome to the new age. Modern conventional medicine benefits from placebo effects and its crass slash and burn techniques are largely outdated. Watch 'What the Bleep Do We Know'; we are energetic beings.

[Brian Foley]

"... (interestingly, it's most popular, in Europe, among female college graduates) ..." Why does this surprise you? I was an ex-pat living in Germany for almost the entire eighties and nineties, and unless something has drastically changed, that demographic is the most gullible and inclined to believe anything alternativ that I've ever met.

One of the perks of being back home is that the women don't know everything better than I do.

They're just smarter than I am.

B

[noribori]

Let’s just say: homeopathic treatment isn’t exactly what the Nazis became famous for.

...predictably, showed that homeopathic remedies had no effect on illnesses except a placebo effect. Basically prayer in pill form.

Comparing placebos with prayer, you must either have a high opinion of prayers or a very low opinion of the placebo effect.

Two quotes from the English Wikipedia entry about placebo:

• Those with Alzheimer’s disease lose the capacity to be influenced by placebos, and this is attributed to the loss of their prefrontal cortex dependent capacity to have expectations.

• Motivation may link to the meaning through which people experience illness and treatment. Such meaning is derived from the culture in which they live and which informs them about the nature of illness and how it responds to treatment. Research upon the placebo treatment of gastric and duodenal ulcers shows that this varies widely with society: those in Germany having a high rate placebo effect while those in Brazil a low one. Placebo effects in treating gastric ulcers is low in Brazil, higher in northern Europe (Denmark, Netherlands) and extremely high in Germany. But the placebo effect for hyper.tension is lower in Germany than elsewhere.

Many people have heard of homeopathy, they have some expectations. The expectations alone can be reason enough why it might work.

A better, more convincing concept than homeopathy to benefit from the placebo effect is certainly possible. I’m sure you could easily come up with a convincing concept. But do people really care about the concept of homeopathy? Do they even know it? If they know it than they will also know that the concept is 200 years old. No wonder the explanations are strange. And it comes as no surprise that scientists don’t like such stuff.
So homeopathy is pretty immune against rational criticism. Would your own concept of a placebo treatment be similar immune against rational thinking? Or would you even try to argue as rationally as possible? But the more rationally you argue, the more will people try to understand it and argue against it. They will do some researches and soon find there is no rational basis for your rational arguing.
Irrational stuff seems to be a better basis to exclude or overcome doubts. Either you trust it, or not.

I met people eating little pills with substances collected by native people in the Himalaya region. I met people who told me strange stories about alkaline nutrition. I met people who believed in dangerous charlatans, like this one.
“57 percent of Germans have taken homeopathic remedies at some time or other”, says the SPIEGEL cover story. An unbelievable high number. None of my friends has taken globuli, AFAIK, and I didn’t, and I don’t intend to. But if one of my friends told me he might try it, would I burst into tears, would I laugh or call him an idiot? Certainly not. It seems pretty harmless (57%!), and, you never know.

Ceterum censeo: it’s Nuremberg, not Nuremburg. Please.