Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions: Two Lectures Delivered Before the Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge

Holmes's two 1842 Boston lectures are the canonical 19th-century English-language critique of homeopathy and, by extension, of the broader class of charismatic-practitioner therapeutic systems that includes Perkinism, mesmerism, and the long line of single-mechanism cure-all theories. Holmes (then 33, a Harvard-trained physician later best known as a poet and as the father of the Supreme Court justice) traces a typology of medical delusion across earlier cases (the royal touch, Greatrakes the stroker, Mesmer, Perkins) and argues that all share a common structural pattern: a charismatic discoverer, an exclusive secret, an enthusiastic clientele drawn from the educated classes, and a refusal to subject the practice to comparison with non-intervention. The lectures are the earliest English-language statement of the structural pattern this archive documents, written 90 years before the structural pattern recurred (in commercial elite-longevity form) with Brown-Séquard and Voronoff.