NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE Bethesda, Maryland Gift of The National Center for Homeopathy ^Maesimund fxmninq yanos Library ,0^-S^ 19! ^ 74 &* rOAlC3EO ^ Gift of "3* .& ■& L* Ul_. lx.^*UL-QJU LIBRARY AMERICAN FOUNDATION FOR HOMOEOPATHY v SAMUEL HAHNEMANN'S OEGANON OF HOMEOPATHIC MEDICINE. SVDE SAP EBB. FOURTH AMERICAN EDITION, WITH IMPROVEMENTS AND ADDITIONS FBOH THE LAST QEBMAN EDITION, AND DR. C. HERING'S INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. NEW-YORK: PUBLISHED BY WM. RADDE, 550 PEARL-STREET; Philadelphia : F. E. Bcericke, 635 Arch-street \ London : Turner & Co., and James Epps. 1869. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1859, by WILLIAM RADDE, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New-York. HENRY LODWM, Printer and Stereotype*, 89 Centre-st. NLM > SOME REMARKS FOB THE FOURTH AMERICAN EDITION OF HAHNEMANN'S OKGANON. It is now twenty-three years since the first edition of the Organon of Medicine appeared in this country. Since that period, the number of homoeopathic physicians in the United States has more than doubled every four years. This increase has been gradual, sometimes more, and at others less rapid, but always without inter- ruption ; and at no time, neither in this country nor in Europe, has there been any retrogression from the ground gained. However, there have never been wanting those who asserted that homoeopathy was on the decline, and indeed was dead; which reminds us of the old adage, that when a man is said to be dead, he has usually the promise of a long life. Other opponents have entertained great hopes, when they have learned that the adherents of our school are divided into different parties. This is like the friends of royalty in Europe, predicting the downfall of republican institutions in this country, because there are here various political parties. Among so laro-e a number of physicians, it is quite natural that different opinions should be entertained and promulgated, and even that partizan conflicts should arise. But against the stubborn adherents Of the old-school doctrines, these various parties stand united as the varied wings of one common army. All homoeopathic physicians are united under the banner of the great law of cure, similia similibus curantur, however they may differ in regard to the theoretical explanation of that law, or the extent to which it may be applied. All homoeopathic physicians also acknowledge that provings upon the healthy are indispensable in ascertaining the unknown curative powers of drugs. And, finally, all homoeopaths concur in giving but one medicine at a time, never mixing different drugs together, under the absurd expectation that each will act according to their dictum. This is the glorious tri-color of our school, which will make the circuit of the world and in these we are as the heart of one man. 3 4 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. It is not a little gratifying to find that all the recent discoveries in chemistry and physiology serve to confirm and establish the prin ciples of our system, while they contradict the usual pathological opinions of the day. The wonderful discoveries in pathological ana- tomy, in ascertaining the material and chemical changes produced by disease and medicines, while they are a valuable addition to our knowledge, serve only to engender in the old school such doctrines as " young physic/' according to which the patient is scientifically in- formed of the nature of his disorder, and gravely left to the efforts Oi nature. Even the water-cure is only t7J% servant of the doctrine oi Hahnemann, cleansing and renovating the house to be occupied by us While the various dissensions among the old school are favoring the extension of homoeopathy, the varied diversities among ourselves serve only to develop and advance our principles. What important influence can it exert whether a homoeopath adopt the theoretical opinions of Hahnemann or not, so long as he holds fast the practical rule of the master, and the materia medica of our school ? What influence can it have whether a physician adopt or reject the psora- theory, so long as he always selects the most similar medicine possible 1 Even in the larger or smaller doses, the masses or the potences, allowing that there is a great difference between them ac- cording to the testimony of the friends of each, yet all this difference dwindles into insignificance when we compare the results of homoeo- pathic with that of common allopathic practice. Hence we may console ourselves, leaving to farther researches to confirm or rectify Hahnemann's theory of potences, and to establish a rule without ex- ceptions, according to which the lower or the higher potences shall be the most appropriate in each individual case. There will always be a large number of physicians who either do not understand, or will not learn how to select for each particular case the one only proper medicine, and such will always find it more comfortable to employ massive doses. There will always be, perhaps, as large a number on the other hand, who will, by-and-by, know how to hit the nail upon the head, and they well learn to prefer the high potences. Even Hahnemann himself required more than a score of years to learn this. As through war we come to the possession of peace, so in the world of science, through conflict and trial we come to the possession of truth. It was an old motto of Luther's : " Lass die Geister auf einander platzen." Philadelphia CONSTANTINE HERING. PREFACE TO THE FIRST BRITISH EDITION. An accidental interview with a Russian physician, in the year 1828, made me acquainted for the first time with the medical doctrine of homoeopathy; the principle of which is, that certain medicines, when administered internally in a healthy state of the system, produce certain effects, and that the same medicines are to be used when symptoms .similar to those which they give rise to occur in disease. This doctrine, directly opposite to that which hitherto formed the basis of medical practice in these countries, attracted my attention. I immediately procured Hahnemann's Materia Medica Pura, in which the doctrine is partially explained, with the view of investigating the system experimentally, and reporting my observations thereon, free from theory, prejudice, or party. The first inquiry was, whether the proposition, similia similibus curantur was true. This investigation was confined to a single substance at a time. To ascertain the effects of Sulphate of Quinine, healthy individuals were selected, to whom grain-doses of the medicine were administered three times a day After using it for some days, stomach-sickness, loss of appetite, a sense of cold along the course of the spine, rigor, heat of skin, and general perspiration succeeded. Effects similar to these are often observed when this medicine is injudiciously selected in the treat- ment of disease. It sometimes happens that the symptoms of ague are aggravated by the prolonged use of Sulphate of Quinia, and, soon after it is withdrawn, the disease gradually subsides. The result of experiments and observations on this remedy elucidate its homoeo- pathic action. Mercurial preparations, when administered internally, produce symptoms local and constitutional, so closely resembling the poison of lues venerea that medical practitioners, who have spent many years in the investigation of syphilis, find it very difficult—nay, in some instances impossible (guided by appearances)—-to distinguish one disease from the other. Of all the medicines used in the treat- ment of lues, Mercury is the only one that has stood the test of time and experience. Let us then compare the effects of syphilis with those of Mercury. The venereal poison produces on the skin pus- 5 6 PREFACE TO THE FIRST BRITISH EDITION. tules, scales, and tubercles. Mercury produces directly the same defoedations of the skin. Syphilis excites inflammation of the perios teum, and caries of the bones. Mercury does the same. Inflam- mation of the iris from lues is an every-day occurrence; the same disease is a very frequent consequence of Mercury. Ulceration of the throat is a common symptom in syphilis ; the same affection re- sults from Mercury. Ulcers on the organs of reproduction are the result of both the poison and the remedy, and furnish another proof of the doctrine similia similibus. Nitric-acid is generally recommended in cutaneous diseases; the internal use of this remedy, in a very dilute form, produces scaly eruptions over the surface of the body; and the external application of a solution, in the proportion of one part acid to one hundred and twenty-eight parts of water, will produce inflammation and> ulceration of the skin. These observations would lead to the conclusion that Nitric-acid cures cutaneous diseases by the faculty it possesses of producing a similar disease of the skin. Nitrate of Potash, adminis- tered internally, in small doses, produces a frequent desire to pass water, accompanied with pain and heat. When this state of the urinary system exists as a consequence of disease, or the application of a blister, a very dilute solution of the same remedy has been found beneficial. The ordinary effects of Hyoscyamus-niger are, vertigo, delirium, stupefaction, and somnolency. Where one or other of these diseased states exists, it yields to small doses of the tincture of this plant. The internal use of Hyoscyamus is followed by mental aber- ration, the leading features of which are jealousy and irascibility When these hallucinations exist, this remedy is indicated. Opium, in general, causes drowsiness, torpor, and deep sleep, and yet this remedy, in small doses, removes these symptoms when they occur in disease. Sulphur is a specific against itch; notwithstanding which, when it is administered to healthy individuals, it frequently excites a pustular eruption, resembling itch in every particular. These observations corroborate the statements of our author as to the value and importance of. homoeopathy; and were not the limits of a preface too confined, I could bring forward the actual experi- ments from which these deductions have been drawn. On the subject of small doses of medicines, a few observations will suffice. A mixture 'composed of one drop of Hydrocyanic-acid and eight ounces of water, administered in a drachm dose, has produced ver- tigo and anxious breathing. Vomiting has followed the use of the sixteenth of a grain of Tartar-emetic ; narcotism, the twentieth of a PREFACE TO THE FIRST BRITISH EDITION. 7 grain of Muriate of Morphia; and spirit of Ammonia, in doses of one drop, acts on the system as a stimulant. On the homoeopathic attenuation of medicines, many are skeptical, and presume that the quantity of the article extant in the dose, cannot produce a medicinal effect. I refer to the pages of the Or- ganon for an elucidation of this proposition, and will relate an ex- periment which may serve to explain the degree of dilution sub- stances are capable of. One grain of Nitrate of Silver, dissolved in 1560 grains of distilled water, to which were added two grains of Muriatic-acid, a grey precipitate of Chloride of Silver was evident in every part of the liquor. One grain of Iodine, dissolved in a drachm of alcohol, and mixed with the same quantity ofcwater as in the pre- ceding experiment, to which were added two grains of starch, dis- solved in an ounce of water, caused an evident blue tint in the solution. In these experiments, the grain of the Nitrate of Silver and Iodine must have been divided into 15^61) of a grain. A few particulars connected with the discoverer and founder of the homoeopathic system of medicine cannot but prove interesting to the readers of this volume. Samuel Hahnemann was born in 1755, at Misnia, in Upper Saxony. He exhibited at an early age traits of a superior genius ; his school education being completed, he applied himself to the study of natural philosophy and natural history, and afterwards prosecuted the study of medicine at Leipsic and other universities. A most accurate observer, a skillful experimenter, and an indefatigable searcher after truth, he appeared formed by nature for the investigation and improvement of medical science. On com- mencing the study of' medicine, he soon became disgusted with the mass of contradictory assertions and theories which then existed. He found everything in this department obscure, hypothetical, and vague, and resolved to abandon the medical profession. Having been previously engaged in the study of chemistry, he determined on translating into his native language the best English and French works on the subject. Whilst engaged in translating the Materia Medica of the illustrious Cullen, in 1790, in which the febrifuge virtues of Cinchona Bark are described, he became fired witn the desire of ascertaining its mode of action. Whilst in the enjoyment of the most robust health, he commenced the use of this substance, and in a short time was attacked with all the symptoms of inter- mittent fever, similar in every respect to those which that medicine is known to cure. Being struck with the identity of the two diseases he immediately divined the great truth which has become the foun dation of the new medical doctrine of homoeopathy. 8 PREFACE TO THE FIRST BRITISH EDITION. Not contented with one experiment, he tried the virtues of medi- cines on his own person, and on that of others. In his investigations he arrived at this conclusion : that the substance employed possessed an inherent power of exciting in healthy subjects the same symptoms which it is said to cure in the sick. He compared the assertions of ancient and modern physicians upon the properties of poisonous sub- stances with the result of his own experiments, and found them to coincide in every respect; and upon these deductions he brought forth his doctrine of homoeopathy. Taking this law for a guide, he recommenced the practice of medicine, with every prospect of his labors being ultimately crowned with success. In 1796 he published his first dissertation on homoeopathy in Hufeland's Journal. A treatise on the virtues of medicines appeared in 1805, and the Organon in 1810. Hahnemann commenced as a public medical teacher in Leipsic, in 1811, where, with his pupils, he zealously investigated the effects of medicines on^the living body, which formed the basis of the Materia Medica Pura, which appeared during the same year Like many other discoverers in medicine, the author of the Organon has been persecuted with the utmost . rigor; and in 1820 he quitted his native country in disgust. In retirement he was joined by several of his pupils, who formed them- selves into a society for the purpose of prosecuting the homoeopathic system of physic, and reporting their observations thereon. Several fasciculi detailing their labors have since been published. Of the doctrine of homoeopathy generally, I have little more to add in this place; time will develop the truth or fallacy of the principle on which it is founded; but, in the meantime, let us not lose sight of the fact that this new system of physic is spreading throughout the continent of Europe with the rapidity of lightning. Germany, Austria, Russia, and Poland have already done homage to the doctrine, and physicians have been appointed to make a specific trial of its effects, the results of which are unequivocally acknowledged to be of a favorable nature. The writings of the illustrious Hahnemann have appeared in five different languages, independent of the present version of his Organon ; and in France alone, a translation of this work, from the pen of A. J. L. Jourdan, member of the Academie Royale de Medecine, has' reached a fourth edition. Convinced, from reflection and observation, of the value of homoeo- pathy, the first step in the propagation and dissemination of this doctrine, in Britain, was to obtain an English version of the Organon. SAMUEL STRATTEN. < Doblin, June 14th, 1833. PREFACE TO THE FIRST AMERICAN EDITION. First impressions commonly determine our judgment of books as well as men. If, on a first interview, a person be repulsive to us, and those who for years have had familiar intercourse with him, admit that we are excusable for first impressions, but nevertheless assure us that he is possessed of'very valuable qualities, and that a nearer acquaintance with him may be useful to us,—when, in addi- tion, our informants give us a key to a more correct judgment, we are no longer justifiable in maintaining our original impressions. Still more would our opinions be influenced, if, before seeing the person we were furnished in advance with a short and impartial representation of his character by one who knew him intimately. If this rule of judgment be applicable to persons, wherefore should it not apply to books ? The Organon contains much that is peculiar and different from the views hitherto entertained by the prevailing school of medicine. Most readers of the medical profession, therefore, conceive prejudices against it, and fall into the vulgar error of rejecting the whole, merely because they do not justly regard it as a whole,—they reject the main propositions, because they are offended at the subordinate. The reader needs no elaborate introduction to the following work, and it is requisite, perhaps, only to apprise him of the different classes into which its several paragraphs may be divided; and this being done, we shall submit each separate class to his own judgment The entire contents of the Organon may be easily arranged under 10 PREFACE TO THE FIRST AMERICAN EDITION. the four following divisions, which,-indeed, do not occur in the order in which they are here given, but they might easily have been desig- nated in accordance to it, by causing them to be severally printed in- a different type. They consist: 1. Of discoveries—experimental propositions, or the results of actual experiment; 2. Of directions or instructions ; 3. Of theoretical and philosophical illustrations; 4. Of defences and accusations. I.—OF DISCOVERIES. Among men of deliberate and acute reflection, no difference of opinion can exist relative to the truth of a discovery which rests upon the basis of actual experiment. When the author appeals to such experiments, they must be led to a repetition of them, and not oppose their own opinions to the dictates of experience; in fine, they have no other way in forming a judgment than that of accurate and careful experiment. It-may be said that every charlatan, in extolling his nostrums, in like manner appeals to experience, and no one is required for that reason to investigate the merits of his compounds ; but it will not be denied that, although the person of the quack may deserve little.for- bearance, yet the remedy with which he dupes the public may, in some cases, prove beneficial. The old school has received many remedies, Mercury among others, from the hands of the quack. But, in the Organon, experience is not referred to for the purpose of lauding any individual remedy, far more, it has relation to an entire method of cure. None but a vulgar dealer in calumny of the grosser sort would attempt to degrade Hahnemann to a level with the charlatan; because he promulgates his views and the peculiari- ties of his method as a learned physician, and in a manner that is sanctioned by custom, and fully recognized in the history of medi- cine. But his method, as we have already intimated, appeals to expe- rience. Not to mention the example of Brown, we need only refer PREFACE TO THE FIRST AMERICAN EDITION. 11 to that of Broussais, and the reports received strikingly in favor of his doctrines, or even to the contra-stimulus of the Italians, which incessantly appeals to the same experience as the test of its value. It is, indeed, desirable that every learned physician—professcfrs, hospital physicians, and others in prominent stations—should care- fully study, and, so far as the experiments are innocuous, prove his new method; nay, Hahnemann and his adherents often and ardently desire that every physician would learn, investigate, and prove ho- moeopathy for himself. But Iwmxmpaihy is not only a new method, but much more. This method does not rest upon new views, like every other hitherto promulgated, but upon new discoveries, which appertain to tlie departments of natural philosophy, the natural sciences, physio- logy, and biology. The doctrine that every peculiar substance—every mineral, plant, animal, in fact every part of them, or every preparation derived from a preceding one, produces a series of peculiar effects upon the human organism, manifestly belongs to the natural sciences, and only so far to the materia medica as the latter calls these properties into re quisition. But it is a science in itself—a science which treats of the effect of a diversity of substances upon the human frame. Whether such a science, in point of fact, be capable of formation, and whether it have any value, can be determined only by experiment. It were equally foolish to deny this without trial, as it was formerly to deny without exploring, the way which Columbus opened to the West. It would be inexcusable, in the present condition of the materia medica __confessedly imperfect, and deficient in all the attributes of a science, to despise this new way of Hahnemann, before knowing, by careful experiment, that it conducts to nothing better. The doctrine of the preparation of the remedies into the so-called dilutions, belongs to natural philosophy, in common with the doc- trines of magnetism, electricity, and galvanism. Nor is it more a subject of wonder than the latter, except that these sooner came 12 PREFACE TO THE FIRST AMERICAN EDITION. under investigation by the natural philosopher. The repetition oi the new electro-magnetic experiments requires great accuracy; those concerning the operation of minute doses require just as much, nay, even more. To deny the results of" the electro-magnetic ex- periments, previous to repeating them, were ridiculous, and it is equally so to deny the results of these. But no hasty, superficial, partial, or wholly perverted experiments must be instituted. The doctrine that such dilutions or potences are capable of curing diseases according to the law, " similia similibus," is a pro- position which belongs to biology, and there finds its confirmation; it likewise can only be investigated by experiment, and cannot be estimated without it. The cautious investigator will not pass judgment upon all these discoveries, until he shall have performed a series of rigorous experiments. Then only will he be prepared either to reject or accept the method founded thereon, or, at least, learn the useful part of it. II.—DIRECTIONS. These appertain to the method of cure, are derived from the long-continued application of the law previously referred to, and acquire their principal value from its truth. No one can judge of them but he who has tested the truth of the experimental pro- positions, and, in doing so, adhered to these directions. By this means only can he become convinced of their great value, which is entirely lost on those who deny the discoveries. We enumerate under this head, directions for the examination of the sick, for the preparation of the medicines, for trying them on the healthy subject, for the selection of the remedies, dietetics, and directions for the psychical treatment. in.—ILLUSTRATIONS. Hahnemann has appended certain theories to the laws of nature discovered by him, by which these laws are illustrated and brought PREFACE TO THE FIRST AMERICAN EDITION. 13 into unison with other laws already acknowledged, or with other theories received as true. This has never been reckoned a subject of reproach to any discoverer. Man will and must seek to illustrate the phenomena which he observes, and bring individual parts into coaptation—the new into harmony with that previously known. In this endeavor, not only is he liable to err, but actually does err in the great majority of cases; accordingly, few hypotheses and at- tempts at explanation have endured long, and it is a fact of daily acknowledgment that one hypothesis gives place to another in all sciences. Columbus himself entertained numerous conjectures which time has verified or overthrown. Whether the theories of Hahne- mann are destined to endure a longer or a shorter space, whether they be the best or not, time only can determine; be it as it may, however, it is a matter of minor importance. For myself, I am generally considered as a disciple and adherent of Hahnemann, and I do indeed declare that I am one among the most enthu- siastic in doing homage to his greatness; but, nevertheless, I declare also that, since my first acquaintance with homoeopathy (in the year 1821), down to the present day, I have never yet accepted a single theory in the Organon as it is there promulgated. I feel no aversion to acknowledge this, even to the venerable sage himself. It is the genuine Hahnemannean spirit totally to dis- regard all theories, even those of one's own fabrication, when they are in opposition to the results of pure experience. All theories and hypotheses have no positive weight whatever, only so far as they lead to new experiments, and afford a better survey of the results of those already made. Whoever, therefore, will assail the theories of Hahnemann, or even altogether reject them, is at perfect liberty to do so; but let him not imagine that he has hereby accomplished a memorable achievement. In every respect, it is an affair of little import- ance. 14 PREFACE TO THE FIRST AMERICAN EDITION. IV.—DEFENCES. Opinions upon this head are also things of secondary considera tion, inasmuch as the entire polemical matter is of subordinate estimation in forming a judgment concerning new discoveries. Had Hahnemann the right to defend himself as he has done, and thereby promote the progress of his doctrine, or had he not ? We cannot judge concerning it, but justly commit the decision of the question to future history. The entire polemical part may be stricken out, without in the slightest degree changing the principal matters, or without having any influence either to ratify or invalidate the doctrine itself. Is there a physician who feels that individual expressions will apply to him, let him take heed to the truth; but if they do not reach him, then is he unaffected by them. He who is offended at the polemical part, let him reflect that it is the first step towards an unjust estimate of the rest. A just judgment is all that we wish from every reader of the Organon, and to contribute something to this end was the design of these preliminary remarks. CONSTANTINE HERING, PREFACE TO THE FIFTH BRITISH EDITION. In order to give a general notion of the treatment of diseases pursued by the old school of medicine (allopathy), I may observe that it presupposes the existence, sometimes, of excess of blood {plethora—which is never present), sometimes of morbid matters and acridities; hence, it taps off the life's blood, and exerts itself either to clear away the imaginary morbid matter, or to conduct it elsewhere (by emetics, purgatives, sialagogues, diaphoretics, diuretics, drawing plasters, setons, issues, &c), in the vain be- lief that the disease will thereby be weakened and substantially eradicated, in place of which, the patient's sufferings are thereby increased, and by such and other painful appliances the forces and nutritious juices, indispensable to the curative process, are abstracted from the organism. It assails the body with large doses of powerful medicines, often repeated in rapid succession for a long time, whose long-enduring, not unfrequently frightful effects it knows not, and which it, purposely, it would almost seem, makes unrecognizable by the commingling of several such unknown substances in one prescription, and, by their long-con- tinued employment, it develops in the body new and often ine- radicable medicinal diseases. Whenever it can, too, it employs, in order to keep in favor with its patient,* remedies that imme- diately suppress and hide the morbid symptoms by opposition (contraria contrariis), for a short time (palliative treatment), but * For the same object, the practiced allopath delights to invent a fixed^ name, by preference a Greek one, for the malady, in order to make the patient believe that he has long known this disease like an old acquaintance, and hence is the fittest person to cure it. 13 16 PREFACE TO THE FIFTH BRITISH EDITION. that leave the disposition to these symptoms (the disease itself) strengthened and aggravated. It considers the affection on the exterior of the body as purely local, and existing there indepen- dently, and vainly supposes that it has cured it when it has driven it away by means of external remedies, so that the inter- nal affection is thereby compelled to break out on a nobler and more important part. When it knows not what else to try with the disease, which will not yield or which grows worse, the old school of medicine undertakes to change it at random, by means of an alterative—for example, by the life-undermining Calomel, Corrosive Sublimate, and other mercurial preparations in large doses. To render (through ignorance), if not fatal, at all events incu- rable, the vast majority (ninety-nine hundredths) of all diseases— those of a chronic character—by continually weakening and tor- menting the debilitated patient, already suffering without that from his disease, and by adding new destructive drug diseases, this distinctly seems to be the unhallowed main business of the old school of medicine (allopathy)—and a very easy business it is, when once one has become familiar with this pernicious prac- tice, and is sufficiently insensible to the stings of conscience! And yet, for all these mischievous operations, the ordinary phy- sician of the old school can assign his. reasons, which, however, rest only on the foregone conclusions of his books and teachers, and on the authority of this or that distinguished physician of the old school. Even the most opposite and the most senseless modes of treatment find their defence, their authority—let their injurious effects speak ever so loudly against them. 'It is under the old physician, who has been at last gradually convinced of the mischievous nature of his so-called art, after many years of misdeeds, and who only continues to treat the severest diseases with strawberry syrup, mixed with plantain water (i. e., with nothing), that the smallest number are injured and die. This non-healing art, which, for many centuries, has been in full possession of the power to dispose of the life and death of patients according to its own good will and pleasure, and in that period has shortened the lives of ten times as many.human beings PREFACE TO THE FDJTH BRITISH EDITION. 17 as the most destructive wars, and rendered many millions of pa- tients more diseased and wretched than they were originally,— this allopathy I shall first expose somewhat more minutely, before teaching in detail its exact opposite—the newly-discovered, true healing art. With regard to the latter (homoeopathy), it is quite otherwise. It can easily convince every reflecting person that the diseases of man depend on no substance, no acridity—that is, no material principle of disease, but that they are solely spiritual (dynamic) derangements of the spiritual power that animates the human body (the vital force). Homoeopathy knows that a cure can only take place by the re-action of the vital force against the rightly-chosen remedy that has been administered, and that the cure will be certain and rapid in proportion to the strength with which the vital force still prevails in the patient. Hence, homoeopathy avoids everything in the slightest degree enfeebling* and as much as possible every excitation of pain, for pain also diminishes the strength, and hence it employs for the cure only those medi- cines whose effects in altering and deranging (dynamically) the health it knows accurately, and from these it selects one whose health-altering power (its medicinal disease) is capable of re- moving the natural disease in question by similarity (similia simi- libus), and this it administers to the patient simply and alone, but in rare and minute doses (so small that, without occasioning pain or weakening, they just suffice to remove the natural malady by means of the re-acting energy of the vital force), with this result, that, without weakening, injuring, or torturing him in the very least, the natural disease is extinguished, and the patient, even whilst his cure is going on, gains in strength, and thus is cured—an apparently easy, but actually troublesome and difficult * Homoeopathy sheds not a drop of blood, administers no emetics, purga- tives, laxatives, or diaphoretics, drives off no external affection hy internal means, prescribes no warm baths nor medicated clysters, apphes no Spanish fties nor mustard plasters, no setons, no issues, creates no ptyalism, burns not with moxa nor red hot iron to the very bone, and the like; but gives with its own hand its own preparations of simple, uncompounded medicines, which it is accurately acquainted with, never subdues pain by Opium, &c. 2 18 PREFACE TO THE FIFTH BRITISH EDITION. business, and one requiring much thought, but which restores the patient to perfect health, without suffering, and in a short time— and thus it is a salutary and blessed business. Thus, homoeopathy is a perfectly simple system of medicine, remaining always fixed in its principles as in its practice, which, like the doctrine whereon it is based, if rightly apprehended, will be found to be so exclusive (and, in that way only, serviceable), that, as the doctrine is pure, so must the practice be also, and all backward straying* to the pernicious routine of the old school (whose opposite it is, as day is to night) is totally impossible, otherwise it ceases to deserve the honorable name of homoeopathy That some erring physicians, who would wish to be considered homoeopathists, engraft some, to them more convenient allopathic bad practices upon their nominally homoeopathic treatment, is owing to ignorance of the doctrine, laziness, contempt for suffering humanity, and ridiculous conceit, and, in addition to unpardonable negligence in searching for the best homoeopathic specific for each case of disease, has often a base love of gain and other dishono*- able motives for its spring—and for its result ? that they cannot cure all important and serious diseases (which pure and careful homoeopathy can), and that they send many of their patients to that place whence no one returns, whilst the friends console them- selves with the reflection, that everything (including every hurtful allopathic process!) has been done for the departed. SAMUEL HAHNEMANN. Ccethen, 28th March, 1833. * I am therefore sorry that I once gave the advice, savoring of allopathy, to apply to the back in psoric diseases a resinous plaster to cause itching, and to employ the finest electrical sparks in paralytic affections. For, as both these applicanse have seldom proved of service, and have furnished the bastard homoeopathists with an excuse for their allopathic transgressions, I am grieved I should ever have proposed them, and J hereby solemnly retract them—for this reason afeo, that, since then, our homoeopathic system has advanced so near to perfection that they are now no longer required. CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION. A view of the prevailing allopathic and palliative medical treatment to the present time................................................. 25 Examples of homoeopathic cures performed unintentionally by physicians of the old school of medicine................................... 59 Persons ignorant of the science of medicine, discovered that the homoeo- pathic treatment was the most rational and efficacious............... 84 Some physicians of an early period suspected that this curative method was superior to every other...................................... 90 ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 4 L 2.—The sole duty of a physician is to restore health in a mild, prompt, and durable manner........................................... 93 Note.—It does not pertain to his office to invent systems, or vainly attempt to account for the morbid phenomena in disease. § 3, 4.—The physician ought to search after that which is to be cured in disease, and be acquainted with the curative virtues of medicines, in order to adapt the medicine to the disease. He must also be acquainted with the means of preserving health............................. 93 $ 5.—In the cure of disease, it is necessary to regard the fundamental cause and other circumstances........................................ 94 $ 6.—For the physician, the totality of the symptoms alone constitutes the disease.................................................. 94 Note.—The fruitless endeavors of the old school to discover the essence of the disease, the prima causa morbi. $ 7.—To oure disease, it is merely requisite to remove the entire symptoms, duly regarding, at the same time, the circumstances enumerated in § 5, 95 Note 1.—The cause which evidently occasions and maintains the disease must likewise be removed. Note 2.—A symptomatic palliative method of treatment, or that directed against an indi- vidual symptom, ought to be rejected. $ 8.—When all the symptoms are extinguished, the disease is at the same time internally cured........................................... 96 Note—This is ignorantly denied by the old school. 4 9.—During health, the system is animated by a spiritual, self-moved, vital power, which preserves it in harmonious order..... ........... 97 $ 10.—Without this vital dynamic power, the organism is dead............ 97 § 11.—In disease, the vital power only is primarily disturbed, and expresses its sufferings (internal changes) by abnormal alterations in the sensations and actions of the system........................................ 97 Note.—To know how the symptoms are produced by the vital power is unnecessary for the purposes of cure. 19 20 CONTENTS. PAGI 4 12.—By the extinction of the totahty of the symptoms in the process of cure, the suffering of the vital power, that is, the entire morbid affection, inwardly and outwardly, is removed.............................. 98 4 13.—To presume that disease (non-chirurgical) is a pecuhar and distinct something, residing in man, is a- conceit which has rendered allopathy so pernicious.................................................. 98 (j 14.—Every curable disease is made known to the physician by its symp- toms ......................................................... 98 $ 15.—The sufferings of ttie deranged vital power, and the morbid symp- toms produced thereby, as an invisible whole, one and the same...... 98 $ 16.—It is only by means of the spiritual influence of a morbific agent that our spiritual vital power can be diseased ; and, in like manner, only by the spiritual (dynamic) operation of medicine that health can be re- stored ........................................................ 99 § 17.—The physician has only to remove the totahty of the symptoms and he has cured the entire disease................................... 99 Note 1, 2.—Explanatory examples. 4 18.—The totahty of the symptoms is the sole indication in the choice of the remedy.................................................... 100 § 19.—Changes in the general state, in disease (symptoms of disease) can be cured in no other way, by medicines, than in so far as the latter possess the power, likewise, of effecting changes in the system............... 100 § 20.—The faculty which medicines have of producing changes in the system can only be known by observing their effects upon healthy individuals, 101 4 21.—The morbid symptoms which medicines produce in healthy persons are the sole indications of their curative virtues in disease............ 101 4 22.—If experience prove that the medicines which produce symptoms simi- lar to those of the disease, are the therapeutic agents that cure it in the most certain and permanent manner, we ought to select these medicines in the cure of the disease. If, on the contrary, it proves that the most certain and permanent cure is obtained by medicinal substances that produce symptoms directly opposite to those of the disease, then the latter agents ought to be selected for this purpose................... 102 Note.—The use of medicines whose symptoms bear no peculiar (affective) relation to the morbid symptoms, but influence the body in a different way, is the exceptional allo- pathic mode of treatment. $ 23.—Morbid symptoms that are inveterate cannot be cured by medicinal symptoms of an opposite character (antipathic method)............... 102 $ 24, 25.—The homoeopathic method, or that which employs medicines pro- ducing symptoms similar to those of the malady, is the only one of which experience proves the certain efficacy........................ 103 $ 26.—This is grounded upon the therapeutic law of nature, that a weaker dynamic affection in man is permanently extinguished by one that is similar, of greater intensity, yet of a different origin................. 104 Note.—This law applies to physical as well as moral affections. 4 27.—The curative virtues of medicines depend solely upon the resemblance that their symptoms bear to those of the disease.................... 104 4 28, 29.—Some explanation of this therapeutic law of nature............. 105 Note.—IllustratioH of it. 4 30—33.—The human body is much more prone to undergo derangement from the action of medicines than from that of natural disease........ 106 § 34, 35.—The truth of the homoeopathic law is shown by the inefficacy of non-homoeopathic treatment in the cure of diseases that are of long standing, and likewise by the fact that either of two natural dissimilar diseases, coexisting in the body, cannot annihilate or cure the other.... 107 CONTENTS. 21 $ 36, I.—A disease existing in the human body prevents the accession of a new and dissimilar one, if the former be of equal intensity to, or greater than the latter................................................. 108 4 37.—Thus, non-homoeopathic treatment, which is not violent, leaves the chronic disease unaltered............t........................... 108 4 38, II.—Or, a new and more intense disease suspends a prior and dissimilar one, already existing in the body, only so long as the former continues ; but it never cures it............................................ 108 4 39.—In the same manner, violent treatment with allopathic remedies never cures a chronic disease, but merely suspends it during the continuance of the powerful action of a medicine incapable of exciting symptoms similar to those of the disease; but afterwards the latter reappears, even more intense than before.................................... 110 4 40, III.—Or, the new disease, after having acted for a considerable time on the system, joins itself finally to the old one, which is dissimilar, and thence results a complication of two different maladies, either of which is incapable of annihilating or curing the other..................... 112 4 41.—Much more frequently than a superadded natural disease, an artificial one, which is occasioned by the long-continued use of violent and un- suitable allopathic remedies, is combined with the dissimilar prior and natural disease (the dissimilarity consequently rendering it incurable by means of the artificial malady), and the patient becomes doubly dis- eased.......................................................... 113 4 42.—The diseases thus complicated, by reason of their dissimilarity, as sume different places in the organism, to which they are severally adapted....................................................... 114 4 43, 44.—But very different is the result where a new disease that is similai and stronger is superadded to the old one; for, in that case, the former annihilates and cures the latter................................... 115 4 45.—This phenomenon explained.................................... 115 4 46.—Examples of the cure of chronic diseases, by the accidental accession of another disease, similar and more intense................... 116—118 4 47—49.—Of any two diseases which occur in the ordinary course of na- ture, it is only that one whose symptoms are similar to the other which can cure or destroy it. This faculty never belongs to a dissimilar disease. Hence the physician may learn what are the remedies with which he can effect a certain cure—that is to say, with none but such as are homoeopathic............................................ 