Inquisition trials

The controversy was not really about science. The use of law and coercion to defend a theory was not so much an indication that the authorities cared deeply about the nature of the elements as a reflection of their wish to preserve the status quo. Like Galileo s trial before the Inquisition, this was not an argument about truth but a struggle for power, a sign of the religious dogmatism of the Counter-Reformation. 

Rudolf5s trial on account of the business with Remer s version ended in summer 1995. Under which star this trial was held was made blindingly clear by a document from the trial records Rudolf s judges in the District Court of Stuttgart wanted to prevent that they themselves should come under the wheels of denunciation and inquisition, as had the judges of the District Court of Mannheim in the Gunter Deckert Case, who were massively criticized by media and politicians,... 

In other words, the public consents to the practice that in NSG trials it is not the guilt of the accused that must be proven, but rather that the accused must prove his innocence of any and all conceivable accusations, in the tradition of the Inquisition of medieval times. 

Earlier, in 1252, the Church had sanctioned torture in Papal Inquisitions and permitted both secret trials and execution by burning. With the aid of Malleus Maleficarum, the inquisitors ordered ferocious witch-hunts against the rural classes. These peaked between 1580 and 1660. Inquisitors and Puritans in England, Europe and America executed hundreds of thousands of alleged witches over a two hundred and fifty year period. Many tens of thousands of these were in Germany alone. 

It is worth remembering that these advances are enjoyed only by a privileged few. The WHO estimates that 80% of the world s population still relies on traditional medicines for their primary health care needs. These are invariably crude natural product extracts, with potentially large variations in composition from one batch to another, and that are not subjected to controlled clinical trials. It is also true that many of these traditional medicines, although consumed by millions of people who vouch for their efficacy, have not succumbed to Western-style inquisitions to determine their mechanism of action. Traditional medicines, contend their proponents, work by complex synergistic interactions between their constituents. Consequently, reductionist approaches that identify single active pharmaceutical ingredients are doomed to failure. 

Traill, D. (1951), Some trials by ingenious inquisitive persons regenerated protein fibres . Journal of the Society of Dyers and Colourists, 67, 270. 

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