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Ah, the 1790s. A time before germ theory and anaesthesia, when medical doctors would bleed, purge and burn their patients to restore their four “humours”, or life forces, to balance. Miasma theory, the idea that disease was caused by bad smells, was considered a radical new science. Witch-hunts were still at large in Europe. And Samuel Hahnemann invented homeopathy.

Hahnemann’s idea was simple: that “like cures like”. After being administered a tiny dose of a substance that causes similar symptoms to those suffered by the patient, the body would respond by healing itself. For example, hay fever makes you cry and onions make you cry; therefore (in Hahnemann’s logic), onions cure hay fever.

Rather than rubbing onions into the patient’s eyes, Hahnemann devised a way to dilute the onion in water to a very tiny amount. Water was put into a vial and banged several times against a leather-bound book, preferably a Bible. This would supposedly activate the water’s ability to retain a “memory”. Then a small part of the onion was added, the vial was shaken in a specific way, and a single drop from it added to another hundred drops of water. This process was repeated until no single molecule of the original substance remained in the water.
The “memory” of the substance was said to remain in the water, ready for the body to respond to when it was administered to the patient.

If you think modern homeopathy is less wacky than this, think again. A small sample of substances used as base ingredients in today’s homeopathic concoctions are: the liver of a duck, a spider ground up alive, table salt, the breast milk of a German Shepherd dog, beer, menstrual blood and, no joke, dog shit. Thankfully, no trace of these substances is left in the preparations by the time they are consumed. In fact, in one British investigation of homeopathy the machines used to dose sugar pills with the diluted concoctions were regularly causing the drops to miss their destination, so none of the water was reaching the pills at all.

Attempts to prove homeopathy’s efficacy have been foiled by revelations of biased, cherry-picked, shaky data and a failure to replicate positive results in careful, double-blind studies. Rival medical treatments from its time, such as whipping out demons, blistering patients’ skin to release bad humours and half drowning patients in icy water, have disappeared because they are painful and dangerous. Homeopathy has endured because it is painless. But its theory is as illogical as any of its maddest contemporaries. Don’t waste your money on it.