119 4 50.—Nature affords but few instances in which one disease can homceo pathically destroy another; and her remedial resources in this way are aneumbered by many inconveniences.............................. 119 ^ 51.—On the other hand, the ph}-sician is possessed of innumerable curative agents, greatly preferable to those................................ 120 4 52.—From the process employed by nature, to which we have just ad- verted, the physician may deduce the doctrine of curing diseases by no other remedies than such as are homoeopathic, and not with those of another kind (allopathic), which never cure, but only injure the patient, 120 4 53, 54.—There are only three possible methods of employing medicines in diseases, viz. : I.—The homxopathic, which only is salutary and efficacious.......... 122 4 55, II.—The allopathic, or lieteropathic................................ 122 4 56, III.—The antipathic, or enantwpathic, which is merely palliative..... 122 Note.—Remarks on isopathy, so called. ^57—An exposition of the method of cure where a remedy producing a contrary effect (contraria contrariis) is prescribed against a single symp- tom of the disease.—Examples.................................. 122 22 CONTENTS. PAOB 4 58.—This antipathic method is not merely defective because it is directed against an individual symptom only, but also because, in chronic dis- eases, after having apparently diminished the evil for a time, this tem- porary abatement is followed by a real aggravation of the symptoms.. 123 Note.—Testimonies of different authors. 4 59.—Injurious consequences of some antipathic cures-............. 124—126 4 60.:—Where a palliative is employed, the gradual increase of the dose never cures a chronic disease, but renders the state of the patient worse, 127 4 61.—Wherefore, physicians ought to have inferred the utility of an oppo- site, and the only beneficial method, namely, that of homoeopathy.... 127 4 62.—The reason that the palliative method is so pernicious, and the ho- moeopathic alone salutary........................................ 128 4 63.—Is founded upon the difference which exists between the primary action of every medicine, and the re-action or secondary effects pro- duced by the living organism (the vital power)..................... 128 § 64.—Explanation of the primitive and secondary effects................ 128 4 65.—Examples of both........................................... 129 $ 66.—It is only by the use of the minutest homoeopathic doses that the re- action of the vital power shows it6elf, simply by restoring the equili- brium of health................................................ 129 § 67.—From these facts, the salutary tendency of the homoeopathic, as well as the adverse effects of the antipathic (palliative) method become manifest..................................................... 130 Note.—Cases in which only antipathic remedies are useful. 4 68.—How far those facte prove the efficacy of the homoeopathic method.. 130 4 69.—How these facts confirm the injurious tendency of the antipathic method....................................................... 131 Note 1.—Contrary sensations cannot neutralize each other in the sensorium of man; they do not react upon each other like chemical substances that are endowed with opposite properties. Note 2.—Explanatory example. 4 70.—A short analysis of the homoeopathic method.................... 133 4 71.—The three necessary points in healing are : 1. To ascertain the ma- lady ; 2. The action of the medicines ; and 3. Their appropriate appli- cation........................................................ 134 4 72.—A general view of acute and chronic diseases..................... 134 4 73.—Acute diseases which are isolated—sporadic, epidemic, acute miasms, 135 4 74.—The worst species of chronic diseases are those produced by the un- skillful treatment of allopathic physicians.......................... 136 4 75.—These are the most difficult of cure.............................. 13(J § 76.—It is only as there is sufficient vital power yet remaining in the system that the injury inflicted by the abuse of allopathic medicines can be repaired; to restore the patient often requires a long time, and the simultaneous removal of the original malady....................... 137 § 77.—Diseases that are improperly termed chronic...................•.. 137 4 78 —Diseases that properly claim that application, and which all arise from chronic miasms............................................ 137 $ 79.—Syphilis and sycosis......................................... 138 §80, 81.—Psora is the parent of all chronic diseases, properly so called, with the exception of the syphilitic and sycosic............... 138—139 Note.—The names given to diseases in ordinary pathology. 4 82.—Every case of chronic disease demands the careful selection of a remedy from among the specifics that have been discovered against chronic miasms, particularly against psora........................ 141 CONTENTS. 23 5 83.—Qualifications necessary for comprehending the image of the disease, 142 4 84—99.—Directions to the physician for discovering and tracing out an image of the disease....................................... 142—148 4 100—102.—Investigation of epidemic diseases in particular........ 148, 149 4 103.—In like mar jer must the source of chronic diseases (not syphilitic) be investigated, and the entire image of psora be brought huo view. . 149 4 104.—The utility of noting down in manuscript the image of tiie disease at the commencement and during the progress of the treatment...... 150 Note.—How physicians of the old school proceed in their examination of the morbid symptoms. 4 105—114.—Preliminaries to be observed in investigating the pure effects of medicines in the healthy human subject. Primary effect. Secon- dary effect.............:..........................;...... 151—154 4 115.—Alternate effects of medicines................................. 154 4 116, 117.—Idiosyncrasies.......................................... 155 4 118, 119-—Every medicine produces effects different from others....... 156 Note.—One medicine cannot be sui&tituted for another. 4 120.—Every medicine must therefore be carefully tried as to the pecu- liarities of its effects........................................... 157 4 121—140.—Course to be adopted in trying medicines upon other indi- viduals ......................... ........................ 157—163 4 141.—The experiments which a physician in health makes in his OAvn person are preferable to others.................................. 164 4 142.—The investigation of the pure effects of medicines by their adminis- tration in disease is difficult...................................... 164 4 143—145.—It is by investigating the pure effects of medicines in the healthy subject only that a true materia medica can be framed.. 165, 166 4 146 —The most appropriate remedial employment of medicines whose peculiar effects are known...................................... 167 4 147—That medicine which is the most homoeopathically adapted is the most beneficial, and is the specific remedy........................ 167 4 148.—Intimation how a homoeopathic cure is probably effected ......... 167 4 149.—The homoeopathic cure of a disease of rapid origin is quickly effected, but the cure of a chronic one requires proportionally a longer time, 167, 168 Note.—The distinction between pure homoeopathy and the doctrines of the mongrel sect. 4 150.—Slight indispositions......................................... 169 4 151.—Severe diseases exhibit a variety of symptoms................... 169 4 152.—A disease with numerous and striking symptoms admits of finding the homoeopathic remedy with more certainty...................... 169 4 153.—"What kind of symptoms ought chiefly to be regarded in selecting the remedy...................... . ........................... 169 4 154.—A remedy that is perfectly homoeopathic cures the disease without any accompanying ill effects..................................... 170 4 155.—The reason why homoeopathic cures are thus effected............. 170 4 156—Reason of the few exceptions thereto.......................... 170 4 157—160.—The medicinal disease, closely resembling, but rather more intense than the primitive one, called also homozopathic aggravation. . . 171 1161.—In chronic (psoric) diseases "the aggravation produced by homoeo- pathic remedies (antipsorics) occurs from time to time during several days......................................................... 172 § 162—171.—Measures to be pursued in the treatment when the number of known medicines is too small to admit of finding a remedy that is per- fectly homoeopathic....................................... 173—175 24 CONTENTS. paos § 172—184.—Measures to be taken in the treatment of diseases that have too few symptoms (einseitige Krankheiten.)....................... 175—177 § 185—203.—The treatment of diseases with local symptoms ; their cure by means of external application is always injurious.............. 177—182 § 204, 205.—All diseases properly chronic, and not arising or being sup- ported merely by bad modes of living, ought to be treated by homoeo- pathic remedies appropriate to their originating miasm, and solely by the internal administration of those remedies.................. 183—184 § 206.—Preliminary search after the simple miasm which forms the basis of the malady, or of its complication with a second (sometimes even with a third)................................................... 184 § 207.—Inquiries to be made respecting the treatment previously adopted.. 185 § 208, 209.—Other inquiries necessary to be made before a perfect image can be formed of a chronic disease............................ 185, 186 § 210-230.—Treatment of mental diseases........................ 186—192 § 231, 232.—Intermittent and alternating diseases................... 192, 193 § 233, 234.—Typical intermittent diseases.............................. 193 § 235—244.—Intermittent fevers ............................... 194—197 § 245—251.—Mode of administering the remedies.................. 198—209 Note.—Repetition of doses. § 252—256.—The signs of incipient amendment................... 209—211 § 257, 258.—Blind predilection for favorite remedies, and unjust aversion to others........................................................ 211 $ 259—261.—The regimen proper in chronic diseases............... 211, 212 Note.—Things that are prejudicial therein. § 262, 263.—Regimen in acute diseases................................ 212 § 264—266.—On the choice of the purest and most energetic medicines .... 213 Note.—Changes produced in some substances in the process of preparing them for food. S 267.—The mode of preparing the most energetic and durable medicines from fresh herbs................................................ 214 § 268.—Dry vegetable substances..................................... 215 S 269—271.—The homoeopathic method of preparing crude medicinal sub- stances, in order to obtain their greatest medicinal power.......215—218 Note.—Preparation of powder for keeping. § 272—274.— Only one simple medicine is to be administered at a time..... 218 S 275—287.—Strength of the doses used in homoeopathic treatment. The manner of graduating them, or of augmenting or diminishing their power. The development of their powers.................... 219—224 $ 288—292.—What parts of the body are more or less sensible to the action of medicines.............................................. 225__226 Note.—Receiving the highly developed medicines by inhalation or smelling is the pre- ferable mode of using them. $ 293, 294.—Animal magnetism (mesmerism). On the application of positive and negative mesmerism.................................... 226__228 INTRODUCTION. A VIEW OF THE PREVAILING MEDICAL TREATMENT, ALLOPATHIC AND PALLIATIVE, TO THE PRESENT TIME. From the earliest period of time, mankind have been liable to disease, individually and collectively, arising from causes na- tural and moral. In the rude and simple forms of primitive life, few maladies appeared, and little skill was requisite to remove them ; but, as society became more dense, and men formed them- selves into states, diseases multiplied, and the necessity for medi- cal aid increased in equal proportion. Thenceforward, at least after the days of Hippocrates, during a lapse of two thousand five hundred years, men have fondly supposed that these multiplied and complicated maladies were to be removed by methods origi- nating purely in scheming and conjecture. Innumerable opinions on the nature and cure of diseases have successively been pro- mulgated ; each distinguishing his own theory with the title of system, though directly at variance with every other, and incon- sistent with itself. Each of these subtile expositions dazzled the reader at first with its unintelligible display of wisdom, and at- tracted to the system-monger crowds of adherents, who re-echoed his unnatural sophistry, but from which none of them could de- rive any improvement in the art of healing, until a new system, frequently in direct opposition to the former, appeared, supplant- ing it, and for a season acquiring celebrity. None of them, how- ever, were in harmony with nature and experience—mere theories spun out of a refined imagination, from pretended consequences, which, on account of their subtilty and contradictions, were prac- tically inapplicable at the bedside of the patient, and only served for idle disputation. By the side of these theories, but independent of them, a mode of cure was contrived, with medical substances of unknown 25 26 INTRODUCTION. quality compounded together, applied to diseases arbitrarily classified, and arranged in reference to their materiality, called Allopathy. The pernicious results of such a practice, at va- riance with nature and experience, may be easily imagined. Without seeking to detract from the reputation which many physicians have justly acquired by their skill in the sciences auxiliary to medicine—such as natural philosophy, chemistry, natural history in all its branches, and that of man in particular, anthropology, physiology, anatomy, &c, &c.—I shall occupy my- self here with the practical part of medicine only, in order to show the imperfect manner in which diseases have been treated till the present day. It is also far from my intention to pursue that mechanical routine by which the precious lives of our fellow- creatures are treated according to pocket-book recipes, volumes of which are still daily appearing before the public, and show, alas! how frequently, and to what extent they are resorted to, even at the present time. I turn from these, as undeserving of notice, and as a lasting reproach to the faculty of medicine. I shall merely speak of the medical art, as hitherto practiced, and which, on account of its antiquity, is supposed to be founded upon scientific principles. It was the boast of the former schools of medicine that their doctrine alone deserved the title of "rational art of healingy" because it was pretended that they alone sought after and re- moved the morbid cause, and followed the traces of nature her- self in the treatment of diseases. Tolle causam ! cried they continually; but they seldom went farther than this vain exclamation. They talked of beino- able to discover the cause of disease, without succeeding in their pre- tended attempts; for, by far the greater number of diseases beinc of dynamic origin, as well as of a dynamic nature, and their cause, therefore, not perceptible to the senses, they were reduced to the necessity of inventing one. By comparing, on the one hand, the normal state of the parts of the dead human body (anatomy) with the visible changes which those parts had under- gone in subjects that had died of disease (pathological anatomy), and, on the other, the functions of the living body (physiolocy) with the endless aberrations to which they are subject in the various stages of disease (semeiotics, pathology), and drawino from thence conclusions relative to the invisible manner in which INTRODUCTION. 27 the changes are brought about in the interior of man, when in a diseased state, they succeeded in forming an obscure and imagi- nary picture, which theoretic medicine regarded as the prima causa morbi,* which afterwards became the proximate cause, and, at the same time, the immediate essence of the disease, and even the disease itself; although common sense tells us that the cause of anything can never be, at the same time, both the cause and the thing itself. How was it then possible, without deceiving themselves, to pretend to cure this yet undiscovered internal cause, or venture to prescribe for it medicines whose curative tendency was equally, for the most part, unknown to them, and more especially to mix up several of those unknown substances in what are termed prescriptions ? However, the sublime project of discovering, a priori, some internal invisible cause of disease, resolved itself (at least with the more astute physicians of the old school) into a search, guided onward by the symptoms, as to what might be held to be the generic character of the existing malady.f They endeavored * It would have been much more consonant with the good sense of man- kind, and with the nature of the case, had they, in order to cure, attempted to discover, as the causa morbi, the originating cause of the disease itself, and had applied a method of treatment which they had found available for diseases springing from that originating cause, and for others of a like origin. For example, the same hydrargyrum is properly applied to every ulcer on the glans-penis, after an impure coition, as hitherto with every venereal chancre—if they, I say, had discovered the originating cause of every other chronic (non-venereal) disease, either from a recent or a former in- fection iu a psoric miasm; if for all these they had found a common method of cure, with a therapeutic reference to each particular case, by which the whole and each separate chronic case could have been healed; then might they with justice have gained renown, that in the treatment of chronic diseases they were familiar with the only useful and successful causa morborum chronicorum (non veriereorum), and, adopting it as a basis, were capable of treating such cases with the best results. But they were incapable of curing the numberless chronic diseases in ages past, as their psoric origin was unknown to them (a discovery which the world owes to homoeopathy, as well as for an effectual method of treatment which it has provided), and notwithstanding their vaunting that they alone had the primam causam in view in their proceeding; after all their boasted science, they had not the remotest suspicion of their psoric origin, and consequently they bungled the treatment of every chronic disease. t Every physician adopting a treatment of such general character, how- ever unblushingly he may affect to be a homccopathist, is, and will always 28 INTRODUCTION. to find out whether it was spasm, debility, paralysis, fever or in- flammation, induration or obstruction, in some one of the parts; excess of blood (plethora), excess or deficiency of oxygen, car- bon, hydrogen, or nitrogen in the fluids; exaltation or depression of vitality in the arterial, venous, or capillary system; a defect in the relative proportion of the factors of sensibility, irritability, or nutrition. These conjectures, honored by the existing school with the name of causal indication, and regarded by them as the only rational part of medicine, were too hypothetical and fal- lacious to be of any permanent utility in practice, and incapable (even if they had any just foundation) of indicating the most ap- propriate remedy in any particular case of disease. It is true, they were flattering to the vanity of the learned inventor, but acting on them only led him further astray, and showed that there was more of ostentation in the pursuit than any reasonable hope of being able to profit by it, or arrive at the real curative indica- tion. How often has it occurred that spasm or paralysis appeared to be in one part of the system, while inflammation seemed to be present in another! On the other hand, where should we be able to procure certain remedies against each of these pretended general characters of diseases ? There could be none, save those which are termed specifics—that is to say, medicines whose action is analogous to the morbid irritation (now called homoeopathic), and whose application has been denounced and prohibited by the old school of medicine, as highly dangerous,* because experience proved that the use of them in such powerful doses as had been usually administered was pernicious in maladies where the apti- tude to undergo homogeneous irritation existed to a great extent. The old school never once thought of administering those medi- remain a generalizing allopathist, as, without the modt minute individualiza tion, homoeopathy is not conceivable. * " In cases where experience had revealed the homoeopathic efficacy of medicines, whose mode of operation, however, was inexplicable, the physi- cians made use of them, and relieved themselves from all further embar- rassment by declaring them to be specific. Thus, by an unmeaning name that was applied to them,.all necessity for further reflection was superseded. But homogeneous excitant remedies—that is to say, specifics or homoeopa- thies—had, for a long time previously, been forbidden, as excercising an extremely dangerous influence."—Ran, Ucber das homaopath. Heilverfahren. Heidelberg, 1824, p. 101, 102. INTRODUCTION. 29 ernes in very small or extremely minute doses. Accordingly, no attempt was made to cure in the direct and most natural way, by using homogeneous and specific medicines, nor was it possible to do so, because the fullest extent of their effects was unknown, and in that state remained; and, had it been otherwise, it would have been impossible to hit on the right medicine, with such gene- ralizing views as were entertained. However, perceiving that it was more consistent with reason to pursue a straightforward path than attempt a circuitous one, the old school of medicine still imagined they could arrest dis- ease by a removal of the supposed morbid material cause. In the theoretic researches after the image which they were to form to themselves of the disease, as well as in their pursuit of the curative indication, it was almost impossible for them to divest themselves of this idea of materiality, or be induced to consider the nature, not only of material, but spiritual organism, as being so potent in itself that the changes in its sensations and vital movements (which are called diseases) are principally, and al- most solely the result of dynamic influence, and could not be produced by any other cause. The old school regarded all the solids and fluids which had become changed by disease (those abnormal substances, turges- cent or secreted,) as the exciting cause of the disorder; or, a least, on account of their supposed reaction, they were considered to be the cause which kept up disease, and this latter opinion is adhered to, even at the present day. This theory first inspired them with the idea of accomplishing causal cures, by using every means in their power to expel from the body that imaginary and supposed material cause of disease. Hence arises the continual practice of evacuating bile, in cases of bilious fever,* by emetics,—the system of prescribing vomits in the so-named foul stomach,f—the diligence in purging away * The Court Physician, Kau (loc. cit., p. 176), at a time when not perfectly conversant with homoeopathy, but firmly convinced of the dynamic origin of these fevers, was in the habit of curing them without any evacuating medicines whatever, merely by one or two small doses of homoeopathic medicines. In his work, he relates two very remarkable instances of cure. f In a case of sudden derangement of the stomach, with frequent nau- seous eructations, as of undigested food (sulphuretted hydrogen), accom- panied with depression of mind, cold feet, hands, &c, physicians, till the 30 INTRODUCTION. mucus and intestinal worms, where there are paleness of the present time, were in the habit of attacking only the degenerated contents of the stomach. A powerful emetic must fetch it out entirely. This object was usually effected by the use of Tartrate of Antimony, with or 'without a mixture of Ipecacuanha. But, did the patient recover his health as soon as he had vomited ?• No! these gastric affections of dynamic origin are com- monly produced by a disturbed state of mind (grief, fright, anger), cold, exertion of the mind or body immediately after eating, and sometimes even after a moderate meal. Neither the Tartrate of Antimony nor the Ipecacu- anha are suitable for removing this dynamic aberration, and the revolution- ary vomiting which they excite is equally unserviceable. Besides provoking a manifestation of the symptoms of disease, they strike one blow more at the health of the patient, and the secretion of bile becomes deranged; so that, if the patient did not happen to be of a robust constitution before, he must feel greatly indisposed for several days after the pretended causal cure. notwithstanding the violent expulsion of the entire contents of the stomach. But if, instead of those powerful and always hurtful evacuating medicines, the patient should only smell once at a globule of sugar, the size of a mus- tard seed, impregnated with the thirtieth dilution of Pulsatilla, which infal- libly restores the order and harmony of the whole system, and that of the* stomach in particular, then he is cured in the space of two hours. If any eructations still take place, they are nothing more than air, without taste or smell j the contents of the stomach are no longer vitiated, and, at the next meal, the patient recovers his accustomed appetite, his health, and his air o-E repose. This is what ought to be denominated " real cure," because it has destroyed the cause. The other is an imaginary one, and only fatigues and does injury to the patient. Even a stomach overloaded with indigestible food never requires a medi- cinal emetic. In such, a case, nature knows full well how to disencumber herself of the excess, by the spontaneous vomitings which she excites, and which may at all times be aided by mechanical provocation, such as tickling the fauces. By this means we avoid the accessory effects resulting from the operation of emetics, and a little coffee (without milk) afterwards suffices to hasten the passage of any matters into the intestines which the stomach may still contain. But if, after excessive overloading, the stomach does not possess or has lost the irritability necessary to produce spontaneous vomiting • and the patient, tormented by acute pain of the epigastrium, does not experience the slightest desire to vomit, in such a state an emetic would only causs a dangerous or fatal inflammation of the intestines; whereas, slight and re- peated doses of a strong infusion of coffee would reanimate the depressed irritability of the stomach, and put it in a condition to evacuate of itself cither upwards or downwards, the substances contained in its interior how- ever considerable the quantity may have been. Here, again, the treatment which ordinary physicians pretend to direct against the cause, is out of place. It is the custom, at the present day, when gastric acid becomes super- INTRODUCTION. 31 countenance, ravenous appetite, pains in the stomach, or enlarged abdomen in children,*—the venesections in cases of haemor- rhage,! and more especially bleeding of all kinds,! as their main abundaut (which is frequently the case in chronic diseases), to administer an emetic to relieve the stomach of its presence. But, the following morning, or a few days after, the stomach contains just the same quantity, if not more. On the other hand, the pains cease of themselves when their dynamic cause is attacked by an extremely small dose of dilute Sulphuric-acid, or with another antipsoric remedy, homoeopathic with the various symptoms. It is thus that, in the plans of treatment which the old school say are directed against the morbific cause, the favorite object is to expel, with trouble, and to the great detriment of the patient, the material product of the dynamic disorder, without exerting themselves in the least to find out the dynamic source of the evil, in order to vanquish it homoeopathically, as well as to annihilate everything that might emanate from it, and thus treat the disease in a rational manner. * Symptoms that depend solely upon a psoric diathesis, and which easily yield to (dynamic) mild antipsoric remedies, without either emetics or pur- gatives. f Though most morbid haemorrhages depend solely on a dynamic change of the vital powers, still the old school assign a superabundance of blood as their cause, and never fail to prescribe bleeding, in order to relieve the body of this supposed excess of the vital fluid. The disastrous consequences which frequently result from this mode of treatment, such as prostration of the powers, tendency to, and even typhoid state itself, they ascribe to the malignity of the disease, which they are then often unable to overcome: in short, though the patient may fall a sacrifice, they, nevertheless, consider that they have acted in conformity to the adage, causam tolle; that is, according to their common remark, " We have done everything that could possibly be done—let the result be what it may! \" % Though the living human body may, perhaps, never have contained one drop of blood too much, still the old school practitioners regard a supposed plethora, or superabundance of blood, as the principal material cause of haemorrhages and inflammations, and which ought to be attacked by bleed- ing, cupping, and leeches. This they call a treatment of the cause, and a rational mode of proceeding. In general inflammatory fevers, as well as in acute pleurisy, they even go so far as to regard the coagulable lymph that exists in the blood (and which they call the buffy coat) as the peccant mat- ter, which they do their best to evacuate by repeated bleedings, although it often occurs that this crust becomes thicker and tougher in appearance at every fresh emission of blood. In this manner, when inflammatory fever cannot be subdued, they often bleed the patient till he is near death, in order to remove this buffy coat, or the pretended plethora, without ever suspecting that the inflamed blood is nothing more than the product of the acute fever, the inflammatory immaterial (dynamic) irritation; and that this latter, the sole cause of the disturbance that has taken place in the vascular system, 32 INTRODUCTION. remedy in inflammatory cases, and, in imitation of a blood-thirsty physician of Paris, the application to the parts affected of a fre- quently fatal number of leeches. By this mode of proceeding may be arrested by a homoeopathic remedy; such, for example, as a globule of sugar impregnated with the juice of Aconite of the decillionth degree of dilution, avoiding the vegetable acids; so that the most violent pleuritic fever, with all its attendant alarming symptoms, is cured in the space of twenty-four hours at farthest, without loss of blood, or any antiphlogistic remedy what- ever (if a little blood, by way of experiment, be now taken from the vein, it will no longer exhibit any traces of inflammatory crust); whereas, another patient, similar in every respect, and treated according to the pretended ra- tional mode of the old school, if he escape death after numerous bleedinga and unspeakable suffering, often languishes entire months, reduced and ex- hausted, before he can stand upright, if he is not taken off in the interval (as is frequently the case) by a typhus fever, a leucophlegmacy, or a pulmo- nary consumption, the common result of this mode of treatment. He who feels the steady pulse of a patient an hour before the shivering comes on, which always precedes acute pleurisy, will be much surprised when, two hours after (the fever having set in), they try to persuade him that the violent plethora which then exists makes repeated bleeding neces- sary ; and he asks himself by what miracle could those pounds of blood, which are now to be taken away, and which he had, two hours before, felt beating with a tranquil movement, have effected an entrance into the arte- ries of the patient ? There could not be an ounce of blood more in his veins than he possessed two hours before, when he was in good health. Thus, when the allopathic physician prescribes venesection, it is not at all super- fluous blood that he draws from the patient attacked with acute fever, be- cause this liquid could not possibly exist in too great quantity; but he de- prives him of a portion of the normal blood necessary to his existence, and to the reestablishment of health;—a grievous loss, which it is no longer in his power to repair, and he thinks, notwithstanding, to have acted according to the axiom, tolle causam, to which he gives so wrong an interpretation, whilst the sole and true cause of the malady was, not a superabundance of blood, which could never exist, but a dynamic inflammatory irritation of the vascular system, as is proved by the permanent and speedy cure which may be effected, in similar cases, by administering one or two incredibly minute doses of the juice of Aconite, which is homoeopathic with this irritation. The old school err not less in recommending partial bleedings, and still more se in the application of leeches in great numbers, when treating local inflam- mation after the manner df Broussais. The palliative relief which they afford, at first, is not crowned by a rapid or perfect cure; the weakness and valetudinarian state, to which the parts that have been thus treated remain a prey, and sometimes even the whole body, sufficiently prove how erro- neous it is to attribute local inflammation to local plethora; and how deceitful are the consequences of such bleedings when this inflammatory irritation apparently local, can be destroyed, in a prompt and permanent manner by INTRODUCTION 33 they think they pursue the causal indication, and treat the pa- tient in a rational manner. They likewise suppose that, by re- moving a polypus by ligature, extirpating a tumefied gland, or destroying the same by suppuration produced by local irritation, by removing with the knife the insulated cyst of a steatomatous or meliceretous tumor, operating for aneurism, fistula-lachryma- lis, or fistula in ano, amputating a cancerous breast, or a limb where the bone had become carious, &c, &c, to have cured the maladies in a radical manner, and destroyed their cause. They imagine the same thing when they make use of their repellent remedies, and dry up old ulcers on the legs by astringents, oxides of lead, copper, and zinc, accompanied, it is true, with purgatives, which only weaken, without diminishing the fundamental evil; when they cauterize chancres, destroy condylomata locally, drive off itch from the skin with Sulphur, Lead, Mercurial or Oxide of Zinc ointment; and, finally, when they cure ophthalmia with solutions of Lead or Zinc, and drive away pain from the limbs by the use of Opodeldoc, volatile linament, or fumigations of Cin- nabar and Amber. In all such cases they think they have annihilated the evil, triumphed over the disease, and performed a rational treatment directed against the cause. But mark what follows ! New forms of diseases, which infallibly manifest them- selves sooner or later, and which, when they appear, are taken for fresh maladies, being always worse than the primitive affection, evidently refute the theories of the old school. These ought to undeceive them, and prove that the evil has an im- material cause, the deeper concealed because its origin is dy- namic, and which can only be removed by dynamic means. A hypothesis which the schools of medicine generally enter- tained until a recent date (and, I might even say, until the present time), is that of morbid or peccant matter in diseases, however subtile that matter may be supposed to be. The blood and lymphatic vessels were to be disencumbered of this matter by the exhalants, the skin, the kidneys, and the salivary glands; the chest was to be freed from it by the trachial and bronchial glands; the stomach and the intestinal canal by vomiting and alvine dejections—in order that the body might be freed from the a small dose of Aconite, or, according to circumstances, of Belladonna, a mode by which the malady is speedily and effectively cured, without having recourse to bleedings, which nothing can justify. 3 34 INTRODUCTION. material cause which excited the disease, and that they had accomplished a radical cure according to the principle—tolle causam ! By incisions made in the diseased body, in which, for years together, foreign substances were inserted, producing tedious ulcers (issues and setons), they sought to draw oft' the materia peccans from the (purely dynamically) diseased body, as dregs escape by a faucet from a filthy cask. By perpetual blisters (Cantharides and Mezereum), they thought to abstract this pec- cant matter, and thus thoroughly purify the system. By such inconsiderate and unnatural treatment, the exhausted patient is commonly brought into a condition totally incurable. I grant it was more convenient for human incapacity to sup- pose that, in the maladies which presented themselves for cure, there existed some morbific material, of which the mind might form a conception, especially as the patients willingly lent them- selves to a hypothesis of this kind. By admitting this, they had nothing further to do than to administer a sufficient quantity of medicines capable of purifying the blood and the fluids, of exciting urine and perspiration, promoting expectoration, and scouring out the stomach and intestines. This is the reason that all the authors on materia medica, who have appeared since Dioscorides up to the present day, say nothing of the peculiar and special action of individual medicines, but content themselves, after enumerating their supposed virtues in any particular case of disease, with saying, whether they promote the secretion of urine, perspiration, expectoration, or the menstrual flow, and, more particularly, if they have the effect of emptying the ali- mentary canal upwards or downwards; because, the principal tendency of the efforts of practitioners has, at all times, been the expulsion of a morbid material principle, and of a quantity of acrid matter, which they imagined to be the cause of the disease. These, however, were vague dreams, gratuitous suppositions, hypotheses destitute of foundation, cunningly devised for the con- venience of therapeutic medicine, as it was expected the easiest way of performing a cure would be to remove the material mor- bific matters. (Si modo essent /) But the essence of diseases, and their cure, will not bend to our fancies and convenience; diseases will not, out of deference to our stupidity, cease to be dynamic aberrations, which our INTRODUCTION. 35 spiritual existence undergoes in its mode of feeling and act- ing,—that is to say, immaterial changes in the state of health. The causes of disease cannot possibly be material, since the least foreign substance* introduced into the blood-vessels, how- ever mild it may appear to us, is suddenly repulsed'by the vital power as a poison; or, where this does not take place, death itself ensues. Even when the smallest foreign particle chances to in- sinuate itself into any of the sensitive parts, the principle of life, which is spread throughout our interior, does not rest until it has procured the expulsion of this body by pain, fever, sup- puration, or gangrene. And, in a skin-disease of twenty years' standing, could this vital principle, whose activity is indefatigable, suffer patiently, during twenty years, an exanthematic material principle (the poison of tetter, scrofula, or gout) to exist in the fluids? What nosologist has ever seen one of those morbid principles of which he speaks with so much confidence, and upon which he presumes to found a plan of medical treatment? Who has ever been able to exhibit to the view the principle of gout, or the virus of scrofula ? Even when a material substance, applied to the skin, or intro- duced into a wound, has propagated disease by infection, who can prove (what has so often been affirmed in our pathogeny) that the slightest particle of this material substance penetrates into our liquids or becomes absorbed ?! It is in vain to wash the genitals with care and promptitude; such precaution will not protect the system from the venereal virus. The least breath of air, emanating from a person affected with small-pox, is sufficient to produce that formidable disease in a healthy child. How much of this material principle—what quantity in weight— would be requisite for the liquids to imbibe in order to produce, * Life was suddenly endangered by injecting a little pure water into a vein.—See Mullen, in Birch, History of the Royal Society, vol. iv. Atmospheric air introduced into the veins has occasioned death,—See J. H. Voigt, Magazin fiir den neuesten Zustand der Naturkunde, vol. i., hi., p. 25. Even the mildest liquids, introduced into the veins, have placed life in danger.—See Autenrieth, Physiologie, ii., § 784. f A young girl, of Glasgow, eight years of age, having been bitten by a mad dog, the surgeon immediately cut out the part, which, nevertheless, did not save the child from an attack of hydrophobia thirty-six days after, of which she died at the end of two days.—Med. Comment, of Edinb., Dec. 2, vol. ii., 1793. 36 rNTRODOCTION. in the first instance, syphilis, which will continue during the whole term of life? and, in the second, the small-pox, which often rapidly destroys life amidst a suppuration* almost general ? Is it possible, in these two cases, or in others which are analo- gous, to admit that a morbific principle, in a material form, could have introduced itself into the blood ? It has often happened that a letter, written in the chamber of a patient, has communi- cated the same contagious disease to the person who read it. Can we entertain the opinion that anything material entered into the humors in this instance ? But why all these proofs ? How often have we seen that an offensive or vexatious word has brought on a bilious fever which endangered life; a superstitious prophecy of death actually occasion death at the very epoch predicted; afflicting news, or an agreeable surprise, suddenly suspend the vital powers! Where is there, in any of these cases, the morbific material principle which entered, in substance, into the body, which produced disease and kept it up, and, without the expul- sion or destruction of which, by medicines, all radical cure would be impossible ? The supporters of a hypothesis so gross as that of morbific principles, ought to blush that they have so thoughtlessly over- * In order to account for the great quantity of putrid foecal matter, and fetid ichorous discharge, often met with in diseases, and to represent these substances as the cause that calls forth, and keeps up, the morbid state, al- though, at the moment of infection, nothing material had been seen to enter into the body, they had recourse to another hypothesis, which admitted that certain very minute contagious principles act upon the body as a fer- ment, bringing the humors into the same degree of corruption with them- selves, and converting them, in this manner, into a similar ferment, which keeps up the disease. But, by what purifying decoctions do they expect to free the body from a ferment that is constantly renewed, and expel it so completely from the mass of fluids that not a single particle may remain, which, according to the admitted hypothesis, if any did remain, would infal- libly corrupt the humors afresh, and reproduce, as at first, new morbific principles ? Thus, according to the manner of the old school, it would be impossible ever to cure these diseases. Here we see to what absurd conclu- sions the most artful hypothesis will lead, if founded in error. The most firmly rooted syphilis, when the psoric affection with which it is often com- plicated has been removed, may be cured by one or two small doses of a solution of Mercury, diluted to the decillionth potency, whereby the general syphilitic corruption of the humors is (dynamically) corrected in a perma nent and constitutional manner. INTRODUCTION. 