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Organon of Medicine - Dr.Samuel Hahnemann. A wonderful medical guidelines for All.

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Post  sv-b Fri Nov 26, 2010 11:45 am

INTRODUCTION
Review of the therapeutics, allopathy and palliative treatment that have hitherto been practiced in the old school of medicine.
As long as men have existed they have been liable, individually or collectively, to diseases from physical or moral causes. In a rude state of nature but few remedial agents were required, as the simple mode of living admitted of but few diseases; with the civilization of mankind in the state, on the contrary, the occasions of diseases and the necessity for medical aid increased, in equal proportion. But ever since that time (soon after Hippocrates, therefore, for 2500 years) men have occupied themselves with the treatment of the ever increasing multiplicity of diseases, who, led astray by their vanity, sought by reasoning and guessing to excogitate the mode of furnishing this aid. Innumerable and dissimilar ideas respecting the nature of diseases and their remedies sprang from so many dissimilar brains, and the theoretical views these gave rise to the so-called systems, each of which was at variance with the rest and self-contradictory. Each of these subtile expositions at first threw the readers into stupefied amazement at the incomprehensible wisdom contained in it, and attracted to the system-monger a number of followers, who re-echoed his unnatural sophistry, to none of whom, however, was it of the slightest use in enabling them to cure better, until a new system, often diametrically opposed to the first, thrust that aside, and in its turn gained a short-lived renown. None of them, however. was in consonance with nature and experience; they were mere theoretical webs, woven by cunning intellects out of pretended consequences, which could not be made use of in practice, in the treatment at the sick-bed, on account of their excessive subtilty and repugnance to nature, and only served for empty disputations.
Simultaneously, but quite independent of all these theories, there sprung up a mode of treatment with mixtures of unknown medicinal substances for forms of disease arbitrarily set up, and directed towards some material object completely at variance with nature and experience, hence, as may be supposed, with a bad result - such is old medicine, allopathy as it is termed.
Without disparaging the services which many physicians have rendered to the sciences auxiliary to medicine, to natural philosophy and chemistry, to natural history in its various branches, and to that of man in particular, to anthropology, physiology and anatomy, etc., I shall occupy myself here with the practical part of medicine only, with the healing art itself, in order to show how it is that diseases have hitherto been so imperfectly treated. Far beneath my notice is that mechanical routine of treating precious human life according to the prescription manuals, the continual publication of which shows, alas! how frequently they are still used. I pass it by unnoticed, as a despicable practice of the lowest class of ordinary practitioners. I speak merely of the medical art as hitherto practiced, which, pluming itself on its antiquity, imagines itself to possess a scientific character.
The partisans of the old school of medicine flattered themselves that they could justly claim for it alone the title of rational medicine, because they alone sought for and strove to remove the cause of disease, and followed the method employed by nature in diseases.
Tolle causam! they cried incessantly. But they went no further than this empty exclamation. They only fancied that they could discover the cause of disease; they did not discover it, however, as it is not perceptible and not discoverable. For as far the greatest number of diseases are of dynamic (spiritual) origin and dynamic (spiritual) nature, their cause is therefore not perceptible to the senses; so they exerted themselves to imagine one, and from a survey of the parts of the normal, inanimate human body (anatomy), compared with the visible changes of the same internal parts in persons who had died of diseases (pathological anatomy), as also from what they could deduce from a comparison of the phenomena and functions in healthy life (physiology) with their endless alterations in the innumerable morbid states (pathology, semeiotics), to draw conclusions relative to the invisible process whereby the changes which take place in the inward being of man in diseases are affected - a dim picture of the imagination, which theoretical medicine regarded as its prima causa morbi;* and thus it was at one and the same time the proximate cause of the disease, and the internal essence of the disease, the disease itself - although, as sound human reason teaches us, the cause of a thing or of an event, can never be at the same time the thing or the event itself. How could they then, without deceiving themselves, consider this imperceptible internal essence as the object to be treated, and prescribe for it medicines whose curative powers were likewise generally unknown to them, and even give several such unknown medicines mixed together in what are termed prescriptions?
* It would have been much more consonant with sound human reason and with the nature of things, had they, in order to be able to cure a disease, regarded the originating cause as the causa morbi, and endeavored to discover that, and thus been enabled successfully to employ the mode of treatment which had shown itself useful in maladies having the same exciting cause, in those also of a similar origin, as, for example, the same mercury is efficacious in an ulcer of the glans after impure coitus, as in all previous venereal chancres - if, I say, they had discovered the exciting cause of all other (non-venereal) chronic diseases to be an infection at one period or another with the itch miasm (psora), and had found for all these a common method of treatment, regard being had for the peculiarities of each individual case, whereby all and each of these chronic diseases might have been cured, then might they with justice have boasted that in the treatment of chronic diseases they had in view the only available and useful causa morborum chronicorum (non venereorum), and with this as a basis they might have treated such diseases with the best results. But during these many centuries they were unable to cure the millions of chronic diseases, because they knew not their origin in the psoric miasm (which was first discovered and afterwards provided with a suitable plan of treatment by homoeopathy), and yet they vaunted that they alone kept in view the prima causa of these diseases in their treatment, and that they alone treated rationally, although they had not the slightest conception of the only useful knowledge of their psoric origin and consequently they bungled the treatment of all chronic diseases!
But this sublime problem, the discovery, namely, a priori, of an internal invisible cause of disease, resolved itself, at least with the more astute physicians of the old school, into a search, under the guidance of the symptoms it is true, for what might be supposed to be the probable general character of the case of disease before them;* whether it was spasm, or debility, or paralysis, or fever, or inflammation, or induration, or obstruction of this or that part, or excess of blood (plethora), deficiency or excess of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen or nitrogen in the juices, exaltation or depression of the functions of the arterial, venous or capillary system, change in the relative proportion of the factors of sensibility, irritability or reproduction., - conjectures that have been dignified by the followers of the old school with the title of causal indication, and considered to be the only possible rationality in medicine; but which were assumptions, too fallacious and hypothetical to prove of any practical utility - incapable, even had they been well grounded, of indicating the most appropriate remedy for a case of disease; flattering indeed, to the vanity of the learned theorist, but usually leading astray when used as guides to practice, and wherein there was evidenced more of ostentation than of an earnest search for the curative indication.
* Every physician who treats disease according to such general character however he may affect to claim the name of homoeopathist, is and ever will remain in fact a generalising allopath, for without the most minute individualisation, homoeopathy is not conceivable.
And how often has it happened that, for example, spasm or paralysis seemed to be in one part of the organism, while in another part inflammation was apparently present!
Or, on the other hand, whence are the certain remedies for each of these pretended general characters to be derived? Those that would certainly be of benefit could be none other than the specific medicines, that is, those whose action is homogeneous* to the morbid irritation; whose employment, however, is denounced and forbidden by the old school as highly injurious, because observation has shown that in consequence of the receptivity for homogeneous irritation being so highly increased in diseases, such medicines in the usual large doses are dangerous to life. The old school never dreamt of smaller, and of extremely small doses. Accordingly no attempt was made to cure, in the direct (the most natural) way, by means of homogeneous, specific medicines; nor could it be done, as the effects of most of medicines were, and continued to remain, unknown, and even had they been known it would have been impossible to hit on the right medicine with such generalizing views as were entertained.
* Homoeopathic.
Where experience showed the curative power of homoeopathically acting remedies, whose mode of action could not be explained, the difficulty was avoided by calling them specific, and further investigation was stifled by this actually unmeaning word. The homogeneous excitant remedies, the specific (homoeopathic), medicines, however, had long previously been prohibited as of very injurious influence. - Rau, On the Value of the Homoeopathic Method of Treatment, Heidelberg, 1824, pp. 101, 102.
However, perceiving that it was more consistent with reason to seek for another path, a straight one if possible, rather than to take circuitous courses, the old school of medicine believed it might cure diseases in a direct manner by the removal of the (imaginary) material cause of disease - for to physicians of the ordinary school, while investigating and forming a judgment upon a disease, and not less while seeking for the curative indication, it was next to impossible to divest themselves of these materialistic ideas, and to regard the nature of the spiritual-corporeal organism as such a highly potentialized entity, that its sensational and functional vital changes, which are called diseases, must be produced and effected chiefly, if not solely, by dynamic (spiritual) influences, and could not be effected in any other way.
The old school regarded all those matters which were altered by the disease, those abnormal matters that occurred in congestions, as well as those that were excreted, as disease-producers, or at least on account of their supposed reacting power, as disease maintainers, and this latter notion prevails to this day.
Hence they dreamed of effecting causal cures by endeavoring to remove these imaginary and presumed material causes of the disease. Hence their assiduous evacuation of the bile by vomiting in bilious fevers; their emetics in cases of so-called stomach derangements;* their diligent purging away of the mucus, the lumbrici and the ascarides in children who are pale-faced and who suffer from ravenous appetite, bellyache, and enlarged abdomen; their venesections in cases of haemorrhage;** and more especially all their varieties of blood-lettings, their main remedy in inflammations, which they now, following the example of a well-known bloodthirsty Parisian physician (as a flock of sheep follow the bellwether even into the butcher's slaughter-house), imagine to encounter in almost every morbidly affected part of the body, and feel themselves, bound to remove by the application of often a fatal number of leeches. They believe that by so doing they obey the true casual indications, and treat disease in a rational manner. The adherents of the old school, moreover, believe that by putting a ligature on polypi, by cutting out, or artificially exciting suppuration by means of local irritants in indolent glandular swellings, by enucleating encysted tumors (steatoma and meliceria) by their operations for aneurysm and lacrymal and anal fistula, by removing with the knife scirrhous tumors of the breast, by amputating a limb affected with necrosis, etc., they cure the patient radically, and that their treatment is directed against the cause of the disease; and they also think, when they employ their repellent remedies, dry up old running ulcers in the legs with astringent applications of oxide of lead copper or zinc (aided always by the simultaneous administration of purgatives, which merely debilitate, but have no effect on the fundamental dyscrasia), cauterize chancres, destroy condylomata locally, drive off itch from the skin with ointments of sulphur, oxide of lead, mercury or zinc, suppress ophthalmiae with solutions of lead or zinc, and drive away tearing pains from the limbs by means of opodeldoc, hartshorn liniment or fumigations with cinnabar or amber; in every case they think they have removed the affection, conquered the disease, and pursued a rational treatment directed towards the cause. But what is the result! The metastatic affections that sooner or later, but inevitably appear, caused by this mode of treatment (but which they pretend are entirely new diseases), which are always worse than the anginal malady, sufficiently prove their error, and might and should open their eyes to the deeper-seated, immaterial nature of the disease, and its dynamic (spirit-like) origin, which can only be removed by dynamic means.
* In a case of sudden derangement of the stomach, with constant disgusting eructations with the taste of the vitiated food, generally accompanied by depression of spirits, cold hands and feet, etc., the ordinary physician has hitherto been in the habit of attacking only the degenerated contents of the stomach; a powerful emetic should clean it out completely. This object was generally attained by tartar emetic, with or without ipecacuanha. Does the patient, however, immediately after this become well, brisk and cheerful? Oh, no! Such a derangement of the stomach is usually of dynamic origin, caused by mental disturbance (grief, fright, vexation), a chill, over-exertion of the mund or body immediately after eating, often after even a moderate meal. Those two remedies are not suitable for removing this dynamic derangement, and just as little is the revolutionary vomiting they produce. Moreover, tartar emetic and ipecacuanha, from their other peculiar pathogenetic powers, prove of further injury to the patient's health, and derange the biliary secretion; so that if the patient be not very robust, he must feel ill for several days from the effects of this pretended causal treatment, notwithstanding all this violent expulsion of the whole contents of the stomach. If the patient, however, in place of taking such violent and always (a) hurtful evacuant drugs, smell only a single time at a globule the size of a mustard seed, moistened with highly diluted pulsatilla juice, whereby the derangement of his health in general and of his stomach in particular will certainly be removed, in two hours he is quite well; and if the eructation recur once more, it consists of tasteless and inodorous air; the contents of the stomach cease to be vitiated, and at the next meal he has regained his full usual appetite; he is quite well and lively. This is true causal medication; the former is only an imaginary one and has an injurious efect on the patient.
Even a stomach overloaded with indigestible food never requires a medicinal emetic. In such a case nature is competent to rid herself of the excess in the best way through the oesophagus, by means of nausea, sickness and spontaneous vomiting, assisted, it may be, by mechanical irritation of the palate and fauces, and by this means the accessory medicinal effects of the emetic drugs are avoided; a small quantity of coffee expedites the passage downwards of what remains in the stomach.
But if, after excessive overloading of the stomach, the irritability of the stomach is not sufficient to promote spontaneous vomiting, or is lost altogether, so that the tendency thereto is extinguished, while there are at the same time great pains in the epigastrium, in such a paralyzed state of the stomach, an emetic medicine would only have the effect of producing a dangerous or fatal inflammation of the intestines; where a small quantity of strong infusion of coffee, frequently administered, would dynamically exalt the sunken irritability of the stomach, and put it in a condition to expel its contents, be they ever so great, either upwards or downwards. So here also the pretended causal treatment is out of place.
Even the acrid gastric acid, to eructations of which patients with chronic diseases are not infrequently subject, may be today violently evacuated by means of an emetic, with great suffering, and yet all in vain, for tomorrow or some days later it is replaced by similar acrid gastric acid, and then usually in larger quantities; whereas it goes away by itself when its dynamic cause is removed by a very small dose of a high dilution of sulphuric acid, or still better, if it is of frequent recurrence, by the employment of minutest doses of antipsoric remedies corresponding in similarity to the rest of the symptoms also. And of a similar character are many of the pretended causal cures of the old-school physicians, whose main effort it is, by means of tedious operations, troublesome to themselves and injurious to their patients, to clear away the material product of the dynamic derangement; whereas if they perceived the dynamic source of the affection, and annihilated it and its products homoeopathically, they would thereby effect a rational cure.
Conditions dependent solely on a psoric taint, and easily curable by mild (dynamic) antipsoric remedies without emetics or purgatives.
** Notwithstanding that almost all morbid haemorrhages depend on a dynamic derangement of the vital force (state of health), yet the old-school physicians consider their cause to be excess of blood, and cannot refrain from bleeding in order to draw off the supposed superabundance of this vital fluid; the palpable evil consequences of which procedure, however, such as prostration of the strength, and the tendency or actual transition, to the typhoid state they ascribe to the malignancy of the disease, which they are then often unable to overcome - in fine, they imagine, even when the patient does not recover, that their treatment has been in conformity with their axiom, causam tolle, and that, according to their mode of speaking, they have done everything in their power for the patient, let the result be what it may.
Although there probably never was a drop of blood too much in the living human body, yet the old-school practitioners consider an imaginary excess of blood as the main material cause of all haemorrhages and inflammations, which they must remove and drain off by venesections, cupping and leeches. This they hold to be a rational mode of treatment, causal medication. In general inflammatory fevers, in acute pleurisy, they even regard the coagulable lymph in the blood - the buffy coat, as it is termed - as the materia peccans, which they endeavor to get rid of, if possible, by repeated venesections, notwithstanding that this coat often becomes more consistent and thicker at every repetition of the bloodletting. They thus often bleed the patient nearly to death, when the inflammatory fever will not subside, in order to remove this buffy coat or the imaginary plethora, without suspecting that the inflammatory blood is only the product of the acute fever, of the morbid, immaterial (dynamic) inflammatory irritation, and that the latter is the sole cause of the great disturbance in the vascular system, and may be removed by the smallest dose of a homogeneous (homoeopathic) medicine, as, for instance, by a small globule of the decillion-fold dilution of aconite juice, with abstinence from vegetable acids, so that the most violent pleuritic fever, with all its alarming concomitants, is changed into health and cured, without the least abstraction of blood and without any antiphlogistic remedy, in a few - at the most in twenty-four - hours (a small quantity of blood drawn from a vein by the way of experiment then shows no traces of buffy coat); whereas another patient similarly affected, and treated on the rational principles of the old school, if, after repeated bleedings, with great difficulty and unspeakable sufferings he escape for the nonce with life, he often has still many months to drag through before he can support his emaciated body on his legs, if in the mean time (as often happens from such maltreatment) he be not carried off by typhoid fever, leucophlegmasia or pulmonary phthisis.
Anyone who has felt the tranquil pulse of a man an hour before the occurrence of the rigor that always precedes an attack of acute pleurisy, will not be able to restrain his amazement if told two hours later, after the hot stage has commenced, that the enormous plethora present urgently requires repeated venesections, and will naturally inquire by what magic power could the pounds of blood that must now be drawn off have been conjured into the blood-vessels of this man within these two hours, which but two hours previously he had felt beating in such a tranquil manner. Not a single drachm more of blood can now be circulating in those vessels than existed when he was in good health, not yet two hours ago!
Accordingly the allopathic physician with his venesections draws from the patient laboring under acute fever no oppressive superabundance of blood, as that cannot possibly be present; he only robs him of what is indispensable to life and recovery, the normal quantity of blood and consequently of strength - a great loss which no physician's power can replacel - and yet he vainly imagines that he has conducted the treatment in conformity to his (misunderstood) axiom, causam tolle; whereas it is impossible that the causa morbi in this case can be an excess of blood, which is not present; but the sole true causa morbi was a morbid, dynamical, inflammatory irritation of the circulatory system, as is proved by the rapid and permanent cure of this and every similar case of general inflammatory fever by one or two inconceivably minute doses of aconite juice, which removes such an irritation homoeopathically.
The old school errs equally in the treatment of local inflammations with its topical bloodlettings, more especially with the quantities of leeches which are now applied according to the maniacal principles of Broussais. The palliative amelioration that at first ensues from the treatment is far from being crowned by a rapid and perfect cure; on the contrary, the weak and ailing state of the parts thus treated (frequently also of the whole body), which always remains, sufficiently shows the error that is committed in attributing the local inflammation to a local plethora, and how sad are the consequences of such abstractions of blood; whereas this purely dynamic, apparently local, inflammatory irritation, can be rapidly and permanently removed by an equally small dose of aconite, or, according to circumstances, of belladonna, and the whole disease annihilated and cured, without such unjustifiable shedding of blood.
A favorite idea of the ordinary school of medicine, until recent (would that I could not say the most recent) times, was that of morbific matters (and acridities) in diseases, excessively subtile though they might be thought to be, which must be expelled from the blood-vessels and lymphathics, through the exhalents, skin, urinary apparatus or salivary glands, through the tracheal and bronchial glands in the form of expectoration, from the stomach and bowels by vomiting and purging, in order that the body might be freed from the material cause that produced the disease, and a radical causal treatment be thus carried out.
By cutting holes in the diseased body, which were converted into chronic ulcers kept up for years by the introduction of foreign substances (issues, setons), they sought to draw off the materia peccans from the (always only dynamically) diseased body, just as one lets a dirty fluid run out of a barrel through the tap-hole. By means also of perpetual fly-blisters and the application of mezereum, they thought to draw away the bad humors and to cleanse the diseased body from all morbific matters - but they only weakened it, so as generally to render it incurable, by all these senseless unnatural processes.
I admit that it was more convenient for the weakness of humanity to assume that, in the diseases they were called on to cure, there existed some morbific material of which the mind might form a conception (more particularly as the patients readily lent themselves to such a notion), because in that case the practitioner had nothing further to care about than to procure a good supply of remedies for purifying the blood and humors, exciting diuresis and diaphoresis, promoting expectoration, and scouring out the stomach and bowels. Hence, in all the works on Materia Medica, from Dioscorides down to the latest books on this subject, there is almost nothing said about the special peculiar action of individual medicines; but, besides on account of their supposed utility in various nosological names of diseases, it is merely stated whether they are diuretic, diaphoretic, expectorant or emmenagogue, and more particularly whether they produce evacuation of the stomach and bowels upwards or downwards; because all the aspirations and efforts of the practitioner have ever been chiefly directed to cause the expulsion of a material morbific matter, and of sundry (fictitious) acridities, which it was imagined were the cause of diseases.
These were, however, all idle dreams, unfounded assumptions and hypotheses, cunningly devised for the convenience of therapeutics, as it was expected the easiest way of performing a cure would be to remove the material morbific matters (si modo essent!).
But the essential nature of diseases and their cure will not adapt themselves to such fantasies, nor to the convenience of medical men; to humor such stupid baseless hypotheses diseases will not cease to be (spiritual) dynamic derangements of our spirit-like vital principle in sensations and functions, that is to say, immaterial derangements of our state of health.
The causes of our maladies cannot be material, since the least foreign material substance,* however mild it may appear to us, if introduced into our blood-vessels, is promptly ejected by the vital force, as though it were a poison; or when this does not happen, death ensues. If even the minutes splinter penetrates a sensitive part of our organism, the vital principle everywhere present in our body never rests until it is removed by pain, fever, suppuration or gangrene. And can it be supposed that in a case of cutaneous disease of twenty years' standing, for instance, this indefatigably active vital principle will quietly endure the presence of such an injurious foreign, material exanthematous substance, such as a herpetic, a scrofulous, a gouty acridity, etc., in the fluids of the body? Did any nosologist ever see with corporeal eyes such a morbific matter, to warrant him in speaking so confidently about it, and in founding a system of medical treatment upon it? Has any one ever succeeded in displaying to view the matter of gout or the poison of scrofula?
* Life was endangered by injecting a little pure water into a vein. (Vide Mullen, quoted by Birch in the History of the Royal Society.)
Atmospheric air injected into the blood-vessels caused death. (Vide J. M. Voigt, Magazin fur den neuesten Zustand der Naturkunde, i, iii, p. 25.)
Even the mildest fluids introduced into the veins endangered life. (Vide Autenreith, Physiologie, ii, § 784.)
Even when the application of a material substance to the skin, or to a wound, has propagated diseases by infection, who can prove (what is so often maintained in works on pathology) that some material portion of this substance has penetrated into our fluids or been absorbed?* The most careful and prompt washing of the genitals does not protect the system from infection with the venereal chancrous disease. The slightest breath of air emanating from the body of a person affected with smallpox will suffice to produce this horrible disease in a healthy child.
* A girl in Glasgow, eight years of age, having been bit by a mad dog, the surgeon immediately cut the piece clean out, and yet thirty-six days afterwards she was seized with hydrophobia, which killed her in two days. (Med. Comment. of Edinb., Dec. 2, vol. ii, 1793.)
What ponderable quantity of material substance could have been absorbed into the fluids, in order to develop, in the first of these instances, a tedious dyscrasia (syphilis), which when uncured is only extinguished with the remotest period of life, with death; in the last, a disease (smallpox) accompanied by almost general suppuration,* and often rapidly fatal? In these and all similar cases is it possible to entertain the idea of a material morbific matter being introduced into the blood? A letter written in the sick-room at a great distance has often communicated the same contagious disease to the person who read it. In this instance, can the notion of a material morbific matter having penetrated into the fluids be admitted? But what need is there of all such proofs? How often has it happened that an irritating word has brought on a dangerous bilious fever; a superstitious prediction of death has caused the fatal catastrophe at the very time announced; the abrupt communication of sad or excessively joyful news has occasioned sudden death? In these cases, where is the material morbific principle that entered in substance into the body, there to produce and keep up the disease, and without the material expulsion and ejection of which a radical cure were impossible?
* In order to account for the large quantity of putrid exerementitious matter and foetid discharge often met with in diseases, and to be able to represent them as the material substance that excites and keeps up disease - although, when infection occurs, nothing perceptible in the shape of miasm, nothing material, could have penetrated into the body - recourse was had to the hypothesis, that the matter of infection, be it ever so minute, acts in the body like a ferment, bringing the fluids into a like state of corruption, and thus changing them into a similar morbific ferment which constantly increases with the disease and keeps it up. But by what all-potent and all-wise purifying draughts will you purge and cleanse the human fluids from this ever reproductive ferment, from this mass of imaginary morbific matter, and that so perfectly, that there shall not remain a particle of such morbific ferment, which, according to this hypothesis, must ever again, as at first, transform and corrupt the fluids to new morbific matter? Were that so it would evidently be impossible to cure these diseases in your way! - See how all hypotheses, be they ever so ingeniously framed, lead to the most palpable absurdities when they are not founded on truth! - The most deeply rooted syphilis may be cured, after the removal of the psora with which it is often complicated, by one or two small doses of the decillionfiold diluted and potentised solution of mercury, whereby the general syphilitic taint of the fluids is forever (dynamically) annihilated and removed.
The champions of this clumsy doctrine of morbific matters ought to be ashamed that they have so inconsiderately overlooked and failed to appreciate the spiritual nature of life, and the spiritual dynamic power of the exciting causes of diseases, and that they have thereby degraded themselves into mere scavenger-doctors, who, in their efforts to expel from the diseased body morbific matters that never existed, in place of curing, destroy life.
Are, then, the foul, often disgusting excretions which occur in diseases the actual matter that produces and keeps them up?* Are they not rather always exeretory products of the disease itself, that is, of the life which is only dynamically deranged and disordered?
* Were this the case, the most inveterate coryza should be certainly and rapidly cured by merely blowing and wiping the nose carefully.
With such false and materialistic views concerning the origin and essential nature of diseases, it was certainly not to be wondered at that in all ages the main endeavor of the most obscure, as well as of the most distinguished practitioners, and even of the inventors of the sublimest medical systems, was always only to separate and expel an imaginary morbific matter, and the indication most frequently laid down was to break up and put in motion this morbific matter, to effect its expulsion by salivation, expectoration, diaphoresis and diuresis, to purify the blood froth (acridities and impurities) morbific matters, which never existed, by means of the intelligence of sundry obedient decoctions of root and plants; to draw off mechanically the imaginary matter of disease by setons, by issues, by portions of the skin kept open and discharging by means of perpetual blisters or mezereum bark, but chiefly to expel and purge away the materia peccans, or the injurious matters as they were termed, through the intestines, by means of laxative and purgative medicines, which, in order to give them a more profound meaning and a more prepossessing appearance, were fondly denominated dissolvents and mild aperients - all so many arrangements for the expulsion of inimical morbific matters, which never could be, and never were instrumental in the production and maintenance of the diseases of the human organism, animated as it is by a spiritual principle - of diseases which never were anything else than spiritual dynamic derangements of the life altered in its sensations and functions.
Let it be granted now, what cannot be doubted, that no diseases - if they do not result from the introduction of perfectly indigestible or otherwise injurious substances into the stomach, or into other orifices or cavities of the body, or from foreign bodies penetrating. the skin, etc. - that no disease, in a word, is caused by any material substance, but that every one is only and always a peculiar, virtual, dynamic derangement of the health; how injudicious, in that case, must not a method of treatment directed towards the expulsion* of that imaginary material substance appear to every rational man, since no good, but only monstrous harm, can result from its employment in the principal diseases of mankind, namely, those of a chronic character!
* There is a semblance of necessity in the expulsion by purgatives of worms, in so-called vermicular diseases. But even this semblance is false. A few lumbric; may be found in some children; in many there exist ascarides. But the presence of these is always dependent on a general taint of the constitution (the psoric), joined to an unhealthy mode of living. Let the latter be improved, and the former cured homoeopathically, which is most easily effected at this age, and none of the worms remain, and children cured in this manner are never troubled with them more; whereas after mere purgatives, even when combined with cina seeds, they soon reappear in quantities.
But the tapeworm, methinks I hear some one exclaim, every effort should be made to expel that monster, which was created for the torment of mankind.
Yes, sometimes it is expelled; but at the cost ot what after-sufferings, and with what danger to life! I should not like to have on my conscience the deaths of so many hundreds of human beings as have fallen sacrifices to the horribly violent purgatives, directed against the tapeworm, or the many years of indisposition of those who have escaped being purged to death. And how often does it happen that after all this health-and-life-destroying purgative treatment, frequently continued for several years, the animal is not expelled, or if so, that it is again produced!
What if there is not the slightest necessity for all these violent, cruel, and dangerous efforts to expel and kill the worm?
The various species of tapeworm are only found along with the psoric taint, and always disappear when that is cured. But even before the cure is accomplished, they live - the patient enjoying tolerable health the while - not exactly in the intestines, but in the residue of the food, the excrement of the bowels, as in their proper element, quite quietly, and without causing the least disturbance, and find in the excrement what suffices for their nourishment; they then do not touch the walls of the intestine, and are perfectly harmless. But if the patient happens to be affected with an acute disease of any kind, then the contents of the bowels become intolerable to the animal; it twists about, comes in contact with, and irritates the sensitive walls of the intestines, causing a peculiar kind of spasmodic colic, which increases materially the sufferings of the patient. (So also the foetus in the womb becomes restless, turns about and kicks, only when the mother is ill; but when she is well; it swims quiet in its proper fluid without causing her any suffering.)
It is worthy of remark, that the morbid symptoms of patients suffering from tapeworm are generally of such a kind, that they are rapidly relieved (homoeopathically) by the smallest dose of tincture of male-fern root; so that the ill-health of the patient, which causes this parasitic animal to be restless, is thereby for the time removed; the tapeworm then feels at ease, and lives on quietly in the excrement of the bowels, without particularly distressing the patient or his intestines, until the antipsoric treatment is so far advanced that the worm, after the eradication of the psora, finds the contents of the bowels no longer suitable for its support, and therefore spontaneously disappears, for ever from the now cured patient, without the least purgative medicine.
In short, the degenerated substances and impurities that appear in diseases are, undeniably, nothing more than products of the disease of the abnormally deranged organism, which are expelled by the latter, often violently enough - often much too violently - without requiring the aid of the evacuating art, and fresh products are always developed as long as it labors under that disease. These matters the true physician regards as actual symptoms of the disease, and they aid him to discover the nature of the disease, and to form an accurate portrait of it, so as to enable him to cure it with a similar medicinal morbific agent.
But the more modern adherents of the old school do not wish it to be supposed, that in their treatment they aim at the expulsion of material morbific substances. They allege that their multifarious evacuant processes are a mode of treatment by derivation, wherein they follow the example of nature which, in her efforts to assist the diseased organism, resolves fever by perspiration and diuresis pleurisy by epistaxis, sweat and mucous expectoration - other diseases by vomiting, diarrhaea and bleeding from the anus, articular pains by suppurating ulcers on the legs, cynanche tonsillaris by salivation, etc., or removes them by metastases and abscesses which she develops in parts at a distance from the seat of the disease.
Hence they thought the best thing to do was to imitate nature, by also going to work in the treatment of most diseases in a circuitous manner like the diseased vital force when left to itself and thus in an indirect manner,* by means of stronger heterogeneous irritants applied to organs remote from the seat of disease, and totally dissimilar to the affected tissues, they produce evacuations, and generally kept them up, in order to draw, as it were, the disease thither.
* In place of extinguishing the disease rapidly, without exhaustion of the strength and without going about the bush, with homogeneous, dynamic medicinal agents acting directly on the diseased points of the organism, as homoeopathy does.
This derivation, as it is called, was and continues to be one of the principal modes of treatment of the old school of medicine.
In this imitation of the self-aiding operation of nature, as some call it, they endeavored to excite, by force, new symptoms in the tissues that are least diseased and best able to bear the medicinal disease, which should draw away* the primary disease under the semblance of crises and under the form of excretions, in order to admit of a gradual lysis by the curative powers of nature.
* Just as if anything immaterial could be drawn away! So that here too was the notion of a substance and a morbific matter, excessively subtile though it might be supposed to be!
It is only the slighter and acute diseases that tend, when the natural period of their course has expired, to terminate quietly in resolution, as it is called, with or without the employment of not very aggressive allopathic remedies; the vital force, having regained its powers, then gradually substitutes the normal condition for the derangement of the health that has now ceased to exist. But in severe acute and in chronic diseases which constitute by far the greater portion of all human ailments, crude nature and the old school are equally powerless; in these, neither the vital force, with ifs self-aiding faculty, nor allopathy in imitation of it, can affect a lysis, but at the most a mere temporary truce, during which the enemy fortifies himself, in order, sooner or later, to recommence the attack with still greater violence.
This they accomplished by means of diaphoretic and diuretic remedies, blood-lettings, setons and issues, but chiefly by irritant drugs to cause evacuation of the alimentary canal, sometimes upwards by means of emetics, sometimes (and this was the favorite plan) downwards by means of purgatives, which were termed aperient and dissolvent* remedies.
* An expression which likewise betrays that they imagined and presupposed a morbific substance, which had to be dissolved and expelled.
To assist this derivative method they employed the allied treatment by counter-irritants; woolen garments to the bare skin, foot-baths, nauseants, inflicting on the stomach and bowels the pangs of hunger (the hunger-treatment), substances to cause pain, inflammation, and suppuration in near or distant parts as the application of horseradish, mustard plasters, cantharides, blisters, mezereum setons, issues, tartar-emetic ointment, moxa, actual cautery, acupuncture, etc.; here also following the example of crude unassisted nature, which endeavors to free herself from the dynamic disease (in the case of a chronic disease, unavailingly) by exciting pain in distant parts of the body, by metastases and abscesses, by eruptions and suppurating ulcers.
It was evidently no rational principle, but merely imitation, with the view of making practice easy that seduced the old school into those unhelpful and injurious indirect modes of treatment, the derivative as well as the counter-irritant; that led them to this inefficacious, debilitating and hurtful practice of apparently ameliorating diseases for a short time, or removing them in such a manner that another and a worse disease was roused up to occupy the place of the first. Such a destructive plan cannot certainly be termed curing.
They merely followed the example of crude instinctive nature in her efforts, which are barely* successful even in the slighter cases of acute disease; they merely imitated the unreasoning life-preserving power when left to itself ill diseases, which entirely dependent as it is upon the organic laws of the body, is only capable of acting in conformity with these laws and is not guided by reason and reflection - they copied nature, which cannot, like an intelligent surgeon, bring together the gaping lips of a wound and by their union effect a cure; which knows not how to straighten and adjust the broken ends of a bone lying far apart and exuding much (often an excess of) new osseous matter; which cannot put a ligature on a wounded artery, but in its energy causes the patient to bleed to death; which does not understand how to replace a dislocated shoulder, but by the swelling it occasions round about it soon presents an obstacle to reduction; which in order to remove a foreign body from the cornea, destroys the whole eye by suppuration; which, with all its efforts can only liberate a strangulated hernia by gangrene of the bowel and death; and which, by the metaschematisms it produces in dynamic diseases, often renders them much worse than they were originally. But more, this irrational vital force receives into our body without hesitation, the greatest plagues of our terrestrial existence, the spark that kindles the countless diseases beneath which tortured mankind has groaned for hundreds and thousands of year, the chronic miasms - psora, syphilis, sycosis - not one of which can it diminish in the slightest degree far less expel single-handed from the organism; on the contrary, it allows them to rankle therein until often after a long life of misery, death at last closes the eyes of the sufferer.
* In the ordinary school of medicine, the efforts made by nature for the relief of the organism in diseases where no medicine was given, were regarded as models of treatment worthy of imitation. But this was a great error. The pitiable and highly imperfect efforts of the vital force to relieve itself in acute diseases is a spectacle that should excite our compassion, and command the aid of all the powers of our rational mind, to terminate the self-inflicted torture by a real cure. If nature is unable to cure homoeopathically a disease already existing in the organism, by the production of another fresh malady similar to it (§§ 43-46), which very rarely lies in her power (§ 50), and if to the organism alone is left the task of overcoming, by its own forces without external aid, a disease newly contracted (in cases of chronic miasms its power of resistance is quite inefficacious), we then witness nought but painful, often dangerous, efforts of nature to save the individual at whatever cost, which often terminate in extinction of the earthly existence, in death.
Little as we mortals know of the operations that take place in the interior economy in health - which must be hidden from us as certainly as they are patent to the eye of the all-seeing Creator and Preserver of his creatures - just as little can we perceive the operations that go on in the interior in disturbed conditions of life, in diseases. The internal operations in diseases are manifested only by the visible changes, the sufferings and the symptoms, whereby alone our life betrays the inward disturbance; so that in no given case can we ascertain which of the morbid symptoms are caused by the primary action of the morbific agent, which by the reaction of the vital force for its own relief.
Both are inextricably mixed up together before our eyes, and only present to us an outwardly reflected picture of the entire internal malady, for the fruitless efforts of unassisted vitality to terminate the sufferings are themselves sufferings of the whole organism. Hence, even in those evacuations termed crises, which nature generally produces at the termination of diseases which run a rapid course, there is frequently more of suffering than of efficacious relief.
What the vital force does in these so-called crises, and how it does it, remains a mystery to us, like all the internal operations of the organic vital economy. One thing, however, is certain: that in all these efforts more or less of the affected parts are sacrificed and destroyed in order to save the rest. These self-aiding operations of the vital force for the removal of an acute disease, performed only in obedience to the laws of organic life and not guided by the reflection of an intellect, are mostly but a species of allopathy; in order to relieve the primarily affected organ by a crisis, an increased, often violent, activity is excited in the excretory organs, to draw away the disease from the former to the latter; there ensue vomitings, purgings, diuresis, diaphoresis, abscesses, etc., in order, by this irritation of distant parts, to effect a sort of derivation from the primarily diseased part, and the dynamically affected nervous power seems to unload itself in the material product.
It is only by the destruction and sacrifice of a portion of the organism itself that unaided nature can save the patient in acute diseases, and, if death do not ensue, restore, though only slowly and imperfectly, the harmony of life - health.
The great weakness of the parts which had been exposed to the disease, and even of the whole body, the emaciation, etc., remaining after spontaneous cures, are convincing proofs of this.
In short, the whole operation of the self-aiding power of the organism when attacked by diseases displays to the observer nothing but suffering - nothing that he could or ought to imitate if he wishes to cure disease in a truly artistic manner.
In such an important affair as that of healing, which demands so much intelligence, reflection and judgment, how could the old school, which arrogates to itself the title of rational, choose as its best instructor, as its guide to be blindly followed, the unintelligent vital force, inconsiderately copy its indirect and revolutionary operations in diseases, imagining these to be the non plus ultra, the best conceivable, when that greatest gift of God, reflective reason and unfettered judgment, was given us to enable us infinitely to surpass it in salutary help to suffering humanity?
When the old school practitioners, thoughtlessly imitating the crude, senseless, automatic vital energy with their counter-irritant and derivative methods of treatment - by far their most usual plans - attack innocent parts and organs of the body, either inflicting on them excruciating pains, or as is most frequently done, compelling them to perform evacuations whereby strength and fluids are wasted, their object is to direct the morbid vital action in the primarily affected parts away to those artificially attacked, and thus to effect the cure of the natural disease indirectly, by the production of a disease much greater in intensity and of quite a different kind, in the healthy parts of the body, consequently by a circuitous way, at the cost of much loss of strength, and usually of great suffering to the patient.*
* Daily experience shows the sad effects of this manoceuvre in chronic diseases. Anything but a cure is effected. Who would ever call that a victory if, in place of attacking the enemy in front in a hand-to-hand fight, and by his destruction terminating at once his hostile assaults, we should, in a cowardly manner and behind his back, lay an embargo on everything, cut off his supplies, burn down everything for a great way round him? By so doing we would at length deprive him of all courage to resist, but our object is not gained, the enemy is far from being destroyed, - he is still there, and when he can again procure provisions and supplies, he once more rears his head, more exasperated than before - the enemy, I repeat, is far from being destroyed, but the poor innocent country is so completely ruined that it will be long before it can recover itself. In like manner acts allopathy in chronic diseases, when, by its indirect attacks on innocent parts at a distance from the seat of the disease, instead of effecting a cure, it destroys the organism. Such is the result of its hurtful operations!

