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    But merely being able to produce cures isn't enough to establish a

    medical discipline.  A new scientific order is a social organism--a

    collection of humans welded together by a common belief.  And

    freshly-hatched superorganisms are often extremely vulnerable.  Older

    social clusters would prefer to kill such youngsters before they can

    grow.  In 19th century  medicine, the entrenched and hostile social

    beast was another professional clique, a coterie which had labored for

    generations to establish its authority.

    Homeopathy's rival: allopathy.  Allopaths, with their dogmatic

    belief in bleedings, mercury and opium48 waged a pitiless war to

    discredit the newcomers.  They founded the American Medical

    Association to purge the medical profession of their rivals.49    And

    through government manipulation and a public smear campaign, they

    succeeded, hounding the homeopaths out of the medical schools, out

    of the medical societies, and out of access to the carefully cultivated

    image of medical infallibility.50

    At first glance, this was a battle between two scientific truths,

    two systems of belief.  But under the surface, it was a struggle between

    superorganisms over the lucrative proceeds of the medical trade.51  The

    allopaths won.

    As we've mentioned before, today's doctors--the heirs of the

    allopaths-- are only able to deal effectively with about fifty percent of

    the complaints brought to them.  The other fifty percent they haughtily

    dismiss as representing nonexistent ills.  Yet many of the symptoms

    they overlook may be produced by the very same allergic problems the

    homeopaths claim to have dealt with successfully.  The result: you and

    I are saddled with a medical community whose "knowledge" is the

    result of a battle between subcultures.  Because we are in the hands of

    the winners, a set of cures that could have healed us has all but

    disappeared.

    Even a wisp of imagination as fragile as poetry can be used in the

    squabble between subcultures over who will get the goods.  In the first

    century  AD, high-born citizens of the Roman Empire were obsessed

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