Sock horror in homeopathic cholera statistics

This is the second paragraph from Ben Goldacre’s recent comment piece Benefits and risks of homeopathy in The Lancet’s November 17 edition.

During the cholera epidemic in the 19th century, death rates at the London Homoeopathic Hospital were three times lower than those at the Middlesex Hospital. (6) The reason for homoeopathy’s success in this epidemic is even more interesting than the placebo effect. At the time, nobody could treat cholera, and while medical treatments such as blood-letting were actively harmful, the homoeopaths’ treatments were at least inert.

(6) Hempel S. The medical detective. London, UK: Granta Books, 2006

Notice how Goldacre doesn’t give us the actual figures. (And this is The Lancet, not the Guardian.) Neither does he clarify that his reasoning is speculation, not established fact. The actual mortality percentages would allow readers to make some kind of sensible judgement about his conjecture that medical treatments exacerbated mortality while homeopathic treatment equated to no treatment at all.