true Materia Medica

With all those precautions in place, Hahnemann was certain that his
experimental results were accurate indications of the effects produced by each
tested drug and of the symptoms they would cure. Orthodox physicians
thought otherwise. Indeed, the provings were one of the chief elements of
homeopathy they had in mind when they sneered at the system as a “monument
of human folly.” To regular doctors, the provings appeared to be unscientific
and naive, because, as we would say today, they included no control
subjects. The reactions of provers testing a drug were not compared to the
sensations experienced by a similar group of people not taking the drug; the
several provers of each drug, furthermore, did not all experience the same
symptoms themselves. How could Hahnemann be sure that the symptoms
reported to him had been produced by the drug rather than being some of
the random occurrences of day-to-day living? Many of the reactions he ascribed
to drug action, after all, were things that everyone experienced on a
regular basis, whether taking any “drug” or not: pimples, hiccups, sneezing,
and snoring, for example, were repeatedly credited to drug action. (A much
later commentary, a cartoon from the 1990s, shows Snow White making the
acquaintance of the dwarves. “Sneezy, Dopey, Sleepy, Grumpy?” she says. “I
take it no one here’s ever heard of homeopathy?”) Hahnemann brushed aside
such objections with the assurance that “the drug being taken in pretty large
quantity, no disturbance can take place in the organism which is not the effect
of the drug.” To him, provings were the only way to “a true Materia Medica,”
one that “should exclude every supposition, every mere assertion and fiction;
its entire contents should be the pure language of nature, uttered in response
to careful and faithful inquiry.”