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Organon of Medicine - Dr.Samuel Hahnemann. A wonderful medical guidelines for All.  Empty Re: Organon of Medicine - Dr.Samuel Hahnemann. A wonderful medical guidelines for All.

Post  sv-b Fri Nov 26, 2010 11:46 am


The disease, if it be acute, and consequently naturally of but short duration, may certainly disappear, even during these heterogeneous attacks on distant and dissimilar parts - but it is not cured. There is nothing that can merit the honorable name of cure in this revolutionary treatment, which has no direct, immediate, pathological relation to the tissues primarily affected. Often indeed, without these serious attacks on the rest of the organism, would the acute disease have ceased of itself, sooner most likely, with fewer subsequent sufferings and less sacrifice of strength. But neither the mode of operation of the crude natural forces, nor the allopathic copy of that, can for a moment be compared to the dynamic (homoeopathic) treatment, which sustains the strength, while it extinguishes the disease in a direct and rapid manner.
In far the greatest number of cases of disease, however - I mean those of a chronic nature - these perturbing, debilitating, indirect modes of treatment of the old school are scarcely ever of the slightest use. They suspend for a few days only, some troublesome symptom or other, which, however, returns when the system has become accustomed to the distant irritation, and the disease recurs worse than before, because by the antagonistic pains* and the injudicious evacuations the vital powers have been depressed.
* What good results have ever ensued from those foetid artificial ulcers, so much in vogue, called issues? If even during the first week or two, whilst they still cause pain, they appear somewhat to check by antagonism a chronic disease, yer by and by, when the body has become accustomed to the pain, they have no other effect than that of weakening the patient and giving still greater scope to the chronic affection. Or does anyone imagine, in this nineteenth century, that they serve as an outlet for the escape of the materia peccans? It almost appears as if this were the case!
Whilst most physicians of the old school, imitating in a general manner the efforts of crude, unaided nature for its own relief, carried out in their practice these derivations of merely hypothetical utility, just as they judged expedient (guided by some imaginary indication), others, aiming at a higher object, undertook designedly to promote the efforts of the vital force to aid itself by evacuations and antagonistic metatases, as seen in diseases, and by way of lending it a helping hand, to increase still more these derivations and evacuations; and they believed that by this hurtful procedure they were acting duce natura, and might justly claim the title of minister naturae.
As the evacuations effected by the natural powers of the patient in chronic diseases are not infrequently the precursors of alleviations - though only of a temporary character - of troublesome symptoms, violent pains, paralyses, spasms, etc., so the old school imagined these derivations to be the true way of curing diseases, and endeavored to promote, maintain and even increase such evacuations. But they did not perceive that all these evacuations and excretions (pseudo-crises) produced by nature when left to herself were, in chronic diseases, only palliative, transient alleviations which, far from contributing to a real cure, on the contrary, rather aggravate the original, internal dyscrasia, by the waste of strength and juices they occasioned. No one ever saw a chronic patient recover his health permanently by such efforts of crude nature, nor any chronic disease cured by such evacuations effected by the organism.* On the contrary, in such cases the original dyscrasia is always perceptibly aggravated, after alleviations, whose duration always becomes shorter and shorter; the bad attacks recur more frequently and more severely in spite of the continuation of the evacuations. In like manner, on the occurrence of symptoms excited by an internal chronic affection that threaten to destroy life, when nature left to its own resources, cannot help herself in any other way than by the production of external local symptoms, in order to avert the danger from parts indispensable to life and direct it to tissues of less vital importance (metastasis), these operations of the energetic but unintelligent, unreasoding and improvident vital force conduce to anything but genuine relief or recovery; they only silence in a palliative manner, for a short time, the dangerous internal affection at the cost of a large portion of the humours and of the strength, without diminishing the original disease by a hair's breadth; they can, at the most, only retard the fatal termination which is inevitable without true homoeopathic treatment.
* Equally inefficacious are those produced artificially.
The allopathy of the old school not only greatly overrated these efforts of the crude automatic power of nature, but completely misjudged them, falsely considered them to be truly curative, and endeavored to increase and promote them, vainly imagining that thereby they might perhaps succeed in annihilating and radically curing the whole disease. When, in chronic diseases, the vital force seemed to silence this or that troublesome symptom of the internal affection by the production, for example, of some humid cutaneous eruption, then the servant of the crude power of nature (minister naturae) applied to the discharging surface a cantharides plaster or an exutory (mezereum), in order, duce natura, to draw still more moisture from the skin, and thus to promote and to assist nature's object - the cure (by the removal of the morbific matter from the body?); but when the effect of the remedy was too violent, the eczema already of long standing, and the system too irritable, he increased the external affection to a great degree without the slightest advantage, to the origirial disease, and aggravated the pains, which deprived the patient of sleep and depressed his strength (and sometimes even developed a malignant febrile erysipelas); or if the effect upon the local affection (still recent, perhaps) was of milder character, he thereby repelled from its seat, by a species of ill-applied external homoeopathy, the local symptom which had been established by nature on the skin for the relief of the internal disease, thus renewing the more dangerous internal malady, and by this repulsion of the local symptom compelling the vital force to effect a transference of a worse form of morbid action to other and more important parts, the patient became affected with dangerous ophthalmia, or deafness, or spasms of the stomach, or epileptic convulsions, or attacks of asthma or apoplexy, or mental derangement, etc., in place of the repelled local disease.*
* Natural effects of the repulsion of these local symptoms - effects that are often regarded by the allopathic physician as fresh diseases of quite a different kind.
When the diseased natural force propelled blood into the veins of the rectum or anus (blind hemorrhoids), the minister natura, under the same delusive idea of assisting the vital force in its curative efforts, applied leeches, often in large numbers, in order to give an outlet to the blood there - with but brief, often scarcely noteworthy, relief, but thereby weakening the body and occasioning still greater congestions in those parts, without the slightest diminution of the original disease.
In almost all cases in which the diseased vital force endeavored to subdue the violence of a dangerous internal malady by evacuating blood by means of vomiting, coughing, etc., the old school physician, duce natura, made haste to assist these supposed salutary efforts of nature, and performed a copious venesection, which was invariably productive of injurious consequences and palpable weakening of the body.
In cases of frequently occurring chronic nausea, he produced, with the view of furthering the intentions of nature, copious evacuations of the stomach, by means of powerful emetics - never with a good result, often with bad, not infrequently dangerous and even fatal consequences.
The vital force, in order to relieve the internal malady, sometimes produces indolent enlargements of the external glands, and he thinks to forward the intentions of nature, in his assumed character of her servant, when, by the use of all sorts of heating embrocations and plasters, he causes them to inflame, so that, when the abscess is ripe, he may incise it and let out the bad morbific matter (?). Experience has shown, hundreds of times, that lasting evil almost invariably results from such a plan.
And having often noticed slight amelioration of the severe symptoms of chronic diseases to result from spontaneous night sweats or frequent liquid stools, he imagines himself bound to obey these hints of nature (duce natura), and to promote them, by instituting and maintaining a complete course of sweating treatment or by the employment of so-called gentle laxatives for years, in order to promote and increase these efforts of nature (of the vital force of the unintelligent organism), which he thinks tend to the cure of the whole chronic affection, and thus to free the patient more speedily and certainly from his disease (the matter of his disease?).
But he thereby always produces quite the contrary result: aggravation of the original disease.
In conformity with this preconceived but unfounded idea, the old school physician goes on thus promoting* the efforts of the diseased vital force and increasing those derivations and evacuations in the patient which never lead to the desired end, but are always disastrous, without being aware that all the local affections, evacuations, and seemingly derivative efforts, set up and continued by the unintelligent vital force when left to its own resources, for the relief of the original chronic disease, are actually the disease itself, the phenomena of the whole disease, for the totality of which, properly speaking, the only efficacious remedy, and the one, moreover, that will act in the most direct manner, is a homoeopathic medicine, chosen on account of its similarity of action.
* In direct opposition to this treatment, the old school not infrequently indulged themselves in the very reverse of this: thus when the efforts of the vital force for the relief of the internal disease by evacuations and the production of local symptoms on the exterior of the body became troublesome, they capriciously suppressed them by their repercutients and repellents, they subdued chronic pains, sleeplessness and diarrhoea of long standing by doses of opium pushed to a dangerous extent; vomitings by effervescent saline draughts; foetid perspiration of the feet by cold footbaths and astringent applications; eruptions on the skin by preparations of lead and zinc; they checked uterine haemorrhage by injections of vinegar; colliquative perspiration by alum; nocturnal seminal emissions by the free use of camphor; frequent attacks of flushes of heat in the body and face by nitre vegetable acids and sulphuric acid; bleeding of the nose by plugging the nostrils with dossils of lint soaked in alcohol or astringent fluids; they dried up discharging ulcers on the legs, established by the vital power for the relief of great internal suffering with the oxides of lead and zinc, etc., with what sad results experience has shown in thousands of cases.
With tongue and with pen the old school physician brags that he is a rational practitioner, and that he investigates the cause of the disease so as always to make radical cures; but behold, his treatment is directed, in these cases, against a single symptom only, and always with injurious consequences to his patient.
As everything that crude nature does to relieve itself in diseases, in those of an acute, but especially those of a chronic kind, is extremely imperfect and even actual disease, it may easily be conceived that the promotion by artificial means of this imperfection and disease must do still more harm; at least, it cannot improve the efforts of nature for its own relief, even in acute diseases, because medical art is not in a condition to follow the hidden paths by which the vital force effects its crises, but attempts to produce them from without, by violent means, which are still less beneficial than what the instinctive vital force left to its own resources does, but on the other hand are more perturbing and debilitating. For even the incomplete amelioration resulting from the natural derivations and crises cannot be obtained in a similar manner by allopathy; with all its endeavors it cannot procure anything like even that pitiful relief the vital force left to itself is able to afford.
It has been attempted to produce, by means of scarifying instruments, a bleeding at the nose, in imitation of that sometimes occurring naturally, in order to mitigate, for example, the attacks of a chronic headache. By this means a large quantity of blood could be made to flow from the nostrils and weaken the patient, but the relief afforded was either nil, or much less than the instinctive vital force would procure at another time, when, of its own accord, it would cause but a few drops to flow.
A so-called critical perspiration or diarrhoea, produced by the ever active vital force after a sudden indisposition excited by anger, fright, a sprain or a chill, will be much more successful, at least for the time, in relieving the acute disease, than all the sudorific or purgative drugs in the pharmacopoeia, which only make the patient worse, as daily experience shows.
But the vital force, which of itself can only act according to the physical constitution of our organism, and is not guided by reason, knowledge and reflection, was not given to man to be regarded as the best possible curative agent to restore those lamentable deviations from health to the normal condition, and still less that physicians should slavishly imitate its in perfect morbid efforts (to free itself from disease), and that with operations incontestably more inappropriate and severe than its own, and thereby conveniently spare themselves the expenditure of reasoning, reflection and judgment requisite for the discovery and for the practice of the noblest of human arts - the true healing art - while they allege their bad copy of the spontaneous efforts of doubtful utility made by the crude natural force for its relief, to be the healing art, the rational healing art!
What sensible man would imitate the efforts of the organism for its own preservation? These efforts are in reality the disease itself, and the morbidly affected vital force is the producer of the visible disease! It must, therefore, necessarily follow that all artificial imitation, and likewise the suppression of these efforts, must either increase the disease or render it dangerous by their suppression, and both of these allopathy does; these are its pernicious operations which it alleges to be the healing art, the rational healing art!
No! that exquisite power innate in the human being, designed to direct in the most perfect manner the operations of life while it is in health, equally present in all parts of tile organism, in the fibres of sensibility as well as in those of irritability, the unwearying spring of all the normal natural functions of the body, was not created for the purpose of affording itself aid in diseases, not for the purpose of exercising a healing art worthy of imitation. No! the true healing art is that reflective work, the attribute of the higher powers of human intellect, of unfettered judgment and of reason selecting and determining on principle in order to effect an alteration in the instinctive, irrational and unintelligent, but energetic automatic vital force, when it has been diverted by disease into abnormal action, and by means of a similar affection developed by a homoeopathically chosen remedy, to excite in it a medicinal disease somewhat greater in degree, so that the natural morbid affection can no longer act upon the vital force, which thus, freed from the natural disease, has now only the similar, somewhat stronger, medicinal morbid affection to contend with, against which it now directs its whole energy and which it soon overpowers, whereby the vital force is liberated and enabled to return to the normal standard of health and to its proper function, the maintenance of the life and health of the organism, without having suffered, during this change, any painful or debilitating attacks. Homoeopathy teaches us how to effect this.
Under the methods of treatment of the old school I have just detailed, no small number of patients certainly got rid of their diseases but not of those of a chronic (non-venereal) character; only such as were acute and unattended with danger; and even these they were only freed from by such circuitous and tedious ways, and often so incompletely, that the results of the treatment could never be termed cures effected by a gentle art. Acute diseases of a not very dangerous kind were, by venesections or suppression of one of the chief symptoms through the instrumentality of an enantiopathic palliative remedy (contraria contrariis), kept under, or by means of counter-irritant and derivative (antagonistic and revulsive) remedies, applied to other than the diseased spots, suspended, until the natural time for the duration of the short malady had expired. These methods were, consequently, indirect, and attended with loss of strength and humours, so much so that in patients so treated the greatest and most important measures for the complete removal of the disease and for the restoration of the lost strength and humours remained to be performed by Nature herself - by the life-preserving power which, besides the removal of the natural acute disease, had also to combat the effects of improper treatment, and thus it was able, in cases unattended by danger, gradually to restore the normal relation of the functions by means of its own energy, but often in a tedious, imperfect and manner.
It remains a very doubtful question whether the natural process of recovery in acute diseases is really at all shortened or facilitated by this interference of the old school, as the latter cannot act otherwise than the vital force, namely, indirectly; but its derivative and counterirritant treatment is much more injurious and much more debilitating.
The old school has yet another method of treatment, which is termed the stimulating and strengthening system* (by excitantia, nervina, tonica, confortantia, roborania). It is astonishing how it can boast of this method.
* It is properly speaking, enantiopathic, and I shall again refer to it in the text of the Organon (§ 59).
Has it ever succeeded in removing the physical weakness so often engendered and kept up or increased by a chronic disease with its prescriptions of etheric Rhinewine or fiery Tokay? The strength gradually sank under this treatment, and all the lower, the greater the quantity of wine the patient was persuaded to drink, because the source of weakness, the chronic disease, was not cured by it, because artificial stimulation is followed by relaxation in the reaction of the vital force.
Or did its cinchona bark, or its amara, so misunderstood, so multifarious in their modes of action, and productive of quite different kinds of injury, give strength in these frequently occurring cases? Did not these vegetable substances, said to be tonic and strengthening under all circumstances, as also the preparations of iron, often add to the old disease new sufferings, by virtue of their peculiar pathogenetic effects, without relieving the weakness proceeding from an unknown disease of long standing?
Has any one ever succeeded in diminishing in the very least the duration of the incipient paralysis of an arm or a leg, so often arising from a chronic dyscrasia, by means of the so called unguenta nervina or any other spirituous or balsarnic embrocations, without curing the dyscrasia itself. Or have electric or galvanic shocks ever been attended with any other result in such cases, than a gradually increasing, and finally absolute, paralysis, and extinction of all muscular and nervous irritability in the affected limbs?*
* Those affected with hardness of hearing were relieved by moderate shocks from the voltaic pile of the apothecary of Jever only for a few hours - these moderate shocks soon lost their power. In order to produce the same result he had to make them stronger; until these stronger shocks had no effect; the very strongest would then at first excite the patients' hearing for a short time, but at length left them quite deaf.
Did not the renowned excitantia and aphrodisiaca, ambergris, lacerta scincus, cantharides tincture, truffles, cardamoms, cinnamon and vanilla invariably bring about complete impotence when used for the purpose of restoring the gradually declining sexual power (which always depended on an unobserved chronic miasm)?
How can credit be taken for the production of a stimulation and invigoration of but a few hours' duration, when the result that must follow and which is permanent - according to the laws of all palliative action - is a directly opposite state, the rendering of the disease incurable?
The little good that the excitantia and roborantia did for recovery from acute diseases (treated according to the
old method) was a thousand times outweighed by their ill effects in chronic maladies.
When physicians of the old school do not know what to do in a chronic disease, they treat it blindly with their so-called alterative remedies (alterantia); among which the horrible mercurialia (calomel, corrosive sublimate and mercurial ointment) occupy the foremost place - which they allow to act in such large quantities and for so long a time on the diseased body (in non-venereal diseases!) that at last the health is by their destructive effects completely undermined. They thus certainly produce great alterations, but invariably such as are not beneficial, and they always utterly ruin the health by their improper administration of this excessively injurious metal.
When they prescribe, in large doses, cinchona bark (which, as a homoeopathic febrifuge, is only specific in true marsh ague, accompanied with psora), for all epidemic intermittent fevers, which are often distributed over large tracts of country, the old school practitioners palpably manifest their stupidity, for these diseases assume a different character almost every year and hence demand for their cure, almost always, a different homoeopathic remedy, by means of one or a few very small doses of which they may always be radically cured in a few days. Now, because these epidemic fevers have periodical attacks (typus) and the adherents of the old school see nothing in all intermittent fevers, but their typus [periodicity], and neither know nor care to know any other febrifuge but cinchona, these routine practitioners imagine if they can but suppress the typus of the epidemic intermittent fever with enormous doses of cinchona and its costly alkaloid, quinine (an event which the unintelligent, but, in this instance, more sensible vital force endeavors to prevent often for months), that they have rured this epidemic ague. But the deluded patient, after such a suppression of the periodicity (typus) of his fever, invariably becomes worse than he was during the fever itself; with sallow complexion, dyspnoea, constriction in the hypochondria, disordered bowels, unhealthy appetite, broken sleep, feeble and desponding, often with great swelling of the legs, of the abdomen and even of the face and hands, he creeps out of the hospital, dismissed as cured, and long years of homoeopathic treatment are not infrequently required, merely to rescue from death, let alone to cure and restore to health, such a profoundly injured (cured?), artificially cachectic patient.
The old school is happy when it can convert the dull stupor that occurs in typhus fevers, by means of valerian, which in this case acts antipathically, into a kind of liveliness of a few hours' duration; but as this does not continue, and to force a repetition of the animation ever increasing doses of valerian are requisite, it is not long before the largest doses cease to have the desired effect. But as this palliative is only stimulant in its primary action, in its after effects the vital force is paralysed, and such a patient is certain of a speedy death from this rational treatment of the old school; none can escape. And yet the adherents of this routine art could not perceive that by these proceedings they most certainly killed their patients; they ascribed the death to the malignancy of the disease.
A palliative of a still more horrible character for chronic patients is the digitalis purpurea, with which the old school practitioners imagine they do such excellent service, when by means of it, they compel the quick, irritated pulse in chronic diseases (purely symptomatic!) to become slower. True it is that this dreadful remedy, which is in such cases employed enantiopathically, strikingly diminishes the frequency of the quick, irritated pulse, and greatly reduces the number of the arterial pulsations, for a few hours after the first dose; but the pulse soon becomes more rapid than before. In order again to diminish in some degree its frequency the dose is increased, and it has the effect, but for a still shorter period, until even these and still larger palliative doses cease to reduce the pulse, which at length, in the secondary action of the foxglove which can no longer be restrained, becomes much more rapid than it was before the use of this drug, - it then becomes uncountable; sleep, appetite and strength are lost - death is imminent; not one of the patients so treated escapes alive, unless to be a prey to incurable insanity!*
* And yet Hufeland, the chief of this old school (v. Homoopathie, p. 22), extols with much satisfaction the employment of digitalis in such cases, in these words: None will deny (experience invariably does so!) that too great rapidity of the circulation can be removed (?) by digitalis. Permanently removed? and by a heroic enantiopathic remedy? Poor Hufeland!
Such was the treatment pursued by the allopathist. The patients, therefore, were obliged to yield to the sad necessity, because they could obtain no better aid from other allopathists, who had gained their knowledge from the same deceitful books.
As the fundamental cause of chronic (non-venereal) diseases, together with the remedies for them, remained unknown to these practitioners, who vainly boasted of their causal medication and of their diagnosis being directed to the investigation of the genesis of diseases2*; how could they hope to cure the immense numbers of chronic diseases by their indirect treatments, which were but hurtful imitations of the unintelligent vital force for its own relief, that never were intended to be models for practice?
* Which Hufeland in his pamphlet, Dse Homoopathie, page 20, makes a futile attempt to appropriate for his old pseudo-art. For since, as is well known, previous to the appearance of my book (Chronic Diseases), the 2500-years-old allopathy knew nothing about the source of most chronic diseases (psora), must it not have attributed a false source (genesis) to such maladies?
The presumed character of the affection they regarded as the cause of the disease, and hence they directed their pretended causal treatment against spasm, inflammation (plethora), fever, general and partial debility, mucus, putridity, obstructions, etc., which they thought to remove by means of their antispasmodic, antiphlogistic, tonic, stimulant, antiseptic, dissolvent, resolvent, derivative, evacuant, antagonistic remedies (of which they only possessed a superficial knowledge).
But from such general indications really serviceable medicines could not be discovered, most assuredly not in the materia medica of the old school, which, as I have elsewhere shown, 2* is founded mainly on conjecture and false deductions ab usu in morbis, mixed up with falsehood and fraud.
* See essay in the first volume of the Materia Medica Pura (English edit.), Sources of the Common Materia Medica.
With equal rashness they attacked those still more hypothetical so-called indications - deficiency or excess of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, or hydrogen in the fluids, exaltation or diminution of the irritability, sensibility and reproduction, derangements of the arterial, venous and capillary systems, asthenia, etc., without knowing a single remedy for effecting objects so visionary. All this was pure ostentation. It was a mode of treatment that did no good to the patients.
But all semblance of appropriate treatment of diseases was completely lost by a practice, introduced in the earliest times, and even made into a rule: I mean the mixture in a prescription of various medicinal substances, whose real action was, almost without an exception, unknown, and which, without any one exception, invariably differed so much among each other. One medicine (the sphere of whose medicinal effects was unknown) was placed foremost, as the principal remedy (basis), and was designed to subdue what the physician deemed the chief character of the disease, to this was added some other drug (equally unknown as regards the sphere of; its medicinal action) for the removal of some accessory symptom, or to strengthen the action of the first (adjuvans); and besides these, yet another (likewise unknown as to the sphere of its medicinal powers), a pretended corrective remedy (corrigens); these were all mixed together (boiled, infused) - and along with them, some medicinal syrup, or distilled medicinal water, also with different properties, would be included in the formula, and it was supposed that each of the ingredients of this mixture would perform, in the diseased body, the part allotted to it by the prescriber's imagination, without suffering itself to be disturbed or led astray by the other things mixed up along with it; which, however, could not in reason be expected. One ingredient suspended wholly or partially the action of another, or communicated to it and to the others a mode of action and operation not anticipated nor conjecturable, so that it was impossible the expected effect could be obtained; there frequently occurred a mew morbid derangement, which, from the incomprehensible changes imparted to substances by their admixture, was not and could not have been foreseen, which escaped observation amid the tumultuous symptoms of the disease, and which became permanent from a lengthened employment of the prescription - accordingly an artificial disease was added to and complicated the original disease, causing an aggravation of the latter - or if the prescription were not often repeated, but superseded by one or more new prescriptions, composed of other ingredients, given in rapid succession, then the very least that could happen was a farther depression of the strength, for the substances administered in that way neither had, nor could have had, any direct pathological relation to the original malady, but only attacked, in a useless and injurious manner, parts that were least implicated in the disease.
The mixture of several medicines, even if the effects of each single medicine on the human body were accurately known (- the prescription writer, however, often knows not the thousandth part of their effects -), the association, in one prescription, of several such ingredients, I repeat, many of which are themselves of a very compound nature, and the peculiar action of any one of which is as good as unknown, although in reality it always differs greatly from that of the others, and the administration of this incomprehensible mixture to the patient in large and frequently repeated doses, in order therewith to obtain some purposed, certain, curative effect, is a piece of folly repugnant to every reflecting and unprejudiced person.*
* The absurdity of medicinal mixtures was perceived even by adherents of the old school of medicine, although they still continued to follow this slovenly plan in their own practice, contrary to their convictions. Thus Marcus Herz (in Hufeland's Journal, ii, p. 33) reveals the pricks of his conscience in the following words: "When we wish to remove the inflammatory state, we do not employ either nitre or sal-ammoniac or vegetable acids alone, but we usually mix several, and often but too many, so-called anti-phlogistics together or give them in the same case in close succession. If we have to combat putridity, we are not content to look for the attainment of our object from the administrations of large doses of one of the known antiseptic medicines, such as cinchona bark, mineral acids, arnica, serpentaria, etc., alone; we prefer associating several of them together, and count upon their community of action; or from our uncertainty as to whose action is the most suitable for the case in question, we throw together a number of different substances, and almost leave it to chance to effect the end we have in view, by means of one of them. Thus we seldom excite perspiration, purify the blood (?), overcome obstructions (?), promote expectoration, or even evacuate the primae viae, by a single remedy; our prescriptions for these objects are always composite, almost never simple and pure, consequently neither are our observations in reference to the actions of each individual substance contained in them. To be sure, we learnedly institute certain grades of rank among the remedies in our formulas; on the one to which we particularly commission the action, we confer the title of base (basis), the others we call helpers, supporters (adjuvantia), correctives (corrigenba), etc. But this classihcation is evidently almost entirely arbitrary. The helpers and supporters have just as much part in the whole action as the chief ingredient, although, from want of a standard of measurement, we are unable to determine the degree of their participation in the result. In like manner the influence of the correctives on the powers of the other ingredients cannot be quite indifferent; they must increase or diminish them, or give tbem quite another direction; and hence we must always regard the salutary (?) change which we effect, by means of such a prescription, as the result of all its ingredients collectively, and we can never obtain from its action a pure experience of the individual efficacy of any single ingredient of which it is composed. In fact, our knowledge of what is essential to be known respecting all our remedies, as also respecting the perhaps hundred-fold relationship among each other into which they enter when combined, is far too little to be relied upon to enable us to tell with certainty the degree and extent of the action of a substance, seemingly ever so unimportant, when introduced into the human body in combination with other substances."
The result naturally belies every expectation that had been formed. There certainly ensue changes and results, but none of an appropriate character, none beneficial - all injurious, destructive!
I should like to see any one who would call the purblind inroads of such prescriptions on the diseased human body a cure!
It is only by guiding what still remains of the vital principle in the patient to the proper performance of its, functions, by means of a suitable medicine, that a cure can be expected, but not by enervating the body to death, secundum artem; and yet the old school knows not what else to do with patients suffering from chronic diseases, than to attack the sufferers with drugs that do nothing but torture them, waste their strength and fluids, and shorten their lives! Can it be said to save whilst it destroys? Does it deserve any other name than that of a mischievous [non-healing] art, It acts, lege artis, in the most inappropriate manner, and it does (it would almost seem purposely) that is to say, the very opposite of what it should do. Can it be commended? Can it be any longer tolerated?
In recent times the old school practitioners have quite surpassed themselves in their cruelty towards their sick fellow-creatures, and in the unsuitableness of their operations, as every unprejudiced observer must admit, and as even physicians of their own school have been forced, by the pricks of their conscience (like Kruger Hansen), to confess before the world.
It was high time for the wise and benevolent Creator and Preserver of mankind to put a stop to these abominations, to command a cessation of these tortures, and to reveal a healing art the very opposite of all this, which should not waste the vital juices and powers by emetics, perennial scourings out of the bowels, warm baths, diaphoretics or salivation; nor shed the life's blood, nor torment and weaken with painful appliances; nor, in place of curing patients, suffering from diseases, render them incurable by the addition of new chronic medicinal maladies by means of the prolonged use of wrong, powerful medicines of unknown properties; nor yoke the horse behind the cart, by giving strong palliatives, according to the old favorite axiom, contraria contrariis curentur; nor, in short, in place of lending the patient aid, to guide him in the way to death, as is done by the merciless routine practitioner, - but which, on the contrary, should spare the patient's strength as much as possible, and should, rapidly and mildly, effect an unalloyed and permanent cure, and restore to health by means of smallest doses of few simple medicines carefully selected according to their proved effects, by the only therapeutic law conformable to nature: similia similibus curentur. It was high time that he should permit the discovery of homoeopathy.
By observation, reflection and experience, I discovered that, contrary to the old allopathic method, the true, the proper, the best mode of treatment is contained in the maxim: To cure mildly, rapidly, certainly, and permanently, choose, in every case of disease, a medicine which can itself produce an affection similar to that sought to be cured!
Hitherto no one has ever taught this homoeopathic mode of cure, no one has carried it out in practice. But if the truth is only to be found in this method, as I can prove it to be, we might expect that, even though it remained unperceived for thousands of years, distinct traces of it would yet be discovered in every age.*
* For truth is co-eternal with the all-wise, benevolent Deity. It may long escape the observation of man, until the time foreordained by Providence arrives, when its rays shall irresistibly break through the clouds of prejudice and usher in the dawn of a day which shall shine with a bright and inextinguishable light for the weal of the human race.
And such is the fact. In all ages, the patients who have been really, rapidly, permanently and obviously cured by medicines, and who did not merely recover by some fortuitous circumstance, or by the acute disease having run its allotted course, or by the powers of the system having, in the course of time, gradually attained the preponderance, under allopathic and antagonistic treatment - for being cured in a direct manner differs vastly from recovering in an indirect manner - such patients have been cured solely (although without the knowledge of the physician) by means of a (homoeopathic) medicine which possessed the power of producing a similar morbid state.
Even in real cures by means of mixtures of medicines - which were excessively rare - it will be found that the remedy whose action predominated was always of a homoeopathic character.
But this is observed much more strikingly in cases where physicians sometimes effected a rapid cure with one simple medicinal substance, contrary to the usual custom, that admitted of none but mixtures of medicines in the form of a prescription. There we see, to our astonishment, that this always occurred by means of a medicine that is itself capable of producing an affection similar to the case of disease, although the physicians themselves knew not what they were doing, and acted in forgetfulness of the contrary doctrines of their own school. They prescribed a medicine the very reverse of that which they should have employed according to the traditional therapeutics, and it was only in consequence of so doing that the patients were rapidly cured.
If we deduct the cases in which the specific remedy for a disease of never varying character has been made known to physicians of the ordinary school (not by their own investigation, but) by the empirical practice of the common people, wherewith they are enabled to effect a direct cure, as for instance, of the venereal chancrous disease with mercury; of the morbid state resulting from contusions with arnica; of marsh ague with cinchona bark; of recent cases of itch with flowers of sulphur, etc. - if we deduct these, we find, that without almost any exception, all the other treatment of the old school physician, in chronic diseases, consists in debilitating, teasing and tormenting the already afflicted patient, to the aggravation of his disease and to his destruction, with a great display of dignified gravity on the part of the doctor and at a ruinous expense to the patient.
Blind experience sometimes led them to a homoeopathic mode of treatment,* and yet they did not perceive the law of nature in obedience to which cures so effected did and must ensue.
* Thus they imagined they could drive out through the skin the sudatory matter which they believed to stagnate there after a chill, if they gave the patient to drink, during the cold stage of the catarrhal fever, an infusion of elder flowers, which is capable of removing such a fever and curing the patient by its peculiar similarity of action (homoeopathically), and this it does most promptly and effectually, without causing perspiration, if but a small quantity of this infusion, and nothing else, be taken. To hard, acute swellings, in which the excessive violence of the inflammation prevents their suppuration and causes intolerable pains, they apply very warm poultices, frequently renewed, and behold! the inflammation and the pains diminish rapidly, while the abscess is rapidly formed, as is known by the yellowish shining elevation and the perceptible softening. In this case they imagine that the hardness has been softened by the moisture of the poultice, whereas it is chiefly by the greater heat of the poultices that the excess of inflammation has been homoeopathically subdued, and the rapid suppuration been enabled to take place. - Why do they employ with benefit in many ophthalmiae St. Yve's salve, the chief ingredient of which is red oxide of mercury, which can produce inflammation of the eyes, if anything can? Is it hard to see that they here act homoeopathically? - Or why should a little parsley juice produce such evident relief in those cases (by no means rare), where there are anxious, often ineffectual, efforts to urinate in little children, and in ordinary gonorrhoea, which is well known by the very painful, frequent and almost ineffectual attempts to make water, if the fresh juice of this plant had not the power of causing, in healthy persons, a painful, almost fruitless, urging to urinate, consequently cures homoeopathically? With the pimpernal root, which causes great secretion of mucus in the bronchia and fauces, they successfully combatted the so-called mucous angina - and quelled some kinds of metrorrhagia with the leaves of savine, which can itself cause metrorrhagia, without perceiving the homoeopathic curative law. In cases of constipation from incarcerated hernia and in ileus many medical men found the constipating opium, in small doses, to be the most excellent and certain remedy, without having the most distant idea of the homoeopathic therapeutic law exemplified in this case. They cured non-venereal ulcers of the fauces with small doses of mercury, which is homoeopathic to such states - stopped some diarrhoeas with small doses of the purgative rhubarb - cured hydrophobia with belladonna, that causes a similar affection, and removed, as if by magic, the dangerous comatose state in acute fevers with a small dose of the heating, stupefying opium; and yet they abuse homoeopathy, and persecute it with a fury that can only arise from the stings of an evil conscience in a heart incapable of improvement.
Hence it is highly important, for the weal of mankind, to ascertain what really took place in these extremely rare but singularly salutary treatments. The answer we obtain to this question is of the utmost significance.
They were never performed in any other manner than by means of medicines of homoeopathic power, that is to say, capable of producing a disease similar to the morbid state sought to be cured; the cures were effected rapidly and permanently by medicines, the medical prescribers of which made use of them as it were by accident, and even in opposition to the doctrines of all previous systems and therapeutics (often without rightly knowing what they were doing and why they did it), and thus, against their will, they practically confirmed the necessity of the only therapeutic law consonant to nature, that of homoeopathy - a therapeutic law, which, despite the many facts and innumerable hints that pointed to it, no physicians of past epochs have exerted themselves to discover, blinded as they all have been by medical prejudices.
For even the domestic practice of the non-medical classes of the community endowed with sound observant faculties has many times proved this mode of treatment to be the surest, the most radical and the least fallacious in practice.
In recent cases of frost-bitten limbs frozen sour crout is applied or frictions of snow are used.*
* It is on such examples of domestic practice that Mr. M. Lux founds his so-called mode of cure by identicals and idem, which he calls Isopathy, which some eccentric-minded persons have already adopted as the non plus ultra of a therapeutic method, without knowing how they could carry it out.
But if we examine these instances attentively we find that they do not bear out these views.
The purely physical powers differ in the nature of their action on the living organism from those of a dynamic medicinal kind.
Heat or cold of the air that surrounds us, or of the water, or of our food and drink, occasion (as heat and cold) of themselves no absolute injury to a healthy body; heat and cold are in their alternations essential to the maintenance of healthy life, consequently they are not of themselves medicine. Heat and cold, therefore, act as curative agents in affections of the body, not by virtue of their essential nature (not, therefore, as cold and heat per se, not as things hurtful in themselves, as are the drugs, rhubarb, china, etc., even in the smallest doses), but only by virtue of their greater or smaller quantity, that is, according to their degrees of temperature, just as (to take an example from purely physical powers) a great weight of lead will bruise my hand painfully, not by virtue of its essential nature as lead, for a thin plate of lead would not bruise me, but in consequence of its quantity and massive weight.
If, then, cold or heat be serviceable in bodily ailments like frost-bites or burns, they are so solely on account of their degree of temperature, just as they only inflict injury on the healthy body by their extreme degrees of temperature.
Thus we find in these examples of successful domestic practice, that it is not the prolonged application of the degree of cold in which the limb was frozen that restores it isopathically (it would thereby be rendered quite lifeless and dead), but a degree as cold that only approximates to that (homoeopathy), and which gradually rises to a comfortable temperature, as frozen sour crout laid upon the frost-bitten hand in the temperature of the room soon melts, gradually growing warmer from 32° or 33° (Fahr.) to the temperature of the room, supposing that to be only 55°, and thus the limb is recovered by physical homoeopathy. In like manner, a hand scalded with boiling water would not be cured isopathically by the application of boiling water, but only by a somewhat lower temperature, as, for example, by holding it in a vessel containing a fluid heated to 160°, which becomes every minute less hot, and finally descends to the temperature of the room, whereupon the scalded part is restored by homoeopathy. Water in the act of freezing cannot draw out the frost isopathically from potatoes and apples, but this is effected by water only near the freezing-point.
So, to give another example from physical action, the injury resulting from a blow on the forehead with a hard substance (a painful lump) is soon diminished in pain and swelling by pressing on the spot for a considerable time with the ball of the thumb strongly at first, and then gradually less forcibly, homoeopathically but not by an equally hard blow with an equally hard body, which would increase the evil isopathically.
The examples of cures by isopathy given in the book alluded to - muscular contractions in human beings and spinal paralysis in a dog, which had been caused by a chill, being rapidly cured by cold bathing - these events are falsely explained by isopathy. What are called sufferings from a chill are only nominally connected with cold, and often arise, in the bodies of those predisposed to them even from a draught of wind which was not at all cold. Moreover, the manifold effects of a cold bath on the living organism, in health and in disease, cannot be reduced to such a simple formula as to warrant the construction of a system of such pretentions! That serpents' bites, as is there stated, are most certainly cured by portions of the serpents, must remain a mere fable of a former age, until such an improbable assertion is authenticated by indubitable observations and experience, which it certainly never will be. That, in fine, the saliva of a mad dog given to a patient laboring under hydrophobia (in Russia), is said to have cured him that is said would not seduce any conscientious physician to imitate such a hazardous experiment, or to construct a so-called isopathic system, so dangerous and so highly improbable in its extended application, as has been done (not by the modest author of the pamphlet entitled The Isopathy of Contagions Leipzic. Kollmann, but) by its eccentric supporters, especially Dr. Gross (v. Alg. hom. Ztg, ii, p. 72), who vaunts this isopathy (aequalia aequalibus) as the only proper therapeutic rule, and sees nothing in the similia similibus but an indifferent substitute for it; ungratefully enough, as he is entirely indebted to the similia similibus for all his fame and fortune.
The experienced cook holds his hand, which he has scalded, at a certain distance from the fire, and does not heed the increase of pain that takes place at first, as he knows from experience that he can thereby in a very short time, often in a few minutes, convert the burnt part into healthy painless skin.*
* So also Fernelius (Therap., lib. vi, cap. 20) considers that the best remedy for a burnt part is to bring it near the fire, whereby the pain is removed. John Hunter (On the Blood, Inflammation, etc., p. 218) mentions the great injury that results from treating burns with cold water, and gives a decided preference to approaching them to the fire, guided in this not by the traditional medical doctrines which (contraria contrariis) prescribe cooling things for inflammation, but by experience, which teaches that the application of a similar heat (similia similibus) is the most salutary.
Other intelligent non-medical persons, as, for example, the manufacturers of lackered ware, apply to a part scalded with the hot varnish a substance that causes a similar burning sensation, such as strong heated spirits of wine,* or oil of turpentine, and by that means cure themselves in the course of a few hours, whereas cooling salves, as they are well aware, would not effect a cure in as many months, and cold water** would but make matters worse.
* Sydenham (Opera, p. 271 [edit. Syd. Soc., p. 601]) says the spirits of wine, repeatedly applied, is preferable to all other remedies in burns. Benjamin Bell, too (System of Surgery, 3rd edit., 1789), acknowledges that experience shows that homoeopathic remedies only are efficacious. He says: One of the best applications to every burn of this kind is strong brandy or any other ardent spirit; it seems to induce a momentary additional pain (see below, § 157), but this soon subsides, and is succeeded by an agreeable soothing sensation. It proves most effectual when the parts can be kept immersed in it; but where this cannot be done, they should be kept constantly moist with pieces of old linen soaked in spirits. To this I may add that warm, and indeed, very warm, alcohol is much more rapidly and much more certainly efficacious, for it is much more homoeopathic than when not heated. And all experience confirms this in a most astonishing manner.
Edward Kentish, having to treat the workers in coal pits, who were so often dreadfully burnt by the explosion of fire-damp, applied heated oil of turpentine or alcohol, as the best remedy in the most extensive and severest burns (Second Essay on Burns; London, 1798). No treatment can be more homoeopathic than this nor is any more efficacious.
The estimable and experienced Heister (Institut. Chirurg., Tom. i, p. 33) confirms this from his own observation and extols the application of turpentine oil, of alcohol and of very hot poultices for this end, as hot as ever they can be borne.
But the amazing superiority of the application to burns of these remedies, which possess the power of exciting burning sensation and heat (and are consequently homoeopathic), over palliative refrigerant remedies, is most incontestably shown by pure experimentation, in which the two opposite methods of treatment are employed for the sake of comparison, in burns of equal intensity in the same body.
Thus Benjamin Bell (in Kuhn's Phys. Med. Journ., Leipzic 1801, Jun., p. 428), in the case of a lady who had scalded both arms, caused one to be covered with oil of turpentine, and made her plunge the other into cold water. In half an hour the first arm was well, but the other continued to be painful for six hours longer; when it was withdrawn one instant from the water she experienced much greater pain in it, and it required a much longer time than the first for its cure.
John Anderson (Rentish, op. cit., p. 43) treated in a similar manner a lady who had scalded herself with boiling grease. The face which was very red and scalded and excessively painful was a few minutes after the accident, covered with oil of turpentine her arms she had, of her own accord, plunged into cold water, with which she desired to treat it for some hours. In the course of seven hours her face looked much better, and the pain was relieved. She had frequently renewed the cold water for the arm, but whenever she withdrew it she complained of much pain, and, in truth, the inflammation in it had increased. The following morning I found that she had had during the night great pain in the arm; the inflammation had extended above the elbow; several large blisters had risen, and thick eschars had formed on the arm and hand; a warm poultice was then applied. The face was completely free from pain, but emollient applications had to be used for the arm for a fortnight longer, before it was cured.
Who can fail to perceive in this instance the ininite superiority of the (homoeopathic) treatment by means of remedies of similar action, over the wretched treatment by opposites (contraria contrariis) of the antiquated ordinary school of medicine!
** John Hunter (loc. cit.) is not singular in asserting the great injury done by treating burns with cold water. W. Fabricius of Hilden, also (De Combustionibus libellus, Basil, 1607, cap. 5, p. II), alleges that cold applications in burns are highly injurious and productive of the most serious consequences; inflammation, suppuration and sometimes mortification are caused by them.
The old experienced reaper, although he may not be in the habit of drinking brandy, will not touch cold water (contraria contrariis) when he has worked himself into a violent feverish state in the heat of the sun - he knows the danger of such a proceeding - but he takes a small quantity of a heating liquor, a mouthful of brandy; experience, the teacher of truth, has convinced him of the great superiority and efficacy of this homoeopathic procedure, whereby his heat and fatigue are speedily removed.*
* Zimmerman (Ueber die Erfahrung, ii, p. 318) informs us that the inhabitants of hot countries act in the same manner, with the best results, and that, after being very much heated, they swallow a small quantity of some spirituous liquor.
There have occasionally been physicians who vaguely surmised that medicines cure analogous morbid states by the power they possess of producing analogous morbid symptoms.*
* I do not bring forward the following passages from authors who had a presentiment of homoeopath, as proofs in support of this doctrine, which is firmly established by its own intrinsic merits, but in order to avoid the imputation of having suppressed these foreshadowings with the view of claiming for myself the priority of the idea.
Thus the author of the book: - - - - -, * which is among the writings attributed to Hippocrates, has the following remarkable words: - - - - .
* Basil. Froben., 1538, p. 72.
Later physicians have also felt and expressed the truth of the homoeopathic method of cure. Thus, for instance, Boulduc* perceived that the purgative property of rhubarb was the cause of its power to allay diarrhoea.
* Mémoire de l'Académie Royale, 1710.
Detharding* guessed that the infusion of senna leaves relieved colic in adults by virtue of its analogous action in causing colic in healthy persons.
* Eph. Nat. Cur., cent. x, obs. 76.
Bertholon* confesses that in diseases electricity diminishes and removes pain very similar to that which itself produces.
* Medicin. Electrisitat., ii, pp. I5 and 282.
Thoury* testifies that positive electricity possesses the power of quickening the pulse, but when that is already morbidly accelerated it diminishes its frequency.
* Mémoire lu à l'Académie de Caen.
Von Stoerk* makes the following suggestion: If stramonium disorders the mind and produces mania in healthy persons, ought we not to try if in cases of insanity it cannot restore reason by producing a revolution in the ideas?
* libell. de Stram., p. 8.
But a Danish army physician, of the name of Stahl,* has expressed his conviction on this point in the most unequivocal terms. The rule generally acted on in medicine, says he, to treat by means of oppositely acting remedies (contraria contrariis), is quite false and the reverse of what ought to be; I am, on the contrary, convinced that diseases will yield to, and be cured by, remedies that produce a similar affection (similia similibus), - burns by exposure to the fire, frost-bitten limbs by the application of snow and the coldest water, inflammation and bruises by distilled spirits; and in like manner I have treated a tendency to acidity of the stomach by a very small dose of sulphuric acid with the most successful result, in cases where a number of absorbent remedies had been fruitlessly employed.
* In Jo. Hammelii, Commentatio de Arthritide tam tartarea, quam scorbutica, seu podagra et scorbuto, Budingae, 1738, viii, pp. 40 42.
How near was the great truth sometimes of being apprehended! But it was dismissed with a mere passing thought, and thus the indispensable change of the antiquated medical treatment of disease, of the improper therapeutic system hitherto in vogue, into a real, true, and certain healing art, remained to be accomplished in our own times.

