The German Genius

electricity but kept their powder dry for a time since their main interest was terrestrial magnetism. This prompted the idea that a magnetometer might also serve as a galvanometer and that, in turn, it might be used to induce a current that could send a message. Weber managed to connect the astronomical observatory at Göttingen with the physics laboratory a mile away by means of a double wire “that broke ‘uncountable’ times as he strung it over houses and two towers.” 17 The first words, and then whole sentences, were transmitted in 1833 and the results of this first “operating electric telegraph” was mentioned (briefly) by Gauss in a notice in the Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen , for August 9, 1834. Gauss grasped the military and economic significance of the invention and tried unsuccessfully to persuade the government to take an interest. It was not until Carl August von Steinheil, professor of mathematics and physics in Munich, in 1837, and Samuel Morse in the United States, in 1838, developed more user-friendly techniques that the electric telegraph caught on. Being ahead of his time was an occupational hazard for Gauss.
    Nonetheless, his contemporaries referred to him as princeps , and he is now generally elevated to the level of Archimedes and Newton, inspiring a later generation—August Ferdinand Möbius, Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, Bernhard Riemann, Richard Dedekind, Georg Cantor, and others. As Marcus du Sautoy has said, the collaboration between Gauss and Weber on the telegraph, and Gauss’s innovations with the clock calculator and its role in computer security, make them “the grandfathers of e-business and the Internet.” Their collaboration is immortalized in a statue of the two of them in the city of Göttingen. 18
    T HE A DVENT OF H UMANE M EDICINE
     
    In marked contrast, statues of Samuel Christian Friedrich Hahnemann have been erected in Washington, Paris, Leipzig, Dessau, and Köthen. In North America at the turn of the (twentieth) century, other memorials existed in the form of twenty-two homeopathic colleges, while homeopathic remedies were used by one in five doctors. By 1945, homeopathic universities existed in the United States, Hungary, and India. In the twenty-first century, there is a homeopathic college in Canada, as well as a National Homeopathic Center just outside Washington, D.C., a Homeopathic Society in India, an Oxford College of Classical Homeopathy, a professional journal Homeopathy , edited from Luton in England and published by Elsevier in the Netherlands, one of the world’s leading publishers of scientific journals. Dentists use homeopathy, it is employed in childbirth, on pets, and on farm animals. 19
    At the same time, there exist an organization and a Web site called “Homeowatch,” dedicated to exposing the “quackery” of homeopathy, to showing that the science on which it is based is wrong-headed, even fraudulent, and that the many products produced in its name are medically worthless. As Martin Gumpert puts it in his biography of Samuel Hahnemann, “is homeopathy merely an excrescence of science, or is its core genuine and useful, even if we may not like its covering?” 20 Hahnemann’s name elicits hatred and scorn among most regular medical practitioners but at the same time he refuses to go away. At one stage, the British royal family appeared in thrall to homeopathic medicine.
    Hahnemann (1755–1843) was the son of a painter in the Meissen porcelain factory, and like many contemporaries he was precocious: at an early age he could speak Latin and Greek, classify old coins, and catalog books. But medicine was his main love, and he graduated from the University of Erlangen in 1779. His first destination was Hettstedt, a mining town that lacked a doctor, and there he came across a mysterious copper sickness that often proved fatal. It was in studying this disease that he first began to have doubts about the traditional blood-letting technique that all doctors of the time used. The basic approach was to make patients excrete, so as to void their bodies of whatever poisonous substances they had accumulated. They were induced to sweat, prescribed laxatives, forced to gargle, vomit, or salivate. The most extreme was blood-letting. 21
    When Hahnemann moved on again, this time to Gommern, near Magdeburg, he had another fraught encounter when a patient of his, a cabinetmaker, broke down suddenly (as we would say now), and Hahnemann accompanied