An early obsrvation by the president of the Massachusetts
Medical Society:
"Homeopathy may be defined as a specious mode of doing nothing.
While it waits on the natural progress of disease and the restorative
tendence of nature on the one hand, or the injurious advance of
disease on the other, it supplies the craving for activity, on
the part of the patient and his friends, by the formal and regular
administration of nominal medicine. Although homeopathy will,
at some future time, be classed with historical delusions."
-- Jacob Bigelow, M.D.: "Brief Expositions of Rational Medicine":
To Which Is Prefixed "The Paradise of Doctors, A Fable."
Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1858, pp 41-42.