Samuel Hahnemann, the dude who developed homeopathy, did so back before the germ theory, the microscope, the first vaccine, and a lot of other things. Medicine at the time consisted of bleeding, purging, starving, and doing things like prescribing carrots for erectile dysfunction, meat of “vigourous” animals for fatigue, and such.
Hahnemann noted that people didn’t seem to get better one way or another, and wanted to try something else. He started out by administering different substances to healthy people, noting the effect, and keeping rigorous notes.
I’m not sure at what point he got his breakthrough idea that if X substance produced Y effect in a healthy person, it should produce opposite-Y in a sick person, but it wasn’t all that stupider than bleeding and purging.
My point is, he kept experimenting and adjusting his ideas all his life. He came up with some wacky stuff, like the horsehair agitator, but that happened because he thought his remedies worked better after being carried in saddle bags, and he was working on determining how water knew how to remember what key substances it had been exposed to, and which ones to “forget.” Water memory is a stupid idea, but again, not really stupider than the idea that seeing a really ugly person while pregnant could cause a woman to give birth to a deformed baby.
Anyway, what I’m getting at is that if Hahnemann came back today, and saw the state of modern medicine, and then found out some people were still insisting on practicing homeopathy as he left it in 1790 (or whatever), he’d be gobsmacked. I think if he’d been granted the ability to live for several hundred years, he would have joined the march of real science, because that’s what he was trying to do when he invented homeopathy-- the problem was that he was stumbling in the dark. But he was a guy who was constantly changing and refining his theory with every new observation he made, which is the way science is supposed to work. It’s not his fault that he didn’t have the tools to make good observations and valid assumptions.