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Organon of Medicine - Dr.Samuel Hahnemann. A wonderful medical guidelines for All.  Empty Re: Organon of Medicine - Dr.Samuel Hahnemann. A wonderful medical guidelines for All.

Post  sv-b Fri Nov 26, 2010 12:15 pm

§ 1
The physician's high and only mission is to restore the sick to health, to cure, as it is termed. 1
1 His mission is not, however, to construct so-called systems, by interweaving empty speculations and hypotheses concerning the internal essential nature of the vital processes and the mode in which diseases originate in the interior of the organism, (whereon so many physicians have hitherto ambitiously wasted their talents and their time); nor is it to attempt to give countless explanations regarding the phenomena in diseases and their proximate cause (which must ever remain concealed), wrapped in unintelligible words and an inflated abstract mode of expression, which should sound very learned in order to astonish the ignorant - whilst sick humanity sighs in vain for aid. Of such learned reveries (to which the name of theoretic medicine is given, and for which special professorships are instituted) we have had quite enough, and it is now high time that all who call themselves physicians should at length cease to deceive suffering mankind with mere talk, and begin now, instead, for once to act, that is, really to help and to cure.
§ 2
The highest ideal of cure is rapid, gentle and permanent restoration of the health, or removal and annihilation of the disease in its whole extent, in the shortest, most reliable, and most harmless way, on easily comprehensible principles.
§ 3
If the physician clearly perceives what is to be cured in diseases, that is to say, in every individual case of disease (knowledge of disease, indication), if he clearly perceives what is curative in medicines, that is to say, in each individual medicine (knowledge of medical powers), and if he knows how to adapt, according to clearly defined principles, what is curative in medicines to what he has discovered to be undoubtedly morbid in the patient, so that the recovery must ensue - to adapt it, as well in respect to the suitability of the medicine most appropriate according to its mode of action to the case before him (choice of the remedy, the medicine indicated), as also in respect to the exact mode of preparation and quantity of it required (proper dose), and the proper period for repeating the dose; - if, finally, he knows the obstacles to recovery in each case and is aware how to remove them, so that the restoration may be permanent, then he understands how to treat judiciously and rationally, and he is a true practitioner of the healing art .
§ 4.

He is likewise a preserver of health if he knows the things that derange health and cause disease, and how to
remove them from persons in health.


§ 5
Useful to the physician in assisting him to cure are the particulars of the most probable exciting cause of the
acute disease, (…….) In these investigations, the ascertainable physical constitution of the patient (especially
when the disease is chronic), his moral and intellectual character, his occupation, mode of living and habits, his
social and domestic relations, his age, sexual function, etc., are to be taken into consideration.
An interesting and very modern insight.


§ 6
The unprejudiced observer (……..) takes note of nothing in every individual disease, except the changes in the
health of the body and of the mind (……) which can be perceived externally by means of the senses; that is to
say, he notices only the deviations from the former healthy state of the now diseased individual, which are felt
by the patient himself, remarked by those around him and observed by the physician. All these perceptible
signs represent the disease in its whole extent, that is, together they form the true and only conceivable portrait
of the disease.1
Basically saying that good observation techniques are essential. But also claiming that all there is
to look for is external.
1 I know not, therefore, how it was possible for physicians at the sick-bed to allow themselves to suppose that,
without most carefully attending to the symptoms and being guided by them in the treatment, they ought to
seek and could discover, only in the hidden and unknown interior, what there was to be cured in the disease,
(…….)
So, here his dogma shines through. He thinks it futile to search for causes other than in the Vital
Force. Here, of course, modern science must disagree.
Is not, then, that which is cognizable by the senses in diseases through the phenomena it displays, the disease
itself in the eyes of the physician, since he never can see the spiritual being that produces the disease, the vital
force? nor is it necessary that he should see it, but only that he should ascertain its morbid actions, in order
that he may thereby be enabled to cure the disease. What else will the old school search for in the hidden interior
of the organism, as a prima causa morbi, whilst they reject as an object of cure and contemptuously despise
the sensible and manifest representation of the disease, the symptoms, that so plainly address themselves
to us? (……..)
Elaborating on the conviction that no “hidden causes” can exist, and that searching for them is a
waste of time. In his era, micro-organisms were known, but their connection to disease was only
just being guessed at yet, still from a modern point of view, it is a little strange to see this absolute
conviction that a whole area of research is totally irrelevant.


§ 7
(…….)
1 It is not necessary to say that every intelligent physician would first remove this where it exists; the indisposition
thereupon generally ceases spontaneously. He will remove from the room strong-smelling flowers, which
have a tendency to cause syncope and hysterical sufferings; extract from the cornea the foreign body that excites
inflammation of the eye; loosen the over-tight bandage on a wounded limb that threatens to cause mortification,
and apply a more suitable one; lay bare and put ligature on the wounded artery that produces fainting;
endeavor to promote the expulsion by vomiting of belladonna berries etc., that may have been swallowed; extract
foreign substances that may have got into the orifices of the body (the nose, gullet, ears, urethra, rectum,
vagina); crush the vesical calculus; open the imperforate anus of the newborn infant, etc.
A few good, if elementary, points on good clinical practice. Rather outdated now, of course. How he
proposes to crush bladder stones with the means at his disposal without hurting the patient is unexplained.
2 In all times, the old school physicians, not knowing how else to give relief, have sought to combat and if possible
to suppress by medicines, here and there, a single symptom from among a number in diseases - a onesided
procedure, which, under the name of symptomatic treatment, has justly excited universal contempt, because
by it, not only was nothing gained, but much harm was inflicted. A single one of the symptoms present is
no more the disease itself than a foot is the man himself. (…….)
Interesting, because Homeopathy is also a symptom-treating regimen, although of a different
character.
§ 8
It is not conceivable, not can it be proved by any experience in the world, that, after removal of all the symptoms
of the disease and of the entire collection of the perceptible phenomena, there should or could remain
anything else besides health, or that the morbid alteration in the interior could remain uneradicated.1
Since Hahnemann is convinced that symptoms are the only manifestation of disease, the basic failure
of palliative treatments to cure should have made him think a bit.
1 When a patient has been cured of his disease by a true physician, in such a manner that no trace of the disease,
no morbid symptom, remains, and all the signs of health have permanently returned, how can anyone,
without offering an insult to common sense, affirm in such an individual the whole bodily disease still remains
interior?
We now know of several diseases that can be completely dormant and symptom-free for years, yet
still exist and break out later.
And yet the chief of the old school, Hufeland, asserts this in the following words: "homeopathy can remove
symptoms, but the disease remains." (………).
Hahnemann repeatedly attacks contemporary main-stream practitioners, and not without cause; at
the time he wrote the Organon, the general medicine, while slowly moving in a scientific direction,
was mainly snake-oil. Of course, this fact does nothing to vindicate his own methods.
§ 9
In the healthy condition of man, the spiritual vital force (autocracy), the dynamis that animates the material
body (organism), rules with unbounded sway, and retains all the parts of the organism in admirable, harmonious,
vital operation, as regards both sensations and functions, so that our indwelling, reason-gifted mind can
freely employ this living, healthy instrument for the higher purpose of our existence.
§ 10
The material organism, without the vital force, is capable of no sensation, no function, no self-preservation 1, it
derives all sensation and performs all the functions of life solely by means of the immaterial being (the vital
principle) which animates the material organism in health and in disease.
1 It is dead, and only subject to the power of the external physical world; it decays, and is again resolved into
its chemical constituents.
§ 11
When a person falls ill, it is only this spiritual, self acting (automatic) vital force, everywhere present in his organism,
that is primarily deranged by the dynamic 1 influence upon it of a morbific agent inimical to life; it is
only the vital force, deranged to such an abnormal state, that can furnish the organism with its disagreeable
sensations, and incline it to the irregular processes which we call disease; for, as a power invisible in itself, and
only cognizable by its effects on the organism, its morbid derangement only makes itself known by the manifestation
of disease in the sensations and functions of those parts of the organism exposed to the senses of the
observer and physician, that is, by morbid symptoms, and in no other way can it make itself known. 2
1 Materia peccans!
So, in §9 through 11, we get one of the very basic doctrines of Homeopathy: The Vital Force (VF)
controls everything and disease is only disturbances in the VF.
What is dynamic influence, - dynamic power? Our earth, by virtue of a hidden invisible energy, carries the
moon around her in twenty-eight days and several hours, and the moon alternately, in definite fixed hours (deducting
certain differences which occur with the full and new moon) raises our northern seas to flood tide and
again correspondingly lowers them to ebb. Apparently this takes place not through material agencies, not
through mechanical contrivances, as are used for products of human labor; and so we see numerous other
events about us as results of the action of one substance on another substance without being able to recognize
a sensible connection between cause and effect. (……..).
OK, here H gets out in the deep. He calls upon gravity as another example of a non-physical power
(he ought to say force). He should have known better, since Newton had laid out the Law of Gravity
a century earlier. We have here our first indication that H might not have been quite the objective
scientist that his present-day adherents want us to believe.
For instance, the dynamic effect of the sick-making influences upon healthy man, as well as the dynamic energy
of the medicines upon the principle of life in the restoration of health is nothing else than infection and so
not in any way material, not in any way mechanical. Just as the energy of a magnet attracting a piece of iron or
steel is not material, not mechanical. One sees that the piece of iron is attracted by one pole of the magnet, but
how it is done is not seen. This invisible energy of the magnet does not require mechanical (material) auxiliary
means, hook or lever, to attract the iron. The magnet draws to itself and this acts upon the piece of iron or
upon a steel needle by means of a purely immaterial invisible, conceptual, inherent energy, that is, dynamically,
and communicates to the steel needle the magnetic energy equally invisibly (dynamically). The steel needle
becomes itself magnetic, even at a distance when the magnet does not touch it, and magnetises other steel
needles with the same magnetic property (dynamically) with which it had been endowered previously by the
magnetic rod, just as a child with small-pox or measles communicates to a near, untouched healthy child in an
invisible manner (dynamically) the small-pox or measles, that is, infects it at a distance without anything material
from the infective child going or capable of going to the one to be infected. A purely specific conceptual influence
communicated to the near child small-pox or measles in the same way as the magnet communicated to
the near needle the magnetic property.
A similar venture into magnetics. He compares this with contagious diseases. Now, of course, we
know better. We could expect him, as a scientist, to understand the difference between a force and
an energy, however.
In a similar way, the effect of medicines upon living man is to be judged. (……). The medicinal property of those
material substances which we call medicines proper, relates only to their energy to call out alterations in the
well-being of animal life. Only upon this conceptual principle of life, depends their medicinal health-altering,
conceptual (dynamic) influence. Just as the nearness of a magnetic pole can communicate only magnetic energy
to the steel (namely, by a kind of infection) but cannot communicate other properties (…….). And thus
every special medicinal substance alters through a kind of infection, that well-being of man in a peculiar manner
exclusively its own and not in a manner peculiar to another medicine, as certainly as the nearness of the
child ill with small-pox will communicate to a healthy child only small-pox and not measles. These medicines act
upon our well-being wholly without communication of material parts of the medicinal substances, thus dynamically,
as if through infection. Far more healing energy is expressed in a case in point by the smallest dose of the
best dynamized medicines, in which there can be, according to calculation, only so little of material substance
that its minuteness cannot be thought and conceived by the best arithmetical mind, than by large doses of the
same medicine in substance. That smallest dose can therefore contain almost entirely only the pure, freelydeveloped,
conceptual medicinal energy, and bring about only dynamically such great effects as can never be
reached by the crude medicinal substances itself taken in large doses.
It is not in the corporal atoms of these highly dynamized medicines, nor their physical or mathematical surfaces
(with which the higher energies of the dynamized medicines are being interpreted but vainly as still sufficiently
material) that the medicinal energy is found. More likely, there lies invisible in the moistened globule or in its
solution, an unveiled, liberated, specific, medicinal force contained in the medicinal substance which acts dynamically
by contact with the living animal fibre upon the whole organism (without communicating to it anything
material however highly attenuated) and acts more strongly the more free and more immaterial the energy
has become through the dynamization.
(……..)
In this part, Hahnemann explains his thesis based on his pretext about gravity and magnetism, a
pretext we know is false. His observations that a contagious disease jumps from patient to patient,
still being the same disease is, of course, well explained in modern medicine. He also, without any
obvious logic base, claims that the more thinned but “dynamized” the medicine, the more effect.
This claim he then uses as an argument for his Vital Force thesis, thus presenting a circular argument.
It also deals with one of the enigmas of homeopathy; the notion of dynamized or potentialized
medicines. Without any explanation, Hahnemann claims that there exists some “conceptual
medical energy”. The discussion of this is still raging to this day.
§ 12 h
(……..).
1 How the vital force causes the organism to display morbid phenomena, that is, how it produces disease, it
would be of no practical utility to the physician to know, and will forever remain concealed from him; only what
it is necessary for him to know of the disease and what is fully sufficient for enabling him to cure it, has the
Lord of life revealed to his senses.
Again discouraging any research into the inner workings of the body.
§ 13
Therefore disease (that does not come within the province of manual surgery) considered, as it is by the allopathists,
as a thing separate from the living whole, from the organism and its animating vital force, and hidden
in the interior, be it ever so subtle a character, is an absurdity, that could only be imagined by minds of a materialistic
stamp, and has for thousands of years given to the prevailing system of medicine all those pernicious
impulses that have made it a truly mischievous [non-healing] art.
Finally going straight out and denouncing the notion that disease can be caused by any cause not
part of the body. In this short paragraph, he even calls such a notion mischievous. Obviously, later
research proved him dead wrong.
§ 14
There is, in the interior of man, nothing morbid that is curable and no invisible morbid alteration that is curable
which does not make itself known to the accurately observing physicians by means of morbid signs and symptoms
- an arrangement in perfect conformity with the infinite goodness of the all-wise Preserver of human life.
Again an incorrect assumption. Dormant infections exist.
§ 15
The affection of the morbidly deranged, spirit-like dynamis (vital force) that animates our body in the invisible
interior, and the totality of the outwardly cognizable symptoms produced by it in the organism and representing
the existing malady, constitute a whole; they are one and the same. The organism is indeed the material instrument
of the life, but it is not conceivable without the animation imparted to it by the instinctively perceiving
and regulating dynamis, just as the vital force is not conceivable without the organism, consequently the two
together constitute a unity, although in thought our mind separates this unity into two distinct conceptions for
the sake of easy comprehension.
§ 16
Our vital force, as a spirit-like dynamis, cannot be attacked and affected by injurious influences on the healthy
organism caused by the external inimical forces that disturb the harmonious play of life, otherwise than in a
spirit-like (dynamic) way, and in like manner, all such morbid derangements (diseases) cannot be removed
from it by the physician in any other way than by the spirit-like (dynamic1, virtual) alterative powers of the
serviceable medicines acting upon our spirit-like vital force, which perceives them through the medium of the
sentient faculty of the nerves everywhere present in the organism, so that it is only by their dynamic action on
the vital force that remedies are able to re-establish and do actually re-establish health and vital harmony, after
the changes in the health of the patient cognizable by our senses (the totality of the symptoms) have revealed
the disease to the carefully observing and investigating physician as fully as was requisite in order to
enable him to cure it.
1 Most severe disease may be produced by sufficient disturbance of the vital force through the imagination and
also cured by the same means.
Elaborating on the doctrine. At the end an interesting insight on psychosomatic disease. It is interesting
that Hahnemann should have this insight and yet fail to realize how profoundly it might influence
his own investigations and observations.
§ 17
(…….)
1 A warning dream, a superstitious fancy, or a solemn prediction that death would occur at a certain day or at a
certain hour, has not unfrequently produced all the signs of commencing and increasing disease, of approaching
death and death itself at the hour announced, which could not happen without the simultaneous production of
the inward change (corresponding to the state observed internally); and hence in such cases all the morbid
signs indicative of approaching death have frequently been dissipated by an identical cause, by some cunning
deception or persuasion to a belief in the contrary, and health suddenly restored, which could not have happened
without the removal, by means of this mortal remedy, of the internal and external morbid change that
threatened death.
Again he recognizes the immense power of self-suggestion. How can it be that he does not draw
the obvious conclusion that self-testing and –reporting is rendered totally unreliable by the very
same thing?
2 It is only thus that God the preserver of mankind, could reveal His wisdom and goodness in reference to the
cure of the disease to which man is liable here below, by showing to the physician what he had to remove in
disease in order to annihilate them and thus re-establish health. (……)
Calling on the inscrutable ways of God. Well, this IS the early 19th century.
§ 18
From this indubitable truth, that besides the totality of the symptoms with consideration of the accompanying
modalities (§ 5) nothing can by any means be discovered in disease wherewith they could express their need of
aid, it follows undeniably that the sum of all the symptoms and conditions in each individual case of disease
must be the sole indication, the sole guide to direct us in the choice of a remedy.
As we have seen, his conclusions are very far from meriting the label “indubitable truth”. In fact,
given our modern knowledge, they are at this point completely unfounded. Even given only the
knowledge of his own time, they build on dubious evidence.
§ 19
Now, as diseases are nothing more than alterations in the state of health of the healthy individual which express
themselves by morbid signs, and the cure is also only possible by a change to the healthy condition of the
state of health of the diseased individual, it is very evident that medicines could never cure disease if they did
not possess the power of altering man’s state of health which depends on sensations and functions; indeed,
that their curative power must be owing solely to this power they possess of altering man’s state of health.
Restating the basic doctrine, and concluding that a useful medicine must address the symptoms.
The conclusion is logical on the premises he uses, however, findings of modern science show that
those premises are false.
§ 20
This spirit-like power to alter man’s state of health (and hence to cure diseases) which lies hidden in the inner
nature of medicines can in itself never be discovered by us by a mere effort of reason; it is only by experience
of the phenomena it displays when acting on the state of health of man that we can become clearly cognizant
of it.
Again this “don’t ask questions”. But we shall, nevertheless, do just that (and, fortunately, other
researchers in the field also neglected to heed this advice).
The following part is crucial, as it is here Hahnemann develops the chain of reasoning that leads to
his doctrine of Homeopathy. Unfortunately, the text is somewhat difficult to penetrate, but we shall
try:
§ 21
Now, as it is undeniable that the curative principle in medicines is not in itself perceptible, and as in pure experiments
with medicines conducted by the most accurate observers, nothing can be observed that can constitute
them medicines or remedies except that power of causing distinct alterations in the state of health of the
human body, and particularly in that of the healthy individual, and of exciting in him various definite morbid
symptoms;
Again, the claim that medicines work by some unknowable principle. Hahnemann’s first premise is
that no effect of medicines are knowable except such symptoms as it may cause in the person who
receives them, again indirectly dismissing the idea of targeting causes:
so it follows that when medicines act as remedies, they can only bring their curative property into play by
means of this their power of altering man’s state of health by the production of peculiar symptoms; and that,
therefore, we have only to rely on the morbid phenomena which the medicines produce in the healthy body as
the sole possible revelation of their in-dwelling curative power, in order to learn what disease-producing power,
and at the same time what disease-curing power, each individual medicine possesses.
He then infers that the only effect a medicine can have on disease is interaction between symptoms
caused by the medicine and symptoms caused by the disease. This follows from the earlier
made premise that the sole presentation of a disease was through its observable symptoms:
But as nothing is to be observed in diseases that must be removed in order to change them into health besides
the totality of their signs and symptoms, and likewise medicines can show nothing curative besides their tendency
to produce morbid symptoms in healthy persons and to remove them in diseased persons; it follows, on
the one hand, that medicines only become remedies and capable of annihilating disease, because the medicinal
substance, by exciting certain effects and symptoms, that is to say, by producing a certain artificial morbid
state, removes and abrogates the symptoms already present, to wit, the natural morbid state we wish to cure.
The logic consequence of the premises presented is that symptom profile of the medication must in
some way exactly fit the symptom profile of the disease:
On the other hand, it follows that, for the totality of the symptoms of the disease to be cured, a medicine must
be sought which (according as experience shall prove whether the morbid symptoms are most readily, certainly,
and permanently removed and changed into health by similar or opposite medicinal symptoms1) have
the greatest tendency to produce similar or opposite symptoms.
He now discusses that such matching can be either similar or opposite. Later he will explain why he
believes the right choice is similar.
1 The other possible mode of employing medicines for diseases besides these two is the allopathic method, in
which medicines are given, whose symptoms have no direct pathological relation to the morbid state, neither
similar nor opposite, but quite heterogeneous to the symptoms of the disease. This procedure plays, as I have
shown elsewhere, an irresponsible murderous game with the life of the patient by means of dangerous, violent
medicines, whose action is unknown and which are chosen on mere conjectures and given in large and frequent
doses. Again, by means of painful operations, intended to lead the disease to other regions and taking the
strength and vital juices of the patient, through evacuations above and below, sweat or salivation, but especially
through squandering the irreplaceable blood, as is done by the reigning routine practice, used blindly and
relentlessly, usually with the pretext that the physician should imitate and further the sick nature in its efforts
to help itself, without considering how irrational it is, to imitate and further these very imperfect, mostly inappropriate
efforts of the instinctive unintelligent vital energy which is implanted in our organism, so long as it is
healthy to carry on life in harmonious development, but not to heal itself in disease. For, were it possessed of
such a model ability, it would never have allowed the organism to get sick. When made ill by noxious agents,
our life principle cannot do anything else than express its depression caused by disturbance of the regularity of
its life, by symptoms, by means of which the intelligent physician is ask for aid. If this is not given, it strives to
save by increasing the ailment, especially through violent evacuations, no matter what this entails, often with
the largest sacrifices or destruction of life itself.
But first he ventures into another denouncing of allopathic medicine, which, when judged by symptoms,
produces various symptoms that are basically unconnected to those of the disease:
For the purpose of cure, the morbidly depressed vital energy possesses so little ability worthy of imitation since
all changes and symptoms produced by it in the organism are the disease itself. What intelligent physician
would want to imitate it with the intention to heal if he did not thereby sacrifice his patient?
In §23 comes the next conclusion; based on the poor results of contemporary medicine, Hahnemann
concludes that medicine with opposite symptoms will not cure:
§ 23
All pure experience, however, and all accurate research convince us that persistent symptoms of disease are far
from being removed and annihilated by opposite symptoms of medicines (as in the antipathic, enantiopathic or
palliative method), that, on the contrary, after transient, apparent alleviation, they break forth again, only with
increased intensity, and become manifestly aggravated (see § 58 - 62 and 69).
Thus, believing he has eliminated all else, Hahnemann concludes that the truth lies in Homeopathic
regiments; the symptoms generated by the medicine must match the ones of the disease:
§ 24
There remains, therefore, no other mode of employing medicines in diseases that promises to be of service
besides the homoeopathic, by means of which we seek, for the totality of the symptoms of the case of disease,
a medicine which among all medicines (whose pathogenetic effects are known from having been tested in
healthy individuals) has the power and the tendency to produce an artificial morbid state most similar to that of
the case of disease in question.
If we examine this conclusion, we see how it is flawed:
Premise 1: There are no external causes to diseases, and internal causes are only in malfunction of
the Vital Force.
Premise 2: The only effect a medicine can have is in the symptoms it causes.
Premise 3: Based on experience, medicine that causes unrelated symptoms and opposite symptoms
do not work.
Conclusion: Homeopathic medicine is the thing that works.
Hahnemann may have had other reasons to come his conclusions, but the above is, in essence, the
arguments he has so far presented in the Organon of Medicine. Premises 1 and 2 have been shown
to be wrong by later research. Premise 3 basically holds true to this day: We do not design or
judge drugs based on their symptoms.
However, even given all three premises, the conclusion does not follow. There is no proof of the
homeopathic principle in the premises. The valid conclusion would be:
Valid conclusion: Medicines based on their ability to cause symptoms may not work at all.
-And this is the conclusion reached by modern medicine and backed by research evidence.
§ 25
Now, however, in all careful trials, pure experience,1 the sole and infallible oracle of the healing art, teaches us
that actually that medicine which, in its action on the healthy human body, has demonstrated its power of producing
the greatest number of symptoms similar to those observable in the case of disease under treatment,
does also, in doses of suitable potency and attenuation, rapidly, radically and permanently remove the totality
of the symptoms of this morbid state, that is to say (§ 6 - 16), the whole disease present, and change it into
health; and that all medicines cure, without exception, those diseases whose symptoms most nearly resemble
their own, and leave none of them uncured.
So having now explained his principle, Hahnemann goes on to claim that it is backed by practical
experience. He does not, at this point, offer any evidence, just that bold sweeping statement, even
to the extent that it ALWAYS works. Not even after thorough testing would a modern scientist dare
to make such a claim.
1 I do not mean that sort of experience of which the ordinary practitioners of the old school boast, after they
have for years worked away with a lot of complex prescriptions on a number of diseases which they never carefully
investigate, but which, faithful to their school, they consider as already described in works of systematic
pathology, and dreamed that they could detect in them some imaginary morbific matter, or ascribe to them
some other hypothetical internal abnormality. (……)
Note 1 to §25 would just be another jab at the competition, except that this is the start of a series
of disclaimers where Hahnemann slowly, but steadily veils his argumentation in special cases, distancing
himself from anything that might constitute comparative evaluation. This stance still very
wide-spread among present-day homeopaths and sometimes makes serious discussions difficult.

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Organon of Medicine - Dr.Samuel Hahnemann. A wonderful medical guidelines for All.  Empty Re: Organon of Medicine - Dr.Samuel Hahnemann. A wonderful medical guidelines for All.