37 looked and disregarded the spiritual nature of our life, and the spiritual dynamic power of morbific agents, and have thus reduced themselves to mere scouring physicians, who, instead of curing, destroy life, by their attempts to drive out of the body peccant matters which never had an existence there. Are, then, the excretions occurring in diseases, and which are often so disgusting, the actual material which produce the malady, and which kept it up ?* Are they not rather the product of the disexise itself f that is to say, of the pure dynamic derange- ment which the constitution has undergone ? > With such erroneous ideas of the material origin and essence of disease, it is by no means surprising that, in all ages, the obscure as well as the distinguished practitioner, together with the inventors of the most sublime theories, should have, for their principal aim, the separation and expulsion of a supposed morbid material, and that the indication most frequently estab- lished, was that of dividing this material, rendering it movable, and expelling it by the saliva, the bronchial mucus, the urine, and perspiration; purifying the blood by the action of herbal decoctions (which are supposed to effect this process at the com- mand of the physician), thus unloading it of acrid matter and impurities which it never contained; drawing off the imaginary principle of the disease mechanically, by means of setons, cau- teries, permanent blisters; and, above all, by the expulsion of the peccant matter, as they termed it, through the intestinal canal, by laxatives and purgatives; and, to add to their importance, they were dignified by the high-sounding titles of aperients and dissolvents. All of these were so many attempts to remove a hostile material principle which never did and never could have existed. Now, if we admit that—which is an established fact—namely, that with the exception of those diseases brought on by the in- troduction of indigestible or hurtful substances into the alimentary canal and other organs,—those produced by foreign bodies pene- trating the skin, &c,—there does not exist a single disease that can have a material principle for its cause. On the contrary, all of them are solely and always the special result of an actual and * If this were true, it would be sufficient to blow the nose, and wipe it clean, to effect a speedy and infallible cure of all species of eoryza, even the most inveterate. 38 INTRODUCTION. dynamic derangement in the state health; how contradictory then, must that method of treatment, which depends upon the expulsion* of this imaginary principle, appear to every rea- * There is, apparently, some necessity for the expulsion of worms in the so-called worm-disease. But even this appearance is false. A few lumbrict are found in some children, and ascarides in a greater number. But the greater part of either one or the other is owing to a general affection (psoric) connected with an unhealthy mode of living. If the regimen be ameliorated, and the psoric affection homoeopathically cured, which is easier to be per- formed at this age than at any other period of life, there will remain but few or no worms at all, or, at least, the children are no longer incommoded by them; whereas, on the other hand, they promptly appear again, in great numbers, after the administration of mere purgatives, even combined with worm-seed. " But the tape-worm, this monster, created for the torment of human nature, must certainly be driven out with all manner of force." Yes, at times, he will be driven out, but beneath what sufferings and danger! I should not like to have upon my conscience the deaths of all those who have fallen sacrifices to the violence of purgatives directed against this worm, or the long years of debility which they, who escaped death, must have dragged out. And how often does it occur that, after having repeated these purga- tives, so destructive to life and health, during several years successively, the animal is either not driven out at all, or is reproduced! What if there be no necessity at all for seeking to expel and destroy the taania by means so violent and cruel, and which place the life of the patient in such imminent danger! The different species of taenia are only found in patients laboring under a psoric affection; and when the latter is cured, they instantly disap- pear. Until the cure is accomplished, they live, without being a source of great inconvenience to the patient, not exactly in the intestines, but amid the residue of the aliments, where they exist without doing injury, and find what they require for their nourishment. As long as this state of things con- tinues, they do not touch the coats of the intestines, or do any harm to the body that contains them; but the first moment that an acute disease attacks the patient, the contents of the intestines become insupportable to the ani- mal, which turns itself about and irritates the sensitive part of the entrails, exciting a species of spasmodic colic, which adds greatly to the sufferings of the invalid. (In the same manner, the foetus in the womb becomes restless, turns and pushes, while the mother is sick, but floats quietly in the amniotic fluid, without inconvenience to her, when she is well.) It may be observed here, that the symptoms which manifest themselves at this epoch, with per- sons who have the solitary worm within them, are of such a nature, that often the smallest dose of tincture of Male-fern root (filex mas.) speedily effects their eradication in a homoeopathic manner, because it puts an end to that part of the malady occasioned by the disturbed state of the animal: the tape-worm, finding itself once more at ease, continues to exist upon tho intestinal substances, without incommoding the patient in any very painful degree, until the anti-psoric cure is so far advanced that the worm no longer INTRODUCTION. 39 sonable man, since no good can result from it in treating the principal diseases of mankind, viz., the chronic, but, on the con- trary, much mischief. No one will deny that the degenerate and impure substances which appear in diseases are anything else than the mere pro- duct of disease itself, which the system can get rid of, in a forcible manner—frequently too forcible—without the aid of evacuating medicines, and that they are reproduced so long as the disease continues. These substances often appear, to the true physician, in the shape of morbid symptoms, and aid him in discovering the nature and image of the disease, which he afterwards avails himself of in performing a cure by means of homoeopathic agents. But the most skillful among the present followers of the old school of medicine do not wish it to be known that the chief aim of their mode of treatment is the expulsion of material morbid principles. To the numerous evacuants which they em- ploy, they apply the name of derivatives, and, in so doing, pretend that they do nothing more than follow the example of nature's efforts to assist the diseased organism, which, in her efforts to reestablish health, distinguishes fever by sweats and urine; pleurisy by bleedings at the nose, perspiration, and mucous ex- pectoration ; other diseases by vomiting, diarrhoea, and haemor- rhoidal flux; articular pains by ulcers on the legs; angina by salivation, &c, or by metastasis and abscesses, which she forais in parts distant from the seat of the disease. Accordingly, they think they can do nothing better than imitate nature, and thus they adopt an indirect mode of treat- ment in the majority of diseases. They follow the traces of the diseased vital power left to itself, and proceed, in an indirect manner,* by applying stronger heterogeneous irritation to parts distant from the seat of the disease, exciting and keeping up evacuations by the organs dissimilar to the tissues affected, in order to turn the course of the evil, in some degree, towards this new position. finds the contents of the intestinal canal fit for his support, and he vohtnta rily quits it forever, without any purgatives being employed. * Instead of extinguishing the evil promptly, and without delay, as in the homoeopathic mode of treatment, by the application of dynamic medicinal powers, directed against the diseased parts of the system. 40 INTRODUCTION This derivative system was, and still continues, one of the chief curative indications of the prevailing school. By this imitation of self-aiding nature, vis medicatrix natures, as it is termed by others, they try to excite, by forcible mean3 (in the parts least affected, and which can best support the malady which the medicines provoke), fresh symptoms, which extinguish the primitive disease,* by assuming the appearance of a crisis, and thus allow the powers of self-helping nature to operate a gradual resolution.! They recommend diaphoretics, diuretics, venesection, setons, and cauteries, and, above all, excite irritation of the alimentary canal, so as to produce evacuations from above, and more espe- cially from below, all of which were irritatives, and to these they applied the names of aperients and dissolvents-! In aid of this derivative system they likewise employ another, which bears great affinity to it, and which consists of counter-irri- tants: lamb's wool applied to the bare skin, foot-baths, nauseants, inflicting on the stomach and bowels the pangs of hunger (the hunger-treatment, abstinence), applications to cause pain, inflam- mation, and suppuration in the neighboring or distant parts, such as Armoracia, sinapisms, blisters, Mezereum, setons, Autenrieth's ointment (ointment of emetic Tartar), moxa, actual cautery, acu- puncture, &c. Here, also, they follow the example of crude, un- assisted nature, which, left to herself, endeavors to get rid of the dynamic disease by pains, which she causes to arise in the distant regions of the body, by metastasis and abscesses, by cutaneous * As if anything immaterial could be drawn off! Yet they suppose a morbid material, be it as subtle as it may. f Diseases that are moderately acute, are the only ones that terminate quietly when they have reached the natural term of their career, whether weak allopathic remedies be applied to them or otherwise: the vital powers, when reviving, gradually substitute the normal state in the place of the in- normal. But, in severe acute and in chronic diseases, which constitute the great majority of diseases to which man is subject, this resource no longer comes to the aid of simple nature, and the old school of medicine. The efforts of the vital powers, and the imitative attempts of allopathy, are not potent enough to effect a resolution ; and all that results from them is a truce of short duration, during which the enemy gathers his forces to reappear, sooner or later, in a more formidable shape than ever. % This very denomination likewise announces a supposition on their part of the presence of some morbific substance which was to be dissolved and expelled. INTRODUCTION. 41 eruptions or suppurating ulcers ; but all her efforts, in this respect are useless, where the disease is of a chronic nature. Thus it is evident that it was no well-digested plan, but merely imitation, which promised to simplify practice, that led the old school to these helpless, pernicious, and indirect methods of cure, both derivative and counter-irritant; and induced them to adopt plans of treatment, so inefficacious, debilitating, and injurious, in ameliorating and dissipating diseases for a short time, or remov- ing them in such a manner as to arouse another and a worse evil to occupy the place of the former. Can we call that healing which rather deserves to be called destroying ? for the name of cure could never be applied to such a result. They merely fol- lowed crude instinctive nature in the efforts which she makes, and which are barely successful,* even in acute diseases of a mild * The ordinary school of medicine regarded the efforts made by the or- ganism to relieve itself, in diseases where no medicine was given, as perfect models of imitation; bub they were greatly mistaken. The pitiable and very imperfect attempts which the vital powers make, to assist themselves in acute diseases, is a spectacle that ought to excite man to the use all the resources of his learning and wisdom to put an end, by a real cure, to this torment, which nature herself inflicts. If nature cannot cure, homoeopa- thically, a disease already existing in the system, by the production of another fresh malady similar to it (sec. 43—46), a thing not often in her power to effect (sec. 50), and if the system, deprived of all external succor, stands alone to triumph over a malady that has just broken out (her resis- tance is totally powerless in chronic miasms), we see nothing but painful and often dangerous efforts of nature to save the individual at all hazards— efforts of which death is most frequently the result. Little as we mortals know of the operations that take place in the interior of our bodies in a healthy condition, and as certainly as these processes re- main concealed from us, as they lie open to the sight of Omniscience, just as little can we perceive the internal operations of the animal frame when life is disturbed by disease. The internal operations in diseases are mani- fested only by external symptoms, through the medium of which alone our system expresses the troubles that take place in the interior; so that in no given case can we ascertain which of the morbid symptoms owe their origin to the primitive action of the disease, and those which are occasioned by the reaction of the vital powers endeavoring to rescue themselves from danger. Both are confounded before our eyes, and only present to us (re- flected on the exterior) an image of the entire malady within; since the fruitless efforts by which nature, abandoned to herself, makes, to put an end to the malady, are also sufferings which the whole frame undergoes. Hence, even in those evacuations termed crises, which nature generally produces at the termination of diseases which have run a rapid course, there is fre- 42 INTRODUCTION. form. They did nothing more than imitate the preserving vital powers, abandoned to their own resources, which, depending solely upon the organic laws of the body, only act in virtue of these laws, without reasoning or reflecting upon their actions. They copied nature, which cannot, like an intelligent surgeon, bring to- gether the gaping lips of a wound, and by their union effect a cure; which, in an oblique fracture, can do nothing—however great may be the quantity of osseous matter which exudes—to adjust and at- tach the two ends of the bone ; which, not knowing how to tie up a wounded artery, suffers a man full of strength and health to bleed to death; which, ignorant of the art of reducing a dislocation, ren- ders its reduction in a very short time impossible, by reason of the swelling she excites in all the neighboring parts ; which, in order to remove a foreign body that had penetrated the transparent cor- nea, destroys the whole eye by suppuration; which, in a strangulated hernia, cannot break the obstacle but by gangrene and death; and which, finally, in dynamic diseases, by changing their form, often quently more of suffering than of efficacious relief What the vital powers do in these pretended crises, and in what manner they do it, are mysteries to us, as well as every other internal action which takes place in the or- ganic economy of life. One thing, however, is certain: that, in the course of these efforts there are particular parts that suffer more or less, and which are sacrificed to the safety of others. The*e operations of the vital power for the removal of an acute disease, solely in conformity to the laws of the organic constitution, and not according to the inspirations of a reflecting mind, are, at most, but a species of allopathy. In order to free the organs primitively affected, by means of a crisis, it increases the activity of the organs of secretion, in order to lead off the evil from the former to the latter: thence result vomiting, diarrhoea, plentiful flow of urine, sweats, abscesses, &c.; and the nervous powers, attacked dynamically, seek, in some degree, to unload themselves by material products. The animal economy, abandoned to its own resources, cannot save itself from acute diseases but by the destruction and sacrifice of one part of the system itself; and, even where death does not ensue, the harmony of life and health is restored only in a slow and imperfect manner. The great debility of those organs which had been exposed to the attacks of the malady, as well as that of the entire body, the emaciation, &c, re- mainiig after this spontaneous cure, are convincing proofs of the truth of what we have asserted. In short, the whole proceedings by which the system delivers itself from the diseases with which it is attacked, only exhibit to the observer a tissue of sufferings, and show him nothing which he can, or ought to imitate, if he truly exercises the art of healing. INTRODUCTION. 43 renders the state of the patient worse than it was before. But more this irrational vital power admits into the body, without hesi taiion the greatest scourge of our earthly existence, the source ot countless diseases which have afflicted the human species for cen- turies past—that is to say, chronic miasms, such as psora, syphilis, and sycosis. And, far from being able to relieve the system of any one of these miasms, she does not even possess the power of ameliorating them; but, on the contrary, suffers them quietly to continue their ravages until death comes to close the eyes of the patient, after long years of grief and suffering. In a matter so important as that of healing—in a profession that requires so much intelligence, judgment, and skill—how could the old school (which arrogates to itself the title of ra- tional) blindly take the vital power for its best instructor and guide ? how could it venture, without reflection, to imitate the indirect and revolutionary acts which the vital power performs in disease, and, finally, follow it as the best and most perfect of models, whilst reflective reason and unfettered judgment—that magnificent gift of the Deity—has been granted to us, to enable us infinitely to surpass its performances for the benefit of hu- manity ? When the prevailing school of medicine, in the accustomed application of their repellent and derivative systems of cure (which have no other basis than an inconsiderate imitation of the natural automatic powers of life), attack the healthy organs, and .inflict on them pains more acute than those of the disease itself, against which they are directed, or, what happens more frequently, force evacuations, whereby strength and fluids are wasted; their aim is to direct towards the parts which irritate that morbid action which life developed in the organs that were primi'tively affected, and thus violently uproot the natural disease, by exciting a stronger heterogeneous disease in the more healthy parts—that is to say, by making use of indirect and circuitous means, which exhaust the powers and occasion great suffering * •* Daily experience shows us how unsuccessful these manoeuvres are in chronic diseases. In very few cases is a cure effected. But can they call that a victorv where, instead of attacking the enemy in front, hand to hand, and terminating 'the difference by his death, they content themselves with setting everv part of the country behind him in flames, cutting ofl retreat, and destroying all around. By such means they may certainly succeed in 44 INTRODUCTION. It is true that, by these heterogeneous attacks, the disease, if it be acute (and consequently of but short duration), transports itself to parts distant and dissimilar to those which it at first occupied; but it is by no means cured. There is nothing in this revolutionary mode of treatment that has a direct or immediate connection with the organs primitively diseased, or wThich deserves to be called a cure. By abstaining from such grievous attacks upon the life of the other parts of the system, the acute disease would often cease of itself, leaving less suffering behind, and without occasioning so great a consumption of the powers. But neither the mode of proceeding which is followed by simple nature, nor its allopathic imitation, will bear a comparison with the direct, dynamic, homoeopathic treatment, which, without wrasting the vital powers, extinguishes the disease in a direct and rapid manner. In far the greatest number of cases of disease, however, and in chronic affections, these stormy, debilitating, and indirect treat- ments of the old school scarcely ever produce any good. All that they can effect is a suspension, for a few days, of some incom- modious symptom or another, which returns immediately, when nature has become accustomed to the distant irritation; the disease then returns more grievous than before, because the repel- lant pains,* and the ill-advised evacuations, have lessened the energy of the vital powers. While the greater number of allopathic physicians, in their breaking the courage of their adversary, but their object is still unattained: the foe is not. destroyed, he is still there; and, when his magazines are re- plenished, he again rears his head, more ferocious than he was before. The enemy, I say, is not destroyed, but the poor innocent country is so ruined that it will scarce recover itself in a long lapse of time. This is precisely what happens to allopathy, in chronic diseases, when, without curing the malady, it undermines and destroys the system by indirect at- tacks against innocent organs, which are distant from the seat of the latter. These are the results of such injurious attempts. * What good results have ever ensued from issues, so frequently estab- lished, diffusing their fetid odors around ? Even though they appear during the first fortnight, by their irritating power, slightly to diminish a chronic disease as long as they continue to keep up considerable pain, they afterwards, when the body is accustomed to the pain, have no other effect than that of weakening the patient, and thus opening a still wider field to the chronic affection. Or,'are there yet physicians in the nineteenth century who could regard these issues as outlets for the escape of the peccant matters? It appears that some such practitioners do exist! INTRODUCTION. 45 general imitation of the salutary effects of nature, abandoned to her own resources, thus introduced into the practice of medicine those derivative systems of merely hypothetical utility, and which every one varied according to the fancied indications suggested by his own ideas; others, aiming at a still higher object, under- took designedly to promote the efforts which the vital powers exhibit in diseases, to relieve themselves by evacuations and opposing metastases, and endeavored in some degree to aid them, by increasing still more these derivations and evacuations, imagining that, by this mode of treatment, they might justly arro- gate to themselves the names, ministri naturod. Because it often happens, in chronic diseases, that the evacuations which nature excites, bring relief in cases where there are acute pains, paraly- sis, spasms, &c, the old school imagined that the true method of curing disease was by favoring, keeping up, or even increasing the evacuations. But they never discovered that all those pretended crises, those evacuations and derivations produced by nature abandoned to her own exertions, only procure palliative relief for a short period, and that, far from contributing towards a real cure, they, on the contrary, aggravate the internal primitive evil by consuming the strength and the fluids. No one has ever seen those efforts of simple nature effect the durable recovery of a patient, nor have those evacuations, excited by the system,* ever cured a chronic disease. On the contrary, in all cases of this nature, after a short relief (the duration of which gradually diminishes), the primitive affection is manifestly aggravated, and the attacks return stronger and more frequent than before, although the evacuations do not cease. In the same manner, nature, abandoned to her own resources in internal chronic diseases which threaten life, can only bring relief by exciting the appearance of external local symptoms, in order to turn away danger from the organs indispensable to exis- tence, and transport it, by metastasis, to those which are not so; such attempts, of an unintelligent, inconsiderate, but energetic vital force, have a tendency towards anything but a real cure; they are nothing more than palliatives, short stagnations imposed on the internal disease at the sacrifice of a great portion of the liquids and strength, without diminishing the primary disease in the * Equally inefficacious are those produced artificially. 46 INTRODUCTION. least. All they can do, at farthest, is to delay for a time that death which is inevitable without the aid of homoeopathic treat- ment. The allopathy of the old school greatly exaggerated the efforts of crude nature. Falsely judging them to be truly salutary, they sought to promote and develop them still farther, hoping, by these means, to destroy the entire evil and effect a radical cure. When, in a chronic disease, the vital power appeared to improve this or thatgrievous symptom of the internal state—for example, by means of some humid cutaneous eruption—then the self-styled minister of nature applied a blister, or some other exutory, upon the sup- purating surface, to draw (duce natura) a still greater quantity of humor from the skin, and thus assist nature in the cure, by removing from the body the morbific principle. But, sometimes, when the action of the remedy was too violent, the humid tetter already old, and the body too susceptible of irritation, the external affection increased considerably, without any advantage accruing to the primitive evil; and the pains, rendered still more acute, deprived the patient of sleep, diminished his strength, and often brought on a bad description of feverish erysipelas. Or, when the remedy acted with more gentleness upon the local disease (which was perhaps yet recent), it exercised a kind of external homoeo- pathy upon the local symptoms which nature had produced upon the skin, in order to relieve the internal malady; thus renewing the latter, to which still greater danger was attached, and exposing the vital powers, by the suppression of the local symptoms, to the excitement of others of a graver nature, in other and more noble parts. The patient then was attacked with a dangerous ophthal- mia, deafness, spasms in the stomach, epileptic convulsions, suffo- cation, fits of apoplexy, mental derangement, &c* The same pretext, of assisting the vital powers in their curative efforts, led the minister of nature, when the malady caused an afflux of blood into the veins of the rectum, or the anus (blind piles), to have recourse to the repeated application of leeches, in great numbers, in order to open an issue to the blood in that quarter. The emission of blood procured an amendment, sometimes so slight as * These are the natural results of repelling such local symptoms—results which the allopathic physician often regards as diseases that are perfectly new and of a different character. INTRODUCTION. 47 to be scarce deserving of notice; but, at the same time, it weak- ened the body, and gave rise to a yet stronger congestion towards the extremity of the intestinal canal, without effecting the slightest diminution of the primitive malady. In almost every case where the diseased vital powers en- deavored to evacuate a little blood by vomiting, expectoration, &c, in order to diminish the severity of a dangerous internal affection, the old school physicians immediately hastened (duce natura) to give all the assistance in their power to these pre- tended salutary efforts of nature, and blood in abundance was extracted from the vein; wdiich never failed to prove injurious in the end, and to weaken the body to a manifest extent. In cases of frequently occurring chronic nausea, and with the view of furthering the intentions of nature, they excited powerful evacuations of the stomach, and administered plentiful emetics; but never with any good result, and seldom without frightful and even dangerous consequences. To appease the internal malady in a slight degree, the vital powers sometimes excite indolent enlargements of the external glands. The minister of nature thinks he is serving the divinity to whom he is devoted by bringing these tumors to a suppuration, by the use of frictions and warm applications, in order to plunge the knife into the abscess when arrived at maturity, and cause the peccant matter to flow externally. (?) But experience has a thousand times proved the interminable evils that always result from this mode of treat- ment And, having often noticed slight amelioration of the severe symptoms of chronic diseases to result from spontaneous noctur- nal perspiration, or from certain natural dejections of liquid matter, he thinks himself bound to follow these indications of nature; he likewise thinks it his duty to second the labors which he sees carried on in his own presence, by prescribing a complete sudorific treatment, or the continued use, during several years, of what he calls gentle laxatives, in order to relieve the patient of the disease that torments him with more speed and cer- tainty. Bat this mode of treatment never produces anything but a contrary result—that is to say, it always aggravates the primitive disease. Thus the allopathist, yielding to the force of this opinion, which he has embraced without scrutiny, notwithstanding the 48 INTRODUCTION. absence of all foundation, persists in seconding* the efforts of the diseased vital powers, and augmenting the derivations and evacu- ations, which never lead to the attainment of his object, but rather to the ruin of the patient. He never discovers that local affec- tions, evacuations, and apparent derivations (which are effects excited and kept up by the vital powers abandoned to their own resources, in order to afford some slight relief to the primitive disease), are of themselves a constituent part of the ensemble of the signs of the malady, against the totality of which there could be no real, salutary, and curative remedy, save a medicine whose effects were analogous with the phenomena occasioned by its action upon man when in a state of health, or, in other terms, a homoeopathic remedy. As everything that crude nature does to relieve herself, in acute, and, more particularly, in chronic diseases, is highly imperfect, and is actually disease itself, it may readily be conceived that the efforts of art, laboring to assist this imperfection, do still greater injury; and, in acute maladies, at least, they cannot remedy that which is defective in the attempts of nature, becaus the physician, incapable of following the concealed paths by which the vital power accomplishes its crises, could only operate upon the exterior by means of energetic remedies, whose effects not only do less good than those of nature, abandoned to herself, * The old school, however, often permitted themselves to follow a reverse method of treatment: that is, when the efforts of nature, tending to relieve the internal malady by evacuation, or by exciting local external symptoma manifestly injured the patient, they employ against^hem all the powers of repellents; and thus combat chronic pains, insomnolency, and diarrhoea of long standing, with strong and hazardous doses of Opium; vomitings, by effervescing mixtures ; foetid perspiration of the feet, by cold foot-baths and astringent fomentations; eruptions of the skin, with preparations of Lead and Zinc; uterine haemorrhages, by injections of Vinegar; colliquative perspira- tions, by Alum curd; nocturnal seminal emissions, by the use of Camphor in large quantities; sudden glow of heat over the face and body, by Nitric, Sulphuric, and vegetable acids; bleeding of the nose, with dossils of lint dipped in alcohol or astringent liquids; ulcers on the lower extremities, by Oxides of Lead, Zinc, &c. But thousands of facts attest the melancholy con- Bequences that result from this mode of treatment. The allopathist, both in speaking and writing, boasts of being a rational physician, of searching out the latent cause of disease, and of always effecting radical cures; but it is evident that a treatment founded on isolated symptoms must always be detrimental to the patient. INTRODUCTION. 49 but, on the contrary, are more perturbating and destructive to the powers. Even this imperfect relief, which nature effects by means of derivations and crises, he cannot attain by following the same path; do what he will, even the miserable succor which the vital powers can procure, when abandoned to their own resources, is infinitely beyond the skill of the allopathist. It has been attempted to produce, by means of scarifying instru- ments, a bleeding at the nose, in imitation of natural nasal hemor- rhage, to relieve, for example, an attack of chronic headache. In such a case, a quantity of blood might be drawn from the nostrils- sufficient to weaken the patient; but the relief would be far less than that afforded at another time, when the vital instinctive powers, of their own accord, caused only a few drops of blood to flow. One of those so-called critical perspirations or diarrhoeas, which the incessant activity of the vital powers excites, after any sudden indisposition, arising from vexation, fright, cold, or injury from improper lifting, is far more efficacious in allaying, momentarily at least, the acute suffering of the patient, than all the nauseous sudorifics or purgatives contained in the shop of an apothecary. This is proved beyond a doubt by daily experience. But the vital power, which is devoid of intelligence and judg- ment, and which can only act according to the organic disposition of our bodies, was not given to us that we should follow it as our best guide in the cure of diseases, much less that we should imi- tate,* in a servile manner, its imperfect attempts to restore health by joining to it a treatment more opposed than its own to the object it hag in view, for no other purpose than that of sparino- ourselves the study and reflection necessary to the discovery of the true art of healing, and, finally, to place a bad copy of the inefficacious aid which nature affords, when abandoned to her ewn resources, in the room of the most noble of all human arts! What reflecting man would copy the efforts of nature in curing disease ? These very efforts are the disease itself, and the morbidly affected vital energy is evidently the source of the malady. It follows, then, that to imitate or to suppress these efforts must in one case augment them, or in the other render them dangerous by suppres- sion, and the allopathist does both; these are their pernicious doings, who boast of following the rational plan of healing! No! that innate power of man, which directs life in the most perfect manner whilst in health, whose presence is alike felt in 50 INTRODUCTION. every part of the system, in the sensitive as in the irritable fibre, and which is the indefatigable spring of all the normal functions of the body, was not created for the purpose of aiding itself in disease. It does not exercise a system of cure that is worthy of imitation, that is to say, a work of reflection and judgment, and which, when the automatic and unintelligent vital powers have been disordered by disease, and abnormal action produced, knows how to modify them by appropriate remedies, so that, after the disappearance of the new disease produced by the, ■medicine (which soon takes place), they return to their normal state, and to their appointed function of maintaining health in the system, without having undergone, during this conver- sion, any painful or debilitating attacks. Homoeopathic medi- cine teaches us the mode by which we are to arri/ve at this result. A great number of patients, treated according to the methods of the old school, which have just passed in review before us, escaped from diseases, not in chronic disorders (non-venereal)., but in those maladies that were acute, and which are less danger- ous. This, however, was effected by such painfully circuitous means, and frequently in a manner so imperfect, that no one could say the cure was performed by the influence of an art that acted mildly in its mode of treatment. In cases where there was no imminent danger, acute diseases were sometimes repressed by means of venesection, or sometimes by the suppression of one of the principal symptoms, by a palliative enantiopathic remedy (contraria contrariis), or sometimes suspended by irritants and revulsants, applied to parts removed from the diseased organ, until the natural time for the duration of the short malady had expired—that is to say, they opposed them by indirect means, exhausting the strength and the juices; 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 humors, remained to be performed by the self- preserving vital power. The latter, then, had not only to subdue the acute natural disease, but also to overcome the results of an ill-directed mode of treatment. In casual cases, this vital power INTRODUCTION. 51 was to exercise its own energies to bring back the functions to their normal rhythm, which could only be effected imperfectly and slowly, and with great difficulty. In acute diseases, it is doubtful whether this treatment of the existing school really facilitates or abridges the cure by the aid of nature, since neither of them act but in an indirect manner; and their derivative and counter-irritating modes of cure, wound the system more profoundly, and lead to a still greater dissipation of the vital powers. The old school practise yet another method of cure, which they call "stimulating and strengthening"* (by excitantia, nervina, tonica, confortantia, roborantia). It is surprising that they should boast of this mode of treatment. Has it ever succeeded in removing, as it has so often attempted to do, the physical weakness which a chronic disease so often engenders, augments, and keeps up, by prescribing ethereal Rhine wine, or fiery Tokay ? As this treatment was not able to cure the chronic disease (the source of the debility), the strength of the patient decreased in proportion as they made him take mor wine, because the vital powers, in their reaction, oppose relaxation to artificial excitements. Did Cinchona, or any of the mistaken, ambiguous, and pernicious substances, which collectively bear the name of Amara, ever restore strength in these cases which are of such frequent occur- rence ? These vegetable products, which they pretended were tonic and strengthening in all circumstances, together with the preparations of Iron, did they not add fresh suff'erings to the old ones, by reason of their peculiar pathogenetic effects, without being able to remove the debility which depended on an unknown malady of long standing ? The so-called unguenta nervina, or the other spirituous and balsamic topical embrocations, did they ever diminish in a durable manner, or even momentarily, incipient paralysis of an arm or leg (which arises, as is frequently the case, from a chronic disease;, * This method is, properly speaking, enantiopathic, and I shall again refer to it in the course of the Organon (sec. 59). 52 INTRODUCTION. without curing the cause itself? Or have electric and 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 such limbs ?* Have not the highly-boasted exciidntia and aphrodisiac a, Ambergris, Smelts, tincture of Cantharides, Truffles, Cardamoms, Cinnamon, and Vanilla, constantly ended with changing the gra- dually declining power of the virile faculties (which is always caused by some unobserved chronic miasm) into total impotence ? How could they boast of an acquisition of strength, and excite- ment, which lasts only a few hours, when the results that follow bring on an opposite state (which is lasting) according to the laws of all palliatives ? The little good that the excitantia and rdborantia did to the patient treated for acute maladies, according to the old method, was a thousand times outweighed by the ill effects which the use of them produced in chronic diseases. Allopathists not unfrequently commence the treatment of a chronic disease by blindly administering their so-called alterative remedies (alterantia), among which the mercurials (Calomel, Blue Pill, Corrosive Sublimate, Mercurial Ointments) occupy a conspicuous place. These sovereign remedies of theirs, even in cases not venereal, are often given in large and long-continued doses, until their deleterious tendency becomes manifest in the ruined health of the patient. Great alterations are certainly pro- duced by the destructive operation of Mercury upon improper parts, but they are such as finally exhaust the constitution of the patient. Cinchona, in all genuine marsh intermittents, is a homoeopathic remedy, and, when not prevented by preexisting psora, a specific. But, by prescribing it in large and long-continued doses in every epidemic intermittent, the ignorance of the old school is abun- dantly shown; for the disease, almost every year assuming a * An apothecary (in Jever) had a voltaic column, the gradual strokes of which gave temporary relief to persons afflicted with deafness. Soon these Bhocks caused no more effect, and it was necessary, in order to produce the same results, to render them stronger, until, in their turn, they likewise became inefficacious; after this, the most powerful shocks would at first excite the patient's hearing for a short time, but at length leave him quite deaf. INTRODUCTION. 53 different character, requires for its removal a different homoeo- pathic remedy, which in a single dose, or, at most, a very few minute doses, effects a radical cure in the course of a few days. Now, because such epidemic fevers have their periodical attacks (type of the disease), 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 Cin- chona; these routine practitioners imagine, if they can but sup- press the type of the disease by means of enormous doses of that medicine, or its more costly extract, Quinine, that the patient is cured. But he is really left in a worse condition, after such sup- pression of the periodical returns of his fever, than before. We behold him moving slowly along, his countenance sallow, his breathing asthmatic, the hypochondres constricted, the abdominal viscera diseased, frequently the abdomen itself and limbs in a bloated condition,—without healthful appetite or refreshing sleep, weak and dispirited, he is discharged from the hospital >in this state of complicated suffering—as cured! not unfrequently years of elaborate homoeopathic treatment are required, we will not say to restore his health, but to rescue this radically vitiated, this artificially cachectic patient from an untimely death. It is cause of gratification to the old school when, by the anti- pathic virtues of Valerian, they can convert the stupor of nerr vous fever into a degree of exhilaration for a few hours. But, this transient excitement being once over, it can be reproduced only by a repetition of still larger doses of the same medicine, and even the largest soon lose their effect. Their primary operation being that of a stimulating palliative, the entire vital energies, during the secondary effects of the medicine, become paralyzed, and thus, by means of the rational treatment of the old school, the speedy dissolution of the patient is rendered inevitable. As certainly mortal as is the issue of the case, the followers of the old system do not perceive it, and the patient's death is ascribed by them to the malignity of his disease. Digitalispurpurea is a still more formidable palliative in chronic diseases, and its virtues are highly extolled by the old school for allaying the rapid and irritated pulse (purely sympto matic) in these maladies. Though the use of this potent enantio- pathic medicine may at first, in many instances, abate the fre- quency of the pulse for some hours, yet it will shortly afterwards 54 INTRODUCTION. become more frequent than ever. To retard its velocity again, the medicine is repeated in a larger dose; it is again availing, yet for a shorter period; until, by frequent repetition, even in augmented doses, it loses its effects altogether. The pulse not now being restrained by the secondary or consecutive effects of Digitalis, becomes more rampant than before its use, and too rapid to be reckoned. Among the train of consequences may also be observed, loss of sleep and appetite and diminution of strength, until, finally, if these disasters do not terminate in incurable mania, death becomes the patient's only refuge !