Behind the scenes

Tales from the sewing box – a chat

Francis Treuherz interviewed

Interview by Louise Mclean

Francis Treuherz

I was fortunate to be invited to the home of Francis Treuherz, the editor of the journal ‘The Homeopath’ of the ‘Society of Homeopaths’, to speak with him about his work.

Francis has been a practising homeopath for many years and also works for David Needleman's ‘Homeopathic Helpline’.

I first asked him about the time he had worked in the accident and emergency clinic of the National Health Service in London. He ended his work there because homeopathic treatment was no longer promoted within primary medical care.

“I wouldn't call it an Accident & Emergency department, but I worked for 13 years in primary medical care of the National Health Service.” He gave me one of his prescriptions, which listed two general practices where he had worked. “I started in 1990 at the Marylebone Health Centre, where I worked for three years. They were still sceptical about homeopathy; then I met an old friend who worked at the Fitzrovia Medical Centre, and he took out his diary and said, ‘When can you start?’ In those two health centres in the West End of London I worked for 13 years, and also in two other suburban practices. One of them awarded me a research fellowship.

I had assumed that the end of his work with the NHS had something to do with the letter written by some sceptical professors to the Primary Care Trusts, but it was clearly due to new regulations introduced by the Blair government. Francis explained:

“I worked in the NHS from 1990 to 2003 – one, two or three days a week, because practices at that time had a certain allowance beyond their budgets, called fund-holding. The Labour Party changed that and introduced Primary Care Trusts, where groups of practices were responsible for their own budgets. So, instead of the greatest, the smallest common denominator applied, and complementary medicine was the first therapy to vanish from the scene.”
“Much later, in May 2007, Baum and others wrote that letter to the Primary Care Trusts, in which they declared homeopathy nonsense and demanded that no more referrals for homeopathic treatment be issued. It was a forgery in that they used paper with the NHS letterhead that they were not actually entitled to use. The Department of Health corrected this mistake on its website in October 2007. The trouble is that this reprimand never achieved the same prominence as the original letter. Unfortunately, the damage had already been done.”
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I asked Francis for his view on the constant attacks against his profession.
“In a way it's a waste of time. It takes an awful lot of time, because when they laugh at us you don't know whether they are just trying to insult us, or whether they actually believe it.”
“Anyway, I always wanted to work within the NHS and never thought it would actually happen. I saw patients who would never have had the chance of private treatment.

Once I treated a baby of refugee parents, where we had to take the case by sign language. The mother shook the child's arm and from her gestures I could gather that the child had had a fit. Apparently the child had received a DPT vaccination after arriving in England, it had convulsions and was covered in eczema from head to toe. So I gave the child Sulphur and some weeks later the potentised vaccine, and when a so-called ‘normal state of health’ was reached, it began teething and received Chamomilla.”

Francis continued: “I also remember a child suffering from headaches who was uncontrollably sad and violent. The father had a crippled arm from a workplace accident and could no longer work. The child had just begun to improve under homeopathic treatment when the letter arrived saying I could no longer treat him. I was as much in tears as the mother.”
“I continued working in one practice for a long time after the guidelines had changed and they kept paying me, but when my senior partner died, that was the end.”
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I emphasised that it must have been a great help to the practice to be relieved of a number of cases.
“Absolutely! The criterion for referral to the homeopath for the practice was to save money and to improve patients' quality of life.”
“It's a shame there are no more homeopaths working in the NHS. There is no reason to ostracise homeopathy like that.”

“Shortly after I left college I worked in Calcutta. I wouldn't have been able to do NHS work without that clinical experience. I worked with people whose language I did not understand and treated diseases I would never have seen in England,” he said.

I wanted to know what it meant to work for the ‘Homeopathic Helpline’, which is such a valuable service.
“How do patients find the right remedy when they need it urgently?”
“One thing is that the Helpline has also helped pharmacies that stock homeopathic remedies, because homeopaths tell their patients to get a set of Ainsworth or Helios so they have emergency remedies on hand. I have a good memory for homeopathic-oriented pharmacies and know where ‘Neal's Yard’ products are available, but in some rural areas there are still too few. If someone needs Pyrogenium and they're up in the Pennines, they're stuck. Long before the Helpline I actually had a patient up in the Pennines with biliary colic and I described how to do a 'liver flush' and it worked.”
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I asked Francis how many calls he and David Needleman receive roughly per day on the Homeopathic Helpline.
“Some days it can be 25 and the next 120. But every year there is one day when everything goes haywire – usually around Christmas, when all the homeopaths are on holiday!”

All families across the country are stressed — from being on their own, from being together with relatives, from colds, hangovers or a combination of the above! And food poisoning and overeating!”
“The Helpline is great,” Francis continues. “They call and say they didn't want to disturb us at Christmas, but David and I don't mind, we're both Jewish.”