Post  sv-b Fri Nov 26, 2010 12:18 pm

§ 26
This depends on the following homoeopathic law of nature which was sometimes, indeed, vaguely surmised but
not hitherto fully recognized, and to which is due every real cure that has ever taken place:
A weaker dynamic affection is permanently extinguished in the living organism by a stronger one, if the latter
(whilst differing in kind) is very similar to the former in its manifestations.1
At last, here comes the holy grail of Homeopathy! How Hahnemann has developed this thesis is
unclear; his practical examples are not convincing, but the message is clear: Hahnemann believes
that a strong symptom will not only suppress, but permanently remove a weaker, similar symptom.
1 Thus are cured both physical affections and moral maladies. How is it that in the early dawn the brilliant
Jupiter vanishes from the gaze of the beholder? By a stronger very similar power acting on his optic nerve, the
brightness of approaching day! - In situations replete with foetid odors, wherewith is it usual to soothe effectually
the offended olfactory nerves? With snuff, that affects the sense of smell in a similar but stronger manner!
No music, no sugared cake, which act on the nerves of other senses, can cure this olfactory disgust. How
does the soldier cunningly stifle the piteous cries of him who runs the gauntlet from the ears of the compassionate
bystanders? By the shrill notes of the fife commingled with the roll of the noisy drum! And the distant
roar of the enemy’s cannon that inspires his army with fear? By the loud boom of the big drum! For neither the
one nor the other would the distribution of a brilliant piece of uniform nor a reprimand to the regiment suffice.
In like manner, mourning and sorrow will be effaced from the mind by the account of another and still greater
cause for sorrow happening to another, even though it be a mere fiction. The injurious consequences of too
great joy will be removed by drinking coffee, which produces an excessive joyous state of mind. Nations like
the Germans, who have for centuries been gradually sinking deeper and deeper in soulless apathy and degrading
serfdom, must first be trodden still deeper in the dust by the Western Conqueror, until their situation became
intolerable; their mean opinion of themselves was thereby over-strained and removed; they again became
alive to their dignity as men, and then, for the first time, they raised their heads as Germans.
Interestingly, several of his rather poetic analogies are not similars, and none of them show an example
where the suppression is more than temporary. Still not clear how he gets the idea that similar
but stronger can cure.
§ 27
The curative power of medicines, therefore, depends on their symptoms, similar to the disease but superior to
it in strength (§ 12 - 26), so that each individual case of disease is most surely, radically, rapidly and permanently
annihilated and removed only by a medicine capable of producing (in the human system) in the most
similar and complete manner the totality of its symptoms, which at the same time are stronger than the disease.
Restating his central thesis, but no further evidence.
§ 28
As this natural law of cure manifests itself in every pure experiment and every true observation in the world,
the fact is consequently established; it matters little what may be scientific explanation of how it takes place;
and I do not attach much importance to the attempts made to explain it. But the following view seems to commend
itself as the most probable one, as it is founded on premises derived from experience.
Hahnemann claims the idea is based on experimental evidence, with a very interesting provision: ”
every pure experiment and every true observation in the world” – Thus, it follows that he might reject any
result that does not support his theory as not being pure or true, and this is exactly what we see
some present-day homeopaths do: Whenever a negative test result is pointed out, the thing tested
was not TRUE homeopathy. Some even go as far as claiming that the fact that is submitted to tests
in itself invalidates it as true homeopathy, thus presenting an impenetrable circular argument
against testing.
§ 29
As every disease (……) consists only in a special, morbid, dynamic alteration of our vital energy (of the principle
of life) manifested in sensation and motion, so in every homoeopathic cure this principle of life dynamically altered
by natural disease is seized through the administration of medicinal potency selected exactly according to
symptom-similarity by a somewhat stronger, similar artificial disease-manifestation. By this the feeling of the
natural (weaker) dynamic disease-manifestation ceases and disappears. This disease-manifestation no longer
exists for the principle of life which is now occupied and governed merely by the stronger, artificial diseasemanifestation.
This artificial disease-manifestation has soon spent its force and leaves the patient free from
disease, cured. The dynamis, thus freed, can now continue to carry life on in health. This most highly probable
process rests upon the following propositions.
Hahnemann explains how his theory works, based on the same earlier premise. Basically you might
express his reasoning this way: Since diseases do not have causes, adding a cause and then removing
it (by the medicine effects wearing off) takes the disease away. Not only is the premise
flawed, since we now know that diseases in fact do have causes, but the logic is also weak: Why
exactly is it that the original problem should not resurface, once the medicine wears off? It’s like
saying that if your balance is impaired, just take half a dozen stiff drinks; when you sober up, your
balance will be fine. Or, if you have spent too much money, spend some more, and the problem
will go away.
§ 30 Sixth Edition
The human body appears to admit of being much more powerfully affected in its health by medicines (partly
because we have the regulation of the dose in our own power) than by natural morbid stimuli - for natural diseases
are cured and overcome by suitable medicines.1
This is pure speculation. Hahnemann has chosen to believe that this effect exists and is now speculating
on how it could function.
(…….) The cures of diseases of many years’ duration (§ 46), by the occurrence of smallpox and measles (both
of which run a course of only a few weeks), are processes of a similar character.
Hahnemann here and later points out some examples of one disease suppressing another. Whether
his examples are based on fact or not, it is entirely thinkable that this effect may exist for some
diseases. If the body’s way of dealing with one disease is effective against the other, this may happen.
§ 31
The inimical forces, partly psychical, partly physical, to which our terrestrial existence is exposed, which are
termed morbific noxious agents, do not possess the power of morbidly deranging the health of man unconditionally1;
but we are made ill by them only when our organism is sufficiently disposed and susceptible to attack
of the morbific cause that may be present, and to be altered in its health, deranged and made to undergo abnormal
sensations and functions - hence they do not produce disease in every one nor at all times.
(……)
Here, Hahnemann tries to use the fact that diseases do not always hit us even after exposure to an
assumed cause as evidence of the Vital Force theory. We know a better explanation now: Exposure
to adverse environment like cold only results in disease if infectious agents are present, and exposure
to infectious agents only result in disease if the immune system cannot deal with them.
§ 32
But it is quite otherwise with the artificial morbific agents which we term medicines. Every real medicine,
namely, acts at all times, under all circumstances, on every living human being, and produces in him its peculiar
symptoms (distinctly perceptible, if the dose be large enough), so that evidently every living human organism
is liable to be affected, and, as it were, inoculated with the medicinal disease at all times, and absolutely
(unconditionally), which, as before said, is by no means the case with the natural diseases.
A correct observation; a certain chemical substance (no reason to restrict the statement to medicines)
will cause a certain effect, regardless of the status of the immune system. The statement of
“under all circumstances, on every living human being” is a bit too sweeping; some people react in different
ways to some substances, and actually, Hahnemann is going to amend this statement later.
§ 33
In accordance with this fact, it is undeniably shown by all experience1 that the living organism is much more
disposed and has a greater liability to be acted on, and to have its health deranged by medicinal powers, than
by morbific noxious agents and infectious miasms, or, in order words, that the morbific noxious agents possess
a power of morbidly deranging man’s health that is subordinate and conditional, often very conditional; whilst
medicinal agents have an absolute unconditional power, greatly superior to the former.
This conclusion, however, is false: The reason we react more consistently to chemical substances
than to disease agents is that the way they affect us is different. But remember: Hahnemann does
not recognize causes.
1 A striking fact in corroboration of this is, that whilst previously to the year 1801, when the smooth scarlatina
of Sydenham still occasionally prevailed epidemically among children, it attacked without exception all children
who had escaped it in a former epidemic; in a similar epidemic which I witnessed in Konigslutter, on the contrary,
all the children who took in time a very small dose of belladonna remained unaffected by this highly infectious
infantile disease. If medicines can protect from a disease that is raging around, they must possess a
vastly superior power of affecting our vital force.
One of the relatively few references to real life experience. Seemingly he has not actually witnessed
the Sydenham epidemics (Hahnemann lived in Germany), so he relies on second-hand information
here. The claim that ALL not affected in the first epidemic were in the second looks a bit
too absolute, however, the general tendency of one epidemic to give immunity against the next is
well-known and easily explained by knowledge of micro-organisms and immune effects.
Afterwards, Hahnemann relates a personal experience. This could hardly be termed an experiment,
though. What he claims is that a dash of belladonna kept a number of children free of disease.
Even if entirely correct, it does not prove a causal connection, as there might have been other reasons.
Also, there is the small clause “who took in time”, so he might simply be rejecting the cases
that don’t fit his theory. The weird thing about this example is that he is indirectly recognizing the
infectious agent as a cause; otherwise the example is obviously moot, but this runs contrary to his
basic doctrine!
§ 34
The greater strength of the artificial diseases producible by medicines is, however, not the sole cause of their
power to cure natural disease. In order that they may effect a cure, it is before all things requisite that they
should be capable of producing in the human body an artificial disease as similar as possible to the disease to
be cured, which, with somewhat increased power, transforms to a very similar morbid state the instinctive life
principle, which in itself is incapable of any reflection or act of memory. It not only obscures, but extinguishes
and thereby annihilates the derangement caused by the natural disease. This is so true, that no previously existing
disease can be cured, even by Nature herself, by the accession of a new dissimilar disease, be it ever so
strong, and just as little can it be cured by medical treatment with drugs which are incapable of producing a
similar morbid condition in the healthy body.
Stressing further that for one disease to replace another, it must be similar and concluding that
this is evidence that medicines must also be similar (=homeopathic). This claim is unbased; none
of Hahnemann’s own earlier examples fulfill the criteria. In my opinion, this shows that he starts
with the conclusion, then tries to construct evidence for it. Also, he is later going to claim that
symptoms can be removed piecemeal, by a sequence of medicines, each addressing part of the
symptom profile.
§ 35
In order to illustrate this, we shall consider in three different cases, as well what happens in nature when two
dissimilar natural diseases meet to in one person, as also the result of the ordinary medical treatment of diseases
with unsuitable allopathic drugs, which are incapable of producing an artificial morbid condition similar to
the disease to be cured, whereby it will appear that even Nature herself is unable to remove a dissimilar disease
already present by one that is unhomoeopathic, even though it be stronger, and just as little is the unhomoeopathic
employment of even the strongest medicines ever capable of curing any disease whatsoever.
Hahnemann claims that he will now present evidence for the claim from §34 and earlier.
§ 36
I. If the two dissimilar diseases meeting together in the human being be of equal strength, or still more if the
older one be the stronger, the new disease will be repelled by the old one from the body and not allowed to
affect it. A patient suffering from a severe chronic disease will not be infected by a moderate autumnal dysentery
or other epidemic disease. The plague of the Levant, according to Larry,1 does not break out where scurvy
is prevalent, and persons suffering from eczema are not infected by it. Rachitis, Jenner alleges, prevents vaccination
from taking effect. Those suffering from pulmonary consumption are not liable to be attacked by epidemic
fevers of a not very violent character, according to Von Hildenbrand.
1 "Memoires et Observations," in the Description de l’ Egpte, tom. i.
Strangely, this first example instead seems to CONTRADICT his claim of the need for similarity, or
else his definition for “similarity” is much different from the current one (we would hardly consider
“plague of the levant” similar to the deficiency syndrome rachitis). Anyhow, he is relating secondhand
information, including some from one Jenner, who works with vaccination. So, the claim from
Jenner that some disease prevents vaccination from working is somehow to be taken as evidence,
although this, by common logic, seems to contradict Hahnemann’s basic theory about disease: If
disease is a malfunction of the Vital Force, how can you inoculate against it? Modern understanding
of diseases explains this much better.
Finally, whether the related cases are true or not, it is not really evidence for Hahnemann’s theories
that some diseases may prevent others, since this can be explained in terms of immunity reactions
as well.
§ 37
So, also under ordinary medical treatment, an old chronic disease remains uncured and unaltered if it is treated
according to the common allopathic method, that is to say, with medicines that are incapable of producing in
healthy individuals a state of health similar to the disease, even though the treatment should last for years and
is not of too violent character.1 This is daily witnessed in practice, it is therefore unnecessary to give any illustrative
examples.
1 But if treated with violent allopathic remedies, other diseases will be formed in its place which are more difficult
and dangerous to life.
Based on the shaky and anecdotical evidence from §36- 37, Hahnemann offers yet another denouncing
of allopathic practice. It is pertinent to rest a little on this because this denouncing is
used by some present-day homeopaths to denounce modern medicine, claiming it to be allopathic.
In the strict definition of the word, this may be true, but not in practice, since the goal of modern
medicine is not to induce symptoms at all, but to target disease causes. Like in vaccination, the
efficiency of which Hahnemann somehow acknowledges.
§ 38
Or the new dissimilar disease is the stronger. In this case the disease under which the patient originally labored,
being the weaker, will be kept back and suspended by the accession of the stronger one, until the latter
shall have run its course or been cured, and then the old one reappears uncured. Two children affected with a
kind of epilepsy remained free from epileptic attacks after infection with ringworm (tinea) but as soon as the
eruption on the head was gone the epilepsy returned just as before, as Tulpius1 observed. The itch, as Schopf 2
saw, disappeared on the occurrence of the scurvy, but after the cure of the latter it again broke out. So, also
the pulmonary phthisis remained stationary when the patient was attacked by a violent typhus, but went on
again after the latter had run its course.3 If mania occur in a consumptive patient, the phthisis with all its
symptoms is removed by the former; but if that go off, the phthisis returns immediately and proves fatal.4
When measles and smallpox are prevalent at the same time, and both attack the same child, the measles that
had already broken out is generally checked by the smallpox that came somewhat later; nor does the measles
resume its course until after the cure of the smallpox; but it not infrequently happens that the inoculated
smallpox is suspended for four days by the supervention of the measles, as observed by Manget,5 after the
desquamation of which the smallpox completes its course. Even when the inoculation of the smallpox had taken
effect for six days, and the measles then broke out, the inflammation of the inoculation remained stationary
and the smallpox did not ensue until the measles had completed its regular course of seven days.6 In an epidemic
of measles, that disease attacked many individuals on the fourth or fifth day after the inoculation of
smallpox and prevented the development of the smallpox until it had completed its own course, whereupon the
smallpox appeared and proceeded regularly to its termination.7 The true, smooth, erysipelatous-looking scarlatina
of Sydenham, with sore throat, was checked on the fourth day by the eruption of cow-pox, which ran its
regular course, and not till it was ended did the scarlatina again establish itself; but on another occasion, as
both diseases seem to be of equal strength, the cow-pox was suspended on the eighth day by the supervention
of the true, smooth scarlatina of Sydenham,8 and the red areola of the former disappeared until the scarlatina
was gone, wherein the cow-pox immediately resumed its course, and went on its regular termination.9 The
measles suspended the cow-pox; on the eighth day, when the cow-pox had nearly attained its climax, the measles
broke out; the cow-pox now remained stationary, and did not resume and complete its course until the
desquamation of the measles, had taken place, so that on the sixteenth day it presented the appearance it otherwise
would have shown on the tenth day, as Kortum10 observed.
Even after the measles had broken out the cow-pox inoculation took effect, but did not run its course until
these measles had disappeared, as Kortum likewise witnessed.11
I myself saw the mumps (angina parotidea) immediately disappear when the cow-pox inoculation had taken
effect and had nearly attained its height; it was not until the complete termination of the cow-pox and the disappearance
of its red areola that this febrile tumefaction of the parotid and submaxillary glands, that is caused
by a peculiar miasm, reappeared and ran its regular course of seven days.
And thus it is with all dissimilar disease; the stronger suspends the weaker (when they do not complicate one
another, which is seldom the case with acute disease), but they never cure one another.
1 Obs., lib. I, obs. 8.
2 In Hufeland’s Journal, xv, 2.
3 Chevalier, in Hufeland’s Neuesten Annalen der franzosichen Heikunde, ii, p.192.
4 Mania phthisi superveniens eam cum omnibus suis phaenomenis auffert, verum mox redit phthisis et occidit,
abeunte mania. Reil Memorab., fasc. iii, v, p.171.
5 In the Edinb. Med. Comment., pt. i, 1.
6 John Hunter, On the Veneral Disease, p.5.
7 Rainey, in the Edinb. Med. Comment., iii, p.480.
8 Very accurately described by Withering and Plenciz, but differing greatly from the purpura (or Roodvonk),
which is often erroneously denominated scarlet fever. It is only of late year that the two, which were originally
very different diseases, have come to resemble each other in their symptoms.
9 Jenner, in Medicinische Annalen, August, 1800, p.747.
10 In Hufeland’s Journal der praktischen Arzneikunde, xx, 3, p.50.
11 Loc. cit.
A number of case stories, again mostly second-hand, as evidenced by the reference list. One problem
with these stories is, of course, that there is absolutely no way to verify or even substantiate
the diagnoses. Likewise, the claim that one disease receded is basically unverifiable; it could be a
case of shifted attention focus, re-infection, or a true suppression. Hahnemann’s conclusion, while
shakily founded, is that dissimilar diseases will suppress each other, but cannot cure each other.
Obviously, even if this was true, it would not be evidence that similar diseases could cure.
§ 39
Now the adherents of the ordinary school of medicine saw all this for so many centuries; they saw that Nature
herself cannot cure any disease by the accession of another, be it ever so strong, if the new disease be dissimilar
to that already present in the body. What shall we think of them, that they nevertheless went on treating
chronic disease with allopathic remedies, namely, with medicines and prescriptions capable of producing God
knows what morbid state - almost invariably, however, one dissimilar to the disease to be cured? (…….)
Another long attack on allopathic practice. What Hahnemann really is saying is that others did not
follow his theories and he chastises them for this. This is a demonstration of the totally different
paradigms of homeopathy and mainstream medicine. As viewed from either side, the other simply
does not make sense.
§ 40
(…….) yet there have also been severe epidemics of this kind, where, in rare cases, two dissimilar acute diseases
occurred simultaneously in one and the same body, and for a short time combined, as it were, with each
other. (……)
Zencker6 saw cow-pox run its regular course along with measles and along with purpura.
The cow-pox went on its course undisturbed during a mercurial treatment for syphilis, as Jenner saw.
(……..)
In this paragraph, Hahnemann does acknowledge that two or more diseases can coexist, although
he still claims it to be a rare occurrence. Nevertheless, even a rare occurrence undermines his basic
theory. In modern medicine, we recognize that several simultaneous diseases occur frequently,
but we must bear in mind that our principle for distinguishing between different diseases is fundamentally
different from Hahnemann’s. He defines a disease by its symptoms, we by its cause, thus
what Hahnemann sees as a sequence A, B, A (where A is one set of symptoms and B is another)
could very well be exactly the same as that which we would see as a, a+b, a (where a is one
causal agent and b is another).
§ 41
Much more frequent than the natural diseases associating with and complicating one another in the
same body are the morbid complication resulting from the art of the ordinary practitioner, which
the inappropriate medical treatment (the allopathic method) (……) which then, when not quite incurable,
can only be transformed into health with the greatest difficulty.
Again, attack on allopathic practice. Actually, at Hahnemann’s time, much of general medical practice
was indeed deplorable, but we see this attitude remaining among certain homeopathic practitioners
even today. The last sentences, especially, have severe consequences, because it induces
some homeopaths to discourage patients from using modern medicines on the grounds that this is
believed to make diseases unreachable for homeopathic treatment. Since homeopathic treatment
has not been shown to have any real effect, patient’s health and even lives might be threatened by
this attitude. Fortunately, many modern homeopathic practitioners have left this position.
1 For mercury, besides the morbid symptoms which by virtue of similarity can cure the venereal disease
homoeopathically, has among its effects many others unlike those of syphilis, for instance, swelling and ulceration
of bones, which, if it be employed in large doses, causes new maladies and commit great ravages in the
body, especially when complicated with psora, as is so frequently the case.
Hahnemann observes, correctly, that the mercury treatment earlier used for some diseases, especially
syphilis, has severe side effects.
§ 42
Nature herself permits, as has been stated, in some cases, the simultaneous occurrence of two (indeed, of
three) natural disease in one and the same body. This complication, however, it must be remarked, happens
only in the case of two dissimilar disease, which according to the eternal laws of nature do not remove, do not
annihilate and cannot cure one another, but, as it seems, both (or all three) remain, as it were, separate in the
organism, and each takes possession of the parts and systems peculiarly appropriate to it, which, on account of
the want of resemblance of these maladies to each other, can very well happen without disparagement to the
unity of life.
Notable in §42 is another call to “eternal laws of nature”, a hyperbole that appears throughout the
Organon.
§ 43
Totally different, however, is the result when two similar disease meet together in the organism, that is to say,
when to the disease already present a stronger similar one is added. In such cases we see how a cure can be
effected by the operations of nature, and we get a lesson as to how man ought to cure.
§ 44
Two similar diseases can neither (as is asserted of dissimilar disease in I) repel one another, nor (as has been
shown of dissimilar disease in II) suspend on another, so that the old one shall return after the new one has
run its course; and just as little can two similar diseases (as has been demonstrated in III respecting dissimilar
affections) exist beside each other in the same organism, or together form a double complex disease.
No! Two diseases, differing, it is true, in kind 1 but very similar in their phenomena and effects and in the sufferings
and symptoms they severally produce, invariably annihilate one another whenever they meet together
in the organism; the stronger disease namely, annihilates the weaker, and that for this simple reason, because
the stronger morbific power when it invades the system, by reason of its similarity of action involves precisely
the same part of the organism that were previously affected by the weaker morbid irritation, which, consequently,
can no longer act on these parts, but is extinguished 2, or (in other words), the new similar but
stronger morbific potency controls the feelings of the patient and hence the life principle on account of its peculiarity,
can no longer feel the weaker similar which becomes extinguished - exists no longer - for it was never
anything material, but a dynamic - spirit-like - (conceptual) affection. The life principle henceforth is affected
only and this but temporarily by the new, similar but stronger morbific potency.
Since Hahnemann has specifically stated in § 6 that a disease is characterized only by the symptoms
it produces, it is difficult to understand how he can now talk about diseases that differ in kind
but produce similar symptoms. According to his own definition of a disease, he should regard them
as the same disease, albeit maybe of varying severity. How he proposes to distinguish between
diseases with similar symptoms while at he same time rejecting the notion of causative agents is
unclear, and indeed, since he did not believe in searching for internal causes, we may assume that
many of his observations are indeed cases of the same disease in varying severity. Which would of
course explain why he observes one disease annihilate the other.
(……)
2 Just as the image of a lamp’s flame is rapidly overpowered and effaced from our retina by the stronger sunbeam
impinging on the eye.
Another little symbolism which actually contradicts his point, since the lamp is still burning, which
we might ascertain by touching it, even if we cannot see its light for the glare of sunlight.
§ 46
(…….)
Smallpox coming on after vaccination, as well on account of its greater strength as its great similarity, at once
removes entirely the cow-pox homoeopathically, and does not permit it to come to maturity; but, on the other
hand, the cow-pox when near maturity does, on account of its great similarity, homoeopathically diminish very
much the supervening smallpox and make it much milder 8, as Muhry 9 and many others testify.
The inoculated cow-pox, whose lymph, besides the protective matter, contains the contagion of a general cutaneous
eruption of another nature, consisting of usually small, dry (rarely large, pustular) pimples, resting on a
small red areola, frequently conjoined with round red cutaneous spots and often accompanied by the most violent
itching, which rash appears in not a few children several days before, more frequently, however, after the
red areola of the cow-pock, and goes off in a few days, leaving behind small, red, hard spots on the skin; - the
inoculated cow-pox, I say, after it has taken, cures perfectly and permanently, in a homoeopathic manner, by
the similarity of this accessory miasm, analogous cutaneous eruptions of children, often of very long standing
and of a very troublesome character, as a number of observers assert.10
After a number of examples, all second-hand, Hahnemann here mentions smallpox and cowpox,
how they influence each other and how the relatively benign cowpox can be used to inoculate
against the more dangerous smallpox. While this was one of the first massive clues that medical
researchers had to the functioning of the immune system, Hahnemann tries to claim it as evidence
for the homeopathic principle. This is a bit weird, since without acknowledging the concept of
cause, in this case microbial infection, it does not seem to make sense at all. Another example of
Hahnemann interpreting observations to fit his theory.
(……..)
8 A new footnote is added here in the Sixth Edition, as follows:
This seems to be the reason for this beneficial remarkable fact namely that since the general distribution of
Janner’s Cow-pox vaccination, human small-pox never again appeared as epidemically or virulently as 40-45
years before when one city visited lost at least one-half and often three-quarters of its children by death of this
miserable pestilence.
(…….)
In this very interesting, short note, Hahnemann recognizes the great success of vaccination against
smallpox. This fact is worth of notice, especially as I have seen present-day homeopaths rejecting
even this vaccination as being useless allopathy.
§ 47
Nothing could teach the physician in a plainer and more convincing manner than the above what kind of artificial
morbific agent (medicine) he ought to choose in order to cure in a sure, rapid and permanent manner, conformably
with the process that takes place in nature.
§ 48
Neither in the course of nature, as we see from all the above examples, nor by the physician’s art, can an existing
affection or malady in any one instance be removed by a dissimilar morbific agent, be it ever so strong, but
solely by one that is similar in symptoms and is somewhat stronger, according to eternal, irrevocable laws of
nature, which have not hitherto been recognized.
Yet another reiteration of the doctrine, yet another attack on allopathy based on the assumption
that the purpose of allopathy is to cure by inducing symptoms.
§ 49
We should have been able to meet with many more real, natural homoeopathic cures of this kind if, on the one
hand, the attention of observers had been more directed to them, and, on the other hand, if nature had not
been so deficient in helpful homoeopathic diseases.
§ 50
Mighty Nature herself has, as we see, at her command, as instruments for effecting homoeopathic cures, little
besides the miasmatic diseases of constant character, (the itch) measles and smallpox1, morbific agents
which2, as remedies, are either more dangerous to life and more to be dreaded than the disease they are to
cure, they themselves require curing, in order to be eradicated in their turn (…….) And yet, as is seen, we can
point to some striking homoeopathic cures effected by this lucky concurrence, all so many incontrovertible
proofs of the great, the sole therapeutic law of nature that obtains in them: Cure by symptom similarity!
1 And the exanthematous contagious principle present in the cow-pox lymph.
2 Namely, small-pox and measles.
Elaborating on the claim that some diseases giving immunity against others, like the smallpox/
cowpox) example, is evidence for the homeopathic principle, and at the same time sensibly
pointing out the dangers and problems inherent in giving patient a disease in order to cure another.

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Organon of Medicine - Dr.Samuel Hahnemann. A wonderful medical guidelines for All.  Empty Re: Organon of Medicine - Dr.Samuel Hahnemann. A wonderful medical guidelines for All.