* Such, then, was the treatment which the allopathic physician practiced on his patients. The latter, therefore, were obliged to yield to necessity, since they could derive nothing better from the other physicians who had drawn their information from the same fallacious source. The fundamental cause of chronic diseases (non-venereal), and the mode by which they could be cured, remained unknown to these practitioners, who prided themselves on their own remedies, which they said were directed against the cause. How was it possible for them to cure the immense number of chronic diseases by their indirect methods, their imperfect imitations of the efforts of an automatic vital power, which were never destined to become models of a treatment to be followed in medicine ? They regarded that which they believed to be the character of the malady as the cause of the disease itself, and, accordingly, directed their pretended radical cures against spasm, inflamma- tion (plethora), fever, general or partial debility, mucus, putridity, obstructions, &c, which they imagined they could remove with the aid of their antispasmodics, antiphlogistics, tonics, irritants, anti- septics, dissolvents, resolutives, derivatives, evaeuants, and other repellent medicines, known to themselves only in a superficial manner. But indications of so vague a nature were insufficient to dis- * Notwithstanding all this, Hufeland, the representative of the old school, with great self-complacency, in his pamphlet on homoeopathia, p. 22, praises the Digitalis for the purpose of repressing morbid frequency of the pulse : his words are, " None will deny''' (but experience does) •' that a too vehement circulation can be removed by Digitalis" (?) permanently? does he mean removed ? What ? By the use of a heroic enantiopathic remedy ? Poor Hufeland! INTRODUCTION. 55 cover those medicines which are of real utility, particularly so in the materia medica of the old school, which, as I have elsewhere shown,* depended mostly upon mere conjecture, and on false con- clusions ab usu in morbis, mixed up with fraud and falsehood. They continued to act with the same degree of coldness in matters that were still more hypothetical; against the deficiency or superabundance of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and hydrogen in the fluids; against the exaltation or diminution of irritability sensibility, and reproduction, derangements of the arterial, venous, and capillary systems, asthenia, &c, without being acquainted with a single remedy by which they could reach so visionary an object. It was ostentation that induced them to attempt these cures which could not be advantageous to the patients. Every appearance of treating disease effectively and to the purpose, disappears in their manner of associating various medi- cinal substances to constitute what they call a prescription, and time has not only rendered this association sacred, but has con- verted it into a law. They place at the head of this recipe, under the name of basis, a medicine that is not at all known in regard to the extent of its medicinal effects, but which they think ought to subdue the principal character of the disease admitted by the physician; they add to this one or two substances equally unknown, in respect of their operation on the system, and which they destine either for the removal of some particular accessory symptom, or to increase the action of the basis; they then add a pretended corrective, of whose special medicinal virtues they have no better knowledge; they then mix the whole together, sometimes adding either a syrup, or a distilled water, which likewise possess distinct medicinal properties, and imagine that each ingredient of the mixture will perform, in the diseased body, the part that has been assigned to it by the prescriber's imagination, without allowing itself to be disturbed or led astray by the other articles that accompany it—a result which no one could reasonably expect. One of these ingredients destroys, either partly or wholly, the operation of the other, or gives to it, as well as to the remainder, a different mode of action altogether, which had never been thought of, so that the effects calculated on could not possi- * In the treatise, " On the Sources of the Old Materia Medica," in the third part of my Materia Medica. 56 INTRODUCTION. bly take place. This inexplicable enigma of mixtures often pro duces that which neither was nor could have been expected, a new morbid derangement,Yfhich is not observed amidst the tumult of symptoms, but which becomes permanent by the prolonged use of the prescription. Consequently, an artificial disease, joining itself to the original one, aggravates the primitive disease; or, if the patient does not use the same prescription for a long time, if one or several be crowded upon him successively, composed of different ingredients, greater debility will at least ensue, be- cause the substances which are prescribed in such a case have generally little or no direct reference to the principal malady, and only make a useless attack upon those points against which its assaults have been the least directed. Though the action of every medicine on the human body should already have been discovered, still the physician who writes the prescription does not often know the effect of one in a hundred. Mixing several drugs together, some of which are already com pounds, whose separate effects are but imperfectly known, 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 an absurdity evident to every unprejudiced* and reflecting individual. The result is con- sequently the reverse of that which they expect to take place in * Even among the ordinary schools of medicine, there have been persons who perceived the absurdity of mixing medicines, although they still con- tinued to follow this eternal routine which their own reason condemned. Marcus Herz expresses himself (Hufeland's Journal, II., p. 33) on this sub- ject in the following terms: " When we wish to remove inflammation, we do not employ either Nitre, Sal-ammoniac, or vegetable acids, singly, but we usually mix up several antiphlogistics, or use them altogether at the same time. If we have to contend against putridity, we are not content with ad- ministering, in large quantities, one of the known antiseptics, Cinchona, mineral acids, Arnica, Serpentaria, &c, to attain the object we have in view; but we prefer mixmg up several of them together, having a greater reliance upon their combined action; or, not knowing which of them would act most suitably in the existing case, we accumulate a variety of incompatible sub- stances, and abandon to chance the care of producing, by means of one or the other of them, the relief we designed to afford. Thus, it is rare that, by the aid of a single medicine, we excite perspiration, purify the blood (?) overcome obstructions, promote expectoration, or even effect purgation. To arrive at these results, our prescriptions are always complicated; they are scarcely ever simple and pure: consequently, they cannot be regarded as ex INTRODUCTION. 57 so precise a manner; changes certainly take place, bnt not one among them is either good or conformable to the object that is to be attained. I should like very much to see that which is called a cure, by a man working thus blindly in the bodies of his fellow-creatures. The restoration of health is to be expected only by cherishing the due activity of the vital principle yet remaining with the pa- tient, by means of remedies suitable for that purpose, and not by debilitating the system, secundum artem*, almost to the extinc- tion of life. This is a method, however, not unfrequent with the old school on commencing the treatment of chronic diseases: they operate by means of medicines which harass the patient, expend the animal fluids, exhaust the strength, and shorten life! Can they be said to save while they thus destroy ? and can they be said to exercise any other than a hurtful art? They act, lege artis, as contrary to their professed aim as possible, and practice dXXoia, that is to say, the very reverse of what they ought to do. Can they deserve commendation ? In modern times, indeed, this school have gone to great excesses in frustrating the end of all true medical treatment, as every impartial observer must acknow- ledge, and as physicians of their own school (v/hen their con- sciences are awakened, like that of Kriiger Hansen) will confess before the world. periments relative to the effects of tlie various substances that enter into their composition. In fact, we learnedly establish certain grades of rank among the medicines in our recipes, and we call that one the basis to which we (properly speaking) confide the effect, giving to others the names ef adju- vants, corrigents, &c. But this classification is evidently almost entirely ar- bitrary. The adjuvants contribute, as well as the basis, to the entire effect, although, in the absence of a scale of measurement, we cannot determine to what degree they may have participated. The influence of the corrigents over the powers of the other medicines, likewise, cannot be wholly indif- ferent ; they must either increase or diminish them, or give them another direc- tion. The salutary (?) change which we effect, by the aid of such a prescrip- tion, ought then always to be considered as the result of its whole contents taken collectively, and we can never come to any certain conclusion upon the individual efficacy of any one of the ingredients of which it is composed. In short, we are but too slightly acquainted with thai which is essential to be known of all medicines, and our knowledge with regard to the affinities they enter into, when mixed up together, is too limited for us to be able to say, with any degree of certainty, what will be the mode or degree of action of a subject, even the most insignificant in appearance, when introduced into the human body, combined with other substances." 58 INTRODUCTION. Observation, reflection, and experiment have unfolded to me that, in opposition to the old allopathic method, the best and true method of cure is founded on the principle, similia similibus curantur. To cure in a mild, prompt, safe, and durable manner it is necessary to choose in each case a medicine that will excite an affection similar (dfioiov Trafloc) to that against which it is employed. Until the present time, no person has ever inculcated this homoeopathic mode of treatment, and, yet more, no one has ever put it into practice. But, if this is the only true method (of which every one may be convinced with myself), we ought to discover sensible traces of it in every epoch of the art, although its true character may have been unknown during thousands of years. And such has, in reality, been the case.* In all ages, the diseases which have been cured by medicines, in a prompt, perfect, durable, and manifest manner, and which were not indebted for their cure to any accidental circumstance, or to the accomplishment of the natural revolution of the acute disease, or to the circumstance of the bodily powers having gra- dually regained a preponderance by means of an allopathic and antagonistic treatment (for being cured in a direct manner differs greatly from being cured in an indirect manner), these diseases, I say, have yielded, although without the knowledge of the physi- cian, to a homoeopathic remedy, that is to say, to a remedy in itself capable of exciting a morbid- state similar to that whose removal is effected. Even in an effectual cure that had been performed by the aid of mixed medicines (of which there are but few examples), it has been discovered that the medicine whose action dominated over that of the others was always of a homoeopathic nature. But this fact presents itself to us still more evidently in certain cases, where physicians performed a speedy cure by the aid of a single remedy, in violation of the custom that admitted none other but mixed medicines in the form of a prescription. Here we see, to our astonishment, that the cure was always the effect of a single medicinal substance, capable of itself to produce an affection * For truth, like the infinitely wise and gracious God, is eternal. Men may disregard it for a tune, until the period arrives when its rays, according to the determination of Heaven, shall irresistibly break through the mists of prejudice, and, like Aurora and the opening day, shed a beneficent light; clear and inextinguishable, over the generations of men. INTRODUCTION. 59 similar to that under which the patient labored, although the physician did not know what he was doing, and only acted thus in forgetfulness of the precepts of his own school. He gave a medicine the very reverse of that which, according to the estab- lished laws of therapeutics, he should have administered, and by these means alone his patients were promptly cured. I shall here relate some examples of these homoeopathic cures, which find a clear and precise interpretation in the homoeopathic doctrine now discovered and acknowledged, but which we are by no means to regard as arguments in favor of the latter, because it stands firm without the aid of any such support.* The author of the treatise on epidemic diseases, emdnfu&v (attri- buted to Hippocrates), at the commencement of lib. 5, mentions a case of cholera morbus that resisted every remedy, and which he cured by means of Veratrum-album alone, which, however, excites cholera of itself, as witnessed by Forestus, Ledelius, Reimann, and many others.f The English sweating sickness, which first exhibited itself in the year 1485, and which, more murderous than the plague itself, carried off in the commencement (as testified by Willis), ninety- * If, in the case which will be cited here, the doses of medicine exceeded those which the safe homoeopathic doctrine prescribes, they were, of course, very naturally attended with the same degree of danger which usually re- sults from all homoeopathic agents when administered in large doses. How- ever, it often happens, from various causes, which cannot at all times be discovered, that even very large doses of homoeopathic medicines effect a cure, without causing any notable injury; either from the vegetable substance having lost a part of its strength, or because abundant evacuations ensued, which destroyed the greater part of the effects of the remedy; or, finally because the stomach had received at the same time other substances, which, acting as an antidote, lessened the strength of the dose. f P. Forestus, xviii., obs. 44.—Ledelius, Misc. Nat. Cur., dec. iii., ann. i., obs. 65.—Reimann, Brest. Samml., 1724, p. 535. In this, and in all the examples that follow, I have purposely abstained from reporting either my own observations or those of my adherents upon the special effects of each indi- vidual medicine, but merely those of the physicians of times past. My object for acting in this manner is to show that the art of curing homoeopathically might have been discovered before my time. 60 INTRODUCTION. nine patients out of a hundred, could not be subdued until physi- cians had learned to administer sudorifcs to their patients. After that time, as Sennertus* observes, few persons died of it. A case of dysentery, which lasted several years, threatening the patient with inevitable death, and against which every other medicine had been tried without success, was, to the great surprise Fischerf (but not to mine), cured in a speedy and permanent manner by a, purgative administered by an empiric. Murray (whom I selected from numerous other authorities), together with daily experience, informs us that, among the symp- toms produced by the use of Tobacco, those of vertigo, nausea, and anxiety are the principal. Whereas Diemerbroeck,J when attacked with those very symptoms of vertigo, nausea, and anxiety, in the course of his close attendance on the victims of epidemic diseases in Holland, removed them by the use of the pipe. The hurtful effects which some writers (among others Georgi§) ascribe to the use of the Agaricus-muscarius, by the inhabitants of Kamtschatka, and which consist of tremors, convulsions, and epilepsy, became a salutary remedy in the hands of C. G. Whist- ling, || who used this mushroom with success in cases of convul- sions accompanied with tremor; likewise, in those of J. C. Bern- hardt,** who used it with success in a species of epilepsy. The remark made by Murray ,ff that oil of Aniseed allays pains of the stomach and flatulent colic caused by purgatives, ought not to surprise us, knowing that J. P. AlbrechtJJ has observed pains in the stomach produced by the liquid; and P. Forestus§§ violent colic likewise caused by its administration. If F. Hoffmann praises the efficacy of Millefoil in various cases of hcemorrhage ; if Gr. E. Stahl, Buchwalk, and Loseke have found this plant useful in excessive hemorrhoidal flux; if Quarin and * De Febribus, iv., cap. 15. f In Hufeland's Journal fur practische Arzneikunde, vol. x. iv., p. 127. t_ Tract de Peste, Amsterdam, 1665, p. 273. § Beschreibung aller Nationen des Russischen Reichs (A Description of all the Nations of the Russian Empire), pp. 78, 267, 281, 321, 329, 352. II Diss, de Virt. Agaric-Muse. Jena, 1718, p. 13. ** Chym. Vers, und Erfahrungen, Leipzig, 1754, obs. 5, p. 324. Gruner De Viribus Agar.-Musc. Jena, 1778, p. 13. ft Appar. Medic, 2d edit., 1, p. 429, 430. J| Misc. Nat. Cur., dec. ii., ann. 8, obs. 169. $$ Observat. et Curationes, lib. 21. INTRODUCTION. 61 the editors of the Bresslauer Sammlungen speak of the cure it has effected of haemoptysis ; and, finally, if Thomasius (according to Haller) has used it successfully in uterine haemorrhage ; these cures are evidently owing to the power possessed by the plant of exciting of itself hemorrhage and hematuria, as observed by G. Hoffmann,* and more especially of producing epistaxis, as confirmed by Boecler.f Scovolo4 among many others, cured a case where the urinary discharge was purulent, by Arbutus Uva-ursi ; which never could have been performed if this plant had not the property of exciting heat in the urinary passage, with discharge of a mucous urine, as seen by Sauvages.§ And, though the frequent experience of Storck, Marges, Plan- chon, Du Monceau, F. C. Junker, Schinz, Ehrmann, and others, had not already established the fact that Colchicum-autumnale cures a species of dropsy, still this power was to have been expected from it, by reason of the peculiar property it possesses of dimin- ishing the urinary secretion, and of exciting at the same time a continual desire to pass water. It likewise causes the flow of a small quantity of urine, of a fiery red color, as witnessed by Storck || and De Berge.** The cure of an asthma attended with hypochondriasis, effected by Goritz,f f by means of Colchicum, and that of an asthma complicated with an apparent hydrothorax, per- formed by Storck,JJ with the same substance, were evidently grounded upon the homoeopathic property which it possesses of exciting by itself asthma and dyspnoea, as witnessed by De Berge. §§ Muralto|||| has seen what we may witness every day, viz., that Jalap, besides creating gripes of the stomach, also causes great uneasiness and agitation. Every physician, acquainted with the facts upon which homoeopathy rests, will find it perfectly natural, * De Medicam. Officin. Leyden, 1738. f- Cynosura Mat. Med. Cont., p. 552. X In Girardi, de Uva-ursi. Padua, 1764. § Nosolog., iii., p. 200. || Libellus de Colchico. Vienna, 1763, p. 12. ** Journal de Medecine, xxii. ft A. E. Biichner, Miscell, Phys. Med. Mathem., Ann. 1728, Jul., pp. 1212, 1213. Erfurt, 1732. XX Ibid., cas. 11, 13. Cont., cas. 4, 9. $$ Ibid., loc. cit. Illl Misc. Nat. Cur., dec. ii. ann. 7, obs. 112. 62 INTRODUCTION. that the power so justly ascribed to this medicine by G.W.Wedel,* of allaying the gripes, restlessness, and screaming, which are so frequent in young children, and of restoring them to tranquil repose, arises from homoeopathic influence. It is also known, and has been attested by Murray, Hillary, and Spielmann, that Senna occasions a kind of colic, and produces, according to C. Hoffmannf and F. Hoffmann,\ flatulency and agi- tation of the blood,\ ordinary causes of insomnolency. It was this innate homoeopathic virtue of Senna which enabled Dethard- ing|| to cure with its aid patients afflicted with violent colic and insomnolency. Storck, who had so intimate a knowledge of medicines, was on the point of discovering that the bad effects of the Dictamnus, which, as he observed himself, sometimes provokes a mucous dis- charge from the vagina,** arose from the very same properties in this root, by virtue of which he cured a leucorrhoea of long standing.ff Storck, in like manner, should not have been astonished when curing a general chronic eruption (humid, phagedenic and psoric) with the Clematis,^ having himself ascertained^ that this plant has the power of producing a p&oric eruption over the whole body. If, according to Murray,|||| the Euphrasia cures lippitudo and a certain form of ophthalmia, how could it otherwise have pro- duced this effect, but by the faculty it possesses of exciting a kind of inflammation in the eyes, as has been remarked by Lobelius?*** According to J. H. Lange,fff the JVutmeghas been found effi- cacious in hysterical fainting fits. The sole natural cause of this phenomenon is homoeopathic, and can be attributed to no other circumstance but that the Nutmeg, when given in strong doses to * Opiolog., lib. 1, p. 1, cap. ii., p. 38. f De Medicin. Officin., lib. 1, cap. 36. X Diss, de Manna, p. 16. § Murray, loc. cit. ii., p. 507, 2d edit. II Ephem. Nat. Cur., cent. 10, obs. 76. ** Lib. de Flamm. Jovis. Vienna, 1769, cap. 2. ff Ibid, cap. 9 XX Lib. de Flamm. Jovis. Vienna, 1769, cap. 13. §$ Ibid., p. 33. |||| Appar. Medic, 11, p. 221, 2d edit. *** Stirp. Adversar., p. 219. Iff Domest. Brunsvic, p. 136 INTRODUCTION. 63 a person in health, produces, according to J.Schmid* and Cullen,f suspension of the senses and general insensibility. The old practice of applying Rose-water externally, in ophthal- mic diseases, looks like a tacit avowal that there exists in the leaves of the rose some curative power for diseases of the eye. This is founded upon the homoeopathic virtue which the rose possesses, of exciting by itself a species of ophthalmia in persons who are in health, an effect which Echtius,J Ledelius,§ and Rau|| actually saw it produce. If, according to Pet. Rossi,** Yan Mons,ff J. Monti,$J Sybel,§§ and others, the Rhus-toxicodendron and Radicans have the faculty of producing pimples which gradually cover the entire body, it may be easily perceived how it could effect a homoeopathic cure of various kinds of herpes, which it really has done, according to information furnished by Dufresnoy and Van Mons. What could have bestowed upon this plant (as in a case cited by Alderson||||) the power of curing a paralysis of the lower extremities, attended with weakness of the intellectual organs, if it did not of itself evidently possess the faculty of depressing the muscular powers by acting on the imagination of the patient to such a degree as to make him believe that he is at the point of death, as in a case witnessed by Zadig.*** The Dulcamara, according to Carrere,fff has cured the most violent diseases emanating from colds, which could result from no other cause but that this herb, in cold and damp weather, frequently produces similar affections to those which a/rise from colds, as Carrere himself has observed,:^ and likewise * Misc. Nat. Cur., dec. ii., ann. 2, obs. 20. J- Arzneimittellehre, ii., p. 233. I In Adami, Vita Medic, p. 72. $ Misc. Nat. Curios,, dec. ii., ann. 2, obs. 140. || Rau, iiber den Werth des Homoeop. Heilverfahrens, p. 73. ** Observ. de Nonnullis Plantis, quae pro venenatis habentur. Pisis, 1667. f f In Dufresnoy, Ueber den wurzelnden Sumach, p. 206. f| Acta Instit. Bonon., sc et. art. iii, p. 165. $$ In Med. Annalen, 1811, July. II || In Samml. aus Abb. f. pr. Aerzte, xviii., 1. *** In Hufeland's Journal der Prakt. Arzeik., v., p. 3. Iff Carrere (and Starcke), Abhandl. iiber die Eigenschaften des Nacht- echattens oder Bittersiisses. Jena, 1786, pp. 20-23. (Treatise on the Pro- perties of the Woody Nightshade or Bitter-sweet). XXX Ibid. 64 INTRODUCTION. Starcke.*—Fritzef saw the Dulcamara produce convulsions, and De HaenJ witnessed the very same effects, attended with delirium; on the other hand, convulsions attended with delirium have yielded to small doses of the Dulcamara, administered by the latter physi- cian^—It were vain to seek, amid the vast empire of hypotheses, the cause that renders the Dulcamara so efficacious in a species of herpes, as witnessed by Carrere,|| Fouquet,** and Poupart.f f Nature, which requires the aid of homoeopathy to perform a safe cure, sufficiently explains the cause, in the faculty possessed by the Dulcamara of producing a certain species of herpes. Carrere saw the use of this plant excite herpetic eruptions, which covered the entire body during a fortnight ;$J and, on another occasion, where it produced the same on the hands/§§ and, a third time, where it fixed itself on the labia-pudendi. \\ || Rucker*** saw the Solanum-nigrum produce swelling of the entire body. This is the reason that Gatackerf ff and CirilloJ^J succeeded in curing with its aid (homoeopathically) a species of dropsy. Boerhaave,§§§ Sydenham,||j||| and Radcliffe,**** cured another species of dropsy with the aid of the Sambucus-niger, because, as Hallerffff informs us, this plant causes smcedematous swelling when applied externally. * In Carrere, Ibid., p. 140, 249. f Annalen des klinischen Instituts, iii., p. 45. X Ratio Medendi. Tom. iv., p. 228 § Ibid., where he says: " Dulco-amarae stipites majori dosi oonvulsiones et deliria excitant, moderata vero spasmos, convulsionesque solvunt." How near was De Haen to the discovery of the law of healing the most conform able to nature! || Ratio Medendi. Tom. iv., p. 92. ** In Razoux, Tables Nosologiques, p. 275. ft Traite des Dartres. Paris, 1782, pp. 184, 192. XX Hid., p. 96. ^ Ibid., p. 149. || || Ibid., p. 164. # ### Commerc. Liter. Noric, 1731, p. 372. ttt Versuche und Bemerk. der Edinb. Gesellschaft, Altenburg, 1762, vii., pp. 95, 98. XXt Consult. Medichi. Tom. iii. Naples, 1738, 4to $$$ Historia Plantarum, P. I., p. 207. Illlll Opera, p. 496. **** In Haller, Arzneimittellehre, p. 349. +ttt 1Q Vicat, Plantes veneneuses, p. 125. INTRODUCTION. 65 De Ila.en,* Sarcone,f and PringleJ have rendered due homage to truth and experience by declaring freely that they cured pleurisy with the Scilla-maritima, a root which, on account of its excessive acrid properties, ought to be forbidden in a disease of this nature, where, according to the received method, only sedative, relaxing, and refrigerant remedies are admissible. The disease in question subsided, nevertheless, under the influence of the Squill, on homoeopathic principles ; for T. C. Wagner§ formerly saw the action of this plant alone produce pleurisy and inflammation of the lungs. A great many practitioners—D. Criiger, Ray, Kellner, Kaaw, Boerhaave, and others !|—have observed that the Datura-stra- moniurn excites a singular kind of delirium and convulsions. It is precisely this faculty that enabled physicians to cure with its aid demonomania** (fantastic madness, attended with spasms of the limbs), and other convulsions, as performed by Sidrenff and Wedenberg.JJ If, in the hands of Sidren,§§ it cured two ca?es of chorea, one of Avhich had been occasioned by fright, and the other by mercurial vapor, it was because it possessed the faculty of exciting involuntary movements of the limbs, as ob- served by Kaaw, Boerhaave, and Lobstein. Numerous observa- tions, and among others those made by Schenck, have shown us that it can destroy consciousness and memory in a very short time; therefore, it ought not to surprise us if, according to the testimony of Sauvages and Schinz, it possesses the faculty of curing a weak memory. By the same rule, Schmalz|| j| succeeded in curing, with the aid of this plant, a case of melancholy, alternating with madness, because, according to Acosta,*** it has the power * Ratio Medendi, P. I., p. 13. f History of Diseases in Naples, vol i., j 175. t Obs. on the Diseases of the Army, ed. 7, p. 143. § Observations Clinicae. Lubec, 1737. || C. Criiger, in Misc. Nat. Cur., dec iii., ann. 2, obs. 83.—Boerhaave, Jmpetum Faciens.—Leyden, 1745, p. 282.—Kellner, in the Bresl. Samml., 172. ** Veckoskrift for Laekare, iv., p. 40, ct sen. ff Diss, de Stramonii usu in Malis Convulsivis. Upsala, 1793. XX Ibid. yj Diss. Morborum Casus, spec. i. Upsala, 1785. |||| Chir. und Medic. Vorfalle. Leipzig, 1784, p. 176. ##* In P. Schenck, lib. 1, obs. 139. o QQ INTRODUCTION. of exciting such alternate mental aberrations when adiannstereJ to a person in health. Percival, Stahl, Quarin* and many other physicians, have observed that Cinchona occasions oppression of the stomach. Others (Morton, Friborg, Bauer, and Quarin) have seen this substance produce vomiting and diarrhoea, (D. Criiger and Morton) syncope; some an excessive dehility; many (Thomson, Richard, Stahl, and C. E. Fisher) a kind oi jaundice; others (Quarin and Fischer) bitterness of the mouth; and yet others, tension of the belly. And it is precisely when these complicated evils occur in intermittent fevers, that Torti and Cleghorn recom- mend the use of Cinchona alone. The advantageous effects of this bark, in cases of exhaustion, indigestion, and loss of appe- tite, resulting from acute fevers (particularly when the latter have been treated by venesection, evacuants, and debilitants), are founded upon the faculty which it possesses of depressing excessively the vital powers, producing mental and bodily ex- haustion, indigestion, and loss of appetite, as observed by Cleghorn, Friborg, Criiger, Romberg, Stahl, Thomson, and others.f How would it have been possible to stop haemorrhages with Ipecacuanha, as effected by Baglivi, Barbeyrac, Gianella, Dal- berg, Bergius, and others, if this medicine did not of itself pos- sess the faculty of exciting haemorrhage homoeopathic ally? as Murray, Scott, and Geoffrey! have witnessed. How could it be so efficacious in asthma, and particularly in spasmodic asthma, as it is described to have been by Akenside,§ Meyer, || Bang,** Stoll,ff Fouquet,JJ and Ranoe,§§ if it did not of itself produce (without exciting any evacuation) asthma, and spasmodic, asthma in particular, as Murray,j| || Geoffroy,*** and Scottf f f have * Quoted in my Mat. Med., iii. f Mat. Med., iii. X Ibid., pp. 184, 185. $ Medic Transact., I., No. 7, p. 39. || Diss, de Ipecac, refracta do3i usu, p. 34. *-* Praxis Medica, p. 346. ff Prselectiones, p. 221. XX Journal de Medecine. torn. 62, p. 137. $$ In Act. Reg. Soc Med. Hafn., ii., p. 163, iii., p. 361. || |i Medic Pract. Bibl., p. 237. ### Traite de la Matiers Medicale, ii., p. 157. fff In Med. Comment, of Edinb., iv., p. 74. INTRODUCTION. 67 seen it call forth? Can any clearer hints be required, that medicines ought to be applied to the cure of diseases according to the morbid effects which they produce? It would be impossible to conceive why the Faba-ignatia could be so efficacious in convulsions, as we are assured it is by Her- mann,* Valentin,f and an anonymous writer,^ if it did not possess the power of exciting similar convulsions, as witnessed by Bergius,§ Camelli,|| and Durius.** Persons who have received a blow or contusion, feel pains in the side, a desire to vomit, spasmodic, lancinating, and burn- ing pain in the hypochondria, all of which are accompanied with anxiety, tremors, and involuntary starts, similar to those produced by an electric shock, formication in the parts that have received the injury, &c. As the Arnica-montana produces similar symptoms, according to the observations of Meza, Vicat, Crichton, Collins, Aaskow, Stoll. and J. C. Lange,ff it may be easily perceived on what account this plant cures the effects of a blow, fall, or contusion, and consequently the malady itself occasioned by such a contusion, as experienced by a host of physicians, and even whole nations, for centuries past. Among the effects which Belladonna excites, when adminis- tered to a person in sound health, are sympt.ims which, taken collectively, present an image greatly resembling that species of hydrophobia and rabies-canina which Mayerne,JJ Munch, §§ Buchholz,|||| and Neimike,*** cured in a perfect manner with this plant, homoeopathically.f ft The patient in vain endeavors to * Cynosura Mat. Med., ii., p. 231 \ Hist. Simplic Reform., p. 194, § 4. X In Act. Berol., dec. ii., vol. x., p. 12. § Materia Medica, p. 150. || Philos. Trans., vol. xxi., No. 250. ** Miscell. Nat. Cur., dec. iii., ann. 9, 10. ff See my Mat. Medica, i. XX Praxeos in Morbis internis Syntagma alterum. August* Vindelicorum, 1697, p. 136. $$ Beobachtungen bei angewendetcr Belladonne bei den Menschen. Sten dal, 1789. || || Heilsame Wirkungen der Belladonne in ausgebrochener Wuth. Erfurt, 1785. ### In J. H. Munch's Beobachtungen, Th. i., p. 74. tff If Belladonna has frequently failed in cases of decided rabies, we ought 68 INTRODUCTION. sleep, the respiration is embarrassed, he is consumed by a. burning thirst, attended with anxiety; the moment any liquids are presented to him he rejects them with violence ; his counte- nance becomes red, his eyes fixed and sparkling (as observed by F. C. Grimm); he experiences a feeling of suffocation lohil", drinking, with excessive thirst (according to E. Camerarius and Sauter); for the most part he is incapable of swallowing any- thing (as affirmed by May, Lottinger, Sicelius, Buchave, D'Her- mont, Manetti, Vicat, and Cullen); he is alternately actuated by terror, and a desire to bite the persons who are near him (as seen by Sauter, Dumoulin, Buchave, and Mardorf); he spits everywhere around him (according to Sauter); he endeavors to make his escape (as we are informed by Dumoulin, E. Gmelin, and Buc'hoz); and a continual agility of the body is predomi- nant (as witnessed by Boucher, E. Gmelin, and Sauter).* Bella- donna has also effected the cure of different kinds of madness and melancholy, as in the cases reported by Evers, Schmucker, Schmalz, the two Munchs, and many others, because it pos- sesses the faculty of producing different kinds of insanity, like those mental diseases caused by Belladonna, which are noted by Rau, Grimm, Hasenest, Mardorf, Hoyer, Dillenius, and others.f Henning,$ after vainly endeavoring, during three months, to cure a case of amaurosis with colored spots before the eyes, by a variety of medicines, was at length struck with the idea that this malady might, perhaps, be occasioned by gout, although the patient had never experienced the slightest attack; and, upon this supposition, he was by chance induced to prescribe Bella- donna^ which effected a speedy cure, free from any inconvenience. to remember that it cannot cure in such instances, but by its faculty of pro- ducing effects similar to those of the malady itself, and that, consequently, \\ ought not to be administered but in the smallest possible doses, as will be shown in the Organon ($ 275-283). In general, it has been administered in very large doses, so that the patient necessarily died, not of the disease, but of the remedy. However, there may exist more than one degree or species of hydrophobia and rabies, and consequently (according to the diversity of the symptoms), the most suitable homoeopathic remedy may be sometimes Hyoscyamus, and sometimes Stramonium. * The places from these authors are referred to in my Mat. Medica i f Referred to in my Materia Medica, i. | In Hufeland's Journal, xxv., iv., pp. 70, 74. § Mere conjecture alone has led physicians to rank Belladonna among INTRODUCTION. 69 He would undoubtedly have made choice of this remedy at the commencement, had he known that it was not possible to per- form a cure but by the aid of a remedy which produces symp- toms similar to those of the disease itself; and that, according to the infallible law of nature, Belladonna could not fail to cure this case homoeopathically, since, by the testimony of Sauter* and Buchholz,f it excites, of itself, a species of amaurosis with colored spots before the eyes. The Hyoscijamus has cured spasms which strongly resembled epilepsy; as witnessed by Mayerne,$ Storck, Collin, and others. It produces this effect by the very same power that it excites convulsions similar to those of epilepsy, as observed in the writings of E. Camerarius, C. Seliger, Hunerwolf, A. Hamilton, Planchon, Acosta, and others.§ Fothergill,|| Storck, Hellwick, and Ofterdinger have used Hyoscyamus with success in certain kinds of mental derangement. But the use of it would have been attended with equal success in the hands of many other physicians, had they confined it to the cure of that species of mental alienation which Hyoscyamus is capable of producing in its primitive effects, viz., a kind of derangement with stupefaction, that Van Helmont, Wedel, J. G. Gmelin, La Serre, Htinerwolf, A. Hamilton, Kiernander, J. Sted- mann, Tozetti, J. Faber, and Wendt saw produced by the action of this plant** By taking the effects of Hyoscyamus collectively, which the latter observers have seen it produce, they present a picture of hysteria arrived at a considerable height. We also find, in J. A. P. Gessner, Storck, and in the Act. Nat. Cur.,f f that a case of hysteria, which bore great resemblance to the above mentioned, was cured by the use of this plant. SchenkbecherJJ would never have succeeded in curing a vertigo the remedies for gout. The disease which could, with justice, arrogate to itself the name of gout, never will nor can be cured by Belladonna. * In Hufeland's Journal, xi. f Ibid. vol. i., p. 252. X Prax. Med., p. 23. $ See my Materia Medica, vol. iv. || Memoirs of Med. Soc of London, i., pp. 310, 314. ** See my Materia Medica, vol. iv. f-f IV. obs. 8. XX Von der Kinkina, Shierling, Bilsenkraut. &c. Riga, 1769, p. 162. 70 INTRODUCTION. of twenty years' standing, if this plant did not possess, in a very high degree, the power of creating generally an analogous state, as attested by Hiinerwolf, Blom, Navier, Planchon, Sloane, Sted- mann, Greding, Wepfer, Vicat, and Bernigau.* A man, who became deranged through jealousy, was for a long time tormented by Mayer Abramsonf with remedies that produced no effect on him, when, under the name of a soporific, he one day administered Hyoscyamus, which cured him speedily. Had he known that this plant excites jealousy and madness in persons who are in health,^ and had he been acquainted with the homoeo- pathic law (the sole natural basis of therapeutics), he would have been able to administer Hyoscyamus from the very commencement, with perfect confidence, and thus have avoided fatiguing the patient with remedies which (not being homoeopathic) could be of no manner of service to him. The mixed prescriptions which were employed for a long time with the greatest success by Hecker,§ in a case of spasmodic constriction of the eyelids, would have proved ineffectual, if some happy chance had not included Hyoscyamus, which, according to Wepfer,|| excites a similar affection in persons who are in sound health. Neither did Withering** succeed in curing a spasmodic con- striction of the pharynx, with inability to swallow, until he adminis- tered Hyoscyamus, whose special action consists of causing a spasmodic constriction of the throat, with the impossibility of swallowing, an effect which Tozetti, Hamilton, Bernigau, Sau- vages, and Hiinerwolfff have seen it produce in a very high degree. How could Camphor produce such salutary effects as the veracious HuxhamJJ says it does, in the so-called slow nervous fevers, where the temperature of the body is decreased, where the sensibility is depressed, and the vital powers greatly diminished, * See my Mat. Medica, vol. iv. f In Hufeland's Journal, xix., ii., p. 60. \ See my Mat. Medica, vol. iv. $ Hufeland's Journal d. pr. Arzneik., i., p. 354. || De Cicuta Aquatica. Basil, 1716, p. 320. ** Edinb. Med. Comment. Dec ii., B. vi., p. 263. ft See my Materia Medica, vol. iv., pp. 38, 39. X\ Opera, t. i., p. 172; t. ii., p. 84. INTRODUCTION. 71 if the result of its immediate action upon the body did not produce a state similar in every respect to the latter, as observed by G. Alexander, Cullen, and F. Hoffmann ?* Spirituous Wines, administered in small doses, have cured, homoeopathic ally, fevers that were purely inflammatory. C. Crivellati,f H. Augenius,^: A. Mundella,§ and two anonymous writers,|| have afforded us the proofs. Asclepiades,** on one occasion, cured an inflammation of the brain by administering a small quantity of Wine. A case of feverish delirium, like an insensible drunkenness, attended with stertorous breathing, similar to that state of deep intoxication which wine produces, was cured in a single night by Wine, which Rademacherf f administered to the patient. Can any one deny the power of a medicinal irrita- tion analogous to the disease itself (similia similibus) in either of these cases? A strong infusion of Tea produces anxiety and palpitation of the heart in persons who are not in the habit of drinking it; on the other hand, if taken in small doses, it is an excellent remedy against such symptoms when produced by other causes, as testi- fied by G. L. Rau4$ A case resembling the agonies of death, in which the patient was convulsed to such a degree as to deprive him of his senses, alternating with attacks of spasmodic breathing, sometimes also sobbing and stertorous respiration, with icy coldness of the face and body, lividity of the feet and hands, and feebleness of the pulse (a state perfectly analogous to the whole of the symptoms which Schweikert and others saw produced by the use of Opium),^ was at first treated unsuccessfully by Stiitz|| || with Ammonia, but afterwards cured in a speedy and permanent manner with Opium. In this instance, could any one fail to discover the homoeopathic * See my Materia Medica, vol. iv. f Trattato delP uso e modo di dare il vino nelle febri acute. Rome, 1600 X Epist, t. ii., lib. ii., ep. 8. $ Epist. 14. Basil, 1588. |l Eph. Nat. Cur., dec. ii., ann. 2, obs. 53. Gazette de Sante, 1738. ** Coel. Aurelianus, Acut. lib. i., c. 16. ft In Hufeland's Journal, xvi., i., p. 92. XX Ueber den "VVerth des homoeopathischen Heilverfahrens. Heidelberg, 1824, p. 72. $$ See my Materia Medica, vol. i. I! II In Hufeland's Journal, x., iv, 72 INTRODUCTION. method brought into action without the knowledge of the person who employed it? According to Vicat, J. C. Grimm, and others,* Opium also produces a powerful and almost irresistible tendency to sleep, accompanied by profuse perspiration and delirium. This was the reason why Osthofff was afraid to administer it in cases of epidemic fever which exhibited similar symptoms; for the principles of the system which he pursued prohibited the use of it under such circumstances. (The poor system!) However, after having exhausted in vain all the known remedies, and seeing his patients at the point of death, he resolved, at all hazards, to administer a small quantity of Opium, whose effects proved salu- tary, as they always must, according to the unerring law of homoeo pathy. J. Lind$ likewise avows that " Opium removes the complaints in the head, while the perspiration tediously breaks forth during the heat of the body; it relieves the head, destroys the burning febrile heat of the skin, softens it, and bathes it3 surface in a pro- fuse perspiration." But Lind was not aware that this salutary effect of Opium (contrary to the axioms of the schools of medi- cine) is owing to the circumstance of its producing analogous morbid symptoms, when administered to a person in health There has, nevertheless, here and there been a physician, across whose mind this truth has passed like a flash of lightning, without ever giving birth to a suspicion, of the laws of homoeopathy. %For example, Alston § says that Opium is a remedy that excites heat, notwithstanding which, it certainly diminishes heat where it already exists. De la Guerene|| administered Opium in a case of fever attended with violent headache, tension and hardness of the pulse, dryness and roughness of the skin, burning heat, and hence difficult and debilitating perspirations, the exhalation of which was constantly interrupted by the extreme agitation of the patient; and was successful with it, because Opium possesses the faculty of creating a feverish state in healthy persons, which is perfectly * See my Materia Medica, vol. i. f In the Salzburg Med. Chirurg. Journal, 1805, iii., p. 110. X Versuch iiber die Krankheiten den en die Europaer in heissen Klimaten unterworfen sind. Riga and Leipzig, 1773. (Treatise on the Diseases to which Europeans are subject in Warm Climates). § In Edinb. Versuchen, v., p. 1., Art. 12. II In Romer's Annalen der Arzneimittellehre, 1. ii., p. 6. INTRODUCTION. 