Inventing the randomized double-blind trial: the Nuremberg salt test of 1835
secondary literature · 2006
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SUMMARY
Peer-reviewed account by the medical historian Michael Stolberg of the 1835 Nuremberg salt test, an early public controlled and blinded trial of a homeopathic high dilution. It supports: the test was prompted by the local physician-homeopath Johann Jacob Reuter's challenge over a C30 (thirtieth-centesimal) dilution of common salt; it was organized by Friedrich Wilhelm von Hoven, the city's senior public health official, with a local newspaper editor (Löhner, of the Allgemeine Zeitung von und für Bayern); 100 numbered vials were thoroughly shuffled and split at random into 50 containing distilled snow water and 50 containing the C30 salt dilution (a grain of salt dissolved in 100 drops of distilled snow water, then diluted 29 further times at a ratio of 1 to 100); the trial was double blind, since neither participants nor organizers knew which vial held the dilution; and of the 50 participants who reported back, only 8 reported anything unusual (5 had received the dilution, 3 the water), so the organizers concluded the homeopathic claim was unsupported. Identifiers copied from PubMed (PMID 17139070) and Crossref (DOI 10.1177/014107680609901216); the legacy DOI 10.1258/jrsm.99.12.642 resolves to the same article. The plausible-looking PMID 17139041 was checked and rejected during grounding (it indexes an unrelated psychiatry paper); the correct identifier was confirmed via PubMed search and the PMC1676327 record.
NOTES
Stolberg’s 2006 note in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine documents the Nuremberg salt test of 1835, which this case treats as the period disconfirmation of homeopathy’s core dilution claim and as an early instance of the controlled, blinded comparison later formalized as the randomized double-blind trial. The dispute began when Johann Jacob Reuter, the city’s remaining physician-homeopath, publicly challenged the public health official Friedrich Wilhelm von Hoven over the claimed effects of a C30 dilution of common salt. The organizers prepared 100 numbered vials, half holding distilled snow water and half the C30 salt dilution, shuffled and distributed them so that neither the participants nor the organizers knew which was which, and recorded the reported effects. Of the fifty who reported back, eight noticed anything unusual, split five to three between the dilution and plain water, a result the organizers read as no effect attributable to the remedy. Bibliographic metadata are copied from PubMed (PMID 17139070) and Crossref (DOI 10.1177/014107680609901216).