The 19th century saw the development of an eclectic medical marketplace in both the United Kingdom and the United States, with mesmerists, herbalists and hydrotherapists amongst the plethora of medical ‘sectarians’ offering mainstream (or ‘allopathic’) medicine stiff competition. Foremost amongst these competitors were homoeopaths, a group of practitioners who followed Samuel Hahnemann (1982[1810]) in prescribing highly dilute doses of single-drug substances at infrequent intervals according to the ‘law of similars’ (like cures like). The theoretical sophistication of homoeopathy, compared to other medical sectarian systems, alongside its institutional growth after the mid-19th-century cholera epidemics, led to homoeopathy presenting a challenge to allopathy that the latter could not ignore. Whilst the subsequent decline of homoeopathy at the beginning of the 20th century was the result of multiple factors, including developments within medical education, the Progressive movement, and wider socio-economic changes, this article focuses on allopathy’s response to homoeopathy’s conceptual challenge. Using the theoretical framework of Berger and Luckmann (1991[1966]) and taking a Tory historiographical approach (Fuller, 2002) to recover more fully 19th-century homoeopathic knowledge, this article demonstrates how increasingly sophisticated ‘nihilative’ strategies were ultimately successful in neutralising homoeopathy and that homoeopaths were defeated by allopaths (rather than disproven) at the conceptual level. In this process, the therapeutic use of ‘nosodes’ (live disease products) and the language of bacteriology were pivotal. For their part, homoeopaths failed to mount a counter-attack against allopaths with an explanatory framework available to them.

19 世纪，英国和美国发展出了一个兼收并蓄的医疗市场，催眠师、草药师和水疗师等众多医学“宗派”为主流（或“对抗疗法”）医学提供激烈的竞争。这些竞争者中最重要的是顺势疗法，这是一群遵循塞缪尔·哈尼曼（Samuel Hahnemann，1982[1810]）的从业者，根据“相似法则”（相似的治疗相似），不频繁地开出高度稀释剂量的单一药物。与其他医学派系体系相比，顺势疗法的理论复杂性，以及 19 世纪中叶霍乱流行后机构的发展，导致顺势疗法对对抗疗法提出了后者无法忽视的挑战。虽然顺势疗法在 20 世纪初的衰落是多种因素的结果，包括医学教育的发展、进步运动和更广泛的社会经济变化，但本文重点讨论对抗疗法对顺势疗法概念挑战的反应。本文利用 Berger 和 Luckmann (1991[1966]) 的理论框架并采用保守党史学方法 (Fuller, 2002) 来更全面地恢复 19 世纪的顺势疗法知识，展示了日益复杂的“虚无”策略如何最终成功地中和了顺势疗法以及顺势疗法在概念层面被对抗疗法击败（而不是被证明是错误的）。在此过程中，“nosodes”（活体疾病产品）的治疗用途和细菌学语言至关重要。就顺势疗法而言，他们未能利用可用的解释框架对对抗疗法发起反击。