Electrohomeopathy

Electrohomeopathy is a nineteenth-century medical system combining homeopathy and herbal preparations with the claim that certain plant compounds possess a healing vegetable electricity, despite not actually involving any electrical device. It was developed by the Italian nobleman Cesare Mattei, who lacked formal medical training but became interested in medical experimentation after his mother death, and who established his enterprise at Rocchetta Mattei, a castle he built in the Bolognese Apennines beginning in 1850 that served as both his residence and a patient treatment facility. The system gained considerable popularity across Europe, the United States and beyond in the late nineteenth century, with 107 authorized remedy distribution centers worldwide by 1884, but drew fierce criticism from orthodox physicians and homeopaths alike for its undisclosed compound formulas, and it is treated today as pseudoscientific, with India government formally stating in 2010 that it is not a recognized system of medicine.