By the British Committee sitting at London [? It was widely practiced during WWI because orthodox management of disease had the capacity to cause iatrogenic illness as a result of the toxic effects of the drugs that were commonly prescribed and were not particularly effective in any case. It would be true to say that very few medications were truly effective, certainly not in the way that modern medications are today. There was no specific treatment for pneumonia, tuberculosis, angina pectoris, bacterial infections nor a host of illnesses that can now be significantly improved by medication.
A glance at the list of diseases treated by the Anglo-French Homeopathic Hospital reveals that nearly all the medical complaints were incurable by the orthodox treatments of the time and all would fare as well as they would if they were admitted to the orthodox General Hospitals.
Many would do better because of care that they were given by the dedicated nurses and doctors. These doctors were all trained in orthodox medicine and knew when to treat by Homeopathic principles and when to treat by standard methods. The Hospital was opened at Neuilly in late and was disbanded on 15 th. March, because so many of their staff were called up for military service in the RAMC. During its existence many surgical patients were treated in their operating room as well as medical patients; the Hospital had a particular interest in the care of indigent civilians as well as military patients.
Dr Geoffrey Miller. EARLY in the course of the great war, whilst the arrangements - later perfected - for the sick and wounded were in the making, it became known that the call for the reception of surgical cases was so considerable and insistent as to relegate any elaborate provision for the inevitable medical casualties to a second place. The first winter - like the Crimean winter - indicated the necessity for an amplified hospital service for medical cases also.
A number of auxiliary institutions for the wounded had been established in Franco-Belgium, while medical cases were steadily rising in number. In the circumstances it seemed hardly possible for Homoeopathy, as a public service, to rule itself out from that volume of auxiliary hospital establishment which private initiative was zealously creating. In the threefold activities of medicine-prevention, the treatment of acute, and the alleviation of chronic disease-Homoeopathy has a special title to take a definite position.