73 analogous, as asserted by many observers,* and of which he was ignorant. In a fever attended with coma, where the patient, deprived of speech, lay extended, the eyes open, the limbs stiff, the pulse small and intermittent, the respiration disturbed and stertorous (all of which are symptoms perfectly similar to those which Opium excites, according to the report of Delacroix, Rade- macher, Crumpe, Pyl, Vicat, Sauvages, and many othersf), this was the only substance which C. L. Hoffmann^: saw produce any good effects, which were naturally a homoeopathic result. Wirthenson,§ Sydenham,|| and Marcus** have even succeeded in curing lethargic fevers with Opium. A case of lethargy, of which De Mezaf f effected a cure, would yield only to this sub- stance, which, in such cases, acts homoeopathically, since it pro- duces lethargy of itself. C. C. Matthai,$f in an obstinate case of nervous disease, where the principal symptoms were insensibility, and numbness of the arms, legs, and belly, after having for a long time treated it with inappropriate, that is to say, nonhomoeopathic remedies, at length effected a cure by Opium, which, according to Stiitz, J. Young, and others,§§ excites similar symptoms of a very intense nature, and which, as every one must perceive, only succeeded on this occasion by reason of the homoeopathic principle. The cure of a case of lethargy which had already existed several days, and which Hufeland performed by the use of Opium,|||| by what other law could this have been effected, if not by that of homoeopathy, which has remained disregarded till the present time ? In that peculiar species of epilepsy which never manifests itself but during sleep, De Haen discovered that it was not at all a sleep, but a lethargic stupor, with stertorous respiration, perfectly similar to that which Opium produces in persons who are in health; it was by the means of Opium alone that he transformed it into a natural * See my Materia Medica, vol. i. t Ibid. X Von Scharbock, Lustseuche, &c Munster. 1787, p. 295. § Opii vires fibras cordis debilitare, &c Munster, 1775. || Opera, p. 654. ** Magazin fur Therapie, I., i., p. 7. ff Act. Reg. Soc. Med. Hafn., iii., p. 202. XX In Struve's Triumph der Heilk., iii. $$ See my Materia Medica, vol. i. || || In Hufeland's Journal, xii. i 74 INTRODUCTION. and healthy sleep, while, at the same time, he delivered the patient of his epilepsy.* How would it be possible that Opium, which of all vegetable substances is the one whose administration, in small doses, pro- duces the most powerful and obstinate constipation, as a primary effect, should notwithstanding be a remedy the most to be relied upon in cases of constipation which endanger life, if it was not in virtue of the homoeopathic law, so little known—that is to say, if nature had not decreed that medicines should subdue natural dis- eases by a special action on their part, which consists in pro- ducing an analogous affection? Opium, whose first effects are so powerful in constipating the bowels, was discovered by Tralles f to be the only cure in a case of ileus, which he had till then treated ineffectually with evacuants and other inappropriate reme- dies. LentiliusJ and G. W. Wedel,§ Wirthenson, Bell, Heister, and Richter|| have likewise confirmed the efficacy of Opium, even when administered alone in this disease. The candid Bohn** was likewise convinced by experience that nothing but opiates would act as purgatives in the colic called miserere; and the celebrated F. Hoffmann,f f in the most dangerous cases of this nature, placed his sole reliance on Opium, combined with the anodyne liquor called after his name. All the theories contained in the two hundred thousand volumes that have been written on medicine, being ignorant of the therapeutic law of homoeopathy, would they be able to furnish us with a rational explanation of this and so many other similar facts ? Have their doctrines conducted us to the discovery of this law of nature, so clearly manifested in every perfect, speedy, and permanent cure—that is to say, have they taught us that, when we use medicines in the treatment of diseases, it is necessary to take for a guide the resemblance of their effects, upon a person in health, to the symptoms of those very diseases? * Ratio Medendi, V., p. 126. f Opii usus et abusus, sect, ii., p. 260. X Eph. Nat. Cur., dec. hi., ann. i. app., p. 131. $ Opiologia, p. 120. || Anfangsgriinde der Wundarzneikunde, V., $ 328.—Chronische Krank- heiten, Berlin, 1816, ii., p. 220. (Rudiments of Surgery, V., § 328.—Chronic Diseases, Berlin, 1816, ii., p. 220). ** De Officio Medici. ft Medicin. rat. system. T. IV., p. ii., 297. INTRODUCTION. 75 Rave* and Wedekindf have suppressed uterine haemorrhage with the aid of Sabina, which, as every one knows, causes uterina haemorrhage, and consequently abortion with women who are in health. Could any one, in this case, fail to perceive the homoeo- pathic law which ordains that we should cure similia similibusf In that species of spasmodic asthma designated by the name of miliar, how could Musk act almost specifically, if it did not of itself produce paroxysms of a spasmodic constriction of the chest without cough, as observed by F. Hoffmann ? $ Could vaccination protect us from the small-pox otherwise than homoeopathically ? Without mentioning any other traits of close resemblance which often exist between these two maladies, they have this in common—they generally appear but once during the course of a person's life; they leave behind cicatrices equally deep; they both occasion tumefaction of the axillary glands; a fever that is analogous; an inflamed areola around each pock; and, finally, ophthalmia and convulsions. The cow-pox would even destroy the small-pox on its first ap- pearance, that is to say, it would cure this already existing malady, if the intensity of the small-pox did not predominate over it. To produce this effect, then, it only wants that excess of power which, according to the law of nature, ought to correspond with the ho- moeopathic resemblance in order to effect a cure (§ 158). Vac- cination, considered as a homoeopathic remedy, cannot, therefore, prove efficacious except when employed previous to the appear- ance of the small-pox, which is the stronger of the two. In this manner it excites a disease very analogous (and conse- quently homoeopathic) to the small-pox, after whose course the human body, which, according to custom, can only be attacked once with a disease of this nature, is henceforward protected against a similar contagion.§ * Beobachtungen und Schliisse (Observations and Conclusions), ii. p. 7. t In Hufeland's Journal, X. i., p. 77; and in his "Aufsatzen," p. 278. X Med. ration. System., iii., p. 92. $ This mode of homoeopathic cure in antecessum (which is called preser- vation of prophylaxy), also appears possible in many other cases. For example, by carrying on our persons Sulphur, we think we are preserved from the itch, which is so common among wool-workers; and, by taking as feeble a dose as possible of Belladonna, that we are protected from scarlet fever. 76 INTRODUCTION. It is well known that retention of urine, with ineffectual efforts to urinate, is one of the most common and painful evils which the use of Cantharides produces. This point has been sufficiently established by J. Camerarius, Baccius, Van Hilden, Forest, J. Lanzoni, Van der Wiel, and Werlhoff* Cantharides, adminis- tered internally, and with precaution, ought, consequently, to be a very salutary homoeopathic remedy in similar cases of painful dysuria. And this is in reality the case. For, without enumerat- ing all the Greek physicians who, instead of our Cantharides, made use of Meloe-cichorii, Fabricius ab Aquapendente, Capo di Vacca, Riedlin, Th. Bartholin, f Young, J Smith, § Raymond, |j De Meza,** Brisbane, ff and others, performed perfect cures of very painful ischuria, that was not dependent upon any mechanical obstacle, with Cantharides. Huxham has seen this remedy pro- duce the best effects in cases of the same nature; he praises it highly, and would willingly have made use of it, had not the pre- cepts of the old school of medicine (which, deeming itself wiser than nature herself, prescribes in such cases soothing and relaxing remedies) prevented him, contrary to his own conviction, from using a remedy which, in such cases, is specific or homoeopathic.:}:^ In cases of recent inflammatory gonorrhoea, where Sachs von Lewenheim, Hannseus, Bartholin, Lister, Mead, and chiefly Werl- hoff, administered Cantharides in very small doses, with perfect success, this substance manifestly removed the most severe symp- toms which began to declare themselves. §§ It produced this effect by virtue of the faculty it possesses * See my Fragmenta de Viribus Medicamentorum Positivis. Leipsic, 1805, i., p. 83. f Epist. 4, p. 345. X Phil. Trans., No. 280. § Medic. Communications, ii., p. 505. || In Auserlesene Abhandl. fur pract. Aerzte (Select Treatises for Practi- cal Physicians), iii., p. 460. ** Act. Reg. Soc Med. Hafn. ii., p. 302. \\ Auserlesene Falle (Selected Cases). Altenburg, 1777. XX Opera, edit. Reichel, t. ii., p. 124. §§ I say, "the most severe symptoms which began to declare themselves " because the subsequent treatment demands other considerations; for. al- though there may have been cases of gonorrhoea so slight as to disappear very soon of themselves, and almost without any assistance whatever still there are others of a graver nature, especially that which has become so common since the time of the French campaigns, which might be called INTRODUCTION. 77 (according to the testimony of almost every observer) of exciting painful micturition, urinary heat, inflammation of the urethra (Wendt), and even, when applied only externally, a species of in- flammatory gonorrhoea (Wichmann).* The administration of Sulphur internally very often occasions, in persons of an irritable disposition, tenesmus, sometimes even attended with vomiting and griping, as attested by Walther. f It is by virtue of this property, which Sulphur exhibits, that physicians have been ablej to cure, with its aid, dysenteric attacks and hsemorrhoidal diseases attended with tenesmus, as observed by Werlhoff, § and, according to Rave, || hsemorrhoidal colics. It is well known that the waters at Toeplitz, like all other warm sulphurous mineral waters, frequently excite the. appearance of an exanthema, which strongly resembles the itch, so prevalent among persons employed in wool-working. It is precisely this homoeopathic virtue which they possess that removes various kinds of psoric eruptions. Can there be anything more suffocat- ing than sulphurous fumes ? Yet it is the vapor arising from the combustion of Sulphur that Bucquet** discovered to be the best means of reanimating persons in a state of asphyxia pro- duced by another cause. From the writings of Beddoes and others, we learn that the English physicians found Nitric-acid of great utility in saliva- tion and ulceration of the mouth, occasioned by the use of Mer- cury. This acid could never have proved useful in such cases if it did not of itself excite salivation and ulceration of the mouth. To produce these effects, it is only necessary to bathe the surface of the body with it, as Scott ff and Blair %% observe, and the same gonorrhosa-sycotica, and which is communicated by coition, like the chan- crous disease, although of a very different nature. * Auswahl aus den Niirnberger gelehrten Unterhaltungen, i., p. 249, note. f Progr. de Sulphure et Marte, Lips., 1743, p. 5. X Medic National-Zeitung (National Med. Gazette), 1798, p. 153. $ Observat. de Febribus, p. 3, § 6. || In Hufeland's Journal, VII., ii., p. 168. ** Edinb. Med. Comment., IX. ft In Hufeland's Journal, IV., p. 353. XX Neueste Erfahrungen (Most Recent Discoveries), Glogau, 1801. 78 INTRODUCTION. will occur if administered internally, according to the testimony of Aloyn,* Luke,f Ferriar,J and G. Kelly.§ Fritze || saw a species of tetanus produced by a bath impreg- nated with Carbonate of Potash; and A. von Humboldt,** by the application of a solution of Salt of Tartar, increased the irri- tability of the muscles to such a degree as to excite tetanic spasms. The curative power which Caustic Potash exercises in all kinds of tetanus, in which Stiitz and others have found it so useful, could it be accounted for in a more simple or rational manner than by the faculty which this alkali possesses of pro- ducing homoeopathic effects ? Arsenic, whose effects are so powerful upon the human eco- nomy that we cannot decide whether it is more hurtful in the hands of the fool-hardy than it is salutary in those of the wise,— Arsenic could never have effected so many remarkable cures of cancer in the face, as witnessed by numerous physicians, among whom I will only cite Fallopius,ff Bernhardt,^ and Ronnow,§§ if this metallic oxide did not possess the homoeopathic power of producing, in healthy persons, very painful tubercles, which are cured with difficulty, as witnessed by Amatus Lusitanus ; || || very deep and malignant ulcerations, according to the testimony of Heinreich *** and Knape ;f f f and cancerous ulcers, as testified by Heinze. %Xt The ancients would not have been unanimous in the praise which they bestowed on the magnetic arsenical plaster of Angelus Sala,§§§ against pestilential buboes and carbuncles, if * In the Memoires de la Soc. Med. d'Emulation, I., p. 195. f In Beddoes. X In the Sammlung auserles. Abhandl. fur pract. Aertzte (Select Trea- tises for Practical Physicians), XIX., ii. $ Ibid., XIX., i., p. 116. || In Hufeland's Journal, XII., i., p. 116. ** Versuch iiber die gereizte Muskel- und Nervenfaser (Treatise on the Irritability of the Muscles and Nerves). Posen and Berlin, 1797. ff De Ulceribus et Tumoribus, lib. 2. Venice, 1563. XX In the Journal de Medecine, Chirurg. et Pharm., lvii., March, 1782. §§'Konigl. Vetensk. Acad. Handl. f. a., 1776. I||| Obs. et cur. Cent, ii., cur. 34. *** Act. Nat. Cur., ii., obs. 10. f f f Annalen der Staatsarzneikunde, I., i. XXX In Hufeland's Journal for September, 1813, p. 48. }$$ Anatom. Vitrioli, tr. ii. in Opera Med. Chym. Frankfort, 1647, pp 381, 463. INTRODUCTION. 79 Arsenic did not, according to the report of Degner* and Pfann,f give rise to inflammatory tumors which quickly turn to gangrene, and to carbuncles or malignant pustules, as observed by Ver- zaschaj and Pfann.§ And whence could arise that curative power which it exhibits in certain species of intermittent fevers (a virtue attested by so many thousands of examples, but in the practical application of which sufficient precaution has not yet been observed, and which virtue was asserted centuries ago by Nicholas Myrepsus, and subsequently placed beyond a doubt by the testimony of Slevogt, Molitor, Jacobi, J. C. Bernhardt, Jiing- ken, Fauve, Brera, Darwin, May, Jackson, and Fowler) if it did not proceed from its peculiar faculty of exciting fever, as almost every observer of the evils resulting from this substance has re- marked, particularly Amatus Lusitanus, Degner, Buchholz, Heun, and Knape.|| We may confidently believe E. Alexander,** when he tells us that Arsenic is a sovereign remedy in some cases of angina-pectoris, since Tachenius, Guilbert, Preussius, Thilenius, and Pyl have seen it give rise to very great oppression of the chest; Gresseliusff to a dyspnoea, approaching even to suffoca- tion; and Majault, jj in particular, saw it produce sudden attacks of asthma, excited by walking, attended with great depression of the vital powers. The convulsions which are caused by the administration of Copper, and those observed by Tondi, Ramsay, Fabas, Pyl, and Cosmier, as proceeding from the use of aliments impregnated with Copper; the reiterated attacks of epilepsy, which J. La- zerme §§ saw result from the accidental introduction of a Copper coin into the stomach, and which Pfundel|||| saw produced by the ingestion of a compound of Sal-ammoniac and Copper into the * Act. Nat. Cur., VI. \ Annalen der Staatsarzneikunde, loc cit. X Obs. Med. Cent. Basil, 1677, obs. 66. § Samml. merkwiird. Falle. (Collection of Remarkable Cases.) Nurem- berg, 1750, pp. 119, 130. || See my Mat, Med., vol. ii. ** Med. Comm. of Edinb. Dec. II., t. i., p. 85. tf Misc. Nat. Cur. Dec. I., ann. 2, p. 149. XX In the Sammlung auserles. Abhandl. fur Aerzte, VII., 1. }$ De morbis internis capitis. Amsterdam, 1748, p. 253. |||| In Hufeland's Journal, II., p. 264; and according to the testimony of Burdach, in his System of Medicine, i. Leip., 1807, p. 284. 80 INTRODUCTION. digestive canal, sufficiently explain, to those physicians who will take the trouble to reflect upon it, how Copper has been able to cure a case of chorea, as reported by R. Willan,* Walcker,f Theussink, \ and Delarive,§ and why preparations of Copper have so frequently effected the cure of epileps}7, as attested by Batty, Baumes, Bierling, Boerhaave, Causland, Cullen, Duncan, Feuer- stein, Hevetius, Lieb, Magennis, C. F. Michaelis, Reil, Russell, Stisser, Thilsnius, Weissmann, Weizenbreyer, Whithers, and others. If Poterius, Wepfer, Wedel, F. Hoffmann, R. A. Vogel, Thierry, and Albrecht have cured a species of phthisis, hectic fever, chronic catarrh, and mucous asthma with Stannum, it is because this metal possesses the faculty of producing a species of phthisis, as Stahl |j has observed. And how could it cure pains of the stomach, as Geischlager says it does, if it was not capable of ex- citing a similar malady? Geischlager himself,** and Stahlff before him, have proved that it does possess this power. The evil effects of Lead, which produces the most obstinate. constipation, and even the iliac passion (as Thunberg, Wilson, Lazuriaga, and others, inform us), do they not also give us to understand that this metal possesses likewise the virtue of curing these two affections ? Like every other medicine, it ought to subdue and cure, in a permanent manner, the natural diseases which bear a resemblance to those which it engenders, by reason of the faculty which it possesses of exciting morbid symptoms. Angelus SalaJJ cured a species of ileus, and J. Agri- cola§§ another kind of constipation, which endangered the life of the patient, by administering Lead internally. The saturnine pills, with which many physicians (Chirac, Van Helationt, Nau- deau, Pererius, Rivinus, Sydenham, Zacutus Lusitanus, Block, and others) cured the iliac passion and obstinate constipation, did not operate merely in a mechanical manner, by reason of their weight; for, if such had been the sources of their efficacy, Gold, * Sammlung auserles Abhandl., XII., p. 62. f Ibid., XL, hi., p. 672. X Waarnemingen, No. 18. \ In Kuhn's Phys. Med. Journal, January, 1800, p. 58. || Mat. Med., cap. 6., p. 83. ** In Hufeland's Journal, X., iii., p. 165, ft Mat. Med., loc cit. tj Opera, p. 213. yj Comment, in J. Poppii chym. Med. Lips., 1638, p. 223. INTRODUCTION. 81 whose weight is greater than that of Lead, would have been pre- ferable in such a case; but the pills acted particularly as a saturnine internal remedy, and cured homoeopathically. If Otto Tachenius and Saxtorph formerly cured cases of obstinate hypo- chondriasis with the aid of Lead, we ought to bear in mind that this metal tends of itself to excite hypochondriasis, as may be seen in the description of its ill effects given by Lazuriaga.* We ought not to be surprised that Marcusf speedily cured an inflammatory swelling of the tongue and of the pharynx with a remedy (Mercury) which, according to the daily experience of physicians, has a specific tendency to produce inflammation and tumefaction of the internal parts of the mouth, phenomena to which it gives rise when merely applied to the surface of the body in the form of ointment or plaster, as experienced by Degner,$ Frieze,§ Alberti,|| Engel,** and many others. The weakening of the intellectual faculties (Swediaurff), imbecility (Degner%%), and mental alienation (Larry§§), which have been seen to result from the use of Mercury, joined to the almost specific faculty which this metal is known to possess, of exciting salivation, ex- plain how G. Perfect|||| was enabled, with the use of Mercury, to cure, in a permanent manner, a case of melancholy alternating with increased secretion of saliva. How does it happen that preparations of Mercury proved so successful in the hands of Seelig,*** in the treatment of angina, accompanied with purpura; in those of Hamiltomfff Hoffmann,:^ Marcus,§§§ Rush,|||||| * Recueil period, de LittSrature, i., p. 20. j- Magazin, II., ii. X Act. Nat. Cur., VI. app. § Geschichte und Versuche einer chirurg. Gesellschaft. (History and Experiments of a Chirurg. Soc.) Copenhagen, 1774. || Jurisprudentia Medica, V., p. 600. ** Specimina Medica. Berlin, 1781, p. 99. ff Traite des Malad. Vener., II., p. 368. Xt IiOC- Clt- $$ Memoirs and Observations in the Description of Egypt, vol. i. [| || Annalen einer Anstalt fur Wahnsinnige (Annals of an Institute for Mad Persons). Hanover, 1804. *** In Hufeland's Journal, XVI., 1, p. 24 fff Edinb. Med. Comment., IX., 1., p. 8. XXX Medic. Wochenblatt, 1787, No. 1. $§§ Magazin fur Specielle Therapie, II., p. 334. || || || Medic. Inquir. and Observ., No. 6. 6 S2 INTRODUCTION. Colden,* Bailey, and Michaelis,f in the treatment of other kinds of malignant quinsy ? It is evidently because this metal brings on of itself a species of angina of the worst description.^ It was certainly by homoeopathic means that Sauter§ cured an ulcerous inflammation of the mouth, accompanied with aphthsa and foetor of the breath, similar to that which occurs in salivation, when he prescribed a solution of Corrosive Sublimate as a gargle and that Block|| removed aphthae by the use of mercurial prepara tions, since, among other ulcerations of the mouth, this substanci particularly produces a species of aphthoe, as we are informed by Schlegel** and Th. Acrey.f f IIeckei|| used various medicinal compounds successfully in a case of caries succeeding small-pox. Fortunately, a portion of Mercury was contained in each of these mixtures, to which it may be imagined that this remedy will yield (homoeopathically), because Mercury is one of the few medicinal agents which excites of itself caries, as proved by the many excessive mercurial courses used against syphilis, or even against other diseases, among which are those related by G. P. Michaelis.§§ This metal, which becomes so formidable when its use is prolonged, on account of the caries-of which it then becomes the exciting cause. exercises, notwithstanding, a very salutary homoeopathic in- fluence in the caries which follows mechanical injuries of the bones, some very remarkable instances of which have been trans- mitted to us by J. gchlegel,H|| Jordens,*** and J. M. Miiller.fff * Medic. Observ. and Inquir., 1, No. 19, p. 211. t In Richtcrs Chirurg. Biblioth., V., pp. 737—739. X Physicians have likewise endeavored to cure the croup by means of Mercury; but they generally failed in the attempt, because this metal cannot produce (of itself) in the mucous membranes of the trachea, a change similar to that particular modification which the disease engenders. Sulphuretem-calcis, which excites cough by impeding respiration, and still more so the tincture of Sponga-tosta, act more homoeopathically in ■ their special effects, and are consequently much more efficacious, particularly when administered in the smallest possible doses. (See my Mat. Med., vi.) $ In Hufeland's Journal, VII., ii. || Medic. Bemerkungen (Med. Observations), p. 161. ** In Hufeland's Journal, VII., iv. ff London Med. Journal, 1788. XX In Hufeland's Journal, i., p. 362. $§ Ibid., June, 1809, vi., p. 57. |||| Hufeland's Journal, v., pp. 605, 610. *** Ibid., X., ii. ff1 Obs. Mod. Chirur., ii., cas. 10. INTRODUCTION. 83 The cure of caries (not venereal) of another kind, which has like- wise been effected by means of Mercury, by J. F. G. Neu* and J. D. Metzger,f furnishes a fresh proof of the homoeopathic curative virtue with which this substance is endowed. In perusing the works which have been published on the subject of medical electricity, it is surprising to see what analogy exists between the morbid symptoms sometimes produced by this agent and the natural diseases which it has cured in a durable manner by homoeopathic influence. Innumerable are the authors who have observed that acceleration of the pulse is among the first effects of positive electricity; but Sauvages,$ Delas,§ and Barillon|| have seen febrile paroxysms excited by electricity. The faculty it has oi producing fever is the cause to which we may attribute the . circumstance of Gardini,** Wilkinson,ff Syme,JJ and Wesley§§ curing with it alone, tertian fever, and likewise the removal of quartan fevers by Zetzel|||| and Willermoz.*** It is also known that electricity occasions a contraction of the muscles which resembles a convulsive movement. De Sansfff was enabled to excite even continued convulsions, in the arm of a young girl, as often as he pleased to make the experiment. It is by virtue of this power which electricity develops that De Sans^JJ and Franblin§§§ applied it successfully in convulsions, and that Theden|||j|| cured with its aid a little <>irl, ten years of age, who lost her speech, and partially the use of her left arm by lightning, yet kept up a constant involuntary rrovement of the arms and legs, accompanied by a spasmodic contraction of the fingers of the left hand. Electricity likewise produced a kind of ischias, as observed by Jallobert**** and another ;f f f f it has also cured this affection by similarity of effect (homoeopathically), as * Diss. Med. Pract. Gcettingae, 1776. f Adversaria, p. ii., sect. 4. X In Bertholon de St. Lazare, Medicinische Electricitat, von Kuhn. (Me- dical Electricity). Leip., 1788, t. i. pp. 239. 240. f Ibid., p. 232. || Ibid., p. 233^ ** Ibid. p. 232. ft Ibid., p. 251. XX Ibid., p. 250. H Ibid., p. 249. |||| Ibid., p. 52. *** Ibid., p. 250. ftt Ibid., p. 274. XXX Ibid., p. 274. §§§ Recueil sur l'Electr. Medic, ii., p. 386. || || || Neue Bemerkungen und Erfahrungen, iii. (Recent Observations and Experiments). **** Experiences et Observations sur l'Electricite. fftt Philos. Trans., vol. 63. 84 INTRODUCTION. confirmed by Hiortberg, Lovet, Arrigoni, Daboueix, Manduyt, Syme, and Wesley. Several physicians have cured a species of ophthalmia by electricity—that is to say, by means of the power which it has of exciting of itself inflammation of the eyes, as observed by P. Dickson* and Bertholon.f Finally, it has, in the hands of Fushel, cured varices; and it owes this sanative virtue to the faculty which JallobertJ ascribes to it, of pro- ducing varicose tumors. Albers relates that a warm bath, at one hundred degrees of the thermometer of Fahrenheit, greatly reduced the burning of an acute fever, in which the pulse beat one hundred and thirty to the minute, and that it brought back the pulsation to the number of one hundred and ten. Loffler found hot fomentations very useful in encephalitis occasioned by insulation or the action of the heat of stoves,§ and Callisen|| regards affusions of warm water on the head as the most efficacious of all remedies in cases of inflammation of the brain. If we except those cases where ordinary physicians have discovered (not by their own research, but by vulgar empiricism) the specific remedy for a disease which always retained its iden- tity, and by whose aid they could consequently cure it in a direct manner—such, for example, as Mercury in the chancrous venereal disease, Arnica in a malady resulting from contusions, Cinchona in intermittent fevers arising from marsh miasmata, Sulphur in a recent development of itch, &c,—I say, if we accept all these cases, we shall find that those which they have cured promptly and permanently by the bounty of Providence alone, are, to the mass of their other irrational cures, in the proportion of one to a thousand. Sometimes they are conducted by mere chance to a homoeo- pathic mode of treatment ;** but yet they did did not perceive the * Bertholon, loc. cit., p. 466. f Loc. cit. ii., p. 296. X Loc. cit. § In Hufeland's Journal, iii., p. 630. || Act. Soc Med. Hafn., iv., p. 419. ** Thus, for example, they always imagine they can drive out the perspi- ration through the skin (which, they say, stops up the pores after catching INTRODUCTION. 85 law of nature, by which cures of this kind are and ever must be performed. It is, therefore, highly important to the welfare of the human race that we should examine how these cures, which are as re- markable for their rare occurrence as they are surprising in their effects, are performed. The result is one of the deepest cold) by administering, in the cold stage of the fever, an infusion of the flowers of the Sambucus-niger, which is capable of subduing such fevers homoeopathically, and restores the patient to health. The cure is most effectually and speedily performed, without perspiration, when the patient drinks but little of this liquor and abstains from all other medicines. They often apply repeated warm cataplasms to acute tumors, whose excessive inflammation, attended with insupportable pain, prevents suppuration taking place. Under the influence of this treatment, the inflammation soon di- minishes, the pain decreases, and the abscess is quickly formed, as may be discovered by the fluctuation and appearance of the surface. They imagine that they have softened the tumor by the moisture of the cataplasm, while they have done nothing more than destroy the excess of inflammation ho- mooopathieally, by the stronger heat of the cataplasm, and promoted sup- puration. Why is the red oxide of Mercury (which forms the basis of the ointment of St. Ives) of such utility in certain cases of ophthalmia, when, of all substances, there is none more capable of producing inflammation of the eyes ? Is it difficult to perceive that in this case its action is homoeopathic ? How could the juice of Parsley procure instantaneous relief in cases of dysuria, so frequent among children, or in ordinary cases of gonorrhoea, which are principally distinguished by painful and vain attempts to pass water, if this juice did not cure homoeopathically, by the faculty which it possesses of exciting painful dysuria in healthy persons ? The Saxifrage, which excites an abundant mucous secretion in the bronchiae and pharynx, is a salutary remedy for the so-called mucous angina; and certain kinds of uterine haemorrhage are stopped by small doses of the leaves of Sabina, which has the property of exciting metrorrhagia: in both instances these remedies are applied without any knowledge of the therapeutic law of ho- moeopathy. Opium, which produces costiveness, has been found, in small doses, to be one of the principal and most certain remedies in constipation from incarcerated hernia and ileus, without ever leading to a discovery of the homoeopathic law which is evident in such cases. Ulcers in the throat (not venereal) have been cured homoeopathically by small doses of Mercury. Diarrhoea has frequently been stopped by the use of Rhubarb, which pro- duces alvine evacuations; rabies has been removed by means of Belladonna, which excites a species of hydrophobia; and, finally, coma, which is so dangerous in acute fevers, has been cured, as if by enchantment, by a small dose of Opium, a substance which occasions heat and stupefaction. And, after all these examples, which speak loudly for themselves, there are still physicians who repulse homoeopathy with disdain! 86 INTRODUCTION interest. The examples which we have cited, sufficiently prove that these cures have never taken place but by homoeopathic means—that is to say, by the faculty of exciting a morbid state, similar to the disease that was to be cured. They have been performed in a prompt and permanent manner, by medicines upon which those who prescribed them (contrary to all the existing systems of therapeutics) have fallen, as it were, by chance, without well knowing what they were doing, or why they acted in this manner. Contrary to their inclinations, they by this fact confirmed the necessity of the sole law of nature in therapeutics, that of homoeopathy; a law which medical prejudices, till now, would not permit us to search after, not- withstanding the infinite number of facts and visible signs which ought to have pointed towards its discovery. Even in the practice of domestic medicine, by persons ignorant of our profession, but who are gifted with sound judgment and discerning minds, it was discovered that the homoeopathic method of cure was the safest, the most rational, and the least subject to failure. Frozen sour-krout is frequently applied to a limb that is re- cently frozen, or, sometimes, it is rubbed with snow.* !* 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 ne plus ultraox a healing art, without knowing how they can carry it out in practice. 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 medical 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 main- tenance 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 heat and cold per se, not as things hurtful in themselves, as are the drugs, Rhubarb, China, &c, 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 mere 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 INTRODUCTION. 87 A cook who has scalded his hand, exposes it to the fire at a certain distance, without heeding the increase of pain which it at first occasions, because experience has taught him that, by acting 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 tem- perature. 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 life- less and dead), but a degree of cold that only approximates to that (homoeo- pathy), and which gradually rises to a comfortable temperature—as frozen sour-krout laid upon the frost-bitten hand, in the temperature of the room, 60on melts, gradually growing warmer from 32° or 33° (Fahr.) to the tem- perature 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 isopathically cured 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, where- upon the scalded part is restored by homaopathy. Water in the act of freezing cannot isopathically draw out the frost 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 tumor), 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 manifest 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 pretensions! 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 authenti- cated by indubitable observation 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 uis said" would not seduce any conscientious physician to imitate such a hazardous experiment, 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; Leip- 88 INTRODUCTION. thus, he can in a very short time perfectly cure the burn, and remove every feeling of pain.* Other intelligent individuals, equally strangers to medical science—such, for example, as the lacker-workers, apply a sub- stance to burns which excites of itself a similar feeling of heat, that is to say, hot Alcohol or the oil of Turpentine,^ and by theoe zig: Kollmann," but) by its eccentric supporters, especially Dr. Gross (v. Allg. Horn. Ztg., ii., p. 72), who vaunts this isopathy (cequalia cequalibus) 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 simflibus for all his fame and fortune. * Fernel (in his Therapeutics, book vi., cap. 20,) considered that the best means to allay pain was to expose the part that was burnt to the fire. John Hunter (in his work on the blood, p. 218) mentions the great inconvenience that results from the application of cold water to burns, and prefers the method of exposing the parts to the fire. In this he departs from the tradi- tional doctrines of medicine, which prescribe cooling remedies in cases of inflammation (contraria contrariis); but experience proved to him that a homoeopathic heat (similia similibus) would be most salutary. f Sydenham (Opera, p. 271) says that repeated applications of Alcohol are preferable to all other remedies in burns. B. Bell (System of Surgery, 1789) expresses himself equally favorable with regard to the efficacy of homoeopa- thic remedies. These are his words: "Alcohol is one of the best remedies for burns of every description; on the first application it appears to increase the pain (see § 157), but the latter is soon allayed, and gives place to an agreeable sensation of calm and tranquillity. This method is never more efficacious than when the whole part is plunged into Alcohol; but where the immersion is not practicable, it is requisite to keep the burn continually covered with pledgets imbibed with this liquid." I further add, that warm, and even very hot Alcohol, affords still more prompt and certain relief, because it is far more homoeopathic than Alcohol that is cold. This is confirmed by every experience. Edward Kentish treated several men who were often dreadfully burned in the coal mines by the explosion of fire-damp; he made them apply hot oil of Turpentine or Alcohol, as being the best remedies that could be used in severe burns. (Second Essay on Burns, London, 1798). No treatment is more homoeopathic than this, nor can there be any more efficacious. The worthy and skillful physician, Heistor, also recommends this practice from his own personal experience (Instit. Chirurg., Tom. I., p. 33); he praises the application of the oil of Turpentine, of Alcohol, and of cataplasms as hot as the patient can bear them. But nothing can more strongly exhibit the surprising superiority of the homoeopathic method (that is to say of the application of substances that excite a sensation of heat and burning, to parts that are burned) over the palliative (which consists of cold applica- tions), than those simple experiments where, in order to compare the results INTRODUCTION. 89 means cure themselves in a few hours, well knowing that the so- called cooling ointments would not produce the same result in an equal number of months, and that cold water* would only make the evil worse. An experienced reaper, however little he may be accustomed to the use of strong liquors, will not drink cold water (contraria con- trariis) when the heat of the sun or the fatigue of hard labor have brought him into a feverish state: he is well aware of the danger that would ensue, and therefore takes a small quantity of some heating liquor—viz., a mouthful of brandy. Experience, the source of all truth, has convinced him of the advantage and of these two opposite proceedings, they have been simultaneously tried upon the same patient, and on parts that were burned in an equal degree. * Thus J. Bell (Kiihn's Phys. Med. Journal, for June, 1801, p. 428), having to treat a lady who had scalded both arms with boiling liquid, covered one with the oil of Turpentine, and plunged the other into cold water. The first was no longer painful at the expiration of half an hour, while the other continued so during six hours: the moment it was withdrawn from the cold water the patient experienced far greater pain, and it required much longer time to cure this arm than it did to heal the other. J. Anderson (Kentish. loc. cit., p. 43) likewise treated a woman who had scalded her face and arm with boiling fat. " The face, which was very red and painful, was covered with oil of Turpentine a few minutes after the accident: as for the arm, the patient had already plunged it of her own accord into cold water, and expressed a desire to await the result of the treatment for a few hours. At the expiration of seven hours, the face was better, and the patient relieved in this part. With regard to the arm, around which the water had been several times renewed, it became exceedingly painful whenever it was with- drawn from the water, and the inflammation had manifestly increased. The next day I found that the patient had suffered extreme pain in the arm; inflammation had extended above the elbow, several large blisters hacf burst, and a thick eschar had formed itself upon the arm and hand, which were then covered with a warm cataplasm. The face was no longer painful, but it was neeessary to apply emollients a fortnight longer to cure the arm." Who does not perceive, in this instance, the great superiority of the homoeopa- thic mode of treatment (that is to say, of the application of agents which pro- duce effects resembling the evil itself) over the antipathic, prescribed by the ordinary physicians of the old school of medicine ? * J. Hunter is not the only one who has pointed out the evil results that attend the treatment of burns with cold water. Fabricius de Ililden (De Combustionibus Libellus. Basil, 1607, cap. V., p. 11.) likewise assures us that cold applications are very hurtful in such cases, that they produce the most disastrous effects—that inflammation, suppuration, and sometimes gan- grene are the consequences. 90 INTRODUCTION efficacy of this homoeopathic mode of proceeding. The heat and lassitude which oppressed him soon diminish.* Occasionally there have been certain physicians who guessed that medicines might cure diseases by the faculty which they possessed of exciting morbid symptoms that resembled the dis- ease itself.f Thus the author of the book, -rrepl ronuv r&v kclt' dvdgu-ov^ which forms a part of the works attributed to Hippocrates, ex- presses himself in the following remarkable words : 6ca ra opoia vovaog yiverai, nal did, ra, OftOLa rrpoocpepouEva Ik vooevvruv vyia- ivovrai,—Sia rb l\ietiv eTteroc rraverai. Physicians of a later period have likewise known and pro- claimed the truths of homoeopathy. Thus, B. Boulduc,\ for example, discovered that the purgative properties of Rhubarb were the faculty by which this plant cured diarrhoea. Detharding guessed || that the infusion of Senna would cure the colic in adults, by virtue of the faculty which it possesses of exciting that malady in healthy persons. Bertholon** informs us that, in diseases, electricity diminishes and finally removes a pain which is very similar to that "which it also produces. Thouryjj-f affirms that positive electricity accelerates arterial pulsation, but that it renders the same slower where it is already quickened by disease. * Zimmermann (Ueber die Erfahrurig, II., p. 318) tells us that the in- habitants of warm countries act in the same manner, with the most bene- ficial results, and that they usually drink a small quantity of spirituous liquors when they are much heated. f In citing the following passages of writers who have had some pre- sentiment of homoeopathy, I do not mean to prove the excellence of the method (which establishes itself without further proof), but I wish to free myself from a reproach of having passed them over in silence to arrogate to myself the merit of the discovery X Basil, Froben, 1538, p. 72. $ Mem. de l'Acad. Royale, 1710. |j Epli. Nat. Cur., cent, x., obs. 76. ** Medic. Elcctricit., II., pp. 15. 282. ft Mem. lu a l'Acad. de Caen. INTRODUCTION. 