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§ 101
It may easily happen that in the first case of an epidemic disease that presents itself to the physician’s notice
he does not at once obtain a knowledge of its complete picture, as it is only by a close observation of several
cases of every such collective disease that he can become conversant with the totality of its signs and symptoms.
The carefully observing physician can, however, from the examination of even the first and second patients,
often arrive so nearly at a knowledge of the true state as to have in his mind a characteristic portrait of
it, and even to succeed in finding a suitable, homoeopathically adapted remedy for it.
§ 102
In the course of writing down the symptoms of several cases of this kind the sketch of the disease picture becomes
ever more and more complete, not more spun out and verbose, but more significant (more characteristic),
and including more of the peculiarities of this collective disease; on the one hand, the general symptoms
(e.g., loss of appetite, sleeplessness, etc.) become precisely defined as to their peculiarities; and on the other,
the more marked and special symptoms which are peculiar to but few diseases and of rarer occurrence, at least
in the same combination, become prominent and constitute what is characteristic of this malady.1 All those
affected with the disease prevailing at a given time have certainly contracted it from one and the same source
and hence are suffering from the same disease; but the whole extent of such an epidemic disease and the totality
of its symptoms (the knowledge whereof, which is essential for enabling us to choose the most suitable
homoeopathic remedy for this array of symptoms, is obtained by a complete survey of the morbid picture) cannot
be learned from one single patient, but is only to be perfectly deduced (abstracted) and ascertained from
the sufferings of several patients of different constitutions.
1 The physician who has already, in the first cases, been able to choose a remedy approximating to the
homoeopathic specific, will, from the subsequence cases, be enabled either to verify the suitableness of the
medicine chosen, or to discover a more appropriate, the most appropriate homoeopathic remedy.
Is it just me, or is this a direct contradiction of §100?
§ 103
In the same manner as has here been taught relative to the epidemic disease, which are generally of an acute
character, the miasmatic chronic maladies, which, as I have shown, always remain the same in their essential
nature, especially the psora, must be investigated, as to the whole sphere of their symptoms, in a much more
minute manner than has ever been done before, for in them also one patient only exhibits a portion of their
symptoms, a second, a third, and so on, present some other symptoms, which also are but a (dissevered, as it
were), portion of the totality of the symptoms which constitute the entire extent of this malady, so that the
whole array of the symptoms belonging to such a miasmatic, chronic disease, and especially to the psora, can
only be ascertained from the observation of very many single patients affected with such a chronic disease, and
without a complete survey and collective picture of these symptoms the medicines capable of curing the whole
malady homoeopathically (to wit, the antipsorics) cannot be discovered; and these medicines are, at the same
time, the true remedies of the several patients suffering from such chronic affections.
So it would seem that after all cases should be compared. One can only say that Hahnemann’s
writings are sometimes difficult to penetrate.
§ 104
When the totality of the symptoms that specially mark and distinguish the case of disease or, in other words,
when the picture of the disease, whatever be its kind, is once accurately sketched,1 the most difficult part of
the task is accomplished. The physician has then the picture of the disease, especially if it be a chronic one,
always before him to guide him in his treatment; he can investigate it in all its parts and can pick out the characteristic
symptoms, in order to oppose to these, that is to say, to the whole malady itself, a very similar artificial
morbific force, in the shape of a homoeopathically chosen medicinal substance, selected from the lists of
symptoms of all the medicines whose pure effects have been ascertained. And when, during the treatment, he
wishes to ascertain what has been the effect of the medicine, and what change has taken place in the patient’s
state, at this fresh examination of the patient he only needs to strike out of the list of the symptoms noted
down at the first visit those that have become ameliorated, to mark what still remain, and add any new symptoms
that may have supervened.
That is it! Period. Having now “examined” the patient, Hahnemann turns to prescribing the proper
treatment.
1 The old school physician gave himself very little trouble in this matter in his mode of treatment. He would not
listen to any minute detail of all the circumstances of his case by the patient; indeed, he frequently cut him
short in his relation of his sufferings, in order that he might not be delayed in the rapid writing of his prescription,
composed of a variety of ingredients unknown to him in their true effects. No allopathic physician, as has
been said, sought to learn all the circumstances of the patient’s case, and still less did he make a note in writing
of them. On seeing the patient again several days afterwards he recollected nothing concerning the few
details he had heard at the first visit (having in the meantime seen so many other patients laboring under different
affections); he had allowed everything to go in at one ear and out at the other. At subsequent visits he
only asked a few general questions, went through the ceremony of feeling the pulse at the wrist, looked at the
tongue, and at the same moment wrote another prescription, on equally irrational principles, or ordered the
first one to be continued (in considerable quantities several times a day), and, with a graceful bow, he hurried
off to the fiftieth or sixtieth patient he had to visit, in this thoughtless way, in the course of that forenoon. The
profession which of all others requires actually the most reflection, a conscientious, careful examination of the
state of each individual patient and a special treatment founded thereon, was conducted in this manner by persons
who called themselves physicians, rational practitioners. The result, as might naturally be expected, was
almost invariably bad; and yet patients had to go to them for advise, partly because there were none better to
be had, partly for fashion’s sake.
But not before one of the more slanderous slashes at the competition. I include it in full, because
while treatment methods have improved much, we still meet physicians with a behavior much like
the one Hahnemann describes here
§ 105
The second point of the business of a true physician related to acquiring a knowledge of the instruments intended
for the cure of the natural diseases, investigating the pathogenetic power of the medicines, in order,
when called on to cure, to be able to select from among them one, from the list of whose symptoms an artificial
disease may be constructed, as similar as possible to the totality of the principal symptoms of the natural disease
sought to be cured.
§ 106
The whole pathogenetic effect of the several medicines must be known; that is to say, all the morbid symptoms
and alterations in the health that each of them is specially capable of developing in the healthy individual must
first have been observed as far as possible, before we can hope to be able to find among them, and to select,
suitable homoeopathic remedies for most of the natural disease.
Beginning to describe how to select medicine.
§ 107
If, in order to ascertain this, medicines be given to sick persons only, even though they be administered singly
and alone, then little or nothing precise is seen of their true effects, as those peculiar alterations of the health
to be expected from the medicine are mixed up with the symptoms of the disease and can seldom be distinctly
observed.
§ 108
There is, therefore, no other possible way in which the peculiar effects of medicines on the health of individuals
can be accurately ascertained - there is no sure, no more natural way of accomplishing this object, than to administer
the several medicines experimentally, in moderate doses, to healthy persons, in order to ascertain
what changes, symptoms and signs of their influence each individually produces on the health of the body and
of the mind; that is to say, what disease elements they are able and tend to produce1, since, as has been demonstrated
(§§ 24-27), all the curative power of medicines lies in this power they possess of changing the state
of man’s health, and is revealed by observation of the latter.
Here comes the idea of self-proving, that is, the charting of symptoms induced in healthy persons
by the medicines.
1 Not one single physician, as far as I know, during the previous two thousand five hundred years, thought of
this so natural, so absolutely necessary and only genuine mode of testing medicines for their pure and peculiar
effects in deranging the health of man, in order to learn what morbid state each medicine is capable of curing,
except the great and immoral Albrecht von Haller. He alone, besides myself, saw the necessity of this (vide the
Preface to the Pharmacopoeia Helvet., Basil, 1771, fol., p.12) (……) But no one, not a single physician, attended
to or followed up this invaluable hint.
First of all, Hahnemann is either ignorant or lying; even at his time, medical researchers had long
been busy testing potential medicines on healthy people, including themselves, and observing the
effects. Second, only his own doctrine about a symptom treating a symptom makes such testing a
crucial method. To researchers looking for medicines to target causative agents, such testing has
second priority.
§ 109
I was the first that opened up this path, which I have pursued with a perseverance that could only arise and be
kept up by a perfect conviction of the great truth, fraught with such blessings to humanity, that it is only by the
homoeopathic employment of medicines1 that the certain cure of human maladies is possible.2
1 It is impossible that there can be another true, best method of curing dynamic diseases (i.e., all diseases not
strictly surgical) besides homoeopathy, just as it is impossible to draw more than one straight line betwixt two
given points. He who imagines that there are other modes of curing diseases besides it could not have appreciated
homoeopathy fundamentally nor practised it with sufficient care, nor could he ever have seen or read cases
of properly performed homoeopathic cures; nor, on the other hand, could he have discerned the baselessness of
all allopathic modes of treating diseases and their bad or even dreadful effects, if, with such lax indifference, he
places the only true healing art on an equality with those hurtful methods of treatment, or alleges the latter to
be auxiliaries to homoeopathy which it could not do without! My true, conscientious followers, the pure
homoeopathists, with their successful, almost never-failing treatment, might teach these persons better.
Hahnemann’s firm belief in having found the holy grail of medicine can only be termed as religious.
Certainly, already at his time, there were observations that would have put some doubt in a more
skeptical mind. For instance the phenomenon of vaccine.
(…….)
§ 110
I saw, moreover, that the morbid lesions which previous authors had observed to result from medicinal substances
when taken into the stomach of healthy persons, either in large doses given by mistake or in order to
produce death in themselves or others, or under other circumstances, accorded very much with my own observations
when experimenting with the same substances on myself and other healthy individuals. These authors
give details of what occurred as histories of poisoning and as proofs of the pernicious effects of these powerful
substances, chiefly in order to warn others from their use; partly also for the sake of exalting their own skill,
when, under the use of the remedies they employed to combat these dangerous accidents, health gradually
returned; but partly also, when the persons so affected died under their treatment, in order to seek their own
justification in the dangerous character of these substances, which they then termed poisons. None of these
observers ever dreamed that the symptoms they recorded merely as proofs of the noxious and poisonous character
of these substances were sure revelations of the power of these drugs to extinguish curatively similar
symptoms occurring in natural disease, that these their pathogenetic phenomena were intimations of their
homoeopathic curative action, and that the only possible way to ascertain their medicinal powers is to observe
those changes of health medicines are capable of producing in the healthy organism; for the pure, peculiar
powers of medicines available for the cure of disease are to be learned neither by any ingenious a priori speculations,
nor by the smell, taste or appearance of the drugs, nor by their chemical analysis, nor yet by the employment
of several of them at one time in a mixture (prescription) in diseases; it was never suspected that
these histories of medicinal diseases would one day furnish the first rudiments of the true, pure materia
medica, which from the earliest times until now has consisted solely of false conjectures and fictions of the
imagination - that is to say, did not exist at all.1
1 See what I have said on this subject in the "Examination of the Sources of the Ordinary Materia Medica," prefixed
to the third part of my Reine Arzneimittellehr: (translated in the Materia Medica Pura, vol. ii).
§ 111
The agreement of my observations on the pure effects of medicines with these older ones - although they were
recorded without reference to any therapeutic object, - and the very concordance of these accounts with others
of the same kind by different authors must easily convince us that medicinal substances act in the morbid
changes they produce in the healthy human body according to fixed, eternal laws of nature, and by virtue of
these are enabled to produce certain, reliable disease symptoms each according to its own peculiar character.
It is a little difficult to see what Hahnemann has really discovered here, except that certain effets
on the human body are characteristic for certain substances. For a modern mind, this is hardly a
revelation, but we must again remember that Hahnemann’s idea of how the organism functions is
fundamentally different.
§ 112
In those older prescriptions of the often dangerous effects of medicines ingested in excessively large doses we
notice certain states that were produced, not at the commencement, but towards the termination of these sad
events, and which were of an exactly opposite nature to those that first appeared. These symptoms, the very
reverse of the primary action (§ 63) or proper action of the medicines on the vital force are the reaction of the
vital force of the organism, its secondary action (§§ 62-67), of which, however, there is seldom or hardly ever
the least trace from experiments with moderate doses on healthy bodies, and from small doses none whatever.
In the homoeopathic curative operation the living organism reacts from these only so much as is requisite to
raise the health again to the normal healthy state (§ 67).
Hahnemann hints at a mechanism he has found, but gives no examples. We are simply assumed to
take his word for it.
§ 113
The only exceptions to this are the narcotic medicines. As they, in their primary action, take away sometimes
the sensibility and sensation, sometimes the irritability, it frequently happens that in their secondary action ,
even from moderate experimental doses on healthy bodies, an increased sensibility (and a greater irritability) is
observable.
§ 114
With the exception of these narcotic substances, in experiments with moderate doses of medicine on healthy
bodies, we observe only their primary action, i.e., those symptoms wherewith the medicine deranges the health
of the human being and develops in him a morbid state of longer or shorter duration.
A few more exceptions. The trouble is that Hahnemann’s earlier sweeping and absolute statements
do not really leave room for exceptions (§32: “… acts at all times, under all circumstances, on every
living human being, and produces in him its peculiar symptoms “) Hahnemann is fond of claiming his
theories to be natural (even divine) law, but then it does not look good with exceptions.
§ 115
Among these symptoms, there occur in the case of some medicines not a few which are partially, or under certain
conditions, directly opposite to other symptoms that have previously or subsequently appeared, but which
are not therefore to be regarded as actual secondary action or the mere reaction of the vital force, but which
only represent the alternating state of the various paroxysms of the primary action; they are termed alternating
actions.
So, it always works, and if it doesn’t, we just give it a different name. When you look closely, Hahnemann
uses a lot of this type of hedging.
§ 116
Some symptoms are produced by the medicines more frequently - that is to say, in many individuals, others
more rarely or in few persons, some only in very few healthy bodies.
§ 117
To the latter category belong the so-called idiosyncrasies, by which are meant peculiar corporeal constitutions
which, although otherwise healthy, possess a disposition to be brought into a more or less morbid state by certain
things which seem to produce no impression and no change in many other individuals.1 But this inability to
make an impression on every one is only apparent. For as two things are required for the production of these
as well as all other morbid alterations in the health of man - to wit., the inherent power of the influencing substance,
and the capability of the vital force that animates the organism to be influenced by it - the obvious derangements
of health in the so-called idiosyncrasies cannot be laid to the account of these peculiar constitutions
alone, but they must also be ascribed to these things that produce them, in which must lie the power of making
the same impressions on all human bodies, yet in such a manner that but a small number of healthy constitutions
have a tendency to allow themselves to be brought into such an obvious morbid condition by them. That
these agents do actually make this impression on every healthy body is shown by this, that when employed as
remedies they render effectual homoeopathic service2 to all sick persons for morbid symptoms similar to those
they seem to be only capable of producing in so-called idiosyncratic individuals.
1 Some few persons are apt to faint from the smell of roses and to fall into many other morbid, and sometimes
dangerous states from partaking of mussels, crabs or the roe of the barbel, from touching the leaves of some
kinds of sumach, etc.
2 Thus the Princess Maria Porphyroghnita restored her brother, the Emperor Alexius, who suffered from faintings,
by sprinkling him with rose water in the presence of his aunt Eudoxia (Hist. byz. Alexias, lib. xv, p. 503,
ed. Posser); and Horstius (Oper., iii, p.59) saw great benefit from rose vinegar in cases of syncope.
More hedging and backing off from the earlier, sweeping claims. It almost seems like reality has
started to make an impact. It is this thick veil of exceptions that enable homeopaths to always
make observations fit their expectations.
§ 118
Every medicine exhibits peculiar actions on the human frame, which are not produced in exactly the same
manner by any other medicinal substance of a different kind.1
(……)
A new sweeping statement, but its interpretation, of course, depends on how you define “different
kinds” of medicine.
§ 119
As certainly as every species of plant differs in its external form, mode of life and growth, in its taste and smell
from every other species and genus of plant, as certainly as every mineral and salt differs from all others, in its
external as well as its internal physical and chemical properties (which alone should have sufficed to prevent
any confounding of one with another), so certainly do they all differ and diverge among themselves in their
pathogenetic - consequently also in their therapeutic - effects.1 Each of these substances produces alterations
in the health of human beings in a peculiar, different, yet determinate manner, so as to preclude the possibility
of confounding one with another.2
1 Anyone who has a thorough knowledge of, and can appreciate the remarkable difference of, effects on the
health of man of every single substance from those of every other, will readily perceive that among them there
can be, in a medical point of view, no equivalent remedies whatever, no surrogates. Only those who do not
know the pure, positive effects of the different medicines can be so foolish as to try to persuade us that one can
serve in the stead of the other, and can in the same disease prove just as serviceable as the other. Thus do
ignorant children confound the most essential different things, because they scarcely know their external appearances,
far less their real value, their true importance and their very dissimilar inherent properties.
More of the absolute, sweeping claims that Hahnemann is so fond of. This one obviously does not
hold water, unless one is ready to back it with some really broad definitions. Earlier, Hahnemann
has (§115 -118) already taken exception to some differences in symptoms for the same substance
when administered to different persons. With this, he cannot avoid contradicting the statements in
§119, since there will be numerous substances that produce the same effects, under the definition
of “same” given in §115-118. Especially among those that produce little or no symptoms at all.
Also, numerous poisonous herbs, although of different species, contain the same poisonous substance,
and will therefore produce the same symptoms. So we are forced to conclude that Hahnemann
is simply making an unfounded claim because it happens to fit his purpose. Unfortunately, he
uses this baseless claim to launch yet another attack at people who disagree with him. This can
only be termed as intellectual dishonesty:
2 If this be pure truth, as it undoubtedly is, then no physician who would not be regarded as devoid of reason,
and who would not act contrary to the dictates of his conscience, the sole arbiter of real worth, can employ in
the treatment of diseases any medicinal substance but one with whose real significance he is thoroughly and
perfectly conversant, i.e., whose positive action on the health of healthy individuals he has so accurately tested
that he knows for certain that it is capable of producing a very similar morbid state, more similar than any
other medicine with which he is perfectly acquainted, to that presented by the case of disease he intends to
cure by means of it; for, as has been shown above, neither man, nor mighty Nature herself, can effect a perfect,
rapid and permanent cure otherwise than with a homoeopathic remedy. Henceforth no true physician can
abstain from making such experiment, in order to obtain this most necessary and only knowledge of the medicines
that are essential to cure, this knowledge which has hitherto been neglected by the physicians in all ages.
In all former ages - posterity will scarcely believe it - physicians have hitherto contented themselves with
blindly prescribing for diseases medicines whose value was unknown, and which had never been tested relative
to their highly important, very various, pure dynamic action on the health of man; and, moreover, they mingled
several of these unknown medicines that differed so vastly among each other in one formula, and left it to
chance to determine what effects should thereby be produced on the patient. This is just as if a madman should
force his way into the workshop of an artisan, seize upon handfuls of very different tools, with the uses of all of
which he is quite unacquainted, in order, as he imagines, to work at the objects of art he sees around him. I
need hardly remark that these would be destroyed, I may say utterly ruined, by his senseless operations.
Declaring his self-contradictory statement “pure truth”, Hahnemann launches what he no doubt
sees as a devastating attack on non-homeopathic practitioners. As always, when unfounded, such
an attack hurts the attacker more than the attacked.
§ 120
Therefore medicines, on which depend man’s life and death, disease and health, must be thoroughly and most
carefully distinguished from one another, and for this purpose tested by careful, pure experiments on the
healthy body for the purpose of ascertaining their powers and real effects, in order to obtain an accurate
knowledge of them, and to enable us to avoid any mistake in their employment in diseases, for it is only by
correct selection of them that the greatest of all earthly blessings, the health of the body and of the mind, can
be rapidly and permanently restored.
Taken completely out of context, this is a sound and undoubtedly true statement. In context, it is
tainted by the shaky grounds upon which Hahnemann’s definitions rest.
§ 121
In proving medicines to ascertain their effects on the healthy body, it must be borne in mind that the strong,
heroic substances, as they are termed, are liable even in small doses to produce changes in the health even of
robust persons. Those of milder power must be given for these experiments in more considerable quantities; in
order to observe the action of the very weakest, however, the subjects of experiment should be persons free
from disease, and who are delicate, irritable and sensitive.
Beginning to define the grounds for self proving. And already putting the basis for fallacy: Delicate,
irritable and sensitive persons are needed. The soil is fertilized for observer bias.
§ 122
In these experiments - on which depends the exactitude of the whole medical art, and the weal of all future
generations of mankind - no other medicines should be employed except such as are perfectly well known, and
of whose purity, genuineness and energy we are thoroughly assured.
§ 123
Each of these medicines must be taken in a perfectly simple, unadulterated form; the indigenous plants in the
form of freshly expressed juice, mixed with a little alcohol to prevent it spoiling; exotic vegetable substances,
however, in the form of powder, or tincture prepared with alcohol when they were in the fresh state and afterwards
mingled with a certain proportion of water; salts and gums, however, should be dissolved in water just
before being taken. If the plant can only be procured in its dry state, and if its powers are naturally weak, in
that case there may be used for the experiment an infusion of it, made by cutting the herb into small pieces
and pouring boiling water on it, so as to extract its medicinal parts; immediately after its preparation it must be
swallowed while still warm, as all expressed vegetable juices and all aqueous infusions of herbs, without the
addition of spirit, pass rapidly into fermentation and decomposition, whereby all their medicinal properties are
lost.
A call for care and exactitude in preparing pure test substances. This is good basic science.
§ 124
For these experiments every medicinal substance must be employed quite alone and perfectly pure, without the
admixture of any foreign substance, and without taking anything else of a medicinal nature the same day, nor
yet on the subsequent days, nor during all the time we wish to observe the effects of the medicine.
More good scientific practice.
§ 125
During all the time the experiment lasts the diet must be strictly regulated; it should be as much as possible
destitute of spices, of a purely nutritious and simple character, green vegetables,1 roots and all salads and herb
soups (which, even when most carefully prepared, possess some disturbing medicinal qualities) should be
avoided. The drinks are to be those usually partaken of, as little stimulating as possible.2
1 Young green peas, green French beans (+ ‘boiled potatoes’ in the Sixth Edition) and in all cases carrots are
allowable, as the least medicinal vegetables.
2 The subject of experiment must either be not in the habit of taking pure wine, brandy, coffee or tea, or he
must have totally abstained for a considerable time previously from the use of these injurious beverages, some
of which are stimulating, others medicinal.
Now it gets problematic. The special diet during the test period, instead of avoiding disturbances
from other substances, is likely to produce its own set of observations in the “delicate, irritable and
sensitive” test subjects, thus providing potential serious noise in the result. As an aside, one cannot
help wonder how many modern self-provers follow these rules.
§ 126
The person who is proving the medicine must be pre-eminently trustworthy and conscientious and during the
whole time of the experiment avoid all over-exertion of mind and body, all sorts of dissipation and disturbing
passions; he should have no urgent business to distract his attention; he must devote himself to careful selfobservation
and not be disturbed while so engaged; his body must be in what is for him a good state of health,
and he must possess a sufficient amount of intelligence to be able to express and describe his sensations in
accurate terms.
Again, special conditions. Persons must devote their time to careful self-observation. What makes
this so absurd is that Hahnemann IS perfectly aware of the power of self-suggestion: In §17 note 1
he goes as far as saying that a person may cause his own death by self-suggestion, yet now he
bases his investigation on delicate, irritable and sensitive persons concentrating on self-observation
while on a special diet! Somehow, incredibly, Hahnemann manages to miss the perspective that
these test subjects could experience practically ANYTHING through self-suggestion.
§ 127
The medicines must be tested on both males and females, in order also to reveal the alterations of the health
they produce in the sexual sphere.
That, in itself, is certainly a good idea.
§ 128
The most recent observations have shown that medicinal substances, when taken in their crude state by the
experimenter for the purpose of testing their peculiar effects, do not exhibit nearly the full amount of the powers
that lie hidden in them which they do when they are taken for the same object in high dilutions potentized
by proper trituration and succussion, by which simple operations the powers which in their crude state lay hidden,
and, as it were, dormant, are developed and roused into activity to an incredible extent. In this manner we
now find it best to investigate the medicinal powers even of such substances as are deemed weak, and the plan
we adopt is to give to the experimenter, on an empty stomach, daily from four to six very small globules of the
thirtieth potency of such a substance, moistened with a little water or dissolved in more or less water and thoroughly
mixed, and let him continue this for several days.
Again, we are presented to another of homeopathy’s great dogmas, and, from a scientific view,
great weaknesses: The “potentializing” of medicines. This implies successive dilution processes
where the original solution is diluted to and beyond the point where not a single molecule of the
original substance can be expected to exist in the end-product. A special form of vigorous stirring
called “succussion” is used. Needless to say, this is an obvious point of attack for any scientifically
minded critic: Homeopathic medicines are chemically indistinguishable from pure solution medium
(usually distilled water).
Much pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo is presented from modern homeopaths to try to explain how
such medicines can retain any effect, let alone an amplified effect, but none of the explanations can
withstand even the most superficial chemical and/or logical scrutiny.
§ 129
If the effects that result from such a dose are but slight, a few more globules may be taken daily, until they
become more distinct and stronger and the alterations of the health more conspicuous; for all persons are not
effected by a medicine in an equally great degree; on the contrary, there is a vast variety in this respect, so
that sometimes an apparently weak individual may by scarcely at all affected by moderate doses of a medicine
known to be of a powerful character, while he is strongly enough acted on by others of a much weaker kind.
And, on the other hand, there are very robust persons who experience very considerable morbid symptoms
from an apparently mild medicine, and only slighter symptoms from stronger drugs. Now, as this cannot be
known beforehand, it is advisable to commence in every instance with a small dose of the drug and, where
suitable and requisite, to increase the dose more and more from day to day.
§ 130
If, at the very commencement, the first dose administered shall have been sufficiently strong, this advantage is
gained, that the experimenter learns the order of succession of the symptoms and can note down accurately
the period at which each occurs, which is very useful in leading to a knowledge of the genius of the medicine,
for then the order of the primary actions, as also that of the alternating actions, is observed in the most unambiguous
manner. A very moderate dose, even, often suffices for the experiment, provided only the experimenter
is endowed with sufficiently delicate sensitiveness, and is very attentive to his sensations. The duration
of the action of a drug can only be ascertained by a comparison of several experiments.
A clearly non-scientific approach. Doses are simply increased till something is observed! More or
less directly, Hahnemann has repeatedly chastised allopathic practitioners for exactly the same
thing.
§ 131
If, however, in order to ascertain anything at all, the same medicine must be given to the same person to test
for several successive days in ever increasing doses, we thereby learn, no doubt, the various morbid states this
medicine is capable of producing in a general manner, but we do not ascertain their order of succession; and
the subsequent dose often removes, curatively, some one or other of the symptoms caused by the previous
dose, or develops in its stead an opposite state; such symptoms should be enclosed in brackets, to mark their
ambiguity, until subsequent purer experiments show whether they are the reaction of the organism and secondary
action or an alternating action of this medicine.
Hahnemann realizes that even according to his own theories, this practice poses a problem.
§ 132
But when the object is, without reference to the sequential order of the phenomena and the duration of the
action of the drug, only to ascertain the symptoms themselves, especially those of a weak medicinal substance,
in that case the preferable course to pursue is to give it for several successive days, increasing the dose every
day. In this manner the action of an unknown medicine, even of the mildest nature, will be revealed, especially
if tested on sensitive persons.
But accepts it nevertheless.
§ 133
On experiencing any particular sensation from the medicine, it is useful, indeed necessary, in order to determine
the exact character of the symptom, to assume various positions while it lasts, and to observe whether,
by moving the part affected, by walking in the room or the open air, by standing, sitting or lying the symptom
is increased, diminished or removed, and whether it returns on again assuming the position in which it was first
observed, - whether it is altered by eating or drinking, or by any other condition, or by speaking, coughing,
sneezing or any other action of the body, and at the same time to note at what time of the day or night it usually
occurs in the most marked manner, whereby what is peculiar to and characteristic of each symptom will
become apparent.
More in-deep exercises in order to watch for symptoms. Imagine going through all this, on a special
diet, and for days. Who would NOT notice some kind, any kind, of symptoms? How can somebody
write that people might die from psychosomatic disease, denounce most of his contemporary
colleague medical practitioners as blundering idiots, yet assume that he can trust observations of
test subjects under these conditions? This is truly one of the weirdest things in Hahnemann’s
works.
§ 134
All external influences, and more especially medicines, possess the property of producing in the health of the
living organism a particular kind of alteration peculiar to themselves; but all the symptoms peculiar to a medicine
do not appear in one person, nor all at once, nor in the same experiment, but some occur in one person
chiefly at one time, others again during a second or third trail; in another person some other symptoms appear,
but in such a manner that probably some of the phenomena are observed in the fourth, eighth or tenth person
which had already appeared in the second, sixth or ninth person, and so forth; moreover, they may not recur at
the same hour.
§ 135
The whole of the elements of disease a medicine is capable of producing can only be brought to anything like
completeness by numerous observations on suitable persons of both sexes and of various constitutions. We can
only be assured that a medicine has been thoroughly proved in regard to the morbid states it can produce -
that is to say, in regard to its pure powers of altering the health of man - when subsequent experimenters can
notice little of a novel character from its action, and almost always only the same symptoms as had been already
observed by others.
Above, experiments were laid wide open to observer bias and error. In §134 and 135, reporting
bias is introduced. Hahnemann literally tells us that symptoms can be expected to differ between
test subjects, so data has to be collected from numerous tests in order to compile the right set of
symptoms.
In other words, subjects are asked to report whatever they think they feel, and the practitioner
then picks and chooses at will between reportings! No, there is no mentioning of statistical methods.
§ 136
Although, as has been said, a medicine, on being proved on healthy subjects, cannot develop in one person all
the alterations of health it is capable of causing, but can only do this when given to many different individuals,
varying in their corporeal and mental constitution, yet the tendency to excite all these symptoms in every human
being exists in it (§ 117), according to an eternal and immutable law of nature, by virtue of which all its
effects, even those that are but rarely developed in the healthy person, are brought into operation in the case
of every individual if administered to him when he is in a morbid state presenting similar symptoms; it then,
even in the smallest dose, being homoeopathically selected, silently produces in the patient an artificial state
closely resembling the natural disease, which rapidly and permanently (homoeopathically) frees and cures him
of his original malady.
So having examined medicines in a manner that might produce any and all results, we proceed to
name it an “eternal and immutable law of nature”, and use it for treating sick people. Note the interesting
claim that whatever symptoms the medicine may have sometimes produced in test subjects
will in some way self-select when needed. A truly fortunate property considering the uncertainties
involved in the test method!
§ 137
The more moderate, within certain limits, the doses of the medicine used for such experiments are - provided
we endeavor to facilitate the observation by the selection of a person who is a lover of truth, temperate in all
respects, of delicate feelings, and who can direct the most minute attention to his sensation - so much the
more distinctly are the primary effects developed, and only these, which are most worth knowing, occur without
any admixture of secondary effects or reactions of the vital force. When, however, excessively large doses are
used there occur at the same time not only a number of secondary effects among the symptoms, but the primary
effects developed, and only these, which are most worth knowing, occur without any admixture of secondary
effects or reactions of the vital force. When, however, excessively large doses are used there occur at the
same time not only a number of secondary effects among the symptoms, but the primary effects also come on
in such hurried confusion and with such impetuosity that nothing can be accurately observed; let alone the
danger attending them, which no one who has any regard for his fellow-creatures, and who looks on the meanest
of mankind as his brother, will deem an indifferent manner.
Some reiteration and a sensible warning against administering overdoses.
§ 138
All the sufferings, accidents and changes of the health of the experimenter during the action of a medicine
(provided the above condition [§§ 124-127] essential to a good and pure experiment are complied with) are
solely derived from this medicine, and must be regarded and registered as belonging peculiarly to this medicine,
as symptoms of this medicine, even though the experimenter had observed, a considerable time previously,
the spontaneous occurrence of similar phenomena in himself. The reappearance of these during the trial
of the medicine only shows that this individual is, by virtue of his peculiar constitution, particularly disposed to
have such symptoms excited in him. In this case they are the effect of the medicine; the symptoms do not
arise spontaneously while the medicine that has been taken is exercising an influence over the health of the
whole system, but are produced by the medicine.
And of course, the test subjects are not to worry about the symptoms experienced, because they
are of transitory character, induced only by the medicine. Well, if the highly diluted types are used,
there is no problem, I’m sure, but Hahnemann originally used what he called raw testing, where
the original substances WERE present in chemically significant doses. And since several of his basic
substances are quite potent poisons, I for one would feel less secure.
§ 139
When the physician does not make the trial of the medicine on himself, but gives it to another person, the latter
must note down distinctly the sensations, sufferings, accidents and changes of health he experiences at the
time of their occurrence, mentioning the time after the ingestion of the drug when each symptom arose and, if
it lasts long, the period of its duration. The physician looks over the report in the presence of the experimenter
immediately after the experiment is concluded, or if the trial lasts several days he does this every day, in order,
while everything is still fresh in his memory, to question him about the exact nature of every one of these circumstances,
and to write down the more precise details so elicited, or to make such alterations as the experimenter
may suggest.1
Apparently practitioners are supposed to often test on themselves, a situation that makes results
even more uncertain.
1 He who makes known to the medical world the results of such experiments becomes thereby responsible for
the trustworthiness of the person experimented on and his statements, and justly so, as the weal of suffering
humanity is here at stake.
So right Hahnemann is! How this brings in mind his own deplorable testing practices.
§ 140
If the person cannot write, the physician must be informed by him every day of what has occurred to him, and
how it took place. What is noted down as authentic information on this point, however, must be chiefly the voluntary
narration of the person who makes the experiment, nothing conjectural and as little as possible derived
from answers to leading questions should be admitted; everything must be ascertained with the same caution
as I have counselled above (§§ 84-99) for the investigation of the phenomena and for tracing the picture of
natural diseases.
Before we snicker at supposedly reliable test subjects who cannot write, we must remember the
time-frame. We are in the beginning of the 19th century.
§ 141
But the best provings of the pure effects of simple medicines in altering the human health, and of the artificial
diseases and symptoms they are capable of developing in the healthy individual, are those which the healthy,
unprejudiced and sensitive physician institutes on himself with all the caution and care here enjoined. He knows
with the greatest certainty the things he has experienced in his own person.1
1 Those trials made by the physician on himself have for him other and inestimable advantages. In the first
place, the great truth that the medicinal virtue of all drugs, whereon depends their curative power, lies in the
changes of health he has himself undergone from the medicines he has proved, and the morbid states he has
himself experienced from them, becomes for him an incontrovertible fact. Again by such noteworthy observations
on himself he will be brought to understand his own sensations, his mode of thinking and his disposition
(the foundation of all true wisdom gnwqi seuton), and he will be also trained to be, what every physician ought
to be, a good observer. All our observations on others are not nearly so interesting as those made on ourselves.
The observer of others must always dread lest the experimenter did not feel exactly what he said, or lest he did
not describe his sensations with the most appropriate expressions. He must always remain in doubt whether he
has not been deceived, at least to some extent. These obstacles to the knowledge of the truth, which can never
be thoroughly surmounted in our investigations of the artificial morbid symptoms that occur in others from the
ingestion of medicines, cease entirely when we make the trials on ourselves. He who makes these trials on
himself knows for certain what he has felt, and each trial is a new inducement for him to investigate the powers
of other medicines. He thus becomes more and more practised in the art of observing, of such importance to
the physician, by continuing to observe himself, the one on whom he can most rely and who will never deceive
him; and this he will do all the more zealously as these experiments on himself promise to give him a reliable
knowledge of the true value and significance of the instruments of cure that are still to a great degree unknown
to our art. Let it not be imagined that such slight indispositions caused by taking medicines for the purpose of
proving them can be in the main injurious to the health. Experience shows on the contrary, that the organism
of the prover becomes, by these frequent attacks on his health, all the more expert in repelling all external influences
inimical to his frame and all artificial and natural morbific noxious agents, and becomes more hardened
to resist everything of an injurious character, by means of these moderate experiments on his own person with
medicines. His health becomes more unalterable; he becomes more robust, as all experience shows.
Hahnemann even recommends practitioners to test on themselves. We can assume that he made
many of his experiments on himself. While one might applaud his courage and self-sacrifice, this
means that his many results are, from a scientific point of view, simply anecdotical evidence.
He emphasizes the health gain from such practice, and as it happened, he was in excellent health
himself and lived to a, for his era, high age. However, there is really nothing in his theories that
merits the notion that homeopathic preparations should have any prophylactic effect.
§ 142
But how some symptoms1 of the simple medicine employed for a curative purpose can be distinguished
amongst the symptoms of the original malady, even in diseases, especially in those of a chronic character that
usually remain unaltered, is a subject appertaining to the higher art of judgement, and must be left exclusively
to masters in observation.
1 Symptoms which, during the whole course of the disease, might have been observed only a long time previously,
or never before, consequently new ones, belonging to the medicine.
Ah, hah. So if you do not see things the way Hahnemann does it, it is because you are not good
enough? More hedging, really, and obviously in contradiction to §2.
§ 143
If we have thus tested on the healthy individual a considerable number of simple medicines and carefully and
faithfully registered all the disease elements and symptoms they are capable of developing as artificial diseaseproducers,
then only have we a true materia medica - a collection of real, pure, reliable1 modes of action of
simple medicinal substances, a volume of the book of nature, wherein is recorded a considerable array of the
peculiar changes of the health and symptoms ascertained to belong to each of the powerful medicines, as they
were revealed to the attention of the observer, in which the likeness of the (homoeopathic) disease elements of
many natural diseases to be hereafter cured by them are present, which, in a word, contain artificial morbid
states, that furnish for the similar natural morbid states the only true, homoeopathic, that is to say, specific,
therapeutic instruments for effecting their certain and permanent cure.
Well, how he can call this “real, pure, reliable” considering the uncertainties inherent in his method
is certainly beyond a scientific mind.
1 Latterly it has been the habit to entrust the proving of medicines to unknown persons at a distance, who were
paid for their work, and the formation so obtained was printed. But by so doing, the work which is of all others
the most important, which is to form the basis of the only true healing art, and which demands the greatest
moral certainty and trustworthiness seems to me, I regret to say, to become doubtful and uncertain in its results
and to lose all value.
Oops! This is one in the face of modern homeopaths, who collect their information from strangers
over the internet. It goes further, however: The real implication is that the only information you
can use is what you have collected yourself (and, presumably, that endorsed by Hahnemann). Another
clear paradigm difference between homeopathy and modern science, as the latter is intent on
making information sufficiently reliable to be used by everybody.
§ 144
From such a materia medica everything that is conjectural, all that is mere assertion or imaginary should be
strictly excluded; everything should be the pure language of nature carefully and honestly interrogated.
The big question is: Would that leave us with anything at all?
§ 145 Sixth Edition
Of a truth, it is only by a very considerable store of medicines accurately known in respect of these their pure
modes of action in altering the health of man, that we can be placed in a position to discover a homoeopathic
remedy, a suitable artificial (curative) morbific analogue for each of the infinitely numerous morbid states in
nature, for every malady in the world.1 In the meantime, even now - thanks to the truthful character of the
symptoms, and to the abundance of disease elements which every one of the powerful medicinal substances
has already shown in its action on the healthy body - but few disease remain, for which a tolerably suitable
homoeopathic remedy may not be met with among those now proved as to their pure action,2 which, without
much disturbance, restores health in a gentle, sure and permanent manner - infinitely more surely and safely
than can be effected by all the general and special therapeutics of the old allopathic medical art with its unknown
composite remedies, which do but alter and aggravate but cannot cure chronic diseases, and rather retard
than promote recovery from acute diseases and frequently endanger life.
Self-appraisal and a jab at allopathy.
1 At first, about forty years ago, I was the only person who made the provings of the pure powders
of medicines the most important of his occupations. Since then I have been assisted in this by
some young men, who instituted experiments on themselves, and whose observations I have critically
revised. Following these some genuine work of this kind was done by a few others. But what
shall we not be able to effect in the way of curing in the whole extent of the infinitely large domain
of disease, when numbers of accurate and trustworthy observers shall have rendered their services
in enriching this, the only true materia medica, by careful experiments on themselves! The healing
art will then come near the mathematical sciences in certainty.
(……)
Now it becomes difficult: Compare this with §143.1. Who is to be trusted? This ought to be a very
difficult question for the present-day homeopath. Lacking the protocol requirements and peerreview
systems of science, it will be very difficult to know which accounts to trust and which not.
§ 146
The third point of the business of a true physician relates to the judicious employment of the artificial morbific
agents (medicines) that have been proved on healthy individuals to ascertain their pure action in order to effect
the homoeopathic cure of natural diseases.
§ 147
Whichever of these medicines that have been investigated as to their power of altering man’s health we find to
contain in the symptoms observed from its use the greatest similarity to the totality of the symptoms of a given
natural disease, this medicine will and must be the most suitable, the most certain homoeopathic remedy for
the disease; in it is found the specific remedy of this case of disease.
§ 148
The natural disease is never to be considered as a noxious material situated somewhere within the interior or
exterior of man (§ 11-13) but as one produced by an inimical spirit-like (conceptual) agency which, like a kind
of infection (note to § 11) disturbs in its instinctive existence of the spirit-like (conceptual) principle of life
within the organism torturing it as an evil spirit and compelling it to produce certain ailments and disorders in
the regular course of its life. These are known as symptoms (disease). If, now, the influence of this inimical
agency that not only caused but strives to continue this disorder, be taken away as is done when the physician
administers an artificial potency, capable of altering the life principle in the most similar manner (a
homoeopathic medicine) which exceeds in energy even in the smallest dose the similar natural disease (§§ 33,
279), then the influence of the original noxious morbid agent on the life principle is lost during the action of this
stronger similar artificial disease. Thence the evil no longer exists for the life principle - it is destroyed. If, as
has been said, the selected homoeopathic remedy is administered properly, then the acute natural disease
which is to be overruled if recently developed, will disappear imperceptibly in a few hours.
An older, more chronic disease will yield somewhat later together with all traces of discomfort, by the use of
several doses of the same more highly potentized remedy or after careful selection1 of one or another more
similar homoeopathic medicine. Health, recovery, follow in imperceptible, often rapid transitions. The life principle
is freed again and capable of resuming the life of the organism in health as before and strength returns.
Basically reiterating earlier statements.
1 But this laborious, sometimes very laborious, search for and selection of the homoeopathic remedy most suitable
in every respect to each morbid state, is an operation which, notwithstanding all the admirable books for
facilitating it, still demands the study of the original sources themselves, and at the same time a great amount
of circumspection and serious deliberation, which have their best rewards in the consciousness of having faithfully
discharged our duty.
Again, the call for trusting only certain sources. But which? Hahnemann’s to be sure, but how can
the dedicated practitioner know what else to trust?
How could his laborious, care-demanding task, by which alone the best way of curing diseases is rendered possible,
please the gentlemen of the new mongrel sect, who assume the honorable name of homoeopathists, and
even seem to employ medicines in form and appearance homoeopathic, but determined upon by them anyhow
(quidquid in buccam venit), and who, when the unsuitable remedy does not immediately give relief, in place of
laying the blame on their unpardonable ignorance and laxity in performing the most and important and serious
of all human affairs, ascribe it to homoeopathy, which they accuse of great imperfection (if the truth be told, its
imperfection consists in this, that the most suitable homoeopathic remedy for each morbid condition does not
spontaneously fly into their mouths like roasted pigeons, without any trouble on their own part). They know,
however, from frequent practice, how to make up for the inefficiency of the scarcely half homoeopathic remedy
by the employment of allopathic means, that come much more handy to them, among which one or more dozens
of leeches applied to the affected part, or little harmless venesections to the extent of eight ounces, and so
forth, play an important part; and should the patient, in spite of all this, recover, they extol their venesections,
leeches, etc., alleging that, had it not been for these, the patient would not have been pulled through, and they
give us to understand, in no doubtful language, that these operations, derived without much exercise of genius
from the pernicious routine of the old school, in reality contributed the best share towards the cure. But if the
patient die under the treatment, as not unfrequently happens, they seek to console the friends by saying that
"they themselves were witnesses that everything conceivable had been done for the lamented deceased". Who
would do this frivolous and pernicious tribe the honour to call them, after the name of the very laborious but
salutary art, homoeopathic physicians? May the just recompense await them, that, when taken ill, they may be
treated in the same manner!
This, unfortunately, cannot be reassuring to the many modern practitioners, who will let their homeopathic
treatment supplement other medical treatment. Hahnemann’s emotional cursing stamps
them as sacrilegious.
§ 149
(…….)
More allopath-bashing. It does get trivial in the long run. If the trashing of allopathy and reiterations
were left out, the Organon would be less that 100 paragraphs long and much easier to read
and, presumably, use.
§ 150
If a patient complain of one or more trivial symptoms, that have been only observed a short time previously,
the physician should not regard this as a fully developed disease but requires serious medical aid. A slight alteration
in the diet and regimen will usually suffice to dispel such an indisposition.
And herein lies, no doubt, the key to some of the clinical successes reported by proponents.

