Homeopathy Au Bard

A Bit of Bloody Nonsense

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine

Making the green one red.

Macbeth, on stabbing Duncan [1]

Pretty powerful stuff, this Scottish blood, that a few drops could colour all the world's oceans!

Let us examine the matter from a molecular point of view, as we do homeopathic claims. Consider first Duncan's blood, and allow a generous ten ml (about one-third ounce to you pre-metrics) to adhere to Macbeth's hand. This volume would contain about 1.5g of haemoglobin, the red pigment of blood. This is equivalent to about 1.5 x 10" or 15 million million million molecules of haemoglobin [2].

Turning now to "all great Neptune's ocean", we note that the Earth's total ocean area is 361 million km", and the average depth is 3.81 km [3]. Hence, the volume of the world's oceans is 1.38 billion km', or 1.38 x 1021 litres [4].

Thus, when Macbeth has washed "this blood clean from my hand", and it is thoroughly and evenly mixed in "the multitudinous seas", the colouring matter of Duncan's blood would be present in a concentration of one molecule in about ninety litres. That is, a cupful would have only one chance in about four hundred of containing any haemoglobin at all.

Note that the dilution obtained in this one-step imaginary experiment is far less than the dilutions achieved in ordinary homeopathic practice by the process of serial dilution. In the notorious Benveniste experiments, dilutions of 1 in 10" (in effect zero) were used in ordinary test-tube experiments [5]. To achieve this dilution, Macbeth would have had to wash his hands in a volume of sea water many times greater than the volume of the observable universe.

References

  1. Shakespeare, W. Macbeth, 1605.
  2. Bell, Davidson & Scarborough. Textbook of Physiology & Biochemistry, 1963.
  3. Philips' Universal Atlas, 1981.
  4. About one-third billion cubic miles, if that is easier to visualise.
  5. See Skeptical Inquirer, vol 13, no 2, 1989.