"The physician's highest and only calling is to restore the sick to health, to cure, as it is termed."[1]

The reader could be forgiven for thinking that such an aphorism should be self-evident, but when the German physician Samuel Hahnemann wrote these words in 1810, he was asserting a radical departure from the medical practices of his day.

So radical, in fact, that his work would ultimately lead to a revolution in medical care that threatened the livelihoods (and intellectual sinecures) of the established conventional doctors, and a vituperative counter-assault that led to the founding of the American Medical Association (AMA).

When there was a free market for medicine in the United States, patients overwhelmingly chose homeopathy, a complete and principled form system of care, for themselves and their families. The disease, destruction, and death, that marks the state of so-called "public health" in the US now is a sad testament to the suppression of the medical marketplace.

This is not an article about homeopathy, but this debate contains the seeds of today's crisis. The long-buried story is elucidated by Harris L. Coulter in his scholarly 1973 book, "Divided Legacy: The Conflict Between Homoeopathy and the American Medical Association."[2]

American medicine was hijacked long before the infamous "Flexner Report" of 1910; without what happened in medicine in the 19th century, the AMA would never have succeeded in monopolizing the industry in the 20th.

Hahnemann attacked the allopaths for abusing and killing patients with ego-driven theorizing and speculative hackwork, and he proposed a alternative system of medicine based on empirical observation and rigorous principles.