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§ 151
But if the patient complain of a few violent sufferings, the physician will usually find, on investigation, several
other symptoms besides, although of a slighter character, which furnish a complete picture of the disease.
§ 152
The worse of the acute disease is, of so much the more numerous and striking symptoms is it generally composed,
but with so much the more certainly may a suitable remedy for it be found, if there be a sufficient number
of medicines known, with respect to their positive action, to choose from. Among the lists of symptoms of
many medicines it will not be difficult to find one from whose separate disease elements an antitype of curative
artificial disease, very like the totality of the symptoms of the natural disease, may be constructed, and such a
medicine is the desired remedy.
§ 153
In this search for a homoeopathic specific remedy, that is to say, in this comparison of the collective symptoms
of the natural disease with the list of symptoms of known medicines, in order to find among these an artificial
morbific agent corresponding by similarity to the disease to be cured, the more striking, singular, uncommon
and peculiar (characteristic) signs and symptoms1 of the case of disease are chiefly and most solely to be kept
in view; for it is more particularly these that very similar ones in the list of symptoms of the selected medicine
must correspond to, in order to constitute it the most suitable for effecting the cure. The more general and undefined
symptoms: loss of appetite, headache, debility, restless sleep, discomfort, and so forth, demand but
little attention when of that vague and indefinite character, if they cannot be more accurately described, as
symptoms of such a general nature are observed in almost every disease and from almost every drug.
There is some sound advice in this, but also much muddling. These things make it very complex for
the practitioner to select the right profile, and that comprises another hedging: If the remedy did
not work, maybe the wrong profile was chosen.
1 Dr. von Bonninghausen, by the publication of the characteristic symptoms of homoeopathic medicines and his
repertory has rendered a great service to homoeopathy as well as Dr. J.H.G. Jahr in his handbook of principal
symptoms.
Acknowledgements. So we must assume that the work of these gentlemen is considered reliable
and true.
§ 154
If the antitype constructed from the list of symptoms of the most suitable medicine contain those peculiar, uncommon,
singular and distinguishing (characteristic) symptoms, which are to be met with in the disease to be
cured in the greatest number and in the greatest similarity, this medicine is the most appropriate homoeopathic
specific remedy for this morbid state; the disease, if it be not one of very long standing, will generally be removed
and extinguished by the first dose of it, without any considerable disturbance.
§ 155
I say without any considerable disturbance. For in the employment of this most appropriate homoeopathic remedy
it is only the symptoms of the medicine that correspond to the symptoms of the disease that are called into
play, the former occupying the place of the latter (weaker) in the organism, i.e., in the sensation of the life
principle, and thereby annihilating them by overpowering them; but the other symptoms of the homoeopathic
medicine, which are often very numerous, being in no way applicable to the case of disease in question, are not
called into play at all. The patient, growing hourly better, feels almost nothing of them at all, because the excessively
minute dose requisite for homoeopathic use is much too weak to produce the other symptoms of the
medicine that are not homoeopathic to the case, in those parts of the body that are free from disease, and consequently
can allow only the homoeopathic symptoms to act on the parts of the organism that are already most
irritated and excited by the similar symptoms of the disease, in order that the sick life principle may react only
to a similar but stronger medicinal disease, whereby the original malady is extinguished.
Here is an attempt at explaining the earlier mentioned automatic selection of the right effects of
the medicine among the many that Hahnemann admits it has. It is a bit self-contradictory, however:
How are we supposed to believe that the medicine can impose those symptoms in healthy
persons, but not in a diseased person? And in this one paragraph, the effects are both referred to
as too weak to cause effect and stronger than the disease, depending of whether we have any use
for them or not.
§ 156
There is, however, almost no homoeopathic medicine, be it ever so suitably chosen, that, especially if it should
be given in an insufficiently minute dose, will not produce, in very irritable and sensitive patients, at least one
trifling, unusual disturbance, some slight new symptom while its action lasts; for it is next to impossible that
medicine and disease should cover one another symptomatically as exactly as two triangles with equal sides
and equal angles. But this (in ordinary circumstances) unimportant difference will be easily done away with by
the potential activity (energy) of the living organism, and is not perceptible by patients not excessively delicate;
the restoration goes forward, notwithstanding, to the goal of perfect recovery, if it be not prevented by the action
of heterogeneous medicinal influences upon the patient, by errors of regimen or by excitement of the passions.
And then a partly contradictory paragraph: There is no such effect, but if this should be wrong,
there is an effect. The Organon contains a number of tautologies, which by themselves seem trivial,
but added up, they provide a typical pseudoscientific smoke-screen that will enable you to interpret
observation in every which way it might fit your purpose.
§ 157
But though it is certain that a homoeopathically selected remedy does, by reason of its appropriateness and the
minuteness of the dose, gently remove and annihilate the acute disease analogous to it, without manifesting its
other unhomoeopathic symptoms, that is to say, without the production of new, serious disturbances, yet it
usually, immediately after ingestion - for the first hour, or for a few hours - causes a kind of slight aggravation
when the dose has not been sufficiently small and (where the dose has been somewhat too large, however, for
a considerable number of hours), which has so much resemblance to the original disease that it seems to the
patient to be an aggravation of his own disease. But it is, in reality, nothing more than an extremely similar
medicinal disease, somewhat exceeding in strength the original affection.
§ 158
This slight homoeopathic aggravation during the first hours - a very good prognostic that the acute disease will
most probably yield to the first dose - is quite as it ought to be, as the medicinal disease must naturally be
somewhat stronger than the malady to be cured if it is to overpower and extinguish the latter, just as a natural
disease can remove and annihilate another one similar to it only when it is stronger than the latter (§§ 43 -
48).
The so-called homeopathic aggravation. On the premises of homeopathy, this is quite logical: If the
medicine is supposed to overcome the disease, there must be a temporary aggravation.
§ 159 Sixth Edition
The smaller the dose of the homoeopathic remedy is in the treatment of acute diseases so much the slighter
and shorter is the apparent increase of the disease during the first hours.
§ 160
But as the dose of a homoeopathic remedy can scarcely ever be made so small that it shall not be able to relieve,
overpower, indeed completely cure and annihilate the uncomplicated natural disease of not long standing
that is analogous to it (§ 249, note), we can understand why a does of an appropriate homoeopathic medicine,
not the very smallest possible, does always, during the first hour after its ingestion, produce a perceptible
homoeopathic aggravation of this kind.1
1 This exaltation of the medicinal symptoms over those disease symptoms analogous to them, which looks like
an aggravation, has been observed by other physicians also, when by accident they employed a homoeopathic
remedy. When a patient suffering from itch complains of an increase of the eruption after sulphur, his physician
who knows not the cause of this, consoles him with the assurance that the itch must first come out properly
before it can be cured; he knows not, however, that this is a sulphur eruption, that assumes the appearance of
an increase of the itch.
"The facial eruption which the viola tricolor cured was aggravated by it at the commencement of its action,"
Leroy tells us (Heilk, fur Mutter, p.406), but he knew not that the apparent aggravation was owing to the
somewhat too large dose of the remedy, which in this instance was to a certain extent homoeopathic. Lysons
says (Med. Transact., vol ii, London, 1772), "The bark of the elm cures most certainly those skin diseases which
it increases at the beginning of its action." Had he not given the bark in the monstrous doses usual in the allopathic
system, but in the quite small doses requisite when the medicine shows similarity of symptoms, that is
to say, when it is used homoeopathically, he would have effected a cure without, or almost without, seeing this
apparent increase of the disease (homoeopathic aggravation).
Reiterating, and jabbing at allopathy.
§ 161
When I here limit the so-called homoeopathic aggravation, or rather the primary action of the homoeopathic
medicine that seems to increase somewhat the symptoms of the original disease, to the first or few hours, this
is certainly true with respect to diseases of a more acute character and of recent origin, but where medicines of
long action have to combat a malady of, considerable or of very long standing, where no such apparent increase
of the original disease ought to appear during treatment and it does not so appear if the accurately chosen
medicine was given in proper small, gradually higher doses, each somewhat modified with renewed dynamization
(§ 247). Such increase of the original symptoms of a chronic disease can appear only at the end of
treatment when the cure is almost or quite finished.
When reading the many anecdotical accounts of homeopathic treatment, we often see this pattern:
Patient presents with symptoms, gets medication. Initially patient gets worse, then recovers. The
homeopathic proponent will interpret this as homeopathic aggravation, followed by cure, thus seeing
evidence for both the direct and the curative effect of the drug. In reality, however, the pattern
fits a natural recovery just as well.
§ 162
Sometimes happens, owing to the moderate number of medicines yet known with respect to their true, pure
action , that but a portion of the symptoms of the disease under treatment are to be met with in the list of
symptoms of the most appropriate medicine, consequently this imperfect medicinal morbific agent must be employed
for lack of a more perfect one.
Here it becomes interesting. Hahnemann earlier (in §34) said that the symptoms of the medicine
must exactly match those of the disease, but now he backs off a bit.
§ 163
In this case we cannot indeed expect from this medicine a complete, untroubled cure; for during its use some
symptoms appear which were not previously observable in the disease, accessory symptoms of the not perfectly
appropriate remedy. This does by no means prevent a considerable part of the disease (the symptoms of
the disease that resemble those of the medicine) from being eradicated by this medicine, thereby establishing a
fair commencement of the cure, but still this does not take place without those accessory symptoms, which are,
however, always moderate when the dose of the medicine is sufficiently minute.
Backing off more, he opens the path for a part by part cure of the disease. Logically this does not
really fly in the face of his basic theory, but he himself denounced it earlier.
§ 164
The small number of homoeopathic symptoms present in the best selected medicine is no obstacle to the cure in
cases where these few medicinal symptoms are chiefly of an uncommon kind and such as are peculiarly distinctive
(characteristic) of the disease; the cure takes place under such circumstances without any particular disturbance.
Here, we are introduced to the strange idea of peculiar symptoms. Since most homeopathic remedies
are noted for a plethora of different indications (an obvious effect of the way they are tested),
it would right away seem that dozens of medicines should work on any disease. One almost get the
feeling that Hahnemann thought this was a tad too easy, so he instructs his practitioners to look
for “peculiar” symptoms, and match those, again making a science out of prescribing.
§ 165
If, however, among the symptoms of the remedy selected, there be none that accurately resemble the distinctive
(characteristic), peculiar, uncommon symptoms of the case of disease, and if the remedy correspond to the
disease only in the general, vaguely described, indefinite states (nausea, debility, headache, and so forth), and
if there be among the known medicines none more homoeopathically appropriate, in that case the physician
cannot promise himself any immediate favorable result from the employment of this unhomoeopathic medicine.
A rather obvious statement. Provided you believe your medicine has any effect at all, it goes without
saying that using the wrong medicine will not help the patient.
§ 166
Such a case is, however, very rare, owing to the increased number of medicines whose pure effects are now
known, and the bad effects resulting from it, when they do occur, are diminished whenever a subsequent medicine,
of more accurate resemblance, can be selected.
§ 167
Thus if there occur, during the use of this imperfectly homoeopathic remedy first employed, accessory symptoms
of some moment, then, in the case of acute diseases, we do not allow this first dose to exhaust its action,
nor leave the patient to the full duration of the action of the remedy, but we investigate afresh the morbid state
in its now altered condition, and add the remainder of the original symptoms to those newly developed in tracing
a new picture of the disease.
This is what is called retaking a disease, that is in effect starting over recording the symptoms and
trying to select a new and better prescription. Of course, that is what any doctor must do if his first
attempt at cure does not seem to work. You can find several case stories where this happens several
times. I suppose any doctor would attribute the eventual recovery of the patient to whatever
medications was last given.
§ 168
We shall then be able much more readily to discover, among the known medicines, an analogue to the morbid
state before us, a single dose of which, if it do not entirely destroy the disease, will advance it considerably on
the way to be cured. And thus we go on, if even this medicine be not quite sufficient to effect the restoration of
health, examining again and again the morbid state that still remains, and selecting a homoeopathic medicine
as suitable as possible for it, until our object, namely, putting the patient in the possession of perfect health, is
accomplished.
Opening all the way for piecemeal treatment, one symptom at the time. As homeopathy claims
that a disease is only its symptoms, this is only logical.
§ 169 Sixth Edition
If, on the first examination of a disease and the first selection of a medicine, we should find that the totality of
the symptoms of the disease would not be effectually covered by the disease elements of a single medicine -
owing to the insufficient number of known medicines, - but that two medicines contend for the preference in
point of appropriateness, one of which is more homoeopathically suitable for one part, the other for another
part of the symptoms of the disease, it is not advisable, after the employment of the more suitable of the two
medicines, to administer the other without fresh examination, and much less to give both together (§ 272, note)
for the medicine that seemed to be the next best would not, under the change of circumstances that has in
the meantime taken place, be suitable for the rest of the symptoms that then remain; in which case, consequently,
a more appropriate homoeopathic remedy must be selected in place of the second medicine for the set
of symptoms as they appear on a new inspection.
§ 170
Hence in this as in every case where a change of the morbid state has occurred, the remaining set of symptoms
now present must be inquired into, and (without paying any attention to the medicine which at first appeared to
be the next in point of suitableness) another homoeopathic medicine, as appropriate as possible to the new
state now before us, must be selected. If it should so happen, as is not often the case, that the medicine which
at first appeared to be the next best seems still to be well adapted for the morbid state that remains, so much
the more will it merit our confidence, and deserve to be employed in preference to another.
§ 171
In non-venereal chronic disease, those, therefore, that arise from psora, we often require, in order to effect a
cure, to give several antipsoric remedies in succession, every successive one being homoeopathically chosen in
consonance with the group of symptoms remaining after completion of the action of the previous remedy.
Reiterating and clarifying the procedure of retaking, represcription, piece by piece.
§ 172
A similar difficulty in the way of the cure occurs from the symptoms of the disease being too few - a circumstances
that deserves our careful attention, for by its removal almost all the difficulties that can lie in the way
of this most perfect of all possible modes of treatment (except that its apparatus of known homoeopathic medicines
is still incomplete) are removed.
Even in this short paragraph, Hahnemann finds space or an appraisal of his system. Note, however,
his concern of having too few symptoms; since according to his view, a disease IS it’s symptoms,
the concern is a bit odd. It almost seems like he does not like his cases to bee too clear-cut.
§ 173
The only diseases that seem to have but few symptoms, and on that account to be less amenable to cure, are
those which may be termed one-sided, because they display only one or two principal symptoms which obscure
almost all the others. They belong chiefly to the class of chronic diseases.
§ 174
Their principal symptom may be either an internal complaint (e.g. a headache of many years’ duration, a diarrhoea
of long standing, an ancient cardialgia, etc.), or it may be an affection more of an external kind. Diseases
of the latter character are generally distinguished by the name of local maladies.
§ 175
In one-sided diseases of the first kind it is often to be attributed to the medical observer’s want of discernment
that he does not fully discover the symptoms actually present which would enable him to complete the sketch
of the portrait of the disease.
§ 176
There are, however, still a few diseases, which, after the most careful initial examination (§§ 84-98), present
but one or two severe, violent symptoms, while all the others are but indistinctly perceptible.
§ 177
In order to meet most successfully such a case as this, which is of very rare occurrence, we are in the first
place to select, guided by these few symptoms, the medicine which in our judgment is the most homoeopathically
indicated.
§ 178
It will, no doubt, sometimes happen that this medicine, selected in strict observance of the homoeopathic law,
furnishes the similar artificial disease suited for the annihilation of the malady present; and this is much more
likely to happen when these few morbid symptoms are very striking, decided, uncommon and peculiarly distinctive
(characteristic).
§ 179
More frequently, however, the medicine first chosen in such a case will be only partially, that is to say, not exactly
suitable, as there was no considerable number of symptoms to guide to an accurate selection.
This seems illogical to an outsider: If there is but a single (or very few) symptom, on would think
that it would be very easy to select a remedy. The key to the problem can be found in the Materia
Medica, which lists all the symptoms associated with each medicine; nearly all medicines have numerous
symptoms ascribed to them, with much overlapping. Thus, a single symptom will often
match dozens of medicines, and for some reason, Hahnemann does not think that just any of them
will cure.
§ 180
In this case the medicine, which has been chosen as well as was possible, but which, for the reason above
stated, is only imperfectly homoeopathic, will, in its action upon the disease that is only partially analogous to it
- just as in the case mentioned above (§ 162, et seq.) where the limited number of homoeopathic remedies
renders the selection imperfect - produce accessory symptoms, and several phenomena from its own array of
symptoms are mixed up with the patient’s state of health, which are, however, at the same time, symptoms of
the disease itself, although they may have been hitherto never or very rarely perceived; some symptoms which
the patient had never previously experienced appear, or others he had only felt indistinctly become more pronounced.
A quite logical concern that the rest of the symptoms that the chosen medicine is assumed to
cause will show up as side-effects.
§ 181
Let is not be objected that the accessory phenomena and new symptoms of this disease that now appear
should be laid to the account of the medicament just employed. They owe their origin to it1 certainly, but they
are always only symptoms of such a nature as this disease was itself capable of producing in this organism, and
which were summoned forth and induced to make their appearance by the medicine given, owing to its power
to cause similar symptoms. In a word, we have to regard the whole collection of symptoms now perceptible as
belonging to the disease itself, as the actual existing condition, and to direct our further treatment accordingly.
1 When they were not caused by an important error in regimen, a violent emotion, or a tumultuous revolution
in the organism, such as the occurrence or cessation of the menses, conception, childbirth, and so forth.
§ 182
Thus the imperfect selection of the medicament, which was in this case almost inevitable owing to the too limited
number of the symptoms present, serves to complete the display of the symptoms of the disease, and in
this way facilitates the discovery of a second, more accurately suitable, homoeopathic medicine.
Then, suddenly, logic is abandoned. Hahnemann has hinted at this earlier, but here it is: He now
tells us that the proper symptoms from the medicine are somehow autoselected. Even if the medicine
does not quite fit, it will bring just the proper symptoms out into the light, so the next shot
can be made more accurate. How handy!
§ 183
Whenever, therefore, the dose of the first medicine ceases to have a beneficial effect (if the newly developed
symptoms do not, by reason of their gravity, demand more speedy aid - which, however, from the minuteness
of the dose of homoeopathic medicine, and in very chronic diseases, is excessively rare), a new examination of
the disease must be instituted, the status morbi as it now is must be noted down, and a second homoeopathic
remedy selected in accordance with it, which shall exactly suit the present state, and one which shall be all the
more appropriate can then be found, as the group of symptoms has become larger and more complete.1
1 In cases where the patient (which, however, happens excessively seldom in chronic, but not infrequently in
acute, diseases) feels very ill, although his symptoms are very indistinct, so that this state may be attributed
more to the benumbed state of the nerves, which does not permit the patient’s pains and sufferings to be distinctly
perceived, this torpor of the internal sensibility is removed by opium, and in its secondary action the
symptoms of the disease become distinctly apparent.
Here again, we see the strange idea that the minute amounts of active ingredient (actually, there is
nothing, but Hahnemann did not know of Avrogado’s number) both renders the homeopathing
medicine harmless, and at the same time a potent cure. Hahnemann believes he can get it both
ways. And in the note, he suddenly advocates the use of opium! Earlier he has denounced palliative
treatment (§57).
§ 184
In like manner, after each new dose of medicine has exhausted its action, when it is no longer suitable and
helpful, the state of the disease that still remains is to be noted anew with respect to its remaining symptoms,
and another homoeopathic remedy sought for, as suitable as possible for the group of symptoms now observed,
and so on until the recovery is complete.
Second reiteration if this information.
§ 185
Among the one-sided disease an important place is occupied by the so-called local maladies, by which term is
signified those changes and ailments that appear on the external parts of the body. Till now the idea prevalent
in the schools was that these parts were alone morbidly affected, and that the rest of the body did not participate
in the disease - a theoretical, absurd doctrine, which has led to the most disastrous medical treatment.
Exhibiting the usual diplomatic style. Here, however, we must tend to agree with him. It is certainly
a good idea to take the whole patient into consideration, even if the disease does only manifest
itself locally.
§ 186
Those so-called local maladies which have been produced a short time previously, solely by an external lesion,
still appear at first sight to deserve the name of local disease. But then the lesion must be very trivial, and in
that case it would be of no great moment. For in the case of injuries accruing to the body from without, if they
be at all severe, the whole living organism sympathizes; there occur fever, etc. The treatment of such diseases
is relegated to surgery; but this is right only in so far as the affected parts require mechanical aid, whereby the
external obstacles to the cure, which can only be expected to take place by the agency of the vital force, may
be removed by mechanical means, e.g., by the reduction of dislocations, by needles and bandages to bring
together the lips of wounds, by mechanical pressure to still the flow of blood from open arteries, by the extraction
of foreign bodies that have penetrated into the living parts, by making an opening into a cavity of the body
in order to remove an irritating substance or to procure the evacuation of effusions or collections of fluids, by
bringing into apposition the broken extremities of a fractured bone and retaining them in exact contact by an
appropriate bandage, etc. But when in such injuries the whole living organism requires, as it always does, active
dynamic aid to put it in a position to accomplish the work of healing, e.g. when the violent fever resulting
from extensive contusions, lacerated muscles, tendons and blood-vessels requires to be removed by medicine
given internally, or when the external pain of scalded or burnt parts needs to be homoeopathically subdued,
then the services of the dynamic physician and his helpful homoeopathy come into requisition.
Acknowledging the need for various physical (surgical) procedures. Here is one place, however,
where a present-day homeopath needs to be extraordinarily hard-headed to ignore the vast successes
in modern medicine.
§ 187
But those affections, alterations and ailments appearing on the external parts, that do not arise from any external
injury or that have only some slight external wound for their immediate exciting cause, are produced in
quite another manner; their source lies in some internal malady. To consider them as mere local affections, and
at the same time to treat them only, or almost only, as it were surgically, with topical applications - as the old
school have done from the remotest ages - is as absurd as it is pernicious in its results.
§ 188
These affections were considered to be merely topical, and were therefore called local diseases, as if they were
maladies exclusively limited to those parts wherein the organism took little or no part, or affections of these
particular visible parts of which the rest of the living organism, so to speak, knew nothing.1
1 One of the many great and pernicious blunders of the old school.
§ 189
And yet very little reflection will suffice to convince us that no external malady (not occasioned by some important
injury from without) can arise, persist or even grow worse without some internal cause, without the cooperation
of the whole organism, which must consequently be in a diseased state. It could not make its appearance
at all without the consent of the whole of the rest of the health, and without the participation of the
rest of the living whole (of the vital force that pervades all the other sensitive and irritable parts of the organism);
indeed, it is impossible to conceive its production without the instrumentality of the whole (deranged)
life; so intimately are all parts of the organism connected together to form an indivisible whole in sensation and
functions. No eruption on the lips, no whitlow can occur without previous and simultaneous internal ill-health.
Hahnemann loves it. Still, his own generalization, his assumption that a local malady is ALWAYS
due to a whole-body disease, is not much better. The truth is, of course, that some diseases are
indeed local, whereas others are not.
§ 190
All true medical treatment of a disease on the external parts of the body that has occurred from little or no injury
from without must, therefore, be directed against the whole, must effect the annihilation and cure of the
general malady by means of internal remedies, if it is wished that the treatment should be judicious, sure, efficacious
and radical.
§ 191
This is confirmed in the most unambiguous manner by experience, which shows in all cases that every powerful
internal medicine immediately after its ingestion causes important changes in the general health of such a patient,
and particularly in the affected external parts (which the ordinary medical school regards as quite isolated),
even in a so-called local disease of the most external parts of the body, and the change it produces is
most salutary, being the restoration to health of the entire body, along with the disappearance of the external
affection (without the aid of any external remedy), provided the internal remedy directed towards the whole
state was suitable chosen in a homoeopathic sense.
§ 192
This is best effected when, in the investigation of the case of disease, along with the exact character of the local
affection, all the changes, sufferings and symptoms observable in the patient’s health, and which may have
been previously noticed when no medicines had been used, are taken in conjunction to form a complete picture
of the disease before searching among the medicines, whose peculiar pathogenetic effects are known, for a
remedy corresponding to the totality of the symptoms, so that the selection may be truly homoeopathic.
§ 193
By means of this medicine, employed only internally (and, if the disease be but of recent origin, often by the
very first dose of it), the general morbid state of the body is removed along with the local affection, and the
latter is cured at the same time as the former, proving that the local affection depended solely on a disease of
the rest of the body, and should only be regarded as an inseparable part of the whole, as one of the most considerable
and striking symptoms of the whole disease.
Reiterating and explaining in more detail, interspersed with jabs at you know who.
§ 194
It is not useful, either in acute local diseases of recent origin or in local affections that have already existed a
long time, to rub in or apply externally to the spot an external remedy, even though it be the specific and,
when used internally, salutary by reason of its homoeopathicity, even although it should be at the same time
administered internally; for the acute topical affections (e.g., inflammations of the individual parts, erysipelas,
etc.), which have not been caused by external injury of proportionate violence, but by dynamic or internal
causes, yield most surely to internal remedies homoeopathically adapted to the perceptible state of the health
present in the exterior and interior, selected from the general store of proved medicines, and generally without
any other aid; but if these diseases do not yield to them completely, and if there still remain in the affected
spot and in the whole state, notwithstanding good regimen, a relic of disease which the vital force is not competent
to restore to the normal state, then the acute disease was (as not infrequently happens) a product of
psora which had hitherto remained latent in the interior, but has now burst forth and is on the point of developing
into a palpable chronic disease.
Note that Hahnemann in §194 denounces any use of external medicine, even homeopathic preparations,
for local symptoms.
§ 195
In order to effect a radical cure in such cases, which are by no means rare, after the acute state has pretty well
subsided, an appropriate antipsoric treatment (as is taught in my work on Chronic Diseases) must then be directed
against the symptoms that still remain and the morbid state of health to which the patient was previously
subject. In chronic local maladies that are not obviously venereal, the antipsoric internal treatment is,
moreover, alone requisite.
On more chronic local symptoms, again, the piecemeal approach.
§ 196
It might, indeed, seen as though the cure of such diseases would be hastened by employing the medicinal substance
which is known to be truly homoeopathic to the totality of the symptoms, not only internally, but also
externally, because the action of a medicine applied to the seat of the local affection might effect a more rapid
change in it.
§ 197 Sixth Edition
This treatment, however, is quite inadmissible, not only for the local symptoms arising from the miasm of
psora, but also and especially for those originating in the miasm of syphilis or sycosis, for the simultaneous
local application, along with the internal employment, of the remedy in diseases whose chief symptom is a constant
local affection, has this great disadvantage, that, by such a topical application, this chief symptom (local
affection)1 will usually be annihilated sooner than the internal disease, and we shall now be deceived by the
semblance of a perfect cure; or at least it will be difficult, and in some cases impossible, to determine, from the
premature disappearance of the local symptom, if the general disease is destroyed by the simultaneous employment
of the internal medicine.
1 Recent itch eruption, chancre, condylomata, as I have indicated in my book of Chronic Diseases.
§ 198
The mere topical employment of medicines, that are powerful for cure when given internally, to the local symptoms
of chronic miasmatic diseases is for the same reason quite inadmissible; for if the local affection of the
chronic disease be only removed locally and in a one-sided manner, the internal treatment indispensable for the
complete restoration of the health remains in dubious obscurity; the chief symptom (the local affection) is
gone, and there remain only the other, less distinguishable symptoms, which are less constant and less persistent
than the local affection, and frequently not sufficiently peculiar and too slightly characteristic to display
after that, a picture of the disease in clear and peculiar outlines.
Reiterating and explaining why homeopathic remedies should not be used externally.
§ 199
If the remedy perfectly homoeopathic to the disease had not yet been discovered1 at the time when the local
symptoms were destroyed by a corrosive or desiccative external remedy or by the knife, then the case becomes
much more difficult on account of the too indefinite (uncharacteristic) and inconstant appearance of the remaining
symptoms; for what might have contributed most to determine the selection of the most suitable remedy,
and its internal employment until the disease should have been completely annihilated, namely, the external
principal symptom, has been removed from our observation.
1 As was the case before my time with the remedies for the condylomatous disease (and the antipsoric medicines).
§ 200
Had it still been present to guide the internal treatment, the homoeopathic remedy for the whole disease might
have been discovered, and had that been found, the persistence of the local affection during its internal employment
would have shown that the cure was not yet completed; but were it cured on its seat, this would be a
convincing proof that the disease was completely eradicated, and the desired recovery from the entire disease
was fully accomplished - an inestimable, indispensable advantage to reach a perfect cure.
Again, essentially discouraging allopathic treatment, on the grounds that it somehow makes diseases
unreachable for homeopathy.

