Homoeopathy in the Irish potato famine

This is a work of original historical research, a first book by Francis Treuherz who works as a homoeopath in London. The book contains a description of the ‘proving’ on the diseased potato carried out by an adventurous homoeopath, Benoit Mure, in 1849. However, the meat of the book is the description of the life and career of Joseph Kidd, a volunteer from Limerick who went to Bantry in 1847 and worked successfully as a homoeopath in the typhoid epidemics. Kidd’s own accounts of his treatments form the central part of the book and his ‘audit’ of his own homoeopathic treatment outcomes is fascinating. For example, the mortality rates of his patients from typhus and dysentery were 1.8% and 14%, respectively, compared with rates of 13.5% and 36%, respectively, achieved at the Bantry Hospital. In this, Kidd was following in the footsteps of Hahnemann himself who had claimed to treat 200 patients without a single loss of life during the epidemic of typhus fever in Germany in 1813. Whatever the truth of these claims, Kidd was nevertheless a remarkable man with great energy and independence of thought. He vigorously denied the validity of Hahnemann’s theory of infinitesimal dose, suggesting that a Hahnemann teaching soberly was better than a Hahnemann drunk with mysticism, and left the Homoeopathic Society over this issue. For this, and for meticulously recording his work, he deserves credit. Both orthodox and complementary medicine need more Joseph Kidds, though I fear there is little room for them in either world.