91 Storck* was struck with the idea that, if Stramonium disturbs the senses and produces mental derangement in persons who are healthy, it might very easily be administered to maniacs for the purpose of restoring the senses by effecting a change of ideas. The Danish physician, Stahl.f has, above ail other writers, expressed his conviction on this head most unequivocally. He speaks in the following terms : " The received method in medi- cine, of treating diseases by opposite remedies—that is to say, by medicines which are opposed to the effects they produce (contraria contrariis)—is completely false and absurd. I am convinced, on the contrary, that diseases are subdued by agents which produce a similar affection (similia similibus): burns, by the heat of a fire to which the parts are exposed; the frost-bite, by snow or icy cold water; and inflammation and contusions, by spirituous applications. It is by these means I have succeeded in curing a disposition to acidity of the stomach, by using very small doses of Sulphuric-acid, in cases where a multitude of ab- sorbing powders had been administered to no purpose." Thus far the great truth has more than once been approached by physicians. But a transitory idea was all that presented itself to them; consequently, the indispensible reform which ought to have taken place in the old school of therapeutics, to make room for the true curative method, and a system of medi- cine at once simple and certain, has, till the present day, not been effected. * Lebell. de Stramon., p. 8. | In J. Hammel, ii., Comment de Arthritide tam Tartarea, quam scorbu- tica, seu podagra et scorbutico. Budingas, 1738—in 8, pp. 40—42 / ORGANON OF MEDICINE. The sole duty of a physician is, to restore health in a mild, prompt, and durable manner. § 1.—The first and sole duty of the physician is, to restore health to the sick.1 This is the true art of healing. § 2.—The perfection of a cure consists in restoring health in a prompt, mild, and permanent manner; in removing and anni- hilating disease by the shortest, safest, and most certain means, upon principles that are at once plain and intelligible. The physician ought to search after what is to be cured in disease, and be acquainted with the curative virtues of medicines, in order to adapt the medicine to the disease. He must also be acquainted with the means of preserving health. k 3.—When the physician clearly perceives the curative in- dication in each particular case of disease—when he is ac quainted with the therapeutic effects of medicines individually __when, guided by evident reasons, he knows how to make such an application of that which is curative in medicine to that which 1 His mission is not, as many physicians (who, wasting their time and powers in the pursuit of fame) have imagined it to be that of inventing systems, by stringing together empty ideas and hypotheses upon the imme- diate essence of life and the origin of disease in the interior of the human economy; nor is it that of continually endeavoring to account for the morbid phenomena, with their nearest cause (which must forever remain concealed), and confounding the whole in unintelligible words and pompous observations, which make a deep impression on the minds of the ignorant, while the patients are left to sigh in vain for relief. We have already too many of these learned reveries, which bear the name of medical theories, and for the inculcation of which even special professorships have been established. It is high time that all those who call themselves physicians should cease to deceive suffering humanity with words that have no meaning, and begin to aet—that is to Bay, to afford relief, and cure the sick in reality 93 94 ORGANON OF MEDICINE. is indubitably diseased in the patient (both in regard to the choice of the substances, the precise dose to be administered, and the time of repeating it) that a cure may necessarily follow —and, finally, when he knows what are the obstacles to the cure, and can render the latter permanent by removing them;—then only can he accomplish his purpose in a rational manner— then only can he merit the title of a genuine p>hysician, or a man skilled in the art of healing. § 4.—The physician is likewise the guardian of health, when he knows what are the objects that disturb it, which produce and keep up disease, and can remove them from persons who are in health. In the cure of disease, it is necessary to regard the fundamental cause, and other circumstances. § 5.—When a cure is to be performed, the physician must avail himself of all the particulars he can learn, both respecting the probable origin of the acute malady and the most significant points in the history of the chronic disease, to aid him in the discovery of their fundamental cause, which is commonly due to some chronic miasm. In all researches of this nature, he must take into consideration the apparent state of the physical constitution of the patient (particularly when the affection is chronic), the disposition, occupation, mode of life, habits, social relations, age, sexual functions, &c, &c. For the physician, the totality of the symptoms alone constitutes the disease. § 6.—The unprejudiced observer (however great may be his powers of penetration), aware of the futility of all elaborate speculations that are not confirmed by experience, perceives in each individual affection nothing but changes of the state of the body and mind {traces of disease, casualties, symptoms), that are discoverable by the senses alone—that is to say, deviations from the former sound state of health, which are felt by the patient himself, remarked by the individuals around him, and ob- served by the physician. The ensemble of these available signs represents, in its full extent, the disease itself—that is, they constitute the true and only form of it which the mind is capable of conceiving.1 1 I cannot, therefore, comprehend how it was possible for physicians, ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 95 To cure disease, it is merely requisite to remove the entire symptoms, duly regarding, at the same time, the circumstances enumerated in $ 5. § 7.—As in a disease where no manifest or exciting cause presents itself for removal (causa occasionalis1), we can perceive nothing but the symptoms, then must these symptoms alone (with due attention to the accessory circumstances, and the possibility of the existence of a miasm, § 5) guide the physician in the choice of a fit remedy to combat the disease. The totality without heeding the symptoms, or taking them as a guide in the treatment, to imagine that they ought to search the interior of the human economy (which is inaccessible and concealed from our view), and that they could there alone discover that which was to be cured in disease. I cannot con- ceive how they could entertain so ridiculous a pretension as that of being able to discover the internal invisible change that had taken place, and restore the same to the order of its normal condition by the aid of medicines, without ever troubling themselves very much about the symptoms, and that they should have regarded such a method as the only means of performing a radical and rational cure. Is not that which manifests itself in disease, by symptoms, identified with the change itself which has taken place in the human economy, and which it is impossible to discover without their aid'2 Do not the symptoms of disease, which are sensibly cognizable, represent to the physician the disease itself? When he can neither see the spiritual essence, the vital power which produces the disease, nor yet the disease itself, but simply perceive and learn its morbid effects, that he may be able to treat it accordingly ? What would the old school search out farther from the hidden interior for a prima causa morbi, whilst they reject and super- ciliously despise the palpable and intelligible representation of the disease, the symptoms which clearly announce themselves to us as the object of cure? What is there besides these in disease which they have to cure?* 1 It is taken for granted that every intelligent physician will commence by removing this causa occasionalis; then the indisposition usually yields of itself. Thus, it is necessary to remove flowers from the room when their odors occasion paroxysms of fainting and hysteria; extract from the e3^e the foreign substance which occasions ophthalmia; remove the tight bandages from a wounded limb which threatens gangrene, and apply others more suitable; lay bare and tie up a wounded artery where haemorrhage produces fainting; evacuate the berries of Belladonna, &c, which may have been swallowed, by vomiting; extract the foreign particles which have introduced themselves into the openings of the body (the nose, pharynx, ears, urethra, rectum, vagina); grind down a stone in the bladder; open the imperforate anus of the new-born infant, &c. * The physician who engages in a search after the hidden springs of the internal economy will hourly be deceived ; but the homceopathist, who, with due attention, seizes upon the faithful image of the entire group of symptoms, possesses himself of a guide that may be depended on; and, when he has succeeded in destroying the whole of them, he may be certain that he haj likewise annihilated the internal and hidden cause of disease.—Rau, loc. cit., p. 103. 96 ORGANON OF MEDICTNE. of the symptoms, this image of the immediate essence of the malady reflected externally, ought to be the principal or sole object by which the latter could make known the medicines it stands in need of—the only agent to determine the choice of a remedy that would be most appropriate. In short, the ensemble1 of the symptoms is the principal and sole object that a physician ought to have in view in every case of disease—the power of his art is to be directed against that alone, in order to cure and transform it into health. When all the symptoms are extinguished, the disease is, at the same time, internally cured. § 8.—It is not possible to conceive or prove by any experience, after the cure of the whole of the symptoms of a disease, to- gether with all its perceptible changes, that there remains or possibly can remain any other than a healthy state, or that the morbid alteration which has taken place in the interior of the economy has not been annihilated.2 1 Not knowing, at times, what plan to adopt in disease, physicians have till now endeavored to suppress or annihilate some one of the various symptoms which appeared. This method, which is known by the name of the symptomatic, has very justly excited universal contempt, not only because no advantage is derived from it, but because it gives rise to many bad con- sequences. A single existing symptom is no more the disease itself than a single leg constitutes the entire of the human body. This method is so much the more hurtful in its effects, that, in attacking an isolated symptom, they make use solely of an opposite remedy (that is to say, of antipathies or palliatives), so that, after an amendment of short duration, the evil bursts forth again worse than before. 2 In one who has thus been restored from sickness by a genuine physician, so that no trace of disease, no morbid symptom any longer remains, and every token of health has again durably returned, can it for a moment be supposed, without offering an insult to common sense, that the entire cor- poreal disease still resides in such an individual ? and yet Hufeland, at the head of the old school, makes this identical assertion (in his work on Ho- moeopathy, p. 27, I., 19) in the following words, viz., " The homoeopathist may remove the symptoms, but the disease will still remain." He affirms this partly out of mortification at the progress and salutary effects of ho- moeopathy, and partly because he entertains wholly material ideas of disease, which he is unable to regard as an immaterial change in the or- ganism, produced by the morbid derangement of the vital power; he does not consider it as a changed condition of the organism, but as a material tomething, which, after the cure is completed, may yet continue to lurk in OEGANON OF MEDICINE. 97 During health, the system is animated by a spiritual, self-moved, vital power, which preserves it in harmonious order. § 9.—In the healthy condition of man, the immaterial vital principle, which animates the material body, exercises an ab- solute sway, and maintains all its parts in the most admirable order and harmony, both of sensation and action, so that our in-dwelling rational spirit may freely employ these living healthy organs for the superior purpose of our existence. Without this vital, dynamic power, the organism is dead. § 10.—The material organism, deprived of its vital principle, is incapable of sensation, action, or self-preservation j1 it is the immaterial vital principle only, animating the former in its healthy and morbid condition, that imparts to it all sensation, and enables it to perform its functions. In disease, the vital power only is primarily disturbed, and expresses its suf- ferings (internal changes) by abnormal alterations in the sensations and actions of the system. § 11.—In disease, this spontaneous and immaterial vital prin- ciple, pervading the physical organism, is primarily deranged by the dynamic influence of a morbific agent, which is inimical to life. Only the vital principle, thus disturbed, can give to the organism its abnormal sensations, and incline it to the irregular actions which we call disease; for, as an invisible principle, and only cognizable through its operations in the organism, its morbid disturbances can be perceived solely by means of the expression of disease hi the sensations and actions of that side of the or- ganism exposed to the senses of the physician and by-standers; in other words, by the morbid symptoms, and can be indicated in no other manner. By the extinction of the totality of the symptoms, in the process of cure, the some internal corner of the body, in order, one day or other, at pleasure, and during a period of blooming health, once more to burst forth with its material presence! So shocking is still the delusion of the old pathology! That such a one only could produce a therapeutica, solely intent upon cleansing out the poor patient, is not surprising. 1 It is then dead, and subject to the physical laws of the external world; it suffers decay, and is again resolved into its constituent elements. 7 98 OKGANON OF MEDICINE. suffering of the vital power—that is, the entire morbid affection, inwardly and outwardly, is removed. § 12.—It is solely the morbidly affected vital principle which brings forth disease,1 so that the expression of disease, percep- tible by the senses, announces, at the same time, all the internal change—that is, all the morbid perturbations of the vital prin- ciple ; in short, it displays the entire disease. Consequently, after a cure is effected, the cessation of all morbid expression, and of all sensible changes which are inconsistent with the healthy performance of the functions, necessarily pre-supposes, with an equal degree of certainty, a restoration of the vital prin- ciple to its state of integrity, and the recovered health of the whole organism. To presume that disease (non-chirurgical) is a peculiar and distinct some- thing, residing in man, is a conceit which has rendered allopathy so per- nicious. § 13.—Disease, therefore (those forms of it not belonging to manual surgery), considered, as it is by the allopathists, as some- thing separate from the living organism and the vital principle which animates it, as something hidden internally, and material, how subtile soever its nature may be supposed, is a nonentity which could only be conceived by minds of a material mould, and which for ages, hitherto, has given to medicine all those pernicious deviations which constitute it a mischievous art. Every curable disease is made known to the physician by its symptoms. § 14.—There is no curable malady, nor any invisible morbid change in the interior of man which admits of cute that is not made known, by morbid indications or symptoms, to the physician of accurate observation—a provision entirely in conformity with the infinite goodness of the all-wise Preserver of men. The sufferings of the deranged vital power, and the morbid symptoms pro- duced thereby, as an invisible whole, one and the same. § 15.—The sufferings of the immaterial vital principle, which 1 In what manner the vital principle produces morbid indications in the Bystem, that is, how it produces disease, is to the physician a useless ques- tion, and, therefore, will ever remain unanswered. Only that which is ne- cessary for him to know of the disease, and which is fully sufficient for the purpose of cure, has the Lord of life rendered evident to his senses. OEGANON OF MEDICINE. 99 animates the interior of our bodies when it is morbidly disturbed, and the mass of symptoms produced by it in the organism, which are externally manifested, and represent the actual malady, con- stitute a whole—they are one and the same. The organism is, indeed, the material instrument of life; but without that anima- tion which is derived from the instinctive sensibility and control of the vital principle, its existence is as inconceivable as that of a vital principle without an organism; consequently, both con- stitute a unit, although, for the sake of ease in comprehension, our minds may separate this unity into two ideas. It is only by means of the spiritual influence of a morbific agent that our spiritual vital power can be diseased; and, in like manner, only by the spiritual (dynamic) operation of medicine that health can be restored. § 16.—By the operation of injurious influences from without upon the healthy organism, influences which disturb the har- monious play of the functions, the vital principle, as a spiritual dynamis, cannot otherwise be assailed and affected than in a (dynamic) spiritual manner; neither can such morbid disturbances, or, in other words, such diseases, be removed by the physician, except in like manner, by means of the spiritual (dynamic virtual) countervailing agency of the suitable medicines acting upon the same vital principle, and this action is communicated by the sen- tient nerves everywhere distributed in the organism; so that curative medicines possess the faculty of restoring, and do actually restore health, with concomitant functional harmony, by a dynamic influence only, acting upon the vital energies, after the morbid alterations in the health of the patient which are evident to the senses (the totality of the symptoms) have represented the disease to the attentive and observant physician as fully as may be requisite to effect a cure. The physician has only to remove the totality of the symptoms, and he has cured the entire disease. § 17.—As the cure, which is effected by the annihilation of all the symptoms of a disease, removes at the same time the internal change upon which the disease is founded—that is to say, destroys it in its totality1—it is accordingly clear that the physician has ■ A dream, a presentiment resulting from a superstitious imagination, a solemn prediction impressing a person with the belief that he will infallibly 100 OKGANON OF MZDICINE. no thin"- more to do than destroy the totality of the symptoms, in order to effect a simultaneous removal of the internal change— that is, to annihilate the disease itself. But by destroying disease we restore health, the first and sole duty of the physician who is sensible of the importance of his calling, which consists in afford- ing relief to his fellow mortals, and not discoursing dogmatically.1 The totality of the symptoms is the sole indication in the choice of the remedy. § 18.—From this incontrovertible truth, that beyond the totality of the symptoms there is nothing discoverable in diseases by which they could make known the nature of the medicines they stand in need of, we ought naturally to conclude that there can be no other indication whatever than the ensemble of the symptoms in each individual case to guide us in the choice of a remedy. Changes in the general state, in disease (symptoms of disease), can be cured in no other way, by medicines, than in so far as the latter possess the power, likewise, of affecting changes in the system. § 19.—As diseases are nothing more than changes in the general state of the human economy $ which declare themselves by symptoms, and the cure being impossible except by the conversion of the diseased state into one of health, it may be readily con- die on a certain day, and at a certain hour, have often produced the embryo of the growing disease, the signs of approaching death, and even death itself at the hour prognosticated. Such effects could never take place with- out some change having been operated in the interior of the body, corres- ponding with the state which manifested itself externally. In cases of this nature, it has also sometimes happened that, by deceiving the patient or in- sinuating a contrary belief, it has succeeded in dissipating all the morbid appearances which announced the approach of death, and suddenly restored him to health: circumstances that never could have taken place without annihilating at the same time, by this moral remedy, the internal morbid change of which death was to be the result. 1 The wisdom and goodness of the Creator, in the cure of disease to which man is subject, could not be more manifest than in developing the incidents, in the malady to be removed, openly to the observation of the physician, in order to remove them and reestablish health. But what would be thought of those divine attributes, if (as the prevailing school of medicine, hitherto affecting a supernatural insight into the internal nature of things, have pre- tended) he had veiled what is to be cured in disease in mystic darkness, wrapt it in concealment within, and thus rendered it impossible for man to know distinctly the malady, and the cure equally impossible. ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 101 ceived that medicines could never cure disease if they did not possess the faculty of changing the general state of the system, which consists of sensation and action, and that their curative virtues are owing to this faculty alone. This faculty which medicines have of producing changes in the system, can only be known by observing their effects upon healthy individuals. § 20.—By a mere effort of the mind we could never discover this innate and hidden faculty of medicines—this spiritual virtue, by which they can modify the state of the human body, and even cure disease. It is by experience only, and observation of the effects produced by their influence on the general state of the economy, that we can either discover or form to ourselves any clear conception of it The morbid symptoms which medicines produce in healthy persons are the sole indications of their curative virtues in disease. § 21.—The curative powers of medicines being nowise dis- coverable in themselves, a fact which few will venture to dispute, and the pure experiments which have been made, even by the most skillful observers, not exhibiting anything to our view which could be capable of rendering them medicines or curative remedies, except the faculty which they possess of producing manifest changes in the general state of the human economy, particularly with persons hi health, in whom they excite morbid symptoms of a very decided character; we ought to conclude from this that, when medicines act as remedies, they cannot exercise their cura- tive virtue but by the faculty wdiich they possess of modifying the general state of the economy, and giving birth to peculiar symp- toms. Consequently, we ought to rely solely upon the morbid appearances which medicines excite in healthy persons, the only possible manifestation of the curative virtues which they possess, in order to learn what malady each of them produces indi- vidually, and at the same time what diseases they are capable of curing. If experience prove that the medicines vjhich produce symptoms similar to those of the disease are the therapeutic agents that cure it in the most certain and permanent manner, we ought to select these medicines in the cure of the disease. If, on the contrary, it proves that the most certain and permanent cure is obtained by medicinal substances that produce symptoms directly 102 OKGANON OF MEDICINE. opposite to those of the disease, then the latter agents ought to be selected fen this purpose. § 22.—But, as we can discover nothing to remove in disease in order to change it into health, except the ensemble of the symp- toms ; as Ave also perceive nothing curative in medicines bu* their faculty of producing morbid symptoms in persons who are healthy, and of removing them from those who are diseased, it very naturally follows that medicines assume the character of remedies, and become capable of annihilating disease in no other manner than by exciting particular appearances and symptoms ; or, to express it more clearly, a certain artificial disease which destroys the previous symptoms—that is to say, the natural disease which they intend to cure. On the other hand, if we wish to destroy the entire symptoms of a disease, we ought to choose a medicine which has a tendency to excite similar or opposite symptoms, according to that which experience may point out to us as the easiest, safest, and most permanent means of removing the symptoms of the disease, and of restoring health, whether it be by opposing to the latter medicinal symptoms that are similar or contrary.1 Morbid symptoms that are inveterate cannot be cured by medicinal symptoms of an opposite character (antipathic method). § 23.—From pure experience, and the most careful experiments 1 Besides these two, there is no other mode of applying medicines in disease but the allopathic; and in this latter, remedies are administered which produce symptoms that bear no reference whatever to those of the disease itself, being neither similar nor contrary, but wholly heterogeneous. I have already shown, in the Introduction, that this method is an imperfect imitation of the still more imperfect attempts made by the unintelligent vital powers (when abandoned to their own resources) to save themselves at all hazards, a power to which the organism was confided merely to preserve its harmony so long as health continued; but, when deranged by disease, to admit of being again changed to health (homoeopathically) by the intelligent physician, but not to cure itself, for which the little power it possesses is so far from being a pattern to be copied, that all the changes and symptoms it produces in the (morbidly deranged) organism, are just the disease itself. However inapplicable this method may be, it has for so long a time been practised by the existing school of medicine, that the physician can no more pass over it unnoticed, than the historian can be silent on the oppression to which mankind has been subject for thousands of years beneath the absurd rnle of despotic governments. ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 103 that have been tried, we learn that the existing morbid symptoms, far from being effaced or destroyed by contrary medicinal symp- toms, like those excited by the antipathic, enantiopathic, or pal- liative methods, they, on the contrary, reappear more intense than ever, after having for a short space of time undergone apparent amendment. (Vide § 58—62, and 69). The homoeopathic method, or that which employs medicines producing symp- toms similar to those of the malady, is the only one of which experience proves the certain efficacy. § 24.—There remains, accordingly, no other method of applying medicines profitably in diseases than the homoeopathic, by means of which we select from all others that medicine (in order to direct it against the entire symptoms of the individual morbid case) whose manner of acting upon persons in health is known, and which has the power of producing an artificial malady the nearest in resemblance to the natural disease before our eyes. § 25.—Plain experience,1 an infallible oracle in the art of heal- ing, proves to us, in every careful experiment, that the particular medicine whose action upon persons in health produces the greatest number of symptoms resembling those of the disease which it is intended to cure, possesses, also, in reality (when administered in convenient doses), the power of suppressing, in a radical, prompt, and permanent manner, the totality of these morbid symptoais— that is to say (§ 6—16), the whole of the existing disease; it also teaches us that all medicines cure the diseases whose symp- toms approach nearest to their own, and that among the latter none admit of exception. 11 do not mean that kind of experience acquired by our ordinary practi- tioners after having long combated, with a heap of complicated prescriptions, a multitude of diseases which they never examined with care, and which (true to the errors of the old school) they regarded as being already included in our pathology, thinking that they perceived in them some imaginary morbific principle, or some anomaly not less hypothetical. In fact, they were in the habit of seeing something, but they knew not what they saw, and they urrived at conclusions which a deity alone could unravel in the midst of so great a concourse of diverse powers acting upon an unknown subject, a result from which no information was to be gained. Fifty years of such experience are like fifty years passed in looking through a kaleido- scope, which, full of unknown things of varied colors, revolves continually upon itself: there would be seen thousands of figures, changing their forms every instant, without a possibility of accounting for any one of them. 104 ORGANON OF MEDICINE. This is grounded upon the therapeutic law of nature, that a weaker dynamic affection in man is permanently extinguished by one that is simila*; of greater intensity, yet of a different origin. § 26.—This phenomena is founded on the natural law of homoeo- pathy—a law unknown till the present time, although it has on all occasions formed the basis of every visible cure—that is to say, a dynamic disease in the living economy of man is extinguished in a permanent manner by another that is more powerful, when the latter (without being of the same species) bears a strong resemblance to it in its mode of manifesting itself J The curative virtues of medicines depend solely upon the resemblance that their symptoms bear to those of the disease. § 27.—The curative powers of medicines are therefore grounded upon the faculty which they possess of creating symptoms similar to those of the disease itself, but which are of a more intense nature. (§ 12—26.) It necessarily follows that disease cannot be destroyed or cured in a certain, radical, prompt, and permanent manner, but by the aid of a medicine which is capable of exciting (in the health of a human being) the entire group of symptoms 1 Physical and moral diseases are cured in the same manner. Why does the brilliant planet Jupiter disappear in the twilight from the eyes of him who gazes at it ? Because a similar but more potent power, the light of breaking day, then acts upon these organs. With what are we in the habit of flattering the olfactory nerves when offended by disagreeable odors? With snuff, which affects the nose in a similar manner, but more powerfully. Neither music nor confectionery will overcome the disgust of smelling, because these objects have affinity with the nerves of other senses. By what means does the soldier cunningly remove from the ears of the compassionate spectator the cries of him who runs the gauntlet ? By the piercing tones of the fife, coupled with the noise of the drum. By what means do they drown the distant roar of the enemy's cannon, which carries terror to the heart of the soldier ? By the deep-mouthed clamor of the big drum. Neither the compassion nor the terror could be suppressed by reprimands or a distribu- tion of brilliant uniforms. In the same manner, mourning and sadness are extinguished in the soul when the news reach us (even though they were false) of a still greater misfortune occurring to another. The evils resulting from an excess of joy are mitigated by coffee, which, of itself, disposes the mind to impressions that are happy. The Germans, a nation which had for centuries been plunged in apathy and slavery by their princes—it was not till after they had been bowed to the dust by the tyranny of the French invader, that a sentiment of the dignity of man could be awakened within them, or that they could once more arise from their abject condition. ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 105 which bear the closest resemblance to those of the disease, but which possess a still greater degree of energy. Some explanation of this therapeutic law of nature. § 28.—As this therapeutic law of nature clearly manifests itself in every accurate experiment and research, it consequently be-' comes an established fact, however unsatisfactory may be the scientific theory of the manner in which it takes place. I attach no value whatever to any explanation that could be given on this head; yet the following view of the subject appears to me to be the most reasonable, because it is founded upon experimental premises. § 29.—Every disease (which does not belong exclusively to surgery) being a purely dynamic and peculiar change of the vital powers in regard to the manner in which they accomplish sensation and action, a change that expresses itself by symptoms which are perceptible to the senses, it therefore follows, that the homoeopathic medicinal agent, selected by a skillful physician, will convert it into another medicinal disease, which is analo- gous, but rather more intense.1 By this means, the natural morbific power which had previously existed, and which was nothing 7nore than a dynamic power without substance, termi- nates, while the medicinal disease which usurps its place, being of such a nature as to be easily subdued by the vital powers, is likewise extinguished in its turn, leaving in its primitive state 1 The brief operation of the artificial morbific powers, which are denomi- nated medicinal, although they are stronger than natural diseases, renders it possible that they may, nevertheless, be more easily overpowered by the vital energies than the latter, which are weaker. Natural diseases, simply because of their more tedious and burthensome operation (as psora, syphilis, s- cosis), cannot be overcome or extinguished by the unaided vital energies, ui til these are more strongly aroused by the physician, through the medium of a very similar yet more powerful morbific agent (a homoeopathic medi- ci: e). Such an agent, upon its administration, urges, as it were, the in- sensate, instinctive vital energies, and is substituted for the natural morbid affection hitherto existing. The vital energies now become affected by the medicine alone, yet transiently; because its effect (that is to say, the natural course of the medicinal disease thereby excited) is of short duration. Those chronic diseases which (according to § 46) are destroyed on the appearance of small-pox and measles (both of which run a course of a few weeks only) furnish similar instances of cure. 106 ORGANON OF MEDICINE. of integrity and health the essence or substance which animates and preserves the body. This hypothesis, which is highly pro- bable, rests upon the following facts. The human body is much more prone to undergo derangement from the action of medicines than from that of natural disease § 30.—Medicines (particularly as it depends on us to vary the doses according to our own will) appear to have greater power in affecting the state of health than the natural morbific irritation; for natural diseases are cured and subdued by appropriate medicines. § 31.—The physical and moral powers, which are called morbi- fic agents, do not possess the faculty of changing the state of health unconditionally ;l we do not fall sick beneath their influence before the economy is sufficiently disposed and laid open to the attack of morbific causes, and will allow itself to be placed by them in a state where the sensations which they undergo, and the actions which they perform,»are different from those which belong to it in the normal state. These powers, therefore, do not excite disease in all men, nor are they at all times the cause of it in the same individual. § 32.—But it is quite otherwise with the artificial morbific powers which we call medicines. Every real medicine will, at all times, and under every circumstance, work upon every living individual, and excite in him the symptoms that are peculiar to it (so as to be clearly manifest to the senses when the dose is power- ful enough), to such a degree that the whole of the system is always (^unconditionally) attacked, and, in a manner, infected by the medicinal disease, which, as I have before said, is not at all the case in natural diseases. § 33.—It is therefore fully proved, by every experiment2 and 1 When I say that disease is an aberration or a discord in the state of health, I do not pretend by that to give a metaphysical explanation of the immediate essence of diseases generally, or of any morbid case in particular. In making use of this term, I merely intend to point at that which diseases are not, and cannot be; or, to express what I have just proved, that they aro not mechanical or chemical changes of the material substance of the body that they do not depend upon a morbific material principle, and that th«y are solely spiritual and dynamic changes of the animal economy. 2 The following is a striking observation of the kind directly in point: previously to the year 1801, the genuine smooth scarlet fever of Sydenhnm ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 107 observation, that the state of health is far m.ie susceptible of derangement from the effects of medicinal powers than from the influence o-f morbific principles and contagious miasms; or, what is the same thing, the ordinary morbific principles have only a conditional and often very subordinate influence, while the medicinal powers exercise one that is absolute, direct, and greatly superior to that of the former. The truth of the homoeopathic law is shown by the inefficiency of non-homao pathic treatment in the cure of diseases that are of long standing, and likewise by the fact that either of two natural dissimilar diseases, coexisting in the body, cannot annihilate or cure the other. § 34.—In artificial diseases produced by medicines, it is not the greater degree of intensity that imparts to them the power they possess of curing those which are natural. In order that the cure may be effected, it is indispensable that the medicines be able to produce in the human body an artificial disease, similar to that which is to be cured; for "it is this resemblance alone, joined to the greater degree of intensity of the artificial disease, that gives to the latter the faculty of substituting itself in the place of the former, and thus obliterating it. This is so far a fact that even nature herself cannot cure an existing disease by the excitement of a new one that is dissimilar, be the intensity of the latter ever so great; in the same manner the physician is inca- pable of effecting a cure when he applies medicines that have not the power of creating in healthy persons a morbid state, resem- bling the disease which is before him. § 35.—In order to illustrate these facts, we will examine suc- cessively, in three different cases, the proceedings of nature, where two natural diseases that are dissimilar meet together in the same patient, and also the results of the ordinary treatment of disease with allopathic medicines, which are incapable of exciting an artificial morbid state similar to that of the disease which is to prevailed epidemically among children, and attacked all, without exception, who had not escaped the disease in a former epidemic; whereas, every child who was exposed to one of the kind which came under my observation in Konio-slutter, remained exempt fron this highly inffictious disease, if it had timely taken a very small dose of Belladonna. When a medicine can thus evince a prophylactic property against the infection of a prevalent disease, it must exercise a predominating influence over the vital power. 108 ORGANON OF MEDICINE. be cured. This examination will fully prove, on the one hand, that it is not even in the power of nature herself to cure an exist- ing disease by one that is dissimilar, be the intensity of the latter ever so great; and, on the other, that even the most energetic medicines, when not homoeopathic, are incapable of effecting a cure. I.__A disease, existing in the human body, prevents the accession of a new and dissimilar one, if the former be of equal intensity to, or greater than the latter. § 36. I.—If the two dissimilar diseases which meet together in the human body have an unequal power, or if the oldest of them is stronger than the other, the new disease will be repulsed from the body by that which existed before it, and will not be able to estab- lish itself there. Thus, a person already afflicted with a severe chronic disease, will never be subject to an attack of slight autumnal dysentery or any other epidemic. According to Larry,1 the plague peculiar to the Levant never breaks out in places where scurvy prevails, nor does it ever infect those who labor under herpetic diseases. According to Jenner, the rickets pre- vent vaccination from taking effect, and Hildebrand informs us that persons suffering under phthisis are never attacked with epidemic fevers, except when the latter are extremely violent. Thus non-homaopaihic treatment, which is not violent, leaves the chronic disease unaltered. k 37.—In the same manner, a chronic disease, of long stand- in o- will not yield to the ordinary mode of cure by allopathic remedies—that is to say, by medicines Avhich are incapable of pro- ducing in healthy persons a state analogous to that by which it is characterized. It resists a treatment of this kind, provided it be not too violent, even prolonged during several years. Practice verifies this assertion, therefore requires no examples to support it. U,__Or a, new and more intense disease suspends a prior and dissimilar one, already existing in the body, only so long as the former continues, but it never cures it. § 38. II.—If the new disease, wdiich is dissimilar to the old, be more powerful than the latter, it will then cause its suspen- sion, until the new disease has either performed its own course or 1 Mem. and Observ. in the Description of Egypt, torn. i. ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 109 is cured; but then the old disease re-appears. We are informed, by Tulpius,1 that two children having contracted tinea, ceased to experience any further attacks of epilepsy to which they had till then been subject; but, as soon as the eruption of the head was removed, they were again attacked as before. Schopf saw the itch disappear when scurvy manifested itself, and return again after the cure of the latter disease."2 A violent typhus has sus- pended the progress of ulcerous phthisis, Avhich resumed its march immediately after the cessation of the typhoid disease.3 When madness manifests itself during a pulmonary disease, it effaces the phthisis with all its symptoms; but, when the mental aliena- tion ceases, the pulmonary disease again rears its head and kills the patient.4 Where the measles and the small-pox exist together, and have both attacked the same infant, it is usual for the measles, which have already declared themselves, to be arrested by the small-pox which bursts forth, and not to resume their course until after the cure of the latter; on the other hand, Manget5 has also seen the small-pox, which had fully developed itself after inocu- lation, suspended during four days by the measles which inter- vened, and, after the desquamation of which, it revived again to run its course. The eruption of measles on the sixth day after inoculation has been known to arrest the inflammatory operation of the latter, and the small-pox did not break out until the other exanthema had accomplished its seven days' course.6 In an epidemic, the measles broke out among several patients four or five days after inoculation, and retarded until their entire disappear- ance the eruption of the small-pox, which subsequently proceeded in a regular manner.7 The true scarlet fever of Sydenham,8 1 Obs., lib. i., obs. 8. 2 In Hufelandls Journal, XV., ii. 3 Chevalier, in Hufeland's neuesten Annalen der franz. Heilkunde, ii., p. 192. 4 Mania phthisi superveniens earn cum omnibus suis phaenomenis auffert, verum mox redit phthisis et occidit, abeunte mania. Reil, Memorabilia. Fasc. III., v., p. 171. 5 Edinb. Med. Comment., Pt. I., i. 6 J. Hunter on the Venereal Disease. 7 Rainey, Edinb. Med. Comment., iii., p. 480. 1 It has also been very accurately described by Withering and Plenciz, and differs greatly from purpura, to which they often give the name of scarlet fever. Only within the last few years have both, originally very different diseases, approached more or less to each other in their symptoms. 