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§ 201
It is evident that man’s vital force, when encumbered with a chronic disease which it is unable to overcome by
its own powers instinctively, adopts the plan of developing a local malady on some external part, solely for this
object, that by making and keeping in a diseased state this part which is not indispensable to human life, it
may thereby silence the internal disease, which otherwise threatens to destroy the vital organs (and to deprive
the patient of life), and that it may thereby, so to speak, transfer the internal disease to the vicarious local affection
and, as it were, draw it thither. The presence of the local affection thus silences, for a time, the internal
disease, though without being able either to cure it or to diminish it materially.1 The local affection, however, is
never anything else than a part of the general disease, but a part of it increased all in one direction by the organic
vital force, and transferred to a less dangerous (external) part of the body, in order to allay the internal
ailment. But (as has been said) by this local symptom that silences the internal disease, so far from anything
being gained by the vital force towards diminishing or curing the whole malady, the internal disease, on the
contrary, continues, in spite of it, gradually to increase and Nature is constrained to enlarge and aggravate the
local symptom always more and more, in order that it may still suffice as a substitute for the increased internal
disease and may still keep it under. Old ulcers on the legs get worse as long as the internal psora is uncured,
the chancre enlarges as long as the internal syphilis remains uncured, the fig warts increased and grow while
the sycosis is not cured whereby the latter is rendered more and more difficult to cure, just as the general internal
disease continues to increase as time goes on.
Interesting theory, but unfounded.
1 The issues of the old-school do something similar; as artificial ulcers on external parts, they silence some
internal chronic diseases, but only for a short time, as long as they cause a painful irritation to which the sick
organism is not used, without being able to cure them; but, on the other hand, they weaken and destroy the
general health much more than is done by most of the metastases effected by the instinctive vital force.
But always good for a kick at the competition.
§ 202
If the old-school physician should now destroy the local symptom by the topical application of external remedies,
under the belief that he thereby cures the whole disease, Nature makes up for its loss by rousing the internal
malady and the other symptoms that previously existed in a latent state side by side with the local affection;
that is to say, she increases the internal disease. When this occurs it is usual to say, though incorrectly
that the local affection has been driven back into the system or upon the nerves by the external remedies.
§ 203
Every external treatment of such local symptoms, the object of which is to remove them from the surface of the
body, while the internal miasmatic disease is left uncured, as, for instance, driving off the skin the psoric eruption
by all sorts of ointments, burning away the chancre by caustics and destroying the condylomata on their
seat by the knife, the ligature or the actual cautery; this pernicious external mode of treatment, hitherto so
universally practised, has been the most prolific source of all the innumerable named or unnamed chronic
maladies under which mankind groans; it is one of the most criminal procedures the medical world can be
guilty of, and yet it has hitherto been the one generally adopted, and taught from the professional chairs as the
only one.1
1 For any medicines that might at the same time be given internally served but to aggravate the malady, as
these remedies possessed no specific power of curing the whole disease, but assailed the organism, weakened
it and inflicted on it, in addition, other chronic medicinal diseases.
Part of this makes sense, of course. In the cases where the local symptoms are indeed a manifestation
of an internal disease, any regimen that treats only local symptoms is very unlikely to cure.
As somebody who has claimed unequivocally that we should not waste out time looking for internally
hidden causes, Hahnemann is left with generalizations, of course.
§ 204 Sixth Edition
If we deduct all chronic affections, ailments and diseases that depend on a persistent unhealthy mode of living,
(§ 77) as also those innumerable medicinal maladies (v. § 74) caused by the irrational, persistent, harassing
and pernicious treatment of diseases often only of trivial character by physicians of the old school, most the
remainder of chronic diseases result from the development of these three chronic miasms, internal syphilis,
internal sycosis, but chiefly and in infinitely greater proportion, internal psora, each of which was already in
possession of the whole organism, and had penetrated it in all directions before the appearance of the primary,
vicarious local symptom of each of them (in the case of psora the scabious eruption, in syphilis the chancre or
the bubo, and in sycosis the condylomata) that prevented their outburst; and these chronic miasmatic diseases,
if deprived of their local symptom, are inevitably destined by mighty Nature sooner or later to become developed
and to burst forth, and thereby propagate all the nameless misery, the incredible number of chronic diseases
which have plagued mankind for hundreds and thousands of years, none of which would so frequently
have come into existence had physicians striven in a rational manner to cure radically and to extinguish in the
organism these three miasms by the internal homoeopathic medicines suited for each of them, without employing
topical remedies for their external symptoms. (See note to § 282).
Lifestyle, allopathy, and just three diseases, in Hahnemann’s opinion accounts for all chronic diseases.
How he makes this conclusion is not clear. And what these “miasms” and “psora” really are
in not explained.
§ 205
The homoeopathic physician never treats one of these primary symptoms of chronic miasms, nor yet one of
their secondary affections that result from their further development, by local remedies (neither by those external
agents that act dynamically,1 nor yet by those that act mechanically), but he cures, in cases where the
one or the other appears, only the great miasm on which they depend, whereupon its primary, as also its secondary
symptoms disappear spontaneously; but as this was not the mode pursued by the old-school practitioners
who preceded him in the treatment of the case, the homoeopathic physician generally, alas!, finds that the
primary symptoms2 have already been destroyed by them by means of external remedies, and that he has now
to do more with the secondary ones, i.e., the affections resulting from the breaking forth and development of
these inherent miasms, but especially with the chronic disease evolved from internal psora, the internal treatment
of which, as far as a single physician can elucidate it by many years of reflection, observation and experience,
I have endeavored to point out in my work on Chronic Diseases, to which I must refer the reader.
1 I cannot therefore advise, for instance, the local extirpation of the so-called cancer of the lips and face (the
product of highly developed psora, not infrequently in conjunction with syphilis) by means of the arsenical remedy
of Frere Cosme, not only because it is excessively painful and often fails, but more for this reason, because,
if this dynamic remedy should indeed succeed in freeing the affected part of the body from the malignant ulcer
locally, the basic malady is thereby not diminished in the slightest, the preserving vital force is therefore necessitated
to transfer the field of operation of the great internal malady to some more important part (as it does in
every case of metastasis), and the consequence is blindness, deafness, insanity, suffocative asthma, dropsy,
apoplexy, etc. But this ambiguous local liberation of the part from the malignant ulcer by the topical arsenical
remedy only succeeds, after all, in those cases where the ulcer has not yet attained any great size, and when
the vital force is still very energetic; but it is just in such a state of things that the complete internal cure of the
whole original disease is also still practicable.
The result is the same without previous cure of the inner miasm when cancer of the face or breast is removed
by the knife alone and when encysted tumors are enucleated; something worse ensues, or at any rate death is
hastened. This has been the case times without number, but the old school still goes blindly on in the same way
in every new case, with the same disastrous results.
2 Itch eruption, chancre (bubo), condylomata.
Talking about syphilis, here Hahnemann is perfectly right, but for the wrong reasons. Treating the
external manifestations of syphilis will not cure the patient, but this is because the bacterial infection
still exists, and will make the disease progress. The special thing about syphilis is that it has
three distinct states, with symptom-free periods between. These periods can be quite long, several
years, and must have made many a practitioner (perhaps including Hahnemann?) believe that
some particular regimen had successfully cured the patient. The attack on other practitioners only
makes sense if you, like Hahnemann, believe that there is an alternative. Also, in the above paragraph,
one of the almost countless reiterations of the claim that the work of the homeopath is
made difficult by allopathic treatment.
§ 206 Sixth Edition
Before commencing the treatment of a chronic disease, it is necessary to make the most careful investigation1
as to whether the patient has had a venereal infection (or an infection with condylomatous gonorrhoea); for
then the treatment must be directed towards this alone, when only the signs of syphilis (or of the rarer condylomatous
disease) are present, but this disease is very seldom met with alone nowadays. If such infection have
previously occurred, this must also be borne in mind in the treatment of those cases in which psora is present,
because in them the latter is complicated with the former, as is always the case when the symptoms are not
those of pure syphilis; for when the physician thinks he has a case of old venereal disease before him, he has
always, or almost always, to treat a syphilitic affection accompanied mostly by (complicated with) psora, for the
internal itch dyscrasia (the psora) is far the most frequent fundamental cause of chronic diseases. At times,
both miasms may be complicated also with sycosis in chronically diseased organisms, or, as is much more frequently
the case, psora is the sole fundamental cause of all other chronic maladies, whatever names they may
bear, which are, moreover, so often bungled, increased and disfigured to a monstrous extent by allopathic unskillfulness.
1 In investigations of this nature we must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the assertions of the patients
of their friends, who frequently assign as the cause of chronic, even of the severest and most inveterate diseases,
either a cold caught (a thorough wetting, drinking cold water after being heated) many years ago, or a
former fright, a sprain, a vexation (sometimes even a bewitchment), etc. These causes are much too insignificant
to develop a chronic disease in a healthy body, to keep it up for years, and to aggravate it year by year, as
is the case with all chronic diseases from developed psora. Causes of a much more important character than
those remembered noxious influences must lie at the root of the initiation and progress of a serious, obstinate
disease of long standing; the assigned causes could only rouse into activity the latent chronic miasm.
Bundling all venereal diseases
§ 207
When the above information has been gained, it still remains for the homoeopathic physician to ascertain what
kinds of allopathic treatment had up to that date been adopted for the chronic disease, what perturbing medicines
had been chiefly and most frequently employed, also what mineral baths had been used and what effects
these had produced, in order to understand in some measure the degeneration of the disease from its original
state, and, where possible, to correct in part these pernicious artificial operations, or to enable him to avoid the
employment of medicines that have already been improperly used.
And to this date, homeopaths a e very careful to collect information on medical treatment, especially
antibiotics and vaccination. I have even seen questionnaires with such questions. It is not
unusual to see homeopaths claiming that all kinds of complaints from the patient are caused by a
vaccination or antibiotic administered sometimes many years previously.
§ 208
The age of the patient, his mode of living and diet, his occupation, his domestic position, his social relation and
so forth, must next be taken into consideration, in order to ascertain whether these things have tended to increase
his malady, or in how far they may favor or hinder the treatment. In like manner the state of his disposition
and mind must be attended to, to learn whether that presents any obstacles to the treatment, or requires
to be directed encouraged or modified.
Obviously this holistic approach can be beneficial for some patients, while others will probably feel
that their privacy is invaded.
§ 209
After this is done, the physician should endeavor in repeated conversations with the patient to trace the picture
of his disease as completely as possible, according to the directions given above, in order to be able to elucidate
the most striking and peculiar (characteristic) symptoms, in accordance with which he selects the first
antipsoric or other remedy having the greatest symptomatic resemblance, for the commencement of the treatment,
and so forth.
§ 210
Of psoric origin are almost all those diseases that I have above termed one-sided, which appear to be more
difficult to cure in consequence of this one-sidedness, all their other morbid symptoms disappearing, as it were,
before the single, great, prominent symptom. Of this character are what are termed mental diseases. They do
not, however, constitute a class of disease the condition of the disposition and mind is always altered;1 and in
all cases of disease we are called on to cure the state of the patient’s disposition is to be particularly noted,
along with the totality of the symptoms, if we would trace an accurate picture of the disease, in order to be able
therefrom to treat it homoeopathically with success.
Mainly reiterating.
1 How often, for instance, do we not meet with a mild, soft disposition in patients who have for years been afflicted
with the most painful diseases, so that the physician feels constrained to esteem and compassionate the
sufferer! But if he subdue the disease and restore the patient to health - as is frequently done in homoeopathic
practice - he is often astonished and horrified at the frightful alteration in his disposition. He often witnesses the
occurrence of ingratitude, cruelty, refined malice and propensities most disgraceful and degrading to humanity,
which were precisely the qualities possessed by the patient before he grew ill.
Those who were patient when well often become obstinate, violent, hasty, or even intolerant and capricious, or
impatient or disponding when ill; those formerly chaste and modest often frequently become lascivious and
shameless. A clear-headed person not infrequently becomes obtuse of intellect, while one ordinarily weakminded
becomes more prudent and thoughtful; and a man slow to make up his mind sometimes acquires great
presence of mind and quickness of resolve, etc.
A rather strange theory. It is certainly happens that disease changes a patient’s personality, but
making it a general rule must be ascribed to Hahnemann’s disposition to deem almost anything he
observes a law of nature.
§ 211
This holds good to such an extent, that the state of the disposition of the patient often chiefly determines the
selection of the homoeopathic remedy, as being a decidedly characteristic symptom which can least of all remain
concealed from the accurately observing physician.
§ 212
The Creator of therapeutic agents has also had particular regard to this main feature of all diseases, the altered
state of the disposition and mind, for there is no powerful medicinal substance in the world which does not very
notably alter the state of the disposition and mind in the healthy individual who tests it, and every medicine
does so in a different manner.
Establishing the universality and calling on the Creator. One should have thought that Hahnemann
had some clinical experiences contradicting this new “law”, but it seems he is capable of interpreting
anything to fit, once he has conceived of a theory.
§ 213
We shall, therefore, never be able to cure conformably to nature - that is to say, homoeopathically - if we do
not, in every case of disease, even in such as are acute, observe, along with the other symptoms, those relating
to the changes in the state of the mind and disposition, and if we do not select, for the patient’s relief, from
among the medicines a disease-force which, in addition to the similarity of its other symptoms to those of the
disease, is also capable of producing a similar state of the disposition and mind.1
1 Thus aconite will seldom or never effect a rapid or permanent cure in a patient of a quiet, calm, equable disposition;
and just as little will nux vomica be serviceable where the disposition is mild and phlegmatic, pulsatilla
where it is happy, gay and obstinate, or ignatia where it is imperturbable and disposed neither to be frightened
nor vexed.
So incorporating another confounding factor, the process of homeopathic prescribing becomes
veiled in further mists. This makes the work of homeopaths more complex, but also provides another
screen to hide behind.
§ 214
The instructions I have to give relative to the cure of mental diseases may be confined to a very few remarks,
as they are to be cured in the same way as all other diseases, namely, by a remedy which shows, by the symptoms
it causes in the body and mind of a healthy individual, a power of producing a morbid state as similar as
possible to the case of disease before us, and in no other way can they be cured.
§ 215
Almost all the so-called mental and emotional diseases are nothing more than corporeal diseases in which the
symptom of derangement of the mind and disposition peculiar to each of them is increased, while the corporeal
symptoms decline (more or less rapidly), till it a length attains the most striking one-sidedness, almost as
though it were a local disease in the invisible subtle organ of the mind or disposition.
§ 216
The cases are not rare in which a so-called corporeal disease that threatens to be fatal - a suppuration of the
lungs, or the deterioration of some other important viscus, or some other disease of acute character, e.g., in
childbed, etc. - becomes transformed into insanity, into a kind of melancholia or into mania by a rapid increase
of the psychical symptoms that were previously present, whereupon the corporeal symptoms lose all their danger;
these latter improve almost to perfect health, or rather they decrease to such a degree that their obscured
presence can only be detected by the observation of a physician gifted with perseverance and penetration. In
this manner they become transformed into a one-sided and, as it were, a local disease, in which the symptom
of the mental disturbance, which was at first but slight, increases so as to be the chief symptom, and in a great
measure occupies the place of the other (corporeal) symptoms, whose intensity it subdues in a palliative manner,
so that, in short, the affections of the grosser corporeal organs become, as it were, transferred and conducted
to the almost spiritual, mental and emotional organs, which the anatomist has never yet and never will
reach with his scalpel.
So, in Hahnemann’s opinion, mental diseases are rooted in physical disease. He describes a sequence
of events that has been observed and interprets it as evidence for his theory. However, the
causative connections are entirely speculative.
§ 217
In these diseases we must be very careful to make ourselves acquainted with the whole of the phenomena,
both those belonging to the corporeal symptoms, and also, and indeed particularly, those appertaining to the
accurate apprehension of the precise character of the chief symptom, of the peculiar and always predominating
state of the mind and disposition, in order to discover, for the purpose of extinguishing the entire disease,
among the remedies whose pure effects are known, a homoeopathic medicinal pathogenetic force - that is to
say, a remedy which in its list of symptoms displays, with the greatest possible similarity, not only the corporeal
morbid symptoms present in the case of disease before us, but also especially this mental and emotional
state.
§ 218
To this collection of symptoms belongs in the first place to accurate description of all the phenomena of the
previous so-called corporeal disease, before it degenerated into a one-sided increase of the physical symptom,
and became a disease of the mind and disposition. This may be learned from the report of the patient’s friends.
§ 219
A comparison of these previous symptoms of the corporeal disease with the traces of them that still remain,
though they have become less perceptible (but which even now sometimes become prominent, when a lucid
interval and a transient alleviation of the psychical disease occurs), will serve to prove them to be still present,
though obscured.
§ 220
By adding to this the state of the mind and disposition accurately observed by the patient’s friends and by the
physician himself, we have thus constructed the complete picture of the disease, for which in order to effect the
homoeopathic cure of the disease, a medicine capable of producing strikingly similar symptoms, and especially
an analogous disorder of the mind, must be sought for among the antipsoric remedies, if the physical disease
have already lasted some time.
Reiterating and elaborating.
§ 221
If, however, insanity or mania (caused by fright, vexation, the abuse of spirituous liquors, etc.) have suddenly
broken out as an acute disease in the patient’s ordinary calm state, although it almost always arises from internal
psora, like a flame bursting forth from it, yet when it occurs in this acute manner it should not be immediately
treated with antipsoric, but in the first place with remedies indicated for it out of the order class of proved
medicaments (e.g., aconite, belladonna, stramonium, hyoscyamus, mercury, etc.) in highly potentized, minute,
homoeopathic doses, in order to subdue it so far that the psora shall for the time revert to its former latent
state, wherein the patient appears as if quite well.
§ 222
But such a patient, who has recovered from an acute mental or emotional disease by the use of these nonantipsoric
medicines, should never be regarded as cured; on the contrary, no time should be lost in attempting
to free him completely,1 by means of a prolonged antipsoric treatment, from the chronic miasm of the psora,
which, it is true, has now become once more latent but is quite ready to break out anew; if this be done, there
is no fear of another similar attack, if he attend faithfully to the diet and regimen prescribed for him.
1 It very rarely happens that a mental or emotional disease of long standing ceases spontaneously (for the internal
dyscrasia transfers itself again to the grosser corporeal organs); such are the few cases met with now
and then, where a former inmate of a madhouse has been dismissed apparently recovered. Hitherto, moreover,
all madhouses have continued to be chokefull, so that the multitude of other insane persons who seek for admission
into such institutions could scarcely find room in them unless some of the insane in the house died. Not
one is ever really and permanently cured in them! A convincing proof, among many others, of the complete
nullity of the non-healing art hitherto practised, which has been ridiculously honored by allopathic ostentation
with the title of rational medicine. How often, on the other hand, has not the true healing art, genuine pure
homoeopathy, been able to restore such unfortunate beings to the possession of their mental and corporeal
health, and so give them back again to their delighted friends and to the world!
More elaboration on Hahnemann’s method of curing mental disease. And a jab at allopathy. Considering
the absolutely horrible way his contemporaries treated the mental ill, we can hardly blame
him, although it must detract some that the treatment he offered instead consisted of shaken water.
It must be assumed that some mental patients have benefited from Hahnemann’s holistic clinical
practice.
§ 223
But if the antipsoric treatment be omitted, then we may almost assuredly expect, from a much slighter cause
than brought on the first attack of the insanity, the speedy occurrence of a new and more lasting the severe fit,
during which the psora usually develops itself completely, and passes into either a periodic or continued mental
derangement, which is then more difficult to be cured by antipsorics.
§ 224
If the mental disease be not quite developed, and if it be still somewhat doubtful whether it really arose from a
corporeal affection, or did not rather result from faults of education, bad practices, corrupt morals, neglect of
the mind, superstition or ignorance; the mode of deciding this point will be, that if it proceed from one or other
of the latter causes it will diminish and be improved by sensible friendly exhortations, consolatory arguments,
serious representations and sensible advice, whereas a real moral or mental malady, depending on bodily disease,
would be speedily aggravated by such a course, the melancholic would become still more dejected,
querulous, inconsolable and reserved, the spiteful maniac would thereby become still more exasperated, and
the chattering fool would become manifestly more foolish.1
1 It would seem as though the mind, in these cases, felt with uneasiness and grief the truth of these rational
representations and acted upon the body as it wished to restore the lost harmony, but that the body, by means
of its disease, reacted upon the organs of the mind and disposition and put them in still greater disorder by a
fresh transference of its sufferings on to them.
Truly a weird theory, especially from a modern, evolutionary, point of view. Why should the body
comprise such an unfortunate mechanism?
§ 225
There are, however, as has just been stated, certainly a few emotional diseases which have not merely been
developed into that form out of corporeal diseases, but which, in an inverse manner, the body being but slightly
indisposed, originate and are kept up by emotional causes, such as continued anxiety, worry, vexation, wrongs
and the frequent occurrence of great fear and fright. This kind of emotional diseases in time destroys the corporeal
health, often to a great degree.
§ 226
It is only such emotional diseases as these, which were first engendered and subsequently kept up by the mind
itself, that, while they are yet recent and before they have made very great inroads on the corporeal state,
may, by means of psychical remedies, such as a display of confidence, friendly exhortations, sensible advice,
and often by a well-disguised deception, be rapidly changed into a healthy state of the mind (and with appropriate
diet and regimen, seemingly into a healthy state of the body also.)
Note these paragraphs. Hahnemann again seems to recognize psychosomatic disease, and gives
some useful advice for its cure.
§ 227
But the fundamental cause in these cases also is a psoric miasm, which was only not yet quite near its full development,
and for security’s sake, the seemingly cured patient should be subjected to a radical, antipsoric
treatment, in order that he may not again, as might easily occur, fall into a similar state of mental disease.
Nevertheless, he holds on to the claim that the “psoric miasm” (a concept invented by himself)
must be treated homeopathically in order for the cure to be permanent.
§ 228
In mental and emotional diseases resulting from corporeal maladies, which can only be cured by homoeopathic
antipsoric medicine conjoined with carefully regulated mode of life, an appropriate psychical behavior towards
the patient on the part of those about him and of the physician must be scrupulously observed, by way of an
auxiliary mental regimen. To furious mania we must oppose clam intrepidity and cool, firm resolution - to doleful,
querulous lamentation, a mute display of commiseration in looks and gestures - to senseless chattering, a
silence not wholly inattentive - to disgusting and abominable conduct and to conversation of a similar character,
total inattention. We must merely endeavor to prevent the destruction and injury of surrounding objects, without
reproaching the patient for his acts, and everything must be arranged in such a way that the necessity for
any corporeal punishments and tortures1 whatever may be avoided. This is so much the more easily effected,
because in the administration of the medicine - the only circumstance in which the employment of coercion
could be justified - in the homoeopathic system the small doses of the appropriate medicine never offend the
taste, and may consequently be given to the patient without his knowledge in his drink, so that all compulsion
is unnecessary.
Elaborating. Surely the treatment he suggests is beneficial to the patients, even if the homeopathic
drugs be without any effect.
1 It is impossible to marvel at the hard-heartedness and indiscretion of the medical men in many establishments
for patients of this kind, who, without attempting to discover the true and only efficacious mode of curing
such disease, which is by homoeopathic medicinal (antipsoric) means, content themselves with torturing
these most pitiable of all human beings with the most violent blows and other painful torments. By this unconscientious
and revolting procedure they debase themselves beneath the level of the turnkeys in a house of correction,
for the latter inflict such chastisement as the duty devolving on their office, and on criminals only,
whilst the former appear, from a humiliating consciousness of their uselessness as physicians, only to vent their
spite at the supposed incurability of mental diseases in harshness towards the pitiable, innocent sufferers, for
they are too ignorant to be of any use and too indolent to adopt a judicious mode of treatment.
Well, as already mentioned, Hahnemann’s wrath against the way insane people were often treated
in his time is understandable. Many institutions treated mentally ill people worse than animals in
the early 19’th century.
§ 229
On the other hand, contradiction, eager explanations, rude corrections and invectives, as also weak, timorous
yielding, are quite out of place with such patients; they are equally pernicious modes of treating mental and
emotional maladies. But such patients are most of all exasperated and their complaint aggravated by contumely,
fraud, and deceptions that they can detect. The physician and keeper must always pretend to believe
them to be possessed of reason.
All kinds of external disturbing influences on their senses and disposition should be if possible removed; there
are no amusements for their clouded spirit, no salutary distractions, no means of instruction, no soothing effects
from conversation, books or other things for the soul that pines or frets in the chains of the diseased
body, no invigoration for it, but the care; it is only when the bodily health is changed for the better that tranquillity
and comfort again beam upon their mind.1
1 The treatment of the violent insane manic and melancholic can take place only in an institution specially arranged
for their treatment but not within the family circle of the patient.
While faring better than many of his contemporaries, Hahnemann’s ideas as expressed above are
certainly not up to modern standards. One might say that he was a century ahead of his time here,
unfortunately, one more century has passed by now.
§ 230
If the antipsoric remedies selected for each particular case of mental or emotional disease (there are incredibly
numerous varieties of them) be quite homoeopathically suited for the faithfully traced picture of the morbid
state, which, if there be a sufficient number of this kind of medicines known in respect of their pure effects, is
ascertained by an indefatigable search for the most appropriate homoeopathic remedy all the more easily, as
the emotional and mental state, constituting the principal symptom of such a patient, is so unmistakably perceptible,
- then the most striking improvement in no very long time, which could not be brought about by
physicking the patient to death with the largest oft - repeated doses of all other unsuitable (allopathic) medicines.
Indeed, I can confidently assert, from great experience, that the vast superiority of the homoeopathic
system over all other conceivable methods of the treatment is nowhere displayed in a more triumphant light
than in mental and emotional diseases of long standing, which originally sprang from corporeal maladies or
were developed simultaneously with them.
In the very convoluted sentences of this paragraph, Hahnemann seems to be saying that if the
symptoms of the mental disease can be charted exactly enough and if enough medicines exist,
then homeopathy will certainly be able to cure much better than allopathy. Furthermore, he claims
to have great experience in this and to have celebrated great triumphs. An interesting statement
which leaves the question of why these triumphs seem to be largely unrecorded, and why homeopathy
has been unable, in spite of a head-start of a century and a half, to make any lasting impression
on treatment of mental diseases.
§ 231
The intermittent diseases deserve a special consideration, as well those that recur at certain periods - like the
great number of intermittent fevers, and the apparently non-febrile affections that recur at intervals like intermittent
fevers - as also those in which certain morbid states alternate at uncertain intervals with morbid states
of a different kind.
§ 232
These latter, alternating diseases, are also very numerous,1 but all belong to the class of chronic diseases; they
are generally a manifestation of developed psora alone, sometimes, but seldom, complicated with a syphilitic
miasm, and therefore in the former case may be cured by antipsoric medicines; in the latter, however, in alternation
with antisyphilitics as taught in my work on the Chronic Diseases.
More complications. Hahnemann’s attempts to explain the vast diversity and complexity of diseases
without acknowledging causative agents, but instead attributing it all do disturbances in the vital
force and a few miasms and psora, inevitably gives rise to some very complicated theories.
(…….)
§ 233
The typical intermittent diseases are those where a morbid state of unvarying character returns at a tolerably
fixed period, while the patient is apparently in good health, and takes its departure at an equally fixed period;
this is observed in those apparently non-febrile morbid states that come and go in a periodical manner (at certain
times), as well as in those of a febrile character, to wit, the numerous varieties of intermittent fevers.
§ 234
Those apparently non-febrile, typical, periodically recurring morbid states just alluded to observed in one single
patient at a time (they do not usually appear sporadically or epidemically) always belong to the chronic diseases,
mostly to those that are purely psoric, are but seldom complicated with syphilis, and are successfully
treated by the same means; yet it is sometimes necessary to employ as an intermediate remedy a small dose
of a potentized solution of cinchona bark, in order to extinguish completely their intermittent type.
This is not the only place in the Organon where Hahnemann, in spite of his own claims of the individuality
of all diseases, suddenly drops the name of a single remedy that is claimed to work as a
catch-all for some problem.
§ 235
With regard to the intermittent fevers,1 that prevail sporadically or epidemically (not those endemically located
in marshy districts), we often find every paroxysm likewise composed of two opposite alternating states (cold,
heat - heat, cold), more frequently still of three (cold, heat, sweat). Therefore the remedy selected for them
from the general class of proved (common, not antipsoric) medicines must either (and remedies of this sort are
the surest) be able likewise to produce in the healthy body two (or all three) similar alternating states, or else
must correspond by similarity of symptoms, in the most homoeopathic manner possible, to the strongest, best
marked, and most peculiar alternating state (either to the cold stage, or to the hot stage, or to the sweating
state, each with its accessory symptoms, according as the one or other alternating state is the strongest and
most peculiar); but the symptoms of the patient’s health during the intervals when he is free from fever must
be the chief guide to the most appropriate homoeopathic remedy.2
1 The pathology hitherto in vogue, which is still in the stage of irrational infancy, recognizes but one single intermittent
fever, which it likewise termed ague, and admits of no varieties but such as are constituted by the
different intervals at which the paroxysms recur, quotidian, tertian, quartan etc. But there are much more important
differences among them than what are marked by the periods of their recurrence; there are innumerable
varieties of these fevers, some of which cannot even be denominated ague, as their fits consist solely of
heat; others, again, are characterised by cold alone, with or without subsequent perspiration; yet others which
exhibit general coldness of the surface, with a sensation on the patient’s part, or whilst the body feels externally
hot, the patient feels cold; others, again, in which one paroxysm consists entirely of a rigor or simple
chilliness followed by an interval of health, while the next consists of heat alone, followed or not by perspiration;
others, again, in which the heat comes first and the cold stage not till that is gone; others, again, wherein
after a cold or hot stage apyrexia ensues, and then perspiration comes on like a second fit, often many hours
subsequently; others, again, in which no perspiration at all comes on, and yet others in which the whole attack
consists of perspiration alone, without any cold or hot stage, or in which the perspiration is only present during
the heat; and there are innumerable other differences, especially in regard to the accessory symptoms, such as
headache of a peculiar kind, bad taste of the mouth, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, want of or excessive thirst,
peculiar pains in the body or limbs, disturbed sleep, deliria, alterations of temper, spasms, etc., before, during
or after the sweating stage, and countless other varieties. All these are manifestly intermittent fevers of very
different kinds, each of which, as might naturally be supposed, requires a special (homoeopathic) treatment. It
must be confessed that they can almost all be suppressed (as is often done) by enormous doses of bark and of
its pharmaceutical preparation, the sulphate of quinine; that is to say, their periodical recurrence (their typus)
may be extinguished by it, but the patients who suffered from intermittent fevers for which cinchona bark is not
suitable, as is the case with all those epidemic intermittent fevers that traverse whole countries and even
mountainous districts, are not restored to health by the extinction of the typus; on the contrary, they now remain
ill in another manner, and worse, often much worse, than before; they are affected by peculiar, chronic
bark dyscrasias, and can scarcely be restored to health even by a prolonged treatment by the true system of
medicine - and yet that is what is called curing, forsooth!
2 Dr. von Bonninghausen, who has rendered more services to our beneficent system of medicine than any
other of my disciples, has best elucidated this subject, which demands so much care, and has facilitated the
choice of the efficient remedy for the various epidemics of fever, in his work entitled Versuch einer homoopathischen
Therapie der Wechselfieber, 1833, Munster bei Regensberg.
§ 236
The most appropriate and efficacious time for administering the medicine in these cases is immediately or very
soon after the termination of the paroxysm, as soon as the patient has in some degree recovered from its effects;
it has then time to effect all the changes in the organism requisite for the restoration of health, without
any great disturbance or violent commotion; whereas the action of a medicine, be it ever so specifically appropriate,
if given immediately before the paroxysm, coincides with the natural recurrence of the disease and
causes such a reaction in the organism, such a violent contention, that an attack of that nature produces at the
very least a great loss of strength, if it do not endanger life.1 But if the medicine be given immediately after the
termination of the fit, that is to say, at the period when the apyretic interval has commenced and a long time
before there are any preparations for the next paroxysm, then the vital force of the organism is in the best possible
condition to allow itself to be quietly altered by the remedy, and thus restored to the healthy state.
1 This is observed in the fatal cases, by no means rare, in which a moderate dose of opium given during the
cold stage quickly deprived the patients of life.
§ 237
But if the stage of apyrexia be very short, as happens in some very bad fevers, or if it be disturbed by some of
the after sufferings of the previous paroxysm, the dose of the homoeopathic medicine should be administered
when the perspiration begins to abate, or the other subsequent phenomena of the expiring paroxysm begin to
diminish.
Interspersed with jabs at the usual suspects, Hahnemann develops and reiterates his strange doctrine
about recurring fevers: They should be treated in the dormant state. Presumably he feels that
the symptoms of the underlying chronic disease are better seen then. In some cases, no doubt, he
is right, but again, his sweeping generalizations seem inappropriate for the real world.
§ 238
Not infrequently, the suitable medicine has with a single dose destroyed several attacks and brought about the
return of health, but in the majority of cases, another dose must be administered after such attack. Better still,
however, when the character of the symptoms has not changed, doses of the same medicine given according to
the newer discovery of repetition of doses (see note to § 270), may be given without difficulty in dynamizing
each successive dose with 10-12 succussions of the vial containing the medicinal substance. Nevertheless,
there are at times cases, though seldom, where the intermittent fever returns after several days’ well being.
This return of the same fever after a healthy interval is only possible when the noxious principle that first
caused the fever, is still acting upon the convalescent, as is the case in marshy regions. Here a permanent restoration
can often take place only by getting away from this causative factor, as is possible by seeking a mountainous
retreat, if the cause was a marshy fever.
First some undocumented claims, then a sudden acknowledgement of a causative factor!
§ 239
As almost every medicine causes in its pure action a special, peculiar fever and even a kind of intermittent fever
with its alternating states, differing from all other fevers that are caused by other medicines, homoeopathic
remedies may be found in the extensive domain of medicines for all the numerous varieties of natural intermittent
fevers and, for a great many of such fevers, even in the moderate collection of medicines already proved
on the healthy individual.
Actually, Hahnemann’s own Materia Medica contradicts this statement, as numerous medicines
have almost identical symptoms listed.
§ 240
But if the remedy found to be the homoeopathic specific for a prevalent epidemic of intermittent fever do not
effect a perfect cure in some one or other patient, if it be not the influence of a marshy district that prevents
the cure, it must always be the psoric miasm in the background, in which case antipsoric medicines must be
employed until complete relief is obtained.
Another of the hit and miss methods: If the homeopathic specific does not work, try antipsoric. And
note the passage “until complete relief is obtained”. How long is that?
§ 241
Epidemics of intermittent fever, in situations where none are endemic, are of the nature of chronic diseases,
composed of single acute paroxysms; each single epidemic is of a peculiar, uniform character common to all
the individuals attacked, and when this character is found in the totality of the symptoms common to all, it
guides us to the discovery of the homoeopathic (specific) remedy suitable for all the cases, which is almost universally
serviceable in those patients who enjoyed tolerable health before the occurrence of the epidemic, that
is to say, who were not chronic sufferers from developed psora.
Again, it seems that the principle of careful “taking” of the case can sometimes be dispensed with.
How a practitioner finds out if all these requirements are met is difficult to see, so one is tempted
to perceive this as another smokescreen.
§ 242
If, however, in such an epidemic intermittent fever the first paroxysms have been left uncured, or if the patients
have been weakened by improper allopathic treatment; then the inherent psora that exists, alas! in so
many persons, although in a latent state, becomes developed, takes on the type of the intermittent fever, and
to all appearance continues to play the part of the epidemic intermittent fever, so that the medicine, which
would have been useful in the first paroxysms (rarely an antipsoric), is now no longer suitable and cannot be of
any service. We have now to do with a psoric intermittent fever only, and this will generally be subdued by
minute and rarely repeated doses of sulphur or hepar sulphuris in a high potency.
Another universal cure. And another jab at allopathy.
§ 243
In those often very pernicious intermittent fevers which attack a single person, not residing in a marshy district,
we must also at first, as in the case of acute diseases generally, which they resemble in respect to their psoric
origin, employ for some days, to render what service it may, a homoeopathic remedy selected for the special
case from the other class of proved (not antipsoric) medicines; but if, notwithstanding this procedure, the recovery
is deferred, we know that we have psora on the point of its development, and that in this case antipsoric
medicines alone can effect a radical cure.
§ 244
The intermittent fevers endemic in marshy districts and tracts of country frequently exposed to inundations,
give a great deal of work to physicians of the old school, and yet a healthy man may in his youth become habituated
even to marshy districts and remain in good health, provided he preserves a faultless regimen and his
system is not lowered by want, fatigue or pernicious passions. The intermittent fevers endemic there would at
the most only attack him on his first arrival; but one or two very small doses of a highly potentized solution of
cinchona bark would, conjointly with the well-regulated mode of living just alluded to, speedily free him from
the disease. But persons who, while taking sufficient corporeal exercise and pursuing a healthy system of intellectual
occupations and bodily regimen, cannot be cured of marsh intermittent fever by one or a few of such
small doses of cinchona - in such persons psora, striving to develop itself, always lies at the root of their malady,
and their intermittent fever cannot be cured in the marshy district without antipsoric treatment.1 It sometimes
happens that when these patients exchange, without delay, the marshy district for one that is dry and
mountainous, recovery apparently ensues (the fever leaves them) if they be not yet deeply sunk in disease,
that is to say, if the psora was not completely developed in them and can consequently return to its latent
state; but they will never regain perfect health without antipsoric treatment.
1 Large, oft-repeated doses of cinchona bark, as also concentrated cinchona remedies, such as the sulphate of
quinine, have certainly the power of freeing such patients from the periodical fits of the marsh ague; but those
thus deceived into the belief that they are cured remain diseased in another way, frequently with an incurable
Quinin intoxication (see §276 note.)
Yet another universal medicine. And another example of either this works, or it doesn’t. Obviously,
much of the preceding 10 paragraphs or so is about malaria and other tropical diseases. These diseases,
with their complex parasite cycles must have been rather confounding for someone with
such a simplistic view of disease causes.
§ 245
Having thus seen what attention should, in the homoeopathic treatment, be paid to the chief varieties of diseases
and to the peculiar circumstances connected with them, we now pass on to what we have to say respecting
the remedies and the mode of employing them, together with the diet and regimen to be observed during
their use.
Every perceptibly progressive and strikingly increasing amelioration in a transient (acute) or persistent
(chronic) disease, is a condition which, as long as it lasts, completely precludes every repetition of the administration
of any medicine whatsoever, because all the good the medicine taken continues to effect is new hastening
towards its completion. Every new dose of any medicine whatsoever, even of the one last administered,
that has hitherto shown itself to be salutary, would in this case disturb the work of amelioration.
A big difference between homeopathy and modern medicine shows here: In modern medicine, if
the patient improves, it is usually taken as a sign that the medication should be continued. Homeopathy,
on the other hand, works on symptoms only, so since the symptoms have now changed,
the prescription must also change. This is logically quite consistent.
§ 246
Every perceptibly progressive and strikingly increasing amelioration during treatment is a condition which, as
long as it lasts, completely precludes every repetition of the administration of any medicine whatsoever, because
all the good the medicine taken continues to effect is now hastening towards its completion. This is not
infrequently the cause in acute diseases, but in more chronic diseases, on the other hand, a single dose of an
appropriately selected homoeopathic remedy will at times complete even with but slowly progressive improvement
and give the help which such a remedy in such a case can accomplish naturally within 40, 50, 60, 100
days. This is, however, but rarely the case; and besides, it must be a matter of great importance to the physician
as well as to the patient that were it possible, this period should be diminished to one-half, one-quarter,
and even still less, so that a much more rapid cure might be obtained. And this may be very happily affected,
as recent and oft-repeated observations have taught me under the following conditions: firstly, if the medicine
selected with the utmost care was perfectly homoeopathic; secondly, if it is highly potentized, dissolved in water
and given in proper small dose that experience has taught as the most suitable in definite intervals for the
quickest accomplishment of the cure but with the precaution, that the degree of every dose deviate somewhat
from the preceding and following in order that the vital principle which is to be altered to a similar medicinal
disease be not aroused to untoward reactions and revolt as is always the case1 with unmodified and especially
rapidly repeated doses.
1 What I said in the fifth edition of the Organon, in a long note to this paragraph in order to prevent these undesirable
reactions of the vital energy, was all the experience I then had justified. But during the last four or
five years, however, all these difficulties are wholly solved by my new altered but perfected method. The same
carefully selected medicine may now be given daily and for months, if necessary in this way, namely, after the
lower degree of potency has been used for one or two weeks in the treatment of chronic disease, advance is
made in the same way to higher degrees, (beginning according to the new dynamization method, taught herewith
with the use of the lowest degrees).
Immediately modifying the statement made in §245, it now seems that it can, after all, sometimes
be right to continue with the same medication. The logical consistency now seems lost.
§ 247
It is impractical to repeat the same unchanged dose of a remedy once, not to mention its frequent repetition
(and at short intervals in order not to delay the cure). The vital principle does not accept such unchanged doses
without resistance, that is, without other symptoms of the medicine to manifest themselves than those similar
to the disease to be cured, because the former dose has already accomplished the expected change in the vital
principle and a second dynamically wholly similar, unchanged dose of the same medicine no longer finds, therefore,
the same conditions of the vital force. The patient may indeed be made sick in another way by receiving
other such unchanged doses, even sicker than he was, for now only those symptoms of the given remedy remain
active which were not homoeopathic to the original disease, hence no step towards cure can follow, only a
true aggravation of the condition of the patient. But if the succeeding dose is changed slightly every time,
namely potentized somewhat higher (§§ 269-270) then the vital principle may be altered without difficulty by
the same medicine (the sensation of natural disease diminishing) and thus the cure brought nearer.1
1 We ought not even with the best chosen homoeopathic medicine, for instance one pellet of the same potency
that was beneficial at first, to let the patient have a second or third dose, taken dry. In the same way, if the
medicine was dissolved in water and the first dose proved beneficial, a second or third and even smaller dose
from the bottle standing undisturbed, even in intervals of a few days, would prove no longer beneficial, even
though the original preparation had been potentized with ten succussions or as I suggested later with but two
succussions in order to obviate this disadvantage and this according to above reasons. But through modification
of every dose in its dynamiztion degree, as I herewith teach, there exists no offence, even if the doses be repeated
more frequently, even if the medicine be ever so highly potentized with ever so many succussions. It
almost seems as if the best selected homoeopathic remedy could best extract the morbid disorder from the vital
force and in chronic disease to extinguish the same only if applied in several different forms.
The idea of increasing dose (or potentialization) somewhat restores logic consistency, providing
you believe that shaking a vial changes the (already thoroughly shaken) content.
§ 248
For this purpose, we potentize anew the medicinal solution1 (with perhaps 8, 10, 12 succussions) from which
we give the patient one or (increasingly) several teaspoonful doses, in long lasting diseases daily or every second
day, in acute diseases every two to six hours and in very urgent cases every hour or oftener. Thus in
chronic diseases, every correctly chosen homoeopathic medicine, even those whose action is of long duration,
may be repeated daily for months with ever increasing success. If the solution is used up (in seven to fifteen
days) it is necessary to add to the next solution of the same medicine if still indicated one or (though rarely)
several pellets of a higher potency with which we continue so long as the patient experiences continued improvement
without encountering one or another complaint that he never had before in his life. For if this happens,
if the balance of the disease appears in a group of altered symptoms then another, one more
homoeopathically related medicine must be chosen in place of the last and administered in the same repeated
doses, mindful, however, of modifying the solution of every dose with thorough vigorous succussions, thus
changing its degree of potency and increasing it somewhat. On the other hand, should there appear during almost
daily repetition of the well indicated homoeopathic remedy, towards the end of the treatment of a chronic
disease, so-called (§ 161) homoeopathic aggravations by which the balance of the morbid symptoms seem to
again increase somewhat (the medicinal disease, similar to the original, now alone persistently manifests itself).
The doses in that case must then be reduced still further and repeated in longer intervals and possibly stopped
several days, in order to see if the convalescence need no further medicinal aid. The apparent symptoms
(Schein - Symptome) caused by the excess of the homoeopathic medicine will soon disappear and leave undisturbed
health in its wake. If only a small vial say a dram of dilute alcohol is used in the treatment, in which is
contained and dissolved through succussion one globule of the medicine which is to be used by olfaction every
two, three or four days, this also must be thoroughly succussed eight to ten times before each olfaction.
1 Made in 40, 30, 20, 15 or 8 tablespoons of water with the addition of some alcohol or a piece of charcoal in
order to preserve it. If charcoal is used, it is suspended by means of a thread in the vial and is taken out when
the vial is succussed. The solution of the medicinal globule (and it is rarely necessary to use more than one
globule) of a thoroughly potentized medicine in a large quantity of water can be obviated by making a solution
in only 7-8 tablespoons of water and after thorough succussion of the vial take from it one tablespoon and put
it in a glass of water (containing about 7 to 8 spoonfuls), this stirred thoroughly and then given a dose to the
patient. If he is unusually excited and sensitive, a teaspoon of this solution may be put in a second glass of
water, thoroughly stirred and teaspoonful doses or more be given. There are patients of so great sensitiveness
that a third or fourth glass, similarly prepared, may be necessary. Each such prepared glass must be made
fresh daily. the globule of the high potency is best crushed in a few grains of sugar of milk which the patient
can put in the vial and be dissolved in the requisite quantity of water.
Complex and detailed instructions, but how to decide when to use this way of medicating has not
been made clear.
§ 249
Every medicine prescribed for a case of disease which, in the course of its action, produces new and troublesome
symptoms not appertaining to the disease to be cured, is not capable of effecting real improvement,1 and
cannot be considered as homoeopathically selected; it must, therefore, either, if the aggravation be considerable,
be first partially neutralized as soon as possible by an antidote before giving the next remedy chosen
more accurately according to similarity of action; or if the troublesome symptoms be not very violent, the next
remedy must be given immediately, in order to take the place of the improperly selected one.2
1 As all experience shows that the dose of the specially suited homoeopathic medicine can scarcely be prepared
too small to effect perceptible amelioration in the disease for which it is appropriate (§§ 275-278), we should
act injudiciously and hurtfully were we when no improvement, or some, though it be even slight, aggravation
ensues, to repeat or even increase the dose of the same medicine, as is done in the old system, under the delusion
that it was not efficacious on account of its small quantity (its too small dose). Every aggravation by the
production of new symptoms - when nothing untoward has occurred in the mental or physical regimen - invariably
proves unsuitableness on the part of the medicine formerly given in the case of disease before us, but
never indicates that the dose has been too weak.
2 The well informed and conscientiously careful physician will never be in a position to require an antidote in his
practice if he will begin, as he should, to give the selected medicine in the smallest possible dose. Like minute
doses of a better chosen remedy will re-establish order throughout.
Mainly elaborating on the idea of giving as small doses as possible. This is another difference compared
to modern medicine, which strives to give the right dose. In many types of modern medicines,
e.g. antibiotics, giving a too small dose can be harmful. Apparently, in homeopathy, it is OK
to give a too small dose. Actually this does not seem quite logical, since the effects of the medicine
is supposed to overcome and supplant those of the disease, but presumably this can be done stepwise.
§ 250
When, to the observant practitioner who accurately investigates the state of the disease, it is evident, in urgent
cases after the lapse of only six, eight or twelve hours, that he has made a bad selection in the medicine last
given, in that the patient’s state is growing perceptibly, however slightly, worse from hour to hour, by the occurrence
of new symptoms and sufferings, it is not only allowable for him, but it is his duty to remedy his mistake,
by the selection and administration of a homoeopathic medicine not merely tolerably suitable, but the
most appropriate possible for the existing state of the disease (§ 167).
Seems rather obvious.

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Organon of Medicine - Dr.Samuel Hahnemann. A wonderful medical guidelines for All.  Empty Re: Organon of Medicine - Dr.Samuel Hahnemann. A wonderful medical guidelines for All.

