21/08/2026
THE PAST REMEMBERS WHAT THE PRESENT FORGOT.
There was a time when Australia had hospitals, pharmacies, colleges, journals and practitioners devoted to a form of healthcare now almost entirely absent from public memory.
Some of what was uncovered while writing this book will stop you in your tracks.
The woman history remembers as Australia's first female doctor wasn't first at all. A homœopath (trained at the highest level of medicine) beat her to it by 25 years, and her name has been written out of the record ever since.
Some of the grandest hospitals this country ever built for the sick didn't start life as medical institutions at all.
Dozens of dedicated homœopathic pharmacies once operated across this country. Almost none of them survived the century.
And the whisper you may have heard, that this medicine carries a N**i past? The real history runs the other way, and it implicates names on your own pharmacy shelf far more than it implicates ours.
Zoom out further and the picture gets stranger still.
Florence Nightingale kept homœopathic remedies within reach for her patients while Mary Seacole, another brave nurse who disappeared from public record also used the remedies.
Presidents, prime ministers, kings and queens have kept homœopaths as their private physicians for two centuries.
In 1916, John D. Rockefeller told his own staff, in his own words: "I am a homeopathist." The man whose fortune helped dismantle homœopathy for the rest of the world never once gave it up himself, and the same circle of families, Carnegie among them, leaned on the very physicians they were working to erase from public life.
Among the first African-American physicians were homœopaths. Some of the first women in the Western world to legally practise medicine at all did so as homœopaths, and their names rarely appear in the history that claims to honour them.
None of this information survived by accident. It survived because one woman, working largely alone for decades, refused to let it disappear. Barbara Armstrong's History of Homœopathy is the extraordinary foundation this book stands on, and it deserves to be far better known than it is.
There are moves underway, now, to bring this profession back to where it belongs inside modern healthcare. This book is part of that work.
The Lost Profession is coming.