110 ORGANON OF MEDICINE. with angina, was arrested on the fourth day by the manifesta- tion of the cow-pox, which went through its natural course; and not before its termination did the scarlet fever manifest itself again. But as these two diseases appear to be of equal force, the cow-pox has likewise been seen to suspend itself on the eighth day by the eruption of genuine scarlatina, and the red areola was effaced until the scarlatina had terminated its career, at which moment the cow-pox resumed its course, and terminated regularly.1 The cow-pox was on the point of attaining to its state of perfection on the eighth day, when the measles broke out, which immediately rendered it stationary, and not before the desquamation of which did it resume and finish its course; so that, according to the report of Kortum,2 it presented on the six- teenth day the aspect which it usually wears on the tenth. The vaccine virus has been known to infect the system even where the measles had already made their appearance, but it did not pursue its course until the measles had passed away; for this we have also the authority of Kortum.3 I have myself had an opportunity of seeing a parotid angina disappear immediately after'the development of the cow-pox. It was not till after the cow-pox had terminated, and the dis- appearance of the red areola of the vesicles, that a great swelling, attended with fever, manifested itself in the parotid and sub- maxillary glands, which ran its ordinary course of seven days. Li is the same in all diseases that are dissimila/r; the stronger one suspends the weaker (except in cases where they blend together, which rarely occurs in acute diseases); but they never cure each other reciprocally. In the same manner, violent treatment with allopathic remedies never cures a chronic disease, but merely suspends it during the continuance of the powerful action of a medicine incapable of exciting symptoms similar to those of the disease; but afterwards, the latter re-appears, even more intense than before. § 39.—The ordinary schools of medicine have witnessed all these effects during whole centuries. They have seen that nature was never in any instance capable of curing a disease by adding another, whatever degree of intensity the latter might 1 Jenner, in the Annals of Medicine, for August, 1800, p. 747. 3 In Hufeland's Journal, XX., iii., p. 50. 3 Loc. cit. ORGANON OF MEDICINE. Ill possess, if it was not similar to the preexisting disease. What opinion, then, ought we to form of these schools of medi- cine, which continued, notwithstanding, to treat chronic diseases With allopathic remedies—that is to say, with substances which were scarcely ever able to excite anything else but a diseasb dissimilar to the affection that was to be cured ? And though physicians had never before regarded nature with a due share of attention, would it not still have been possible for them to discover, from the miserable results of their mode of treatment, that they were pursuing a wrong path, which could only lead them still farther from their purpose ? Could they not see that, in having recourse (according to their usual practice) to vio- lent allopathic remedies in chronic diseases, they did nothing more than provoke an artificial malady dissimilar to the primi- tive disease, which certainly had the effect of extinguishing the latter, so long as the other continued to exist, but which suffered it to re-appear as soon as the diminished powers of the patient could no longer support the vigorous attacks of allopathy on the vital principle ? It is in this manner that strong purgatives, fre- quently repeated, cause eruptions of the skin to disappear pretty quickly; but when the patient can no longer endure the dissimilar disease that has been violently kindled in the vitals, and is com- pelled to discontinue the purgatives, then the cutaneous eruption either flourishes again in its former vigor, or the internal psoric affection manifests itself by some bad symptom or another, wdiile, in addition to the primitive malady (which is not in the least de- gree diminished), indigestion ensues, and the vital powers are exhausted. Thus, also, when ordinary physicians insert setons, and excite ulceration of the surface of the body, for the purpose of destroying chronic diseases, they never accomplish the object they have in view—that is to say, they never perform a cure, because those factitious cutaneous ulcers are perfectly foreign and allopathic to the internal disease; but the irritation pro- duced by many cauteries, being often a more powerful disease than the primitive morbid state (although at the same time dis- similar), it frequently has the power of silencing the latter for a short time, which is nothing more than a suspension of the dis- ease obtained at the expense of the patient, whose powers are thereby gradually diminished. An epilepsy, which had been suppressed during several years by issues, constantly re-appeared, 112 ORGANON OF MEDICINE. more violent than before, whenever the exuditories were allowed to heal up, as attested by Pechlin1 and others. But purgatives are no more allopathic in regard to psora, or issues in respect to epilepsy, than the compounds of unknown ingredients employed till the present time in ordinary practice are so in relation to the other innumerable forms of disease. These mixtures do nothing more than weaken the patient, and suspend the evil for a very short space of time, without being able to cure it, while their con- tinued and repeated use, as it frequently happens, adds a new disease to the old one. III.—Or, the new disease, after having acted for a considerable time on the system, joins itself finally to the old one, which is dissimilar, and thence results a complication of two different maladies, either of which is incapable of annihilating or curing the other. § 40. III.—Or it sometimes occurs that the new disease, after having acted for a considerable period upon the system, joins itself finally to the old dissimilar one, presenting together a complicated form of disease, but in such a manner that each of them, notwithstanding, occupies a particular region of the economy, installing itself in those organs with which it sym- pathizes, and abandoning the others to the diseases that are dissimilar. Thus a venereal affection may turn to one that is psoric, and vice versa. These two diseases being dissimilar, they are incapable of annihilating or curing each other. Venereal symptoms are effaced and suspended, in the first in- stance, as soon as a psoric eruption commences; but, in the pro- gress of time, the venereal affection being at least quite as powerful as the psoric, the two unite together2—that is to say, each seizes merely upon those parts of the organism that are appropriate to it individually, by which the patient is rendered worse, and the cure more difficult than before. In a case where two contagious acute diseases meet together, bearing no analogy 1 Obs. Phys. Med., lib. 2, obs. 30. 2 The cures which I performed of these kinds of complicated diseases, to- gether with the accurate experiments whioh I have made, have convinced me that they do not arise from an amalgamation of two diseases; but that the latter exist separately in the organism, each occupying the parts that are most in harmony with it. In short, the cure is effected in a very complete manner, by administering alternately, and at the proper time, mercurial? and antipsorics, each according to its appropriate dose and preparation. ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 113 to each other (such as, for example, the small-pox and the measles), one of them ordinarily suspends the other, as before stated. However, there have been some extraordinary instances in violent epidemic diseases, where two dissimilar acute maladies have simultaneously attacked the body of the same individual, and become, so to express it, complicated for a short time. In an epidemic where the small-pox and the measles reigned to- gether, there were about three hundred cases in which one of these maladies suspended the other, and in which the measles , did not break forth until twenty days after the eruption of the small-pox, and the latter till from seventeen to eighteen days after that of the measles—that is to say, until after the first disease had run its entire course; but there was a single instance in which P. Russell1 met with these two dissimilar maladies simul- taneously in the same patient. Rainey2 saw the small-pox and the measles together in two little girls; and J. Maurice3 remarks that he never met with more than two instances of this kind in the whole course of his practice. Similar examples may be found in Ettmuller,4 and a few other writers. Zencker5 saw the cow-pox pursue its course in a regular manner, conjointly with measles and purpura; and Jenner likewise observed it pursue its course tranquilly in the midst of a mercurial treatment directed a ainst the ^enel•eal (isease. Much m < /•< frequently t an a superadded natural disease, an artificial one, which is occasioned by the long continued use of violent and unsuitable allopathic remedies, is combined with the dissimilar prior and natural disease (the dissimilarity consequently rendering it incurable by means of the artificial malady), and the patient becomes doubly diseased. § 41.—The complication or coexistence of several diseas s in the same patient, resulting from a long use of medicines that were not homoeopathic, is far more frequent than those to which nature herself has given birth. The continued application of inappropriate medicines finishes by adding to the natural disease, which it is intended to cure, such fresh morbid symptoms as 1 Transactions of a Society for the Improvement of Med. and Chir. Know- ledge, vol. ii. 2 Med. Comment, of Edinb., iii., p. 480. 3 Med. and Phys. Journal, 1805. * Opera, ii., p. i., cap. 10. 6 In Hufeland's Journal, xvii. 8 114 ORGANON OF MEEICINE. those remedies are capable of exciting, according to the nature of their special properties. These symptoms, not being capable of curing by analogous counter-irritation (that is to say, homoeo- pathically), a chronic disease to which they bear no similitude, gradually associate themselves to the latter, and thus add a new factitious disease to the old one, so that the patient becomes considerably worse and far more difficult to cure. There are many observations and cases cited in the medical journals and treatises that support this assertion. One proof of it is also to be met with in the frequent cases of the venereal chancrous disease, especially when complicated with psora, and even with gonor- rhoea, sycotica, which, far from being cured by considerable and repeated doses of inappropriate mercurial preparations, station themselves in the organism alongside of the chronic mercurial disease, which develops itself gradually,1 and form together a monstrous complication, generally designated by the name of masked syphilis (pseudo-syphilis), a state of disease which, if not absolutely incurable, cannot, at least, but with the greatest difficulty, be changed to that of health. The diseases thus complicated, by reason of their dissimilarity, assume differen. places in the organism to which they are severally adapted. § 42.—Nature, as I have before said, sometimes permits the coincidence of two, and even three spontaneous diseases in one and the same body; but it must be observed that this com- plication never takes place but in diseases that are dissimilar, and which, according to the eternal laws of nature, cannot anni- hilate or cure each other reciprocally. Apparently, this is exe- cuted in such a manner that the two or three diseases divide, if we may so express it, the organism between them, and each takes possession of the parts that are best suited to it individually; a division which, in consequence of the want of similitude between them, can very well take place without doing injury to the unity of the vital principle. 1 For, besides the morbid symptoms analogous to those of the venereal disease, which would be capable of curing the same homoeopathically, Mer- cury produces a crowd of others, which bear no resemblance whatever to those of syphilis, and which, when administered in large doses, especially where there is a complication with psora, as is frequently the case, engen- ders fresh evils, and commits terrible ravages on the body. ORGANON OF MEDICINE. Ho But very different is the result where a new disease that is similar and stronger is superadded to the old one, for in that case the former annihi- lates and cures the latter. § 43.—But the result is very different when two diseases that are similar meet together in the organism—that is to say, when an analogous but more powerful disease joins itself to the preexisting malady. It is true that we here see how a cure is performed according to nature, and how man is to proceed in effecting the same object. § 44.—Two diseases that resemble each other closely, can neither repel (as in the first of the three preceding hypotheses, I.), nor suspend each other (as in the second, II.), so that the old one re-appears after the cessation of the new one; nor, finally (as in the third, III.), can they exist beside each other in the same organism, and form a double or complicated disease. This phenomenon explained. § 45.—No! Two diseases that differ greatly in their species,1 but which bear a strong resemblance in their development and effects—that is to say, in the symptoms which they produce, always mutually destroy each other when they meet together in the system. The stronger annihilates the weaker; nor is it diffi- cult to conceive how this is performed. Two dissimilar diseases may coexist in the body, because their dissmilitude would allow of their occupying two distinct regions. But, in the present case, the stronger disease which makes its appearance, exercises ah influence upon the same parts as the old one, and even throws itself, in preference, upon those which have till now been attacked by the latter; so that the old disease, finding no other organ to act upon, is necessarily extinguished.2 Or, to express it in other terms, as soon as the vital powers, which have till then been deranged by a morbific cause, are attacked with greater energy by a new power very analogous to the former, but more intense, they no longer receive any impression but from the latter, while the preceding one, reduced to a state of mere dynamic power without matter, must cease to exist 1 See the note attached to $ 26. In the same way that the light of a lamp is rapidly effaced from the retina by a sunbeam which strikes the eye with greater force. 116 ORGANON OF MEDICINE. Examples of the cure of chronic diseases, by the accidental accession of another disease, similar and more intense. § 46.—Many examples might be adduced where nature has cured diseases homoeopathically by other diseases which excited similar symptoms. But, if precise and indisputable facts alone be required, it will be necessary to confine ourselves to the few diseases which arise from some permanent miasm, and constantly preserve their identity, for which reason they ought to receive a distinct appellation. The foremost that presents itself among these affections is the small-pox, so famous for the violence and number of its symptoms, and which has cured a multitude of diseases that were character- ized by symptoms similar to its own. Violent ophthalmia, extending even to the loss of sight, is one of the most ordinary occurrences in the small-pox; whereas, Dezoteux1 and Leroy2 have reported cases of chronic ophthalmia which were cured in a perfect and permanent manner by inocula- tion. A case of blindness, of two years' standing, brought on by the metastasis of tinea, was, according to Klein,3 perfectly cured by the small-pox. How often has the small-pox cured deafness and oppressed respiration ? J. F. Closs4 has seen it cure both these affections when it had reached its highest state of intensity. Considerable enlargement of the testicle is a frequent symptom in small-pox, and, according to Klein,5 it has been known to cure homoeopathically a large hard swelling of the left testicle, the consequence of a contusion. Another observer has seen it cure a similar swelling of the testicle. Dysentery is one of the bad symptoms which occur in small-pox —for this reason it cures the former disease homoeopathically, as in a case reported by F. Wendt.7 1 Traite de l'Inoculation, p. 189. 2 Heilkunde fur Mutter (Medical Treatise for the use of Mothers) i> 384. " *' 3 Interpres Clinicus, p. 293. * Neue Heilart der Kinderpocken (New System for the Cure of Small- pox), Ulm, 1769, p. 68, and Specim. Obs., No. 18. 5 Loc. cit. 6 Nov. Act. Nat. Cur., vol. i., obs. 22. 7 Nachricht von dem Krankeninstitut (Directions of the Medical Board) zu Erlangen, 1783. ORGANON OF MEDICTNE. 117 The small-pox, which comes on after vaccination, destroys the latter immediately, and does not permit it to arrive at perfection, both because it is more powerful than the cow-pox, and bears a close resemblance to it. By the same reason, when the cow-pox approaches to its term of maturity, it diminishes and softens, in a very great degree, the small-pox which ha3 just broken out, and causes it to assume a milder form, as witnessed by Muhry1 and many others. The cow-pox, in addition to the vesicles which protect from small-pox, excites also a general cutaneous eruption of another kind. This exanthema consists of sharp-pointed pimples, usually small, seldom large and suppurating, dry, resting upon a small red areola, frequently interspersed with small round spots of a red color, and sometimes attended with severe itching. In many children it precedes by several days the appearance of the red areola of the cow-pox. But most often it manifests itself afterwards, and disappears in a few days, leaving small hard red spots on the skin. It is by reason of this other exanthema, and the analogy which it bears to the same, that the cow-pox the moment it takes, removes in a permanent manner those cutaneous eruptions which exist in some children, and which are often troublesome and of long standing. This has been attested by numerous observers.2 Vaccination, whose special symptom is a swelling of the arm,3 cured, after its eruption, the tumefaction of an arm that was half paralyzed.4 The vaccine fever, which takes place at the period of the for- mation of the red areola, has, according to the information of Hardege,5 cured two cases of intermittent fever homoeopathically; which confirms the remark, formerly made by J. Hunter,6 that two fevers (or diseases that are similar) can never exist together in the body.7 1 In R. Willan on Vaccination. 2 Particularly Clavier, Hurel, and Desormeaux, in the Bulletin des Sc Med. de l'Eure, 1808. Journal de Medecine continue, xv., 206. 3 Balhorn, in Hufeland's Journal, X., ii. 4 Stevenson, in Duncan's Annals of Med. Lustr. ii., vol. i., pt. 2., No. 9 6 In Hufeland's Journal, xxiii. 6 Ueber die venerische Krankheit (on the Venereal Disease), p. 4. 7 In the former editions of the Organon, I have cited cases where chronic 118 ORGANON OF MEDICINE. The measles and whooping cough resemble each other, both in regard to the fever and the character of the cough. This was the reason that Bosquillon1 observed, during an epidemic of measles and whooping cough, that among the children who had the former there were many entirely free from the latter. All of them would have been exempt from whooping cough for ever after, and also beyond the reach of the contagion of measles, if the whooping cough was not a disease that only resembled the measles partially—that is, if it produced an eruption of the skin analogous to that of the latter; thus the measles are able to preserve but a certain number of children homoeopathically from the whooping cough, nor can they do this for a longer period than during the continuance of the reigning epidemic. But when the measles come in contact with a disease that re- sembles them in the principal symptom, viz., the eruption, they can beyond a doubt annihilate and cure it homoeopathically. It was under such circumstances that the eruption of measles cured a chronic tetter2 in a prompt, durable, and perfect manner, as observed by Kortum.3 A miliary eruption, that covered the neck, face, and arms, during a period of six years, attended with insupportable heat, and which returned at.every change of weather, was reduced to s awelling of the skin on the appearance of measles ; after the cessation of the latter the miliary eruption was cured and never re appeared.4 diseases have been cured by psora, which, according to the discoveries I have made known in the first part of my Treatise on Chronic Diseases, can only be partially regarded as homoeopathic cures. The great affections which were thus obliterated (such as suffocating asthma and phthisis of many years' standing), already owed their origin to some psoric cause. The symptoms of a psoric eruption of long standing, which were completely developed in the system, and threatened the life of the patient, were reduced by the appear- ance of a psoric eruption caused by a new infection, to the simple form of primitive psora, by which means the old disease, with its alarming symptoms, were removed. This return to the primitive form cannot, therefore, be re- garded as a homoeopathic cure of the old psora but in this sense, that the new infection places the patient in a much more favorable way of being subsequently cured of the entire psora by antipsoric medicines. 1 Cullen's Elements of Pract. Med., part ii., 1-3, ch. 7. 2 Or, at least, this symptom was removed. 3 In Hufeland's Journal, XX., iii., p. 50. 4 Rau, loc. cit., p. 35. ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 119 Of any two diseases which occur in the ordinary course of nature, it is only that one whose symptoms are similar to the other which can cure or destroy it. This faculty never belongs to a dissimilar disease. Hence the physi- cian may learn what are the remedies with which he can effect a certain cure, that is to say, with none but such as are homoeopathic. § 47.—No instructions can be more simple and persuasive than these to direct the physician in the choice of the substances (medicines) whioh are capable of exciting artificial diseases, in order that he may be enabled to cure in a prompt and durable manner according to the course of nature. § 48.—All the preceding examples prove to us that neither the efforts of nature, nor the skill of the physician, have ever been able to cure a disease by a dissimilar morbific power, whatever energy the latter may have possessed; also, that a cure is not to be obtained but by a morbific power capable of producing symp- toms that are similar, and, at the same time, a little stronger. The cause of this rests with the eternal and irrevocable law of nature, which was hitherto not understood. § 49.—We should have met with a much greater number of those truly natural homoeopathic cures if, on the one hand, obser- vers have been more attentive to the subject, and, on the other, nature had at her disposal more diseases capable of effecting homoeopathic cures. Nature affords but few instances in which one disease can homoeopathically destroy another, and her remedial resources in this way are encumbered by many inconveniences. § 50.—Even nature herself has no other homoeopathic agents at her command than the miasmatic diseases which always retain their identity, such as itch, measles, and small-pox.1 But of these morbific powers, the small-pox and the measles are more dangerous and terrific than the maladies which they cure; and the other, psora, demands itself, after the performance of a cure, the application of a remedy that is capable of annihilating it in its turn: both of these are circumstances that render their use as homoeopathic remedies difficult, uncertain, and dangerous And how few are the diseases to which man is subject tha* would find their homoeopathic cure in psora, measles, or small- pox! Nature can, therefore, cure but a very limited number of 1 And the exanthematic miasm which is contained in the cow-pox lymph 120 ORGANON OF MEDICINE. diseases with those hazardous remedies. Their use is attended with considerable danger to the patient, because the doses of these morbific agents cannot be varied according to circumstances, as in the case with doses of medicine; and, in curing an analogous disease of long standing, they weigh down the patient with the dangerous burden of psora, measles, and small-pox. Notwith- standing this, we have many examples where their favorable junc- tion has produced the most perfect homoeopathic cures, which are a living commentary upon the sole therapeutic law of nature: Cure with medicines that are capable of exciting symptoms ana- logous to those of the disease itself. On the other hand, the physician is possessed of innumerable curative agents, greatly preferable to those. § 51.—These facts will more than suffice to reveal to the under- standings of men the great law which has just been declared. And behold the advantage which man has here over rude nature, whose acts are not guided by reflection! How are the homoeo- pathic morbific powers multiplied in the various medicines which are spread over the creation, all of which are at his disposal, and may be brought to the relief of his suffering fellow-mortals! With these, he can create morbid symptoms as varied as the countless natural diseases which they are to cure. With such precious resources at his command, there can be no necessity for those violent attacks upon the organism to extirpate an old and obstinate disease ; and the transition from the state of suffering to that of durable health is effected in a gentle, imperceptible, and often speedy manner. From the process employed by nature, to which we have just adverted, the physician may deduce the doctrine of curing diseases by no other remedies than such as are homoeopathic, and not with those of another kind (allo- pathic), which never cure, but only injure the patient. § 52.—After such evidence and examples, it is impossible any reasonable physician to persevere in the ordinary allopathic treatment, or continue to apply remedies whose effects have no direct or homoeopathic relation with the chronic disease that is to be cured, and which attack the body in the parts that are least diseased, by exciting evacuations, counter-irritation, derivations, ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 121 &C.1 It is impossible that he can persist in the adoption of a method which consists in exciting, at the expense of the powers of the patient, the appearance of a morbid state entirely different from the primitive affection, by administering strong doses of mixtures which are of the most part composed of drugs whose effects are unknown. The use of such mixtures can have no other result but that which proceeds from the general law of nature when one dissimilar disease joins itself to another in the animal economy—that is to say, the chronic affection, far from being cured, is, on the contrary, always aggravated. Three different effects may then take place: 1st. If the allopathic treatment, though of long duration, be gentle, the natural disease remains unchanged, and the patient will only have lost a portion of his strength, because, as we have seen before, the disease which already exists in the body will not permit a new dissimilar one that is weaker to establish itself there likewise. 2d. When the economy is attacked with violence by allopathic medicines, the primitive disease will yield for a time; but it re-appears, with at least the same degree of vigor as before, the moment this treat- ment is interrupted, because, as before stated, of two concurrent diseases, the new one, which is the stronger, destroys and suspends for a time that which existed before it, which is weaker and dis similar. 3d. Finally, if large doses of allopathic medicines b* continued for a length of time, this treatment only adds a new factitious disease, without ever curing the primitive one, and ren- ders the cure still more difficult; because, as we have already seen, when two dissimilar • chronic affections of equal intensity meet together, one takes up its station beside the other in the system, and both are simultaneously established. There are only three possible methods of employing medicines in diseases, viz. § 53.—These cures are, as we see, performed solely by means of homoeopathy, which we have at length attained to by consult- ing reason and taking experience for our guide (§ 7—25). By this method alone can we cure disease in the most speedy, certain, and permanent manner, because it is grounded upon an eternal and unerring law of nature. 1 Seethe introduction, "A View," &c, and my book, " Die AllSopathie: ein Wort der Warnung an Kranke jeder Art." Leipzig, bei Baumgartner 122 ORGANON OF MEDICINE. I.— The homoeopathic, which only is salutary and efficacious. § 54._I have before remarked (§ 43—±9) that there is no true method but the homceopathic; because, of the only three modes of employing medicines in disease, this alone leads in a direct way to a mild, safe, and durable cure, without either injuring the patient or diminishing his strength. II.—The allopathic or heterovathic. § 55.—The second mode of employing medicines in disease, is that which I term the allopathic, or heteropathic, which has been in general use till the present time. Without ever regarding that which is really diseased in the body, it attacks those parts which are sound, in order to draw off the malady from another quarter, and direct it towards the latter. I have already treated of this method in the Introduction, and therefore will not speak of it farther. III.—The antipathic or enantiopathic, which is merely palliative. § 56.—The third and last mode of employing medicines1 in dis- ease is the antipathic, enantiopathic, or palliative. By this method, physicians have, till the present time, succeeded in afford- ing apparent relief, and gained the confidence of their patients by deluding them with a temporary suspension of their sufferings. We will now show its inefficacy, and to what extent it is even in- jurious in diseases that run their course rapidly. In fact, this is the only feature, in the treatment employed by allopathists, that has any direct reference to the sufferings occasioned by the natural disease. But in what does this reference consist? In precisely that which ought most to be avoided, if wre would not delude and mock the patient. .An exposition of the method of cure where a remedy producing a contrary effect (contraria contrariis) is prescribed against a single symptom of the disease.—Examples. § 57.—An ordinary physician, who proceeds upon the antipathic 1 A fourth mode of employing medicines in diseases has been attempted to be created by means of isopathy, as it is called—that is to say, a method of curing a given disease by the same contagious principle that produces it. But, even granting this could be done, which would certainly be a most valu- able discovery, yet, after all, seeing that the miasm is given to the patient highly dynamized, and thereby, consequently, to a certain degree in an altered condition, the cure is effected only by opposing a simillimum to a simillimum. ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 123 method, pays attention to one symptom only—that of which the patient complains loudest, and neglects all the others, however numerous. He prescribes against this symptom a medicine that is known to produce the very opposite effect; for, according to the axiom contraria contrariis, laid down fifteen hundred years ago by the old schools of medicine, it is from this remedy that he expects the most speedy relief (palliative). Accordingly, he administers strong doses of Opium in pains of every description, because this substance rapidly benumbs the feeling. He pre- scribes the same drug in diarrhoea, because in a short time it stops the peristaltic movement of the intestinal canal, and renders it insensible. He administers it likewise in cases of insomnolence, because it produces a state of hebetude and stupor. He employs purgatives when the patient has for a long time been tormented with constipation. He plunges a hand that has received a burn into cold water, because its icy quality appears suddenly to re- move the pain as if by enchantment. When a patient complains of a sense of cold and loss of vital heat, he places him in a warm bath, whereby heat is immediately restored. Any one complain- ing of habitual weakness is advised to take Wine, which imme- diately reanimates and appears to refresh him. Some other antipathies—that is to say, medicines opposed to the symptoms— are likewise employed; but, independent of those I have just enumerated, there are not many, because ordinary physicians are only acquainted with the peculiar and primitive effects of a very small number of medicines. This antipathic method is not merely defective because it is directed against an individual symptom only, but also, because in chronic diseases, after having apparently diminished the evil for a time, this temporary abatement is followed by a real aggravation of the symptoms. § 58.—I will pass over the defect (see the note to § 7) which this method has in attaching itself to but one of the symptoms, and consequently but to a small part of the whole, a circumstance from which nothing could evidently be expected for the ameliora- tion of the entire disease, which is the only thing the patient aspires to. I will now ask, if experience can show me a single case where the application of these antipathic remedies in chronic or permanent diseases, and the short relief which they have pro- cured, has not been followed by a manifest aggravation, not only 124 ORGANON OF MEDICINE. of the symptoms thus palliated in the first instance, but, what is more, of the entire disease ? Every one who has paid attention to the subject will concur in saying that, after this slight anti- pathic amendment, which lasts only for a sho±*t time, the condition of the patient invariably becomes worse, although the ordinary physician endeavors to account for this too palpable augmentation by attributing it to the malignity of the primitive disease, which, according to his account, only then began to manifest itself-1 Injurious consequences of some antipathic cures. § 59.—No severe symptom of a permanent disease has ever been treated by these opposite remedies and palliatives, where the evil did not re-appear, after a few hours, more aggravated than before. Thus, to cure a habitual tendency to sleep during the day, Coffee was administered, the first effects of which are exeitement and insomnolence; but, the moment that its first action was exhausted, the propensity to sleep returned stronger than ever. When a person was subject to frequent waking at night, without any regard being paid to the other symptoms of the disease, Opium was administered at bed-time, which, by virtue of its primitive action, produces sleep, stupor, and hebetude ; but on the following night the evil only became still more aggravated in consequence. Alike regardless of the other symptoms, Opium was administered in chronic diarrhoea, because its primitive effect is to constipate the bowels; but the alvine flux, after having been suspended for some time, re-appeared more grievous than before. 1 However unaccustomed physicians may have been till the present time to make correct observations, it could not have Escaped their notice that disease infallibly increases after the use of palliatives. A striking example of this nature is found in J. H. Schulze (Diss, qua corporis humani momenta- nearum alterationum specimina quadam expenduntur. Halle, 1741, $ 28). Something similar to this is attested by Willis (Pharm. rat., sec. 7, cap. i., p. 298): Opiata dolores atrocissimos plerumque sedant atque indolentiam...... procurant, eamque .... aliquamdiu et pro stato quodam tempore continuant, quo spatio elapso, dolores mox recrudescunt et brevi ad solitam ferociam au- gentur. And, p. 295: Exactis opii viribus illico redeunt tormina, nee atroci- tatem suam remittunt, nisi dum ab eodem pharmaco rursus incantuntur. J. Hunter (in his Treatise on the Venereal Disease, p. 13) says, that Wine increases the energy of persons who are weak, without bestowing on them any real vigor; and that the vital powers sink afterwards in the same pro- portion as they have been stimulated, so that the patient gains nothing by it, but, on the contrary, loses the greater part of his strength. ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 125 Acute and frequent pains of all descriptions were momentarily calmed beneath the influence of Opium, which blunts and benumbs the feeling; but they never failed to return with greater violence than before, or they were even sometimes replaced by another disease of a worse description. The ordinary physician knows no better remedy for a cough of long standing, which becomes worse at night, than Opium, whose first effects remove all kinds of irritation; for the first night it may very well happen that the patient experiences some relief, but on the succeeding nights the cough returns more distressing than ever; and, if the physician persists in combatting it with the same palliative, by gradually increasing the dose, nocturnal perspirations and fever will then be added to the previous complaint. It has been imagined that tincture of Cantharides, which stimulates the urinary passages, would remedy a weakness of the bladder, and the retention of urine which results from it; it may, indeed, effect some forced emissions of urine, but in the end the bladder is only rendered less irritable and less susceptible of contraction, while paralysis of the bladder is likely to follow. Physicians have flattered them- selves that they could subdue an inveterate tendency to consti- pation by purgatives, administered in large doses, which provoke frequent and abundant alvine evacuations; but the secondary effect of this treatment is generally that of constipating the bowels in a still greater degree. An ordinary physician prescribes Wine as a remedy in chronic debility; but it is only the primitive action of this agent that is stimulating, and its definite results are those of reducing the powers still more. It has been imagined that Bitters and Spices would warm and Strengthen the cold and inactive stomach; but the secondary effect of these heating palliatives is to increase the inactivity of the gastric viscera. Warm baths have been prescribed in cases of rigors, and a habitual deficiency of the vital heat; but, on coming out of the water, the patients are still weaker, more incapable of receiving warmth, and more subject to rigors than they were before. Immersion in cold water instantly relieves the pain occa- sioned by a severe burn; subsequently, however, this pain is increased to an insupportable degree, and the inflammation extends to the neighboring parts.1 To cure gravedo of long standing, 1 See the close of the Introduction. r-d ORGANON OF MEDICINE. sternutatories are prescribed, which excite the pituitary secretion, and it has not been perceived that the final result of this method was always that of aggravating the evil which it was intended to cure. Electricity and galvanism, which at first exercise great influence upon the muscular system, quickly restore activity to members that have for a long time been feeble'and nearly para- lyzed: but the secondary effect is absolute annihilation of all muscular irritability, and entire paralysis. It has been said that venesection is a fit remedy to stop long-continued congestions of blood in the head; but this mode is always succeeded by a still greater determination of blood to the upper parts of the body. The sole remedy that physicians in ordinary know to apply in cases where the moral and physical powers are inactive and half paralyzed, which are predominant symptoms in different kinds of typhus, is Valerian, administered in strong doses, because this plant is one of the most powerful excitants they are acquainted with; but it escaped their notice that the excitement which Valerian produces is merely its primitive effect, and after the re- action of the organism, the stupor and the incapability of motion— that is to say, the paralysis of the body, and the debility of the mind, increase—they have not observed that the patients on whom they lavished doses of antipathic Valerian are precisely those who have suffered the greatest mortality. The old school physician rejoices1 that he is able to reduce for several hours the velocity of the small rapid pulse in cachectic patients, with the very first dose of uncombined purple Fox-glove (which, in its primary action,makes the pulse slower), its rapidity, however, soon returns; repeated, and now increased doses, effect an ever smaller diminu- tion of its rapidity, and at length none at all; indeed, in the secondary action, the pulse becomes uncountable, sleep, appetite, and strength depart, and a speedy death is invariably the result, or else insanity ensues. In short, the former schools of medicine have never calculated how often the secondary effects of anti- pathic medicines have tended to increase the malady, or even bring on something that was still worse, of which experience has given us examples that are enough to inspire the soul with terror Where a palliative is employed, the gradual increase of the dose never cures a chronic disease, hut renders the state of the patient worse. 1 See Hufeland, in his Pamphlet, " Die Homoopathie," p. 20. ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 127 § 60.—When these grievous consequences (which naturally might have been expected from the use of antipathic remedies) begin to manifest themselves, the ordinary physician imagines that he will be delivered from his embarrassment, if he adminis- ters a stronger dose each time that the evil grows worse. But from this also th'ere results nothing but momentary relief, while, from the necessity in which he sees himself of constantly aug- menting the dose of the palliative, it sometimes follows that a still severer malady declares itself—sometimes that life is endan- gered, and even that the patient falls a sacrifice. A disease of long standing or of inveteracy has never been cured by such means. Wherefore, physicians ought to have inferred the utility of an opposite, and the only beneficial method—namely, that of homcedpathy. § 61.—If physicians had been capable of reflecting upon the sad results of the application of antipathic remedies, they would long ago have arrived at the great truth, that a path directly opposite would leeul them to a method of treatment by which they might cure disease perfectly and permanently. They would then have discovered that, if a medicinal effect, con- trary to the symptoms of the malady (antipathic treatment), only procures momentary relief, at the expiration of which the evil constantly grows worse; by the same rule the inverse method— that is to say, the homoeopathic application of medicines, ad- ministered according to the analogy existing between the symp- toms they excite and those of the disease itself, constituting at the same time, for the enormous doses that were in use, the smallest that could possibly be applied—must necessarily bring about a perfect and permanent cure. But, notwithstanding all these arguments—notwithstanding the positive fact that no physi- cian ever performed a permanent cure in chronic diseases but in proportion as the prescriptions included some predominant homoeopathic medicine—notwithstanding another fact, no less clear, that nature never accomplished a speedy and perfect cure but by means of a similar disease which she added to the old one (§ 46); notwithstanding all this, physicians have, during so many centuries, never arrived at a truth on which alone depended the safety of the patient. 128 ORGANON OF MEDICINE. The reason that the palliativ-e method is so pernicious, and the homoeopathic alone salutary. $ 62.—The source of all these pernicious results of palliative antipathic treatment, and the salutary effects proceeding from the reverse method, the homoeopathic, will be sufficiently explained in the following observations, which are drawn' from experience, and a number of facts that have hitherto escaped the notice of every other physician, although they were very palpable, per- fectly evident in their nature, and of the deepest importance to the medical art. Is founded upon the difference tvhich exists between the primary action of every medicine, and the re-action, or secondary effects, produced by the living organism (the vital power). § 63.