Post  sv-b Fri Nov 26, 2010 12:35 pm

§251
There are some medicines (e.g., ignatia, also bryonia and rhus, and sometimes belladonna) whose power of
altering man’s health consists chiefly in alternating actions - a kind of primary-action symptoms that are in part
opposed to each other. Should the practitioner find, on prescribing one of these, selected on strict
homoeopathic principles, that no improvement follows, he will in most cases soon effect his object by giving (in
acute diseases, even within a few hours) a fresh and equally small dose of the same medicine.1
1 As I have more particularly described in the introduction to "Ignatia" (in the first volume of the Materia
Medica Pura).
Complicating things even more, certain medicines seem to be administered repeatedly in the same
dose.
§ 252
But should we find, during the employment of the other medicines in chronic (psoric) diseases, that the best
selected homoeopathic (antipsoric) medicine in the suitable (minutest) dose does not effect an improvement,
this is a sure sign that the cause that keeps up the disease still persists, and that there is some circumstances
in the mode of life of the patient or in the situation in which he is placed, that must be removed in order that a
permanent cure may ensue.
Here, at last, something we can all relate to. Remove the cause of the disease. Of course, that is
rather like “allopathy”, but ….
§ 253
Among the signs that, in all diseases, especially in such as are of an acute nature, inform us of a slight commencement
of amelioration or aggravation that is not perceptible to every one, the state of mind and the whole
demeanor of the patient are the most certain and instructive. In the case of ever so slight an improvement we
observe a greater degree of comfort, increased calmness and freedom of the mind, higher spirits - a kind of
return of the natural state. In the case of ever so small a commencement of aggravation we have, on the contrary,
the exact opposite of this: a constrained helpless, pitiable state of the disposition, of the mind, of the
whole demeanor, and of all gestures, postures and actions, which may be easily perceived on close observation,
but cannot be described in words.1
Basically not bad advice to take heed of how the patient feels. However, the caveat is that this may
not always show how well he actually is. In fact an improved mood has been known to mask a progression
of the disease.
1 The signs of improvement in the disposition and mind, however, may be expected only soon after the medicine
has been taken when the dose has been sufficiently minute (i.e., as small as possible), an unnecessary
large dose of even the most suitable homoeopathic medicine acts too violently, and at first produces too great
and too lasting a disturbance of the mind and disposition to allow us soon to perceive the improvement in
them. I must here observe that this so essential rule is chiefly transgressed by presumptuous tryos in
homoeopathy, and by physicians who are converted to homoeopathy from the ranks of the old school. From old
prejudices these persons abhor the smallest doses of the lowest dilutions of medicine in such cases, and hence
they fail to experience the great advantages and blessings of that mode of proceeding which a thousandfold
experience has shown to be the most salutary; they cannot effect all that homoeopathy is capable of doing, and
hence they have no claim to be considered its adherents.
Another attack, this time not on “allopathy” as such, but on non-kosher homeopaths.
§ 254
(……)
§ 255
(……)
Mainly reiterations.
§ 256
On the other hand, if the patient mention the occurrence of some fresh accidents and symptoms of importance
- signs that the medicine chosen has not been strictly homoeopathic - even though he should good-naturedly
assure us that he feels better, as is not infrequently the case in phthisical patients with lung abscess, we must
not believe this assurance, but regard his state as aggravated as it will soon be perfectly apparent it is.
Finally pointing out the caveat in §253. It must be slightly confusing to be a homeopathic practitioner.
§ 257
The true physician will take care to avoid making favorite remedies of medicines, the employment of which he
has, by chance, perhaps found often useful, and which he has had opportunities of using with good effect. If he
do so, some remedies or rarer use, which would have been more homoeopathically suitable, consequently more
serviceable, will often be neglected.
§ 258
The true practitioner, moreover, will not in his practice with mistrustful weakness neglect the employment of
those remedies that he may now and then have employed with bad effects, owing to an erroneous selection
(from his own fault, therefore), or avoid them for other (false) reasons, as that they were unhomoeopathic for
the case of disease before him; he must bear in mind the truth, that of medicinal agents that one alone invariably
deserves the preference in every case of disease which correspond most accurately by similarity to the
totality of the characteristic symptoms, and that no paltry prejudices should interfere with this serious choice.
Good and sound advice. Somewhat difficult to follow, though, in a school that relies entirely on
clinical experience.
§ 259
Considering the minuteness of the doses necessary and proper in homoeopathic treatment, we can easily understand
that during the treatment everything must be removed from the diet and regimen which can have any
medicinal action, in order that the small dose may not be overwhelmed and extinguished or disturbed by any
foreign medicinal irritant.
§ 260
Hence the careful investigation into such obstacles to cure is so much the more necessary in the case of patients
affected by chronic diseases, as their diseases are usually aggravated by such noxious influences and
other disease-causing errors in the diet and regimen, which often pass unnoticed.1
1 Coffee; fine Chinese and other herb teas; beer prepared with medicinal vegetable substances unsuitable for
the patient’s state; so-called fine liquors made with medicinal spices; all kinds of punch; spiced chocolate;
odorous waters and perfumes of many kinds; strong-scented flowers in the apartment; tooth powders and essences
and perfumed sachets compounded of drugs; highly spiced dishes and sauces; spiced cakes and ices;
crude medicinal vegetables for soups; dishes of herbs, roots and stalks of plants possessing medicinal qualities;
asparagus with long green tips, hops, and all vegetables possessing medicinal properties, celery, onions; old
cheese, and meats that are in a state of decomposition, or that passes medicinal properties (as the flesh and
fat of pork, ducks and geese, or veal that is too young and sour viands), ought just as certainly to be kept from
patients as they should avoid all excesses in food, and in the use of sugar and salt, as also spirituous drinks,
undiluted with water, heated rooms, woollen clothing next the skin, a sedentary life in close apartments, or the
frequent indulgence in mere passive exercise (such as riding, driving or swinging), prolonged suckling, taking a
long siesta in a recumbent posture in bed, sitting up long at night, uncleanliness, unnatural debauchery, enervation
by reading obscene books, reading while lying down, Onanism or imperfect or suppressed intercourse in
order to prevent conception, subjects of anger, grief or vexation, a passion for play, over-exertion of the mind
or body, especially after meals, dwelling in marshy districts, damp rooms, penurious living, etc. All these things
must be as far as possible avoided or removed, in order that the cure may not be obstructed or rendered impossible.
Some of my disciples seem needlessly to increase the difficulties of the patient’s dietary by forbidding
the use of many more, tolerably indifferent things, which is not to be commended.
No doubt, some cures obtained by homeopathy really come from the above recommendations for a
healthier lifestyle, even if some of them are a bit, shall we say Victorian, from a modern point of
view. Which else his disciples might forbid their patients boggles the mind.
§ 261
The most appropriate regimen during the employment of medicine in chronic diseases consists in the removal
of such obstacles to recovery, and in supplying where necessary the reverse: innocent moral and intellectual
recreation, active exercise in the open air in almost all kinds of weather (daily walks, slight manual labor), suitable,
nutritious, unmedicinal food and drink, etc.
§ 262
In acute diseases, on the other hand - except in cases of mental alienation - the subtle, unerring internal sense
of the awakened life-preserving faculty determines so clearly and precisely, that the physician only requires to
counsel the friends and attendants to put no obstacles in the way of this voice of nature by refusing anything
the patient urgently desires in the way of food, or by trying to persuade him to partake of anything injurious.
§ 263
The desire of the patient affected by an acute disease with regard to food and drink is certainly chiefly for
things that give palliative relief: they are, however, not strictly speaking of a medicinal character, and merely
supply a sort of want. The slight hindrances that the gratification of this desire, within moderate bounds, could
oppose to the radical removal of the disease1 will be amply counteracted and overcome by the power of the
homoeopathically suited medicine and the vital force set free by it, as also by the refreshment that follows from
taking what has been so ardently longed for. In like manner, in acute diseases the temperature of the room and
the heat or coolness of the bed-coverings must also be arranged entirely in conformity with the patients’ wish.
He must be kept free from all over-exertion of mind and exciting emotions.
1 This is, however, rare. Thus, for instance, in pure inflammatory diseases, where aconite is so indispensable,
whose action would be destroyed by partaking of vegetable acids, the desire of the patient is almost always for
pure cold water only.
Elaborating.
§ 264
The true physician must be provided with genuine medicines of unimpaired strength, so that he may be able to
rely upon their therapeutic powers; he must be able, himself, to judge of their genuineness.
§ 265
It should be a matter of conscience with him to be thoroughly convinced in every case that the patient always
takes the right medicine and therefore he must give the patient the correctly chosen medicine prepared, moreover,
by himself.
This is bad news for the billion$ homeopathic drug industry.
§ 266
Substances belonging to the animal and vegetable kingdoms possess their medicinal qualities most perfectly in
their raw state.1
1 All crude animal and vegetable substances have a greater or less amount of medicinal power, and are capable
of altering man’s health, each in its own peculiar way. Those plants and animals used by the most enlightened
nations as food have this advantage over all others, that they contain a larger amount of nutritious constituents;
and they differ from the others in this that their medicinal powers in their raw state are either not very
great in themselves, or are diminished by the culinary processes they are subjected to in cooking for domestic
use, by the expression of the pernicious juice (like the cassava root of South America), by fermentation (of the
rye-flour in the dough for making bread, sour-crout prepared without vinegar and pickled gherkins), by smoking
and by the action of heat (in boiling, stewing, toasting, roasting, baking), whereby the medicinal parts of
many of these substances are in part destroyed and dissipated. By the addition of salt (pickling) and vinegar
(sauces, salads) animal and vegetable substances certainly lose much of their injurious medicinal qualities, but
other disadvantages result from these additions.
This paragraph is interesting in two ways. Hahnemann here claims that most kinds of treatment
reduce the medicinal effect of biological preparation. In many cases, he is right, because normal
cooking and conservation tends to destroy a lot of active compounds in such materials. What is
interesting is that he is certain that HIS way of treating them has the opposite effect. Another interesting
remark is in the last sentence. We can surely agree that medicinal effects in foodstuffs
can be harmful, but this statement contradicts the notion that homeopathic drugs are without
harmful side-effects.
But even those plants that possess most medicinal power lose that in part or completely by such processes. By
perfect desiccation all the roots of the various kinds of iris, of the horseradish, of the different species or arum
and the peonies lose almost all their medicinal virtue. The juice of the most virulent plants often becomes inert,
pitch-like mass, from the heat employed in preparing the ordinary extracts. By merely standing a long time, the
expressed juice of the most deadly plants becomes quite powerless; even at moderate atmospheric temperature
it rapidly takes on the vinous fermentation (and thereby loses much of its medicinal power), and immediately
thereafter the acetous and putrid fermentation, whereby it is deprived of all peculiar medicinal properties;
the fecula that is then deposited, if well washed, is quite innocuous, like ordinary starch. By the transudation
that takes place when a number of green plants are laid one above the other, the greatest part of their medicinal
properties is lost.
§ 267
We gain possession of the powers of indigenous plants and of such as may be had in a fresh state in the most
complete and certain manner by mixing their freshly expressed juice immediately with equal parts of spirits of
wine of a strength sufficient to burn in a lamp. After this has stood a day and a night in a close stoppered bottle
and deposited the fibrinous and albuminous matters, the clear superincumbent fluid is then to be decanted off
for medicinal use.1 All fermentation of the vegetable juice will be at once checked by the spirits of wine mixed
with it and rendered impossible for the future, and the entire medicinal power of the vegetable juice is thus
retained (perfect and uninjured) for ever by keeping the preparation in well-corked bottles and excluded from
the sun’s light.2
Strange that Hahnemann assumes that pickling with salt or vinegar is destructive for the medical
powers of his raw substances, but not alcohol. How does he get this idea?
1 Buchholz (Taschenb. f. Scheidek. u. Apoth. a. d. J., 1815, Weimar, Abth. I, vi) assures his readers (and his
reviewer in the Leipziger Literaturzeitung, 1816, No. 82, does not contradict him) that for this excellent mode
of operating medicines we have to thank the campaign in Russia, whence it was (in 1812) imported into Germany.
According to the noble practice of many Germans to be unjust towards their own countrymen, he conceals
the fact that this discovery and those directions, which he quotes in my very words from the first edition
of the Organon of Rational Medicine, § 230 and note, proceed from me, and that I first published them to the
world two years before the Russian campaign (the Organon appeared in 1810). Some folks would rather assign
the origin of a discovery to the deserts of Asia than to a German to whom the honor belongs. O tempora! O
mores!
Oops! A jab at a colleague, who fails t ogive Hahnemann credit, it seems. The politically somewhat
incorrect reference to the ”deserts of Asia” has to be seen in the context of his time, I presume.
(………)
A long description of how to prepare and store raw biological substances. Quite sensible, except
that Hahnemann fails to mention the cause of possible decomposition: Micro organisms. Attributing
things to microorganisms is, of course, detrimental to Hahnemann’s doctrine.
§ 269
The homoeopathic system of medicine develops for its special use, to a hitherto unheard-of degree, the inner
medicinal powers of the crude substances by means of a process peculiar to it and which has hitherto never
been tried, whereby only they all become immeasurably and penetratingly efficacious1 and remedial, even
those that in the crude state give no evidence of the slightest medicinal power on the human body.
This remarkable change in the qualities of natural bodies develops the latent, hitherto unperceived, as if slumbering2
hidden, dynamic (§ 11) powers which influence the life principle, change the well-being of animal life.3
This is effected by mechanical action upon their smallest particles by means of rubbing and shaking and
through the addition of an indifferent substance, dry of fluid, are separated from each other. This process is
called dynamizing, potentizing (development of medicinal power) and the products are dynamizations4 or potencies
in different degrees.
Restating one of the homeopathic cornerstone claims. Still without any backing evidence.
1 Long before this discovery of mine, experience had taught several changes which could be brought about in
different natural substances by means of friction, for instance, warmth, heat, fire, development of odor in odorless
bodies, magnetization of steel, and so forth. But all these properties produced by friction were related only
to physical and inanimate things, whereas it is a law of nature according to which physiological and pathogenic
changes take place in the body’s condition by means of forces capable of changing the crude material of drugs,
even in such as had never shown any medicinal properties. This is brought about by trituration and succussion,
but under the condition of employing an indifferent vehicle in certain proportions. this wonderful physical and
especially physiological and pathogenic law of nature had not been discovered before my time. No wonder then,
that the present students of nature and physicians (so for unknowing) cannot have faith in the magical curative
powers of the minute doses of medicines prepared according to homoeopathic rules (dynamized).
Pronouncing his thesis (if it even merits that) a law of nature. The last sentence is interesting; calling
on magical, and recognizing that it is not strange (in his time) that scientists put little faith in
his theory. It only remains to add that they still don’t.
2 The same thing is seen in a bar of iron and steel where a slumbering trace of latent magnetic force cannot but
be recognized in their interior. Both, after their completion by means of the forge stand upright, repulse the
north pole of a magnetic needle with the lower end and attract the south pole, while the upper end shows itself
as the south pole of the magnetic needle. But this is only a latent force; not even the finest iron particles can
be drawn magnetically or held on either end of such a bar.
Only after this bar of steel is dynamized, rubbing it with a dull file in one direction, will it become a true active
powerful magnet, one able to attract iron and steel to itself and impart to another bar of steel by mere contact
and even some distance away, magnetic power and this in a higher degree the more it has been rubbed. In the
same way will triturating a medicinal substance and shaking of its solution (dynamization, potentation) develop
the medicinal powers hidden within and manifest them more and more or if one may say so, spiritualizes the
material substance itself.
Calling on observations about magnetic properties. His observations are imprecise and, as we now
know, irrelevant. Since magnetism was already quite well researched in Hahnemann’s era, he
really cannot be excused for his unscientific approach here; he is not a physicist, but if you want to
call in evidence from a different area, the least you can do is to get your data straight.
3 On this account it refers to the increase and stronger development of their power to cause changes in the
health of animals and men if these natural substances in this improved state, are brought very near to the living
sensitive fibre or come in contact with it (by means of intake or olfaction). Just as a magnetic bar especially
if its magnetic force is increased (dynamized) can show magnetic power only in a needle of steel whose pole is
near or touches it. The steel itself remains unchanged in the remaining chemical and physical properties and
can bring about no changes in other metals (for instance, in brass), just as little as dynamized medicines can
have any action upon lifeless things.
Elaborating on the “magnetic connection”. Still wrong.
4 We hear daily how homoeopathic medicinal potencies are called mere dilutions, when they are the very opposite,
i.e., a true opening up of the natural substances bringing to light and revealing the hidden specific medicinal
powers contained within and brought forth by rubbing and shaking. The aid of a chosen, unmedicinal medium
of attenuation is but a secondary condition.
Simple dilution, for instance, the solution of a grain of salt will become water, the grain of salt will disappear in
the dilution with much water and will never develop into medicinal salt which by means of our well prepared
dynamization, is raised to most marvellous power.
Claiming that succussion is different from dilution, but not providing any clue to how or why.
§ 270
In order to best obtain this development of power, a small part of the substance to be dynamized, say one
grain, is triturated for three hours with three times one hundred grains sugar of milk according to the method
described below 1 up to the one-millionth part in powder form. For reasons given below (b) one grain of this
powder is dissolved in 500 drops of a mixture of one part of alcohol and four parts of distilled water, of which
one drop is put in a vial. To this are added 100 drops of pure alcohol 2 and given one hundred strong succussions
with the hand against a hard but elastic body.3 This is the medicine in the first degree of dynamization
with which small sugar globules 4 may then be moistened 5 and quickly spread on blotting paper to dry and
kept in a well-corked vial with the sign of (I) degree of potency. Only one 6 globule of this is taken for further
dynamization, put in a second new vial (with a drop a water in order to dissolve it) and then with 100 powerful
succussions.
With this alcoholic medicinal fluid globules are again moistened, spread upon blotting paper and dried quickly,
put into a well-stoppered vial and protected from heat and sun light and given the sign (II) of the second potency.
And in this way the process is continued until the twenty-ninth is reached. Then with 100 drops of alcohol
by means of 100 succussions, an alcoholic medicinal fluid is formed with which the thirtieth dynamization
degree is given to properly moistened and dried sugar globules.
By means of this manipulation of crude drugs are produced preparations which only in this way reach the full
capacity to forcibly influence the suffering parts of the sick organism. In this way, by means of similar artificial
morbid affection, the influence of the natural disease on the life principle present within is neutralized. By
means of this mechanical procedure, provided it is carried out regularly according to the above teaching, a
change is effected in the given drug, which in its crude state shows itself only as material, at times as unmedicinal
material but by means of such higher and higher dynamization, it is changed and subtlized at last into
spirit-like 7 medicinal power, which, indeed, in itself does not fall within our senses but for which the medicinally
prepared globule, dry, but more so when dissolved in water, becomes the carrier, and in this condition,
manifests the healing power of this invisible force in the sick body.
1 One-third of one hundred grains sugar of milk is put in a glazed porcelain mortar, the bottom dulled previously
by rubbing it with fine, moist sand. Upon this powder is put one grain of the powdered drug to be triturated
(one drop of quicksilver, petroleum, etc.). The sugar of milk used for dynamization must be of that special
pure quality that is crystallized on strings and comes to us in the shape of long bars. For a moment the
medicines and powder are mixed with a porcelain spatula and triturated rather strongly, six to seven minutes,
with the pestle rubbed dull, then the mass is scraped from the bottom of the mortar and from the pestle for
three to four minutes, in order to make it homogeneous. This is followed by triturating it in the same way 6 - 7
minutes without adding anything more and again scraping 3 - 4 minutes from what adhered to the mortar and
pestle. The second third of the sugar of milk is now added, mixed with the spatula and again triturated 6 - 7
minutes, followed by the scraping for 3 - 4 minutes and trituration without further addition for 6 - 7 minutes.
The last third of sugar of milk is then added, mixed with the spatula and triturated as before 6 -7 minutes with
most careful scraping together. The powder thus prepared is put in a vial, well corked, protected from direct
sunlight to which the name of the substance and the designation of the first product marked /100 is given. In
order to raise this product to /10000, one grain of the powdered /100 is mixed with the third part of 100 grains
of powdered sugar of milk and then proceed as before, but every third must be carefully triturated twice thoroughly
each time for 6 -7 minutes and scraped together 3 -4 minutes before the second and last third of sugar
of milk is added. After each third, the same procedure is taken. When all is finished, the powder is put in a well
corked vial and labelled /10000, i.e., (I), each grain containing 1/1,000,000 the original substance. Accordingly,
such a trituration of the three degrees requires six times six to seven minutes for triturating and six times 3 -4
minutes for scraping, thus one hour for every degree. After one hour such trituration of the first degree, each
grain will contain 1/000; of the second 1/10,000; and in the third 1/1,000,000 of the drug used.* Mortar and
spatula must be cleaned well before they are used for another medicine. Washed first with warm water and
dried, both mortar and pestle, as well as spatula are then put in a kettle of boiling water for half an hour. Precaution
might be used to such an extent as to put these utensils on a coal fire exposed to a glowing heat.
* These are the three degrees of the dry powder trituration, which if carried out correctly, will effect a good
beginning for the dynamization of the medicinal substance.
2 The vial used for potentizing is filled two-thirds full.
3 Perhaps on a leather bound book.
4 They are prepared under supervision by the confectioner from starch and sugar and the small globules freed
from fine dusty parts by passing them through a sieve. Then they are put through a strainer that will permit
only 100 to pass through weighing one grain, the most serviceable size for the needs of a homoeopathic physician.
5 A small cylindrical vessel shaped like a thimble, made of glass, porcelain or silver, with a small opening at the
bottom in which the globules are put to be medicated. They are moistened with some of the dynamized medicinal
alcohol, stirred and poured out on blotting paper, in order to dry them quickly.
6 According to first directions, one drop of the liquid of a lower potency was to be taken to 100 drops of alcohol
for higher potentiation. This proportion of the medicine of attenuation to the medicine that is to be dynamized
(100:1) was found altogether too limited to develop thoroughly and to a high degree the power of the medicine
by means of a number of such succussions without specially using great force of which wearisome experiments
have convinced me.
But if only one such globule be taken, of which 100 weigh one grain, and dynamize it with 100 drops of alcohol,
the proportion of 1 to 50,000 and even greater will be had, for 500 such globules can hardly absorb one drop,
for their saturation. With this disproportionate higher ratio between medicine and diluting medium many successive
strokes of the vial filled two-thirds with alcohol can produce a much greater development of power. But
with so small a diluting medium as 100 to 1 of the medicine, if many succussions by means of a powerful machine
are forced into it, medicines are then developed which, especially in the higher degrees of dynamization,
act almost immediately, but with furious, even dangerous violence, especially in weakly patients, without having
a lasting, mild reaction of the vital principle. But the method described by me, on the contrary, produces
medicines of highest development of power and mildest action, which, however, if well chosen, touches all suffering
parts curatively.* In acute fevers, the small doses of the lowest dynamization degrees of these thus perfected
medicinal preparations, even of medicines of long continued action (for instance, belladonna) may be
repeated in short intervals. In the treatment of chronic diseases, it is best to begin with the lowest degrees of
dynamization and when necessary advance to higher, even more powerful but mildly acting degrees.
* In very rare cases, notwithstanding almost full recovery of health and with good vital strength, an old annoying
local trouble continuing undisturbed it is wholly permitted and even indispensably necessary, to administer
in increasing doses the homoeopathic remedy that has proved itself efficacious but potenized to a very high
degree by means of many succussions by hand. Such a local disease will often then disappear in a wonderful
way.
7 This assertion will not appear improbable, if one considers that by means of this method of dynamization (the
preparations thus produced, I have found after many laborious experiments and counter-experiments, to be the
most powerful and at the same time mildest in action, i.e., as the most perfected) the material part of the
medicine is lessened with each degree of dynamization 50,000 times yet incredibly increased in power, so that
the further dynamization of 125 and 18 ciphers reaches only the third degree of dynamization. The thirtieth
thus progressively prepared would give a fraction almost impossible to be expressed in numbers. It becomes
uncommonly evident that the material part by means of such dynamization (development of its true, inner medicinal
essence) will ultimately dissolve into its individual spirit-like, (conceptual) essence. In its crude state
therefore, it may be considered to consist really only of this underdeveloped conceptual essence.
Above is the detailed description of how to prepare homeopathic drugs. Hahnemann claims to have
made many “laborious experiments and counter-experiments”, but fails to provide any details. This
rather flies in the face of modern homeopath’s claim that homeopathy does not lend itself to objective
testing. Logically, you will either have to contend that Hahnemann was able to conduct concise
tests enabling him to judge the effect of different potencies and substances, or you must conclude
that he is lying.
§ 271
If the physician prepares his homoeopathic medicines himself, as he should reasonably do in order to save men
from sickness,1 he may use the fresh plant itself, as but little of the crude article is required, if he does not
need the expressed juice perhaps for purposes of healing. He takes a few grains in a mortar and with 100
grains sugar of milk three distinct times brings them to the one-millionth trituration (§ 270) before further potentizing
of a small portion of this by means of shaking is undertaken, a procedure to be observed also with the
rest of crude drugs of either dry or oily nature.
Again pointing out that the practitioner should prepare his/her own medicines.
1 Until the State, in the future, after having attained insight into the indispensability of perfectly prepared
homoeopathic medicines, will have them manufactured by a competent impartial person, in order to give them
free of charge to homoeopathic physicians trained in homoeopathic hospitals, who have been examined theoretically
and practically, and thus legally qualified. The physician may then become convinced of these divine tools
for purposes of healing, but also to give them free of charge to his patients - rich and poor.
A remarkable suggestion, especially in Hahnemann’s time. We here get confirmation of his idealism.
However, this scenario did not materialize. Homeopathy stayed in the belief realm.
§ 272
Such a globule,1 placed dry upon the tongue, is one of the smallest doses for a moderate recent case of illness.
Here but few nerves are touched by the medicine. A similar globule, crushed with some sugar of milk and dissolved
in a good deal of water (§ 247) and stirred well before every administration will produce a far more
powerful medicine for the use of several days. Every dose, no matter how minute, touches, on the contrary,
many nerves.
1 These globules (§ 270) retain their medicinal virtue for many years, if protected against sunlight and heat.
Trying to explain the effect to some degree, but the claim remains unsubstantiated. There is a
strange contrast between the declaration that the effect of the medicines is “spirit-like” and the ,
very physical, requirement to keep them away from sunlight and heat. It seems that Hahnemann
cannot quite make up his mind whether he is dealing with magic or chemistry.
§ 273
In no case under treatment is it necessary and therefore not permissible to administer to a patient more than
one single, simple medicinal substance at one time. It is inconceivable how the slightest doubt could exist as to
whether it was more consistent with nature and more rational to prescribe a single, simple1 medicine at one
time in a disease or a mixture of several differently acting drugs. It is absolutely not allowed in homoeopathy,
the one true, simple and natural art of healing, to give the patient at one time two different medicinal substance.
A clear statement. Not all modern homeopaths heed this, however.
1 Two substances, opposite to each other, united into neutral Natrum and middle salts by chemical affinity in
unchangeable proportions, as well as sulphurated metals found in the earth and those produced by technical art
in constant combining proportions of sulphur and alkaline salts and earths, for instance (natrum sulph. and calcarea
sulph.) as well as those ethers produced by distillation of alcohol and acids may together with phosphorus
be considered as simple medicinal substances by the homoeopathic physician and used for patients. On the
other hand, those extracts obtained by means of acids of the so-called alkaloids of plants, are exposed to great
variety in their preparation (for instance, chinin, strychnine, morphine), and can, therefore, not be accepted by
the homoeopathic physician as simple medicines, always the same, especially as he possesses, in the plants
themselves, in their natural state (Peruvian bark, nux vomica, opium) every quality necessary for healing.
Moreover, the alkaloids are not the only constituents of the plants.
This is rather illogical. He concedes that plants are complex compounds, yet he considers them to
be “pure and simple”. He must be assuming that the Creator designed those plants for the specific
purpose of becoming medicines.
(……..)
Reiterating.
1 When the rational physician has chosen the perfectly homoeopathic medicine for the well-considered case of
disease and administered it internally, he will leave to irrational allopathic routine the practice of giving drinks
or fomentations of different plants, of injecting medicated glysters and of rubbing in this or the other ointment.
Here we see the origin of the term “rational practitioner” used by some homepaths. And ,of course
the usual jab at “irrational” allopaths.
§ 275
The suitableness of a medicine for any given case of disease does not depend on its accurate homoeopathic
selection alone, but likewise on the proper size, or rather smallness, of the dose. If we give too strong a dose of
a medicine which may have been even quite homoeopathically chosen for the morbid state before us, it must,
notwithstanding the inherent beneficial character of its nature, prove injurious by its mere magnitude, and by
the unnecessary, too strong impression which, by virtue of its homoeopathic similarity of action, it makes upon
the vital force which it attacks and, through the vital force, upon those parts of the organism which are the
most sensitive, and are already most affected by the natural disease.
Now, we come to dosage. Dosage is an area where modern homeopaths really seem to be groping
in the dark.
§ 276
For this reason, a medicine, even though it may be homoeopathically suited to the case of disease, does harm
in every dose that is too large, the more harm the larger the dose, and by the magnitude of the dose and in
strong doses’ it does more harm the greater its homoeopathicity and the higher the potency1 selected, and it
does much more injury than any equally large dose of a medicine that is unhomoeopathic, and in no respect
adapted to the morbid state (allopathic).
Too large doses of an accurately chosen homoeopathic medicine, and especially when frequently repeated, bring
about much trouble as a rule. They put the patient not seldom in danger of life or make this disease almost
incurable. They do indeed extinguish the natural disease so far as the sensation of the life principle is concerned
and the patient no longer suffers from the original disease from the moment the too strong dose of the
homoeopathic medicine acted upon him but he is in consequence more ill with the similar but more violent medicinal
disease which is most difficult to destroy.2
A VERY interesting little paragraph. Here Hahnemann clearly stated that, applied wrongly, homeopathy
is dangerous. Here, Hahnemann effectively wipes out the claim made by many modern
practitioners that homeopathy will not harm the patient and that it is free of side-effects. Hahnemann’s
stance is really the only logical conclusion to be made from the belief that homeopathic
drugs are effective; all potent drugs are dangerous, if administered wrongly.
1 The praise bestowed of late years by some homoeopathists on the larger doses is owing to this, either that
they chose low dynamizations of the medicine to be administered (as I myself used to do twenty years ago,
from nor knowing any better), or that the medicines selected were not homoeopathic and imperfectly prepared
by their manufacturers.
2 Thus, the continuous use of aggressive allopathic large doses of mercurials against syphilis develops almost
incurable maladies, when yet one or several doses of a mild but active mercurial preparation would certainly
have radically cured in a few days the whole venereal disease, together with the chancre, provided it had not
been destroyed by external measures (as is always done by allopathy). In the same way, the allopath gives
Peruvian bark and quinine in intermittent fever daily in very large doses, where they are correctly indicated and
where one very small dose of a highly potentized China would unfailingly help (in marsh intermittents and even
in persons who were not affected by any evident psoric disease). A chronic China malady (coupled at the same
time with the development of psora) is produced, which, if it dose not gradually kill the patient by damaging the
internal important vital organs, especially spleen and liver, will put him, nevertheless suffering for years in a
sad state of health. A homoeopathic antidote for such a misfortune produced by abuse of large doses of
homoeopathic remedies is hardly conceivable.
Intermingled with allopathy-bashing, we here notice Hahnemann’s clear claim that homeopathy
can cure syphilis and malaria. Syphilis had been well curbed by modern medicine, but a simple
cure for malaria would certainly be welcomed by the world, even today. This alone would be sure
to bring homeopathy in from the cold.
We also get Hahnemann’s clear indication that higher potency = stronger effect.
§ 277
For the same reason, and because a medicine, provided the dose of it was sufficiently small, is all the more
salutary and almost marvellously efficacious the more accurately homoeopathic its selection has been, a medicine
whose selection has been accurately homoeopathic must be all the more salutary the more its dose is reduced
to the degree of minuteness appropriate for a gentle remedial effect.
§ 278
Here the question arises, what is this most suitable degree of minuteness for sure and gentle remedial effect;
how small, in other words, must be the dose of each individual medicine, homoeopathically selected for a case
of disease, to effect the best cure? To solve this problem, and to determine for every particular medicine, what
dose of it will suffice for homoeopathic therapeutic purposes and yet be so minute that the gentlest and most
rapid cure may be thereby obtained - to solve this problem is, as may easily be conceived, not the work off
theoretical speculation; not by fine-spun reasoning, not by specious sophistry can we expect to obtain the solution
of this problem. It is just as impossible as to tabulate in advance all imaginable cases. Pure experiment,
careful observation of the sensitiveness of each patient, and accurate experience can alone determine this in
each individual case; and it were absurd to adduce the large doses of unsuitable (allopathic) medicines of the
old system, which do not touch the diseased side of the organism homoeopathically, but only attack the parts
unaffected by the disease, in opposition to what pure experience pronounces respecting the smallness of the
doses required for homoeopathic cures.
§ 279
This pure experience shows UNIVERSALLY, that if the disease do not manifestly depend on a considerable deterioration
of an important viscus (even though it belong to the chronic and complicated diseases), and if during
the treatment all other alien medicinal influences are kept away from the patients, the dose of the
homoeopathically selected and highly potentized remedy for the beginning of treatment of an important, especially
chronic disease can never be prepared so small that it shall not be stronger than the natural disease and
shall not be able to overpower it, at least in part and extinguish it from the sensation of the principle of life and
thus make a beginning of a cure.
§ 280
The dose of the medicine that continues serviceable without producing new troublesome symptoms is to be
continued while gradually ascending, so long as the patient with general improvement, begins to feel in a mild
degree the return of one or several old original complaints. This indicates an approaching cure through a gradual
ascending of the moderate doses modified each time by succussion (§ 247). It indicates that the vital principal
no longer needs to be affected by the similar medicinal disease in order to lose the sensation of the natural
disease (§ 148). It indicates that the life principle now free from the natural disease begins to suffer only
something of the medicinal disease hitherto known as homoeopathic aggravation.
§ 281
In order to be convinced of this, the patient is left without any medicine for eight, ten of fifteen days, meanwhile
giving him only some powders of sugar of milk. If the few last complaints are due to the medicine simulating
the former original disease symptoms, then these complaints will disappear in a few days or hours. If
during these days without medicine, while continuing good hygienic regulations nothing more of the original
disease is seen, he is probably cured. But if in the later days traces of the former morbid symptoms should
show themselves, they are remnants of the original disease not wholly extinguished, which must be treated
with renewed higher potencies of the remedy as directed before. If a cure is to follow, the first small doses
must likewise be again gradually raised higher, but less and more slowly in patients where considerable irritability
is evident than in those of less susceptibility, where the advance to higher dosage may be more rapid.
There are patients whose impressionability compared to that of the insusceptible ones is like the ratio as 1000
to 1.
Here we may see the reason for the present uncertainty among homeopaths about dosage. The
above instructions are complex and difficult to follow in practice. Notice that Hahnemann uses placebo.
His procedure is very time-consuming and requires many consultations, and, since it all
hinges on describing perceived symptoms, very subjective. Notice how even Hahnemann, who is
wont declaring any and all of his theories laws of nature, and his results “indubitable”, now says
“he is probably cured”.
§ 282
It would be a certain sign that the doses were altogether too large, if during treatment, especially in chronic
disease, the first dose should bring forth a so-called homoeopathic aggravation, that is, a marked increase of
the original morbid symptoms first discovered and in the same way every repeated dose (§ 247) however
modified somewhat by shaking before its administration (i.e., more highly dynamized).1
1 The rule to commence the homoeopathic treatment if chronic diseases with the smallest possible doses and
only gradually to augment them is subject to a notable exception in the treatment of the three great miasms
while they still effloresce on the skin, i.e., recently erupted itch, the untouched chancre (on the sexual organs,
labia, mouth or lips, and so forth), and the figwarts. These not only tolerate, but indeed require, from the very
beginning large doses of their specific remedies of ever higher and higher degrees of dynamization daily (possibly
also several times daily). If this course be pursued, there is no danger to be feared as is the case in the
treatment of diseases hidden within, that the excessive dose while it extinguishes the disease, initiates and by
continued usage possible produces a chronic medicinal disease. During external manifestations of these three
miasms this is not the case; for from the daily progress of their treatment it can be observed and judged to
what degree the large dose withdraws the sensation of the disease from the vital principle day by day; for none
of these three can be cured without giving the physician the conviction through their disappearance that there
is no longer any further need of these medicines.
Reiterations plus special cases. Hahnemann, who is against naming specific diseases, nevertheless
names three specific diseases that must be treated in a way exactly opposite than other diseases,
dosage-wise.
Since diseases in general are but dynamic attacks upon the life principle and nothing material - no
materia peccans - as their basis (as the old school in its delusion has fabulated for a thousand
years and treated the sick accordingly to their ruin) there is also in these cases nothing material to
take away, nothing to smear away, to burn or tie or cut away, without making the patient endlessly
sicker and more incurable (Chron. Dis. Part 1), than he was before local treatment of these
three miasms was instituted. The dynamic, inimical principle exerting its influence upon the vital
energy is the essence of these external signs of the inner malignant miasms that can be extinguished
solely by the action of a homoeopathic medicine upon the vital principle which affects it in
a similar but stronger manner and thus extracts the sensation of internal and external spirit-like
(conceptual) disease enemy in such a way that it no longer exists for the life principle (for the organism)
and thus releases the patient of his illness and he is cured.
Experience, however, teaches that the itch, plus its external manifestations, as well as the chancre,
together with the inner venereal miasm, can and must be cured only by means of specific medicines
taken internally. But the figwarts, if they have existed for some time without treatment, have
need for their perfect cure, the external application of their specific medicines as well as their internal
use at the same time.
Reiterating his claim that diseases have no material reason. Actually a rather strange idea, that
living organisms should be endowed with a mechanism that can make them ill, all by itself. And
another exception: Hahnemann is otherwise adamant that local treatment is bad, but the specific
disease of figwarts appears to be an exception.
§ 283
In order to work wholly according to nature, the true healing artist will prescribe the accurately chosen
homoeopathic medicine most suitable in all respects in so small a dose on account of this alone. For should he
be misled by human weakness to employ an unsuitable medicine, the disadvantage of its wrong relation to the
disease would be so small that the patient could through his own vital powers and by means of early opposition
(§ 249) of the correctly chosen remedy according to symptom similarly (and this also in the smallest dose) rapidly
extinguish and repair it.
§ 284
Besides the tongue, mouth and stomach, which are most commonly affected by the administration of medicine,
the nose and respiratory organs are receptive of the action of medicines in fluid form by means of olfaction and
inhalation through the mouth. But the whole remaining skin of the body clothed with epidermis, is adapted to
the action of medicinal solutions, especially if the inunction is connected with simultaneous internal administration.
1
1 The power of medicines acting upon the infant through the milk of the mother or wet nurse is wonderfully
helpful. Every disease in a child yields to the rightly chosen homoeopathic medicines given in moderate doses to
the nursing mother and so administered, is more easily and certainly utilized by these new world-citizens than
is possible in later years. Since most infants usually have imparted to them psora through the milk of the
nurse, if they do not already possess it through heredity from the mother, they may be at the same time protected
antipsorically by means of the milk of the nurse rendered medicinally in this manner. But the case of
mothers in their (first) pregnancy by means of a mild antipsoric treatment, especially with sulphur dynamizations
prepared according to the directions in this edition (§ 270), is indispensable in order to destroy the psora -
that producer of most chronic diseases - which is given them hereditarily; destroy it both within themselves and
in the foetus, thereby protecting posterity in advance. This is true of pregnant women thus treated; they have
given birth to children usually more healthy and stronger, to the astonishment of everybody. A new confirmation
of the great truth of the psora theory discovered by me.
§ 285
In this way, the cure of very old disease may be furthered by the physician applying externally, rubbing it in the
back, arms, extremities, the same medicine he gives internally and which showed itself curatively. In doing so,
he must avoid parts subject to pain or spasm or skin eruption.1
A couple of interesting claims. It seems that homeopathic medicine might be given externally, as a
supplement, and that it can be applied to an infant through nursing.
1 From this fact may be explained those marvellous cures, however infrequent, where chronic deformed patients,
whose skin nevertheless was sound and clean, were cured quickly and permanently after a few baths
whose medicinal constituents (by, chance) were homoeopathically related. On the other hand, the mineral baths
very often brought on increased injury with patients, whose eruptions on the skin were suppressed. After a
brief period of well-being, the life principle allowed the inner, uncured malady to appear elsewhere, more important
for life and health.
At times, instead, the ocular nerve would become paralyzed and produce amaurosis, sometimes the crystalline
lens would become clouded, hearing lost, mania or suffocating asthma would follow or an apoplexy would end
the sufferings of the deluded patient.
Taking homeopathic credit from another system, and discrediting it at the same time, attributing,
in good homeopathic style, anything bad that might happen to the patient later to the competing
system.
A fundamental principle of the homoeopathic physician (which distinguishes him from every physician of all
older schools) is this, that he never employs for any patient a medicine, whose effects on the healthy human
has not previously been carefully proven and thus made known to him (§§ 20,21). To prescribe for the sick on
mere conjecture of some possible usefulness for some similar disease or from hearsay "that a remedy has
helped in such and such a disease" - such conscienceless venture the philanthropic homoeopathist will leave to
the allopath. A genuine physician and practitioner or our art will therefore never send the sick to any of the
numerous mineral baths, because almost all are unknown so far as their accurate, positive effects on the
healthy human organism is concerned, and when misused, must be counted among the most violent and dangerous
drugs. In this way, out of a thousand sent to the most celebrated of these baths by ignorant physicians
allopathically uncured and blindly sent there perhaps one or two are cured by chance more often return only
apparently cured and the miracle is proclaimed aloud. Hundreds, meanwhile sneak quietly away, more or less
worse and the rest remain to prepare themselves for their eternal resting place, a fact that is verified by the
presence of numerous well-filled graveyards surrounding the most celebrated of these spas.*
* A true homoeopathic physician, one who never acts without correct fundamental principles, never gambles
with the life of the sick entrusted to him as in a lottery where the winner is in the ratio of 1 to 500 or 1000
(blanks here consisting of aggravation or death), will never expose any one of his patients to such danger and
send him for good luck to a mineral bath, as is done so frequently by allopaths in order to get rid of the sick in
an acceptable manner spoiled by him or others.
Almost an entire paragraph dedicated to denouncing and slandering mineral baths. The funny thing
is that I have met homeopaths that were proponents of mineral baths.
§ 286
The dynamic force of minerals magnets, electricity and galvanism act no less powerfully upon our life principle
and they are not less homoeopathic than the properly so-called medicines which neutralize disease by taking
them through the mouth, or by rubbing them on the skin or by olfaction. There may be diseases, especially
diseases of sensibility and irritability, abnormal sensations, and involuntary muscular movements which may be
cured by those means. But the more certain way of applying the last two as well as that of the so-called electromagnetic
lies still very much in the dark to make homoeopathic use of them. So far both electricity and Galvanism
have been used only for palliation to the great damage of the sick. The positive, pure action of both
upon the healthy human body have until the present time been but little tested.
Considering his previous analogies with magnetism, and his view on electromagnetic powers, it is
not surprising that Hahnemann sees medical potential here. In his time, electricity was fairly well
explored, but its basic character was unknown, and its affects on the body was only superficially
researched. So, sensibly, he states that it might have uses, but that not enough is known.
§ 287
The powers of the magnet for healing purposes can be employed with more certainty according to the positive
effects detailed in the Materia Medica Pura under north and south pole of a powerful magnetic bar. Though both
poles are alike powerful, they nevertheless oppose each other in the manner of their respective action. The
doses may be modified by the length of time of contact with one or the other pole, according as the symptoms
of either north or south pole are indicated. As antidote to a too violent action the application of a plate of polished
zinc will suffice.
On the other hand, he goes all the way on magnet healing. Strangely, this seems not widely
adopted by modern homeopaths.
§ 288
I find it yet necessary to allude here to animal magnetism, as it is termed, or rather Mesmerism (as it should be
called in deference to Mesmer, its first founder) which differs so much in its nature from all other therapeutic
agents. This curative force, often so stupidly denied and disdained for a century, acts in different ways. It is a
marvellous, priceless gift of God to mankind by means of which the strong will of a well intentioned person
upon a sick one by contact and even without this and even at some distance, can bring the vital energy of the
healthy mesmerizer endowed with this power into another person dynamically (just as one of the poles of a
powerful magnetic rod upon a bar of steel).
It acts in part by replacing in the sick whose vital force within the organism is deficient here and there, in part
also in other parts where the vital force has accumulated too much and keeps up irritating nervous disorders it
turns it aside, diminishes and distributes it equally and in general extinguishes the morbid condition of the life
principle of the patient and substitutes in its place the normal of the mesmerist acting powerfully upon him, for
instance, old ulcers, amaurosis, paralysis of single organs and so forth. Many rapid apparent cures performed in
all ages, by mesmerizers endowed with great natural power, belong to this class. The effect of communicated
human power upon the whole human organism was most brilliantly shown, in the resuscitation of persons who
had lain some time apparently dead, by the most powerful sympathetic will of a man in full vigor of vital energy,
1 and of this kind of resurrection history records many undeniable examples.
If the mesmerizing person of either sex capable at the same time of a good-natured enthusiasm (even its degeneration
into bigotry, fanaticism, mysticism or philanthropic dreaming) will be empowered all the more with
this philanthropic self-sacrificing performance to direct exclusively the power of his commanding good will to
the recipient requiring his help and at the same time to concentrate these, he may at times perform apparent
miracles.
1 Especially of one of such persons, of whom there are not many, who, along with great kindness of disposition
and perfect bodily powers, possesses but a very moderate desire for sexual intercourse, which it would give him
very little trouble wholly to suppress, in whom, consequently, all the fine vital spirits that would otherwise be
employed in the production of the semen, are ready to be communicated to others, by touching them and powerfully
exerting the will. Some powerful mesmerisers, with whom I have become aquatinted, had all this peculiar
character.
Therapeutically, mesmerism is equal to hypnosis. Perhaps it is not surprising that Hahnemann
would think of this as a possible method of cure, but obviously his claims are unfounded.
§ 289
All the above-mentioned methods of practicing mesmerism depend upon influx of more or less vital force into
the patient, and hence are termed positive mesmerism.1 An opposite mode of employing mesmerism, however,
as it produces just the contrary effect, deserves to be termed negative mesmerism. To this belong the passes
which are used to rouse from the somnambulic sleep, as also all the manual processes known by the names of
soothing and ventilating. This discharge by means of negative mesmerism of the vital force accumulated to
excess in individual parts of the system of undebilitated persons is most surely and simply performed by making
a very rapid motion or the flat extended hand, held parallel to, and about an inch distant from the body,
from the top of the head to the tips of the toes.2 The more rapidly this pass is made, so much the more effectually
will the discharge be effected. Thus, for instance, in the case where a previously healthy woman,3 from
the sudden suppression of her catamenia by a violent mental shock, lies to all appearance dead, the vital force
which is probably accumulated in the precordial region, will, by such a rapid negative pass, be discharged and
its equilibrium throughout the whole organism restored. So that the resuscitation generally follows, immediately.
4 In like manner, a gentle, less rapid, negative pass diminishes the excessive restlessness and sleeplessness
accompanied with anxiety sometimes produced in very irritable persons by a too powerful positive pass,
etc.
1 When I here speak of the decided and certain curative power of positive mesmerism, I most assuredly do not
mean that abuse of it, where, by repeated passes of this kind, continued for half an hour or a whole hour at a
time, and, even day after day, performed on weak, nervous patients, that monstrous revolution of the whole
human system is effected which is termed somnambulism, wherein the human being is ravished from the world
of sense and seems to belong more to the world of spirits - a highly unnatural and dangerous state, by means
of which it has not infrequently been attempted to cure chronic diseases.
2 It is a well known rule that a person who is either to be positively or negatively mesmerised, should not wear
silk on any part of the body.
3 Hence a negative pass, especially if it be very rapid, is extremely injurious to a delicate person affected with a
chronic ailment and deficient in vital force.
4 A strong country lad, ten years of age, received in the morning, on account of slight indisposition, from a professed
female mesmeriser, several very powerful passes with the points of both thumbs, from the pit of the
stomach along the lower edge of the ribs, and he instantly grew deathly pale, and fell into such a state of unconsciousness
and immobility that no effort could arouse him, and he was almost given up for dead. I made his
eldest brother give him a very rapid negative pass from the crown of the head over the body to the feet, and in
one instance he recovered his consciousness and became lively and well.
Getting out on a limb here, if you ask me. Weird, absolute statements, like about not wearing silk,
do not reinforce any impression we might have left of Hahnemann as a serious scientist.
§ 290
Here belongs also the so-called massage of vigorous good-natured person given to a chronic invalid, who,
though cured, still suffers from loss of flesh, weakness of digestion and lack of sleep due to slow convalescence.
The muscles of the limbs, breast and back, separately grasped and moderately pressed and kneaded arouse the
life principle to reach and restore the tone of the muscles and blood and lymph vessels. The mesmeric influences
of this procedure is the chief feature and it must not be used to excess in patients still hypersensitive.
Well, simple massage…..
§ 291
Baths of pure water prove themselves partly palliative, partly as homoeopathic serviceable aids in restoring
health in acute diseases as well as in convalescence of cured chronic patients with proper consideration of the
conditions of the convalescent and the temperature of the bath, its duration and repetition. But even if well
applied, they may bring only physically beneficial changes in the sick body, in themselves they are no true
medicine. The lukewarm baths at 25 to 27° serve to arouse the slumbering sensibility of fibre in the apparent
dead (frozen, drowned, suffocated) which benumbed the sensation of the nerves. Though only palliative, still
they often prove themselves sufficiently active, especially when given in conjunction with coffee and rubbing
with the hands. They may give homoeopathic aid in cases where the irritability is very unevenly distributed and
accumulated too unevenly in some organs as is the case in certain hysteric spasms and infantile convulsions. In
the same way, cold baths 10 to 6° in persons cured medically of chronic diseases and with deficiency of vital
heat, act as an homoeopathic aid. By instantaneous and later with repeated immersions they act as a palliative
restorative of the tone of the exhausted fibre. For this purpose, such baths are to be used for more than momentary
duration, rather for minutes and of gradually lowered temperature, they are a palliative, which, since it
acts only physically has no connection with the disadvantage of a reverse action to be feared afterwards, as
takes place with dynamic medicinal palliatives.
Warm baths may surely be beneficial to some (we should remember that in Hahnemann’s time, the
average person did not take daily baths). To attribute them to homeopathy, seems a bit farfetched.

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