You have to think pretty fast and ask the pertinent questions!
“Once I had to think very, very quickly. A father phoned me and said his son had severe testicular pain. I don't remember why it immediately occurred to me, but I strongly suspected a testicular torsion, where the spermatic cord becomes twisted and cuts off the blood supply to the testicle. If the testicle is to be saved, surgery must take place within six hours. I advised the father to grab a few Arnica pellets and take his son straight to the clinic. I told him not to wait for an ambulance and to give his son Arnica after the operation to heal the trauma, and to take a dose himself to counteract the shock he would undoubtedly suffer. If I had been wrong I would have been sorry, but if I was right and the boy wasn't operated on, we might have regretted it.”
“The father rang a week later to tell me I had been right. The son had had to be operated on immediately, but he was now recovering well. The doctors saved the boy's fertility and homeopathy helped with Arnica in the recovery.”
“We can help patients feel better, but doctors are often good craftsmen and plumbers when necessary. That is not meant disparagingly. An operation after an accident is different from a tonsillectomy, when we can prevent the conditions for their occurrence.” [...]
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We then changed the subject and talked about some old homeopathic books Francis had collected over the years.
“I have always been interested in books,” he said. As a successful patient I read an old Boericke in the 1970s and then I managed to get the first two volumes of the first edition of Clarke’s Dictionary of Materia Medica for a fiver.

Eventually I also managed to get the third volume there. I was always offered cheap books. “I borrowed a book from the Society of English Homeopaths which, in hindsight, I think they ought not to have lent me, but I didn't know that at the time. It was Hahnemann’s Minor Writings from 1852. I put it in my bicycle basket and at a traffic light a motorcyclist stole the whole basket from me. So I never brought the book home. Back then I began writing to second-hand bookshops (long before the internet) to try to find a copy. It took a few years and then, one fine summer, I found two copies. I bought both – one for me and one for the library. The librarian of the BHA (British Homeopathy Association), who by then was retired, even received a call to say that a copy had appeared!”
 “By then I had already bought various other books that had been offered to me in my search for this book. I got all kinds of books and then eBay turned up!!”
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I never thought you could get old homeopathy books on eBay!
 “When I gave a talk in Stockholm I went into a bookshop and found an Organon that had been translated into Swedish in 1835! The people I visited there hadn't even known such a thing existed. I have the Organon in Russian, Hebrew, Finnish, Persian, Polish, Norwegian, Farsi and, of course, German, French, Spanish and Italian. It has been translated into many, many languages. I'm still waiting for a Japanese edition, since homeopathy is practised in Japan too.”
 “When I was in Australia I visited the library of a Benedictine monastery, one or two hours' drive from Perth out in the Australian bush.”

Do they have homeopathic books there?!
“Of course!”
“A Benedictine monk called Rosendo Salvado went to Australia to convert the Aborigines to Christianity. He took the trouble to learn their language, founded a school, an orphanage and a farm and cared for their welfare. When they fell ill he gave them homeopathic remedies. We even found a letter from the monastery ordering medicines from a London pharmacy, because apparently delivery from London was faster than from Melbourne! We found an old Organon and many other homeopathic books in the monastery library.”
 [Francis Treuherz ‘Strange, rare and peculiar: Aborigines, Benedictines and homeopathy’. Homeopathy (2006) 95: 182-286. Illustrated copies available from: fran@gn.apc.org.]
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“On the way to the Left Conference in Heidelberg, I stopped off at the Robert Bosch Institute in Stuttgart, which has a large Hahnemann archive.
The librarians there exchanged copies of books and stories with me over the years. Above the cloakroom hung a full-size portrait of Hahnemann in which he looks like a grumpy old man, quite different from the idealised pictures. They had apparently acquired this picture at an auction. The artist was called A.B.J. Hesse, but nobody knew anything about him, not even my brother, an excellent art historian.”

“The Complementary and Alternative Medicine library and information service at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital www.cam.nhs.uk has a postcard with a reproduction of a Hahnemann picture by a Russian artist, A.J. Beidemann. Hahnemann is shown sitting up in the clouds looking down on the allopaths. I recommend you take a look. They have an online library service like a university.”
I would very much like to see the picture and the library.
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Francis owns an American police badge engraved ‘Hahnemann Guard’.
“This was the badge of a police officer from Philadelphia who retired and sold it on eBay. He had worked as a guard at the Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia.”

“I got two of these badges and sent one to my friend, the late Julian Winston in New Zealand.”

He showed a funny photo of Julian with the badge. “Julian originally lived in Philadelphia, where Boericke and Tafel were based. In the 19th century they were the largest publishers and producers of homeopathy in the whole of the USA. When they moved to California, Julian tried to stop them throwing away their old possessions. He didn't succeed, but because he lived locally he had opportunities to inspect the rubbish containers and was able to rescue some important items.

He then showed me one of Hahnemann's wax seals from an envelope he had bought on eBay. I also saw a small spoon commemorating the centenary of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital dated 1849–1949 and a medal awarded to a nurse for 40 years' service at the RLHH. He also showed examples of handwriting samples that had been used to help find remedies for the relevant people and used for prescribing Schuessler salts.

The interview drew to a close and it was time for me to leave. It was a fascinating experience to learn so much about Francis's life and to hear the interesting stories he had to tell.

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Francis Treuherz, MA, RSHom, FSHom, lives in London, UK. He has been a practising homeopath since 1984 and has written many historical and clinical articles, a research report and a book.

Original article and further information at Avilian