—Every agent that acts upon the human economy, every medicine produces, more or less, some notable change in the existing state of the vital powers, or creates a certain modifica- tion in the health of man, for a period of shorter or longer duration: this change is called the primitive effect. Although this is the joint effect of both a medicinal and a vital power, it belongs, notwithstanding, more particularly to the former, whose action is exercised upon the body. But our vital powers tend always to oppose their energy to this influence or impression. The effect that results from this, and which belongs to our con- servative vital powers and their automatic force, bears the name of secondary effect or re-action. Explanation of the primitive and secondary effects. § 64.—So long as the primitive effects of artificial morbific agents (medicines) continue their influence upon a healthy body, the vital power appears to play merely a passive part, as if it were compelled to undergo the impression of the medicine that is acting upon it from without. But, subsequently, this also appears, in a manner, to rouse itself. Then, if there exists any state directly contrary to the primitive effect (a), the vital power manifests a tendency to produce one (b) that is proportionate to its own energy, and the degree of influence exercised by the morbid or medicinal agent; and, if there exists no state in nature that is directly contrary to this primitive effect, the vital power then seeks to gain the ascendancy by destroying the change that ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 129 has been operated upon it from without (by the action of the medicine), for which it substitutes its own natural state (re-action). Examples of both. § 65.—Examples of (a) are before the eyes of every one. A hand that has been bathed in cold water has, at first, a much greater share of heat than the other that has not undergone the immersion (primitive effect); but, shortly after it is withdrawn from the water, and well dried, it becomes cold again, and, in the end, much colder than that on the opposite side (secondary effect). The great degree of heat that accrues from violent exercise (primitive effect) is followed by shivering and cold (secondary effect). A man who has overheated himself by drinking co- piously of wine (primitive effect), finds, on the next day, even the slightest current of air too cold for him (secondary effect). An arm that has been immersed for any length of time in freezing water, is, at first, much colder and paler than the other (primitive effect); but let it be withdrawn from the water, and carefully dried, it will not only become warmer than the other, but even burning hot, red, and inflamed (secondary effect). Strong coffee, in the first instance, stimulates the faculties (primitive effect), but it leaves behind a sensation of heaviness and drowsiness (se- condary effect), which continues a long time, if we do not again have recourse to the same liquid (palliative). After exciting somnolence, or rather a deep stupor, by the aid of Opium (primi- tive effect), it is much more difficult to fall asleep on the suc- ceeding night (secondary effect). Constipation excited by Opium (primitive effect), is followed by diarrhoea (secondary effect); and evacuations produced by purgatives (primitive effect) are suc- ceeded by costiveness, which lasts several days (secondary effect). It is thus that the vital power, in its re-action, opposes to the primitive effects of strong doses of medicine which operate powerfully on the healthy state of the body, a condition that is directly opposite, whenever it is able to do so. It is only by the use of the minutest homoeopathic doses that the re-action of the vital power shows itself simply by restoring the equilibrium of health. § 66.—But it may be readily conceived that the healthy state will make no perceptible re-action in an opposite sense, after weak and homoeopathic doses of agents that modify and change 9 130 ORGANON OF MEDICINE. its vitality. On due attention, it is true that even small doses produce primitive effects that are perceptible; but the re-action made by the living organism never exceeds the degree that is requisite for the reestablishment of health. From these facts, the salutary tendency of the homoeopathic, as well as the adverse effects of the antipathic (palliative) method, become manifest. § 67.—These incontrovertible and self-evident truths, which nature and experience have laid before us, explain, on the one hand, why the homoeopathic method is so beneficial in its results, and prove, on the other, the absurdity of that which consists in treating diseases by antipathic and palliative remedies.1 How far these facts prove the efficacy of the homoeopathic r..:thod. § 68.-—We find, it is true, in homoeopathic cures, that the very minute doses of medicine (§ 275—287) which they require to sub- 1 It is merely in urgent and dangerous cases, or in diseases that have just broken out in persons who were previously in health—such, for example, as in asphyxia, especially from lightning, suffocation, freezing, drowning, &c,— that it is either admissible or proper, in the first instance at least, to reani- mate the feeling and irritability by the aid of palliatives, such as slight electric shocks, injections of strong Coffee, stimulating odors, gradual warmth, &c* As soon as physical life is reanimated, the action of the organs that support it resumes its regular course, as is to be expected from a body that was in the full enjoyment of health previous to the accident. Under this head are also included the antidotes to several poisons, such as alkalies against mineral acids; liver of Sulphur against metallic poisons; Coffee, Camphor (and Ipecacuanha) against poison by Opium, &c. We must not imagine that a homoeopathic medicine has been badly selected in a case of disease, beoause a few of the symptoms of this remedy correspond antipathically with some morbid symptoms of minor or less im- portance. Provided the other symptoms of the disease—those which are the strongest and the most developed, and finally those which characterize it—find in the remedy similar symptoms which cover, extinguish, and de- stroy them, the small number of antipathic symptoms that are visible dis- appear of themselves after the remedy has expended its action, without retarding the recovery in the slightest degree. *And yet the new mongrel sect appeal to these remarks, though in vain, in order to find a pretext everywhere for such exceptions, to the general rule, and very conveniently to introduce their allopathic palliatives, accompanied with other mischief of a like character, merely to spire themselves the trouble of searching for suitable homoeopathic remedies for every case oi disease—one might say, to save themselves the trouble of being homoeopathic physicians, though thoy wish to be considered such. But their deeds will follow them—they are of the little moment. ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 131 due and destroy natural diseases by analogy to the symptoms produced by the latter, leave in the organism a slight medicinal disease, which outlives the primitive affection. But the extreme minuteness of the dose renders this disease so slight and suscep- tible of dissipating itself, that the organism has no need to oppose to it any greater re-action than that which is requisite to raise the existing state to the habitual degree of health—that is to say, to establish the latter. And all the symptoms of the primitive disease being now extinct, a very slight effort will suffice to accomplish this (§ 65-6). How these facts confirm the injurious tendency of the antipathic method. § 69.—But precisely the reverse of this takes place in the antipathic or palliative method. The medicinal symptom which the physician opposes to the morbid symptom (such as, for example, stupefaction, which constitutes the primitive effect of Opium, op- posed to an acute pain), is not wholly foreign and allopathic to this latter. There is an evident affinity between the two symptoms, but it is inverse. The morbid symptom is to be annihilated here by a medicinal symptom opposed to it. This cannot possibly be accomplished. It is true the antipathic remedy acts precisely on the diseased part of the organism, just as certain as the homceo pathic; but it confines itself to covering, in a certain degree, the natural morbid symptom, and rendering it insensible for a certain length of time. During the first moments of the action of the palliative, the organism undergoes no disagreeable sensation, neither on the part of the morbid symptom, nor on that of the medicinal one, which appear to be reciprocally annihilated and neu- tralized, as it were, in a dynamic manner. This, for example, is what takes place in regard to pain and the stupefying powers of Opium; for, during the first moments, the organism feels as if it were in health, alike free from the painful sensation and the stu- pefaction. But as the medicinal symptom that is opposed cannot occupy in the organism the place of the preexisting disease (as is the case in the homoeopathic method, where the remedy exites an artificial disease similar to the natural one, but merely stronger), the vital power consequently not being affected by the remedy employed, with a disease similar to that which had pre- viously tormented it, the latter does not become extinguished. The new disease, it is true, keeps the organism insensible, during 132 ORGANON OF MEDICINE. the first moments, by a kind of dynamic neutralization,1 if we may so express it, but it soon dies away of itself, like all medicinal affections; and then it not only leaves the malady in its former state, but, still more (as palliatives can never be administered but in large doses to afford apparent relief), it compels the organism to produce a state contrary to that excited by the palliative medicine, and creates an effect opposite to that of the remedy— that is to say, gives birth to a condition analogous to the natural disease, which is not yet destroyed. This addition, then, which proceeds from the organism itself (the re-action against the pallia- tive), does not fail to increase the intensity and severity of the dis- ease.2 Thus the morbid symptom (this single part of the disease) becomes worse the moment the effect of the palliative ceases, and that, too, in a degree proportionate to the effect of the dose of the palliative. And, to continue with the same example, the greater the quantity of the Opium administered to suspend the pain, in the same degree does the pain increase beyond its primi- tive intensity when the Opium has ceased to act.3 1 Contrary or opposite sensations in the living economy of man cannot be permanently neutralized, like substances of opposite qualities in the laboratory of the chemist, where we may see, for example, sulphuric acid and potash form, by their union, a substance that is entirely different, a neutral salt that is no longer acid or alkali and which not even fire will decompose. Com- binations like these producing something that is neutral and durable, can never take plaoe in the organs of sensation with regard to impressions of an opposite nature. There k, indeed, some appearance of neutralization or of reciprocal destruction, but this phenomenon is of short duration. The tears of the mourner may cease for a moment when there is some merry spectacle before his eyes, but soon the mirth is forgotton, and the tearB begin to flow again more freely than ever. * However intelligible this proposition may be, it has, nevertheless, been misinterpreted, and an objection made to it, that a palliative would be just as well able to cure by its consecutive effect, which resembles the existing disease, as a homceopathio remedy by its primitive effect. But, in raising this obstaole, it has never been considered that the consecutive effect is by no means a product of the remedy, that it always arises from the re-action exercised by the vital powers of the organism, and that, consequently, this re-action of the vital powers, by reason of the application of a palliative, is a state similar to the symptom of the disease which this remedy failed to annihilate, and whioh, consequently, was aggravated by the re-action of the vital power against the palliative. 8 As in a dungeon, where the prisoner scarcely distinguishes the objects that are immediately before him, the flame of alcohol spreads around a con- ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 133 A short analysis of the homoeopathic method. § 70.—From all that has here been stated, the following truths must be admitted: 1st There is nothing for the physician to cure in disease but the sufferings of the patient; and the changes in his state of health which are perceptible to the senses—that is to say, the totality or mass of symptoms by which disease points out the remedy it stands in need of; every internal cause that could be attributed to it, every occult character that man might be tempted to bestow, are nothing more than so many idle dreams and vain imaginings. 2d. That state of the organism which we call disease cannot be converted into health but by the aid of another affection of the organism, excited by means of medicines. The experiments made upon healthy individuals are the best and purest means that could be adopted to discover this virtue. 3d. According to every known fact, it is impossible to cure a natural disease by the aid of medicines which have the faculty of producing a dissimilar artificial state or symptom in healthy persons. Therefore the allopathic method can never effect a real cure. Even nature never performs a cure, or annihilates one dis- ease by adding to it another that is dissimilar, be the intensity of the latter ever so great. 4th. Every fact serves to prove that a medicine capable of ex- citing in healthy persons a morbid symptom opposite to the dis- ease to be cured, never effects any other than momentary relief in disease of long standing, without curing it, and suffers it to re- appear, after a certain interval, more aggravated than ever. The antipathic and purely palliative method is, therefore, wholly opposed to the object that is to be attained, where the disease is an important one, and of long standing. 5th. The third method, the only one to which we can still have recourse (the homoeopathic), which employs against the totality of the symptoms of a natural disease a medicine that is capable of exciting in healthy persons symptoms that closely resemble those of the disease itself, is the only one that is really salutary, eolatory light; but, when the flame is extinguished, the obscurity is then greater in the same proportion as the flame was brilliant, and now the dark- ness that envelops him is still more impenetrable, and he has greater diffi- culty than before in distinguishing the objects around him. 134 ORGANON OF MEDICINE. and which always annihilates disease, or the purely dynamic aberrations of the vital powers, in an easy, prompt, and perfect manner. In this respect, nature herself furnishes the example, when, by adding to an existing disease a new one, that resembles it, she cures it promptly and effectually. The three necessary points in healing, are: 1. To ascertain the malady; 2. The action of the medicines; and 3. Their appropriate application. § 71.—As it is no longer doubted that the diseases of mankind consist merely of groups of certain symptoms, which cannot be destroyed but by the aid of medicines, and the inherent faculty which those substances possess of exciting morbid symptoms similar to those of the natural disease, the points to be considered in the mode of treatment are the three following: 1st. By what means is the physician to arrive at the necessary information relative to a disease, in order to be able to undertake the cure? 2d. How is he to discover the morbific powers of medicines —that is to say, of the instruments destined to cure natural diseases ? 3d. What is the best mode of applying these artificial morbific powers (medicines) in the cure of diseases ? A general view of acute and chronic diseases. § 72.—Relative to the first point, it will be necessary for us to enter here into some general considerations. The diseases of mankind resolve themselves into two classes. The first are rapid operations of the vital power departed from its natural condition, which terminate in a shorter or longer period of time, but are always of moderate duration. These are called acute diseases. The others, which are less distinct, and often almost imperceptible on their first appearance, seize upon the organism, each accord- ing to its own peculiar manner, and remove it by degrees so far from the state of health that the automatic vital energy which is destined to support the latter, and which is called vital power, cannot resist but in a useless and imperfect manner; and, not being potent enough to extinguish them herself, she is compelled to allow them to grow until, in the end, they destroy the organism. The latter are known by the appellation of chronic diseases, and are produced by infection from a chronic miasm. OROANON OF MEDICINE. 135 Acute diseases which are isolated—sporadic, epidemic, acute miasms. § 73.—As to acute diseases, they may be classed under two distinct heads. The first attack single individuals, and arise from some pernicious cause to which they have been exposed. Immoderate excess in either eating or drinking, a want of ne- cessary aliment, violent impressions of physical agents, cold, heat, fatigue, &c, or mental excitement, are the most frequent causes. But, for the most part, they depend upon the occasional aggravation of a latent psoric affection, which returns to its former sleep and insensibility when the acute affection is not too violent, or when it has been cured in a prompt manner. The others attack a plurality of individuals at once, and develop themselves here and there (sporadically) beneath the sway of meteoric and telluric influence, of whose action but few persons are at the moment susceptible. Nearly approaching to these are those which attack many individuals at the same time, arising from similar causes, and exhibiting symptoms that are analogous (epidemics); and usually become contagious when they act upon close and compact masses of human beings. These maladies or fevers1 are each of a distinct nature, and the individual cases which manifest themselves being all of the same origin, they invariably place the patients everywhere in one identical morbid state, but which, if abandoned to themselves, terminate in a very short space of time, either by a cure or death. War, inundations, and famine frequently give rise to these diseases, but they may likewise result from acute miasms, which always re-appear be- neath the same form, for which reason they are designated by particular names; some of which attack man but once during life, such as the small-pox, measles, whooping cough, the scarlet2 fever of Sydenham, mumps, &c: and others which may seize him re- peatedly, such as the plague, yellow fever, Asiatic cholera, &c. 1 The homoeopathic physician, who does not share the prejudices of the ordinary schools of medicine—that is to say, who does not, like them, fix the number of those fevers to a certain few, forbidding nature to produce any others, nor affixes particular names to them in order that he may follow this or that mode of treatment—he does not acknowledge the appellations of jail fever, bilious fever, typhus, putrid fever, pituitous fever, but cures all these diseases individually by a treatment suited to the symptoms they present. 2 Subsequent to the year 1801, a purple miliary fever came from the west of Europe, which physicians have confounded with scarlatina, although the 13fr ORGANON OF MEDICINE. The worst species of chronic diseases are those produced by the unskillful treatment of allopathic physicians. § 74.—Under the class of chronic diseases, we have unfor- tunately to reckon those numerous factitious maladies, of universal propagation, arising from the long-continued administration, by the allopathists, of violent heroic medicines in large and in- creasing doses, from the abuse of Calomel, Corrosive Sublimate, mercurial ointments, Nitrate of Silver, Iodine and its ointment, Opium, Valerian, Bark and Quinine, Digitalis-purpurea, Hydro- cyanic-acid, Sulphur and Sulphuric-acid, long-continued evacuants, venesection, leeches, setons, issues, &c, by which the vital power is either unmercifully weakened, or, if it be not indeed exhausted, gradually becomes so abnormally altered (in different manners, according to the particular medicine administered), that, in order to support life against such hostile and destructive assaults, it must effect changes in the organization, and either deprive this or the other part of its sensibility or irritability, or exalt these properties to excess, produce dilatation or contraction, relaxation or induration1 of parts, or else totally destroy them, and here and there induce organic changes, both internally and externally (maim, as it were, the interior and exterior of the body), in order to protect the organization against the entire destruction of life, from the reiterated assaults of such hostile and destructive influences. These are the most difficult of cure. § 75.—The most distressing and unmanageable chronic maladies affecting the human system are those which have been super- induced by the unskillful treatment of those allopathists (in modern times most injurious), and I regret to say that, when they signs of these two affections are entirely different, and Aconite is the cura- tive and preservative remedy of the first, and Belladonna of the second, while the former always assumes the epidemic character, and the latter is mostly sporadic. Of late years, both these two affections appear to have been combined into a particular species of eruptive fever, against which neither of these two remedies were found perfectly homoeopathic. 1 When, at length, the patient sinks, his physician, who had prescribed such a course of treatment, takes care, on a post-mortem examination, to exhibit to the disconsolate relatives these internal organic arra?)g or boxes. Animal and vegetable substances gradually lose their medicinal virtues, even when they are preserved entire, but much more so when they are in the form of powder, if the bottles are not stoppered air-proof, and kept in a dark place. 216 ORGANON OF MEDICINE. § 270.—If two drops of a mixture of equal parts of alcohol and the recent juice of any medicinal plant (see § 267) be diluted with ninety-eight drops of alcohol, in a vial capable of containing one hundred and thirty drops, and the whole twice shaken together, the medicine becomes exalted in energy (potenzirt) to the first development of power, or, as it may be denominated, the first potence. The process is to be continued through twenty-nine additional vials, each of equal capacity with the first, and each containing ninety-nine drops of spirits of wine; so that every suc- cessive vial, after the first, being furnished with one drop from the vial or dilution immediately preceding (which had just been twice shaken), is, in turn, to be shaken twice,1 remembering to num- 1 In order to have a determinate rule for the moderate development of power of the fluid medicines, multiplied experience and observation have led me to retain two shakes for every vial, in preference to a greater number, which had previously been used, but which developed the energy in too great a degree. On the contrary, there are homoepathists who, in their visits to the sick, carry about their persons the medicines in a fluid state, which, they nevertheless affirm, do not in time become increased in energy by the fre- quent agitation to which they are thus subjected. This declaration, however, betrays on their part the want of a talent for accurate observation. I dis- solved a grain of Natron in half an ounce of a mixture of water and a little alcohol, poured the solution into a vial, which was thereby filled two-thirds, and shook it uninterruptedly for half an hour. By this agitation, the fluid attained an energy equal to that of the thirtieth dilution. [Hahnemann's latest recorded notions respecting dynamization, as we find them in the second edition of his Chronic Diseases, Part V., merit insertion in this place, and it will be seen that in his later years he modified con- siderably the opinions he has, in various places throughout the Organon, expressed on the subject. "Actual dilutions," he says, "are almost wholly confined to sapid and colored objects. A solution of salt or bitter substances becomes always more tasteless the more water is mixed with it, and at length loses almost all taste, though we may shake it as much as we please—and in like manner a solution of a colored substance becomes, by the admixture of more and more water, at last almost quite colorless, and gains no increase of color by any imaginable shaking. " These are and continue to be the true attenuations or dilutions, but not dynamizations. " Homoeopathic dynamizations are real awakenings of the medicinal pro- perties that lie dormant in natural bodies during their crude state, which then become capable of acting in almost a spiritual manner upon our life, that is to say on our percipient (sensible) and excitable (irritable) fibres. These developments of properties (dynamizations) in crude medicinal sub- ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 217 ber the dilution of each vial upon the cork as the operation pro- ceeds. These manipulations are to be conducted thus through all the vials, from the first up to the thirtieth or decillionth develop- ment of poAver (potenzirte Decillion- Verdiinnung, X.), which is the one in most general use. stances, which were unknown before my time, are accomplished, as I first taught, by the trituration of dry substances in a mortar, but by the succus- sion of liquid substances, which is nothing less than a trituration of them. These preparations, therefore, cannot have the term 'dilutions' applied to them, although every preparation of the sort, in order topotentize it higher— that is to say, in order to awaken and develop still farther the medicinal properties that still lie latent in it—must first be again yet more attenuated, to allow the trituration or succussion to penetrate more deeply into the essential nature of the medicinal substance, and thus to liberate and bring to light the more subtile part of the medicinal power that lies still deeper, which were impossible to be effected by the greatest amount of trituration and succussion of substances in a concentrated state. "We frequently read, in homoeopathic writings, that some one or other found no effect from this or that high (dilution) dynamization of a medicine in a certain case of disease, but that a lower one rendered the desired service—whilst others saw more success attending higher ones. But the cause of the great difference in the results is not investigated. What is to prevent the preparer of homoeopathic ^medicines (this should always be the homoeopathic practitioner himself—the weapons he uses against diseases he should himself forge, he should himself whet), what is to prevent him, in order that he may obtain powerful dynamizations, in place of giving a few slovenly shakes (whereby little more than dilutions are produced, which they ought not to be), giving, for the preparation of each potency, to every vial which contains one drop of the lower potency to ninety-nine drops of alcohol, ten, twenty, fifty, and even more strong succussions, performed against some hard elastic body. " The perfection of our, the only healing art, and the weal of the patients, appear well to deserve that the physician take the requisite pains to procure for hie medicines the proper, the greatest possible efficacy. " Thus we obtain, even in the fiftieth potency (the new wise-acres have hitherto ridiculed the thirtieth potency, and made use of the lower, little developed, massive medicinal preparations in large doses, whereby, how- ever they were not able to effect what our system can do), each lower one of which has been dynamized with an equal number of succussions, medicines of the most penetrating efficacy, so that each of the minutest globules im- pregnated with it, dissolved in much water, can be taken in small portions, and must be so taken in order not to produce too violent effects in sensitive patients not to mention that such a mode of preparation develops almost all the properties that lie hid in the essential nature of the medicinal substance, which thereby alone can attain any activity.—Paris, 19th December, 1838."! 218 ORGANON OF MEDICTNE. § 271.—All other medicinal substances, excepting Sulphur which of late years has been employed only in the form of the highly-diluted tincture (X), such, for example, as the metals, either pure, oxydized, or in the form of sulphurets, and other minerals, Petroleum, Phosphorus, the parts or juices of plants, ob- tainable only in their dry or inspissated state, animal substances, neutral salts, &c^—one and all were, in the first place, exalted in energy by attenuation in the form of powder (by means of three hours' trituration in a mortar) to the millionth degree. Of this, one grain was then dissolved, and brought through twenty-seven vials, by a process similar to that employed in the case of vege- table juices, up to the thirtieth development of power.1 Only one simple medicine to be administered at a time. § 272.—In no instance is it requisite to employ more than one simple medicinal substance at a time.2 § 273.—It is scarcely possible to conceiAre how a doubt can still exist on the question, whether it is more reasonable and con- formable to nature .to employ but one known medicine at a time in a case of sickness, or to prescribe a mixture of several drugs. § 274.—As the true physician finds in simple and uncom- ^ounded medicines all he can desire—that is to say, the artificial morbific agents whose homoeopathic poAvers completely cure natural diseases—and as it is a wise precept never to attemnt with the aid of several powers that which can be effected by a single one, he will never think of administering as a remedy more than one simple remedy at a time. For he knows that, if even the pure and specific effects of every medicine upon the healthy state of man had been discovered, we should still remain as igno- rant as we were before, as to the manner in which tAvo medicinal substances, mixed together, might oppose and modify each other reciprocally in their effects. He is aware that a single medicine, 1 The process is described at large in the " Chronische Krankheiten," second edition, and in the " Arzneimittellehre," vol. ii., third edition. 8 Experiments have been made by some homoeopathists, in cases where, imagining that one part of the symptoms of a disease required one remedy, and that another remedy was more suitable to the other part, they have given both remedies at the same time, Or nearly so; but I earnestly caution all my adherents against such a hazardous practice, which never will be necessary, though, in some instances, it may appear serviceable ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 219 administered in a disease where the totality of the symptoms is perfectly similar to its own, cures it completely; and he is like- wise convinced, even in the least favorable case, where the remedy would not perfectly harmonize with the malady, in regard to the resemblance of the symptoms, that it leads to a knowledge of the curative medicine, since the new symptoms which it excites in such a case confirm those which it formerly created, when tried upon healthy individuals—an advantage that can never be derived where compound medicines are employed.1 Strength of the doses used in homoeopathic treatment. The manner of gra- duating them, or of augmenting or diminishing their power. The develop- ment of their powers. § 275.—The suitableness of a medicine to any given case of disease does not depend solely upon the circumstance of its being perfectly homoeopathic, but also upon the minute quantity of the dose in which it is administered. If too strong a dose of a remedy, that is even entirely homoeopathic, be given, it will infallibly in- jure the patient, though the medicinal substance be of ever so salutary a nature; the impression it makes is felt more sensibly, because, in virtue of its homoeopathic character, the remedy acts precisely on those parts of the organism which have already been most exposed to the attacks of the natural disease. § 276.—Even a homoeopathic medicine is, on this account, always injurious when given in too large a dose, and hurtful to the patient in proportion to the extent of the quantity adminis- tered. But the increase of the dose itself is also prejudicial in the same degree as the remedy is more homoeopathic and the higher the potency ;2 and a strong dose of such a medicine Avould do more harm than the dose of an allopathic medicinal substance (which bears no analogy whatever to the disease) of equal 1 A judicious physician will confine himself to an internal application of the remedy which he has selected as homoeopathio as possible, and will leave the use of ptisans, little bags filled with medicinal herbs, fomentations of vegetable decoctions, washes, and frictions with different species of oint- ments, injections, &c, to those who practice according to routine. 1 The praise bestowed, of late years, by some few homoeopathists, on the larger doses, depends on this, that they chose low dynamizations of the medrcine to be administered, as I myself used to do twenty years ago, from not knowing any better, or that the medicines selected were not perfectly homoeopathic. 220 ORGANON OF MEDICINE. strength; for, in that«case, the homoeopathic aggravation (§ 157— 160)—that is to say, the artificial malady, which is very analogous to the natural one excited by the remedy in the most suffering parts of the organism—is carried to a height that is injurious (§ 246, note); whereas, if it had been confined within proper limits, it would have effected a gentle, prompt, and certain cure. It is true the patient no longer suffers from the primitive malady Avhich has been homoeopathically destroyed, but he suffers so much more from the medicinal one which was much too powerful, and from unnecessary debility. § 277.—For this very reason, and because a remedy adminis- tered in a dose sufficiently small is so much more efficacious, nay, almost wonderfully so, in proportion as it has been homoeopa- thically selected, in the same manner, a medicine whose peculiar symptoms correspond perfectly with those of the disease ought to be salutary in proportion as the dose approaches nearer to the appropriate minuteness to which it should be reduced to effect a gentle cure. § 278.—The question that now suggests itself is, to discover Avhat may be the degree of minuteness of the dose best calculated to render the salutary effects intended to be produced certain and gentle—that is to say, how far the dose of a homoeopathic remedy, in any given case of disease, ought to be reduced, in order to de- rive from it the best possible cure. It may be readily conceived that no theoretical conjecture will furnish an answer to this prob- lem, and that it is not by such means we can establish, in respect to each individual medicine, the quantity of the dose that suffices to produce the homoeopathic effect, and accomplish a prompt and gentle cure. No reasonings, however.ingenious, will avail in this instance. It is by pure experiments only, and precise observa- tions, that this object can be attained. It would be absurd to bring forward as an objection the large doses used in ordinary medicine, which are not applied to the suffering parts them- selves, but merely to those not attacked by the disease. This Avouldbeno argument against the minuteness of the doses which pure experiments have proved to be necessary in homoeopathic treatment. § 279.—It has been fully proved, by pure experiments, that when a disease does not evidently depend upon the impaired state of an important organ, even though it were of a chronic nature, ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 221 and complicated, and due care has been taken to remove from the patient all foreign medicinal influence, the dose of the homoeo- pathic remedy can never be sufficiently small so as to be inferior to the power of the natural disease which it can, at least, par tidily extinguish and cure, provided it be capable of producing only a small increase of symptoms immediately after it is administered. (§ 157—160.) § 280.—This incontrovertible axiom, founded upon experience will serve as a rule by which the doses of all homoeopathic medi cines, without exception, are to he attenuated to such a degret that after being introduced into the body they shall merely pro- duce an almost insensible aggravation of the disease. It is of little import whether the attenuation goes so far as to appear almost impossible to ordinary physicians, whose minds feed on no other ideas but what are gross and material.1 All their argu- 1 Mathematicians will inform them that, in whatever number of parts they may divide a substance, each portion still retains a small share of the mate- rial; tliat, consequently, the most diminutive part that can be conceived never ceases to be something, and can, in no instance, be reduced to nothing. Physicians may learn from them that there exist immense powers which have no weight, such as light and heat, and which are consequently infinitely lighter than the medicinal contents of the smallest homoeopathic doses. Let them Aveigh, if they can, the injurious words which excite a bilious fever, or the afflicting news of the death of a son, which terminates the existence of an affectionate mother. Let them only touch, for a quarter of an hour, a magnet capable of carrying a av eight of an hundred pounds, and the pain Avill soon teacn them that even the imponderable bodies can also produce on man the most violent medicinal effects ! Let any of these weak-minded mortals of a delicate constitution but gently apply, during a few minutes, to the pit of the Btomach the extremity of the thumb of a vigorous mesmerizer who has fixed his intent, and the disagreeable sensations that he experiences will soon make him repent having set limits to the boundless activity of nature. If the allopathist, in essaying the homoeopathic method, cannot resolve upon administering doses that are so feeble and attenuated, only let him ask himself what risk he ventures by doing so. If there is nothing real except that which is possessed of weight, ami if everything which has no weight ought to be looked upon as equal to nothing, a dose that appears to him like nothing could have no worse results than that of producing no effect at all, which is at least far more innocent than the effects resulting from the strong doses of allopathic medicines. Why will the physician believe his own inexperience, which is flanked by prejudice, more competent than the expe- rience of several years borne out by facts ? Added to this, the homoeopathic medicines acquire at each division or dilution a new degree of power by the 222 ORGANON OF MEDICINE. ments and vain assertions will be of little avail when opposed to the dictates of unerring experience. § 281.—All diseases have an extraordinary tendency to undergo a change when operated upon by the influence of homogeneous medicinal agents. There is no patient, however robust his con- stitution may be, who, if attacked merely by a chronic disease, or by what is called a local malady, does not speedily experience a favorable change in the suffering parts after having taken the appropriate homoeopathic remedy in the smallest dose possible. In short, the effects of this substance will make a greater im- pression on him than they would upon a healthy child tAventy- four hours after its birth. How insignificant and ridiculous is mere theoretic incredulity, when opposed to the infallible evidence of facts! § 282.—However feeble the dose of a remedy may be, provided it can in the slightest degree aggravate the state of the patient homoeopathically,—provided it has the power of exciting symptoms similar to those of the primitive disease, but rather more intense,— it will, in preference, and almost exclusively, affect those parts of the organism that are already in a state of suffering, and which are. strongly irritated and. predisposed to receive any irritation analogous to their own. Thus an artificial disease rather more intense is substituted in the place of the natural one. The organ- ism no longer suffers but from the former affection, which, by reason of its nature, and the minuteness of the dose by Avhich it was produced, soon yields to the efforts of the vital force to re- store the normal state, and thus leaves the body (if the disease was an acute one) free from suffering—that is to say, in a healthy condition. § 283.—To proceed, therefore, in a manner conformable to nature, the true physician will only administer a homoeopathic remedy in the precise dose necessary to exceed and destroy the disease to which it is opposed, so that, if by one of those errors, pardonable to human frailty, he had made choice of a remedy that was inappropriate, the injury that might result from it would be rubbing or shaking they undergo, a means of developing the inherent virtues of medicines that was unknown till my time; and which is so energetic that latterly I have been forced by experience to reduce the number of shakes to two, of which 1 formerly prescribed ten to each dilution. ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 223 so slight that the development of the ATital force, and the adminis- tration of the smallest dose of another remedy more homoeopathic, would suffice to repair it. § 284.—The effects of a dose are by no means diminished in the same proportion as the quantity of the medicinal substance is attenuated in the homoeopathic practice. Eight drops of a tincture taken at once do not produce upon the human body four times the effect of a dose of two drops; they merely produce one that is nearly double. In the same manner the single drop of a mixture composed of one drop of a tincture and ten of a liquid void of all medicinal properties, does not produce ten times the effect that a drop ten times more attenuated would produce, but merely an effect that is scarcely double. The progression con- tinues according to this law, so that a single drop of a dilution, attenuated in the highest degree, ought, and does in faot, produce a very considerable effect.1 § 285.—By diminishing the volume of the dose, the power of it is also diminished; that is to say, when instead of one entire drop of attenuated tincture, merely a fraction of this drop be adminis- tered,2 the object of rendering tho effect less powerful is then very perfectly attained. The reason of this may be easily conceived: 1 Suppose, for example, that one drop of a mixture containing the tenth of a grain of any medicinal substance produces an effect = a, a drop of another mixture containing merely a hundredth part of a grain of this same substance will only produce an effect = f ; if it contains a ten-thousandth part of a grain of medicine, the effect will be = £ ; if a millionth, it will be = - • and so on progressively, to an equal volume of the doses; the effects of the remedy on the body will merely be diminished about one-half each time that the quantity is reduced nine-tenths of what it was before. I have often seen a drop of the tincture of Nux-vomica, at the decillionth degree of dilution, produce exactly half the effect of another at the quintillionth degree, when I'administered both one and the other to the same individual, and under the same circumstances. a The best mode of administration is to make use of small globules of sugar, the size of a mustard-seed; one of these globules having imbibed the medi- cine and being introduced into the vehicle, forms a dose containing about the three-hundredth part of a drop, for three hundred of such globules will imbibe one drop of alcohol; by placing one of those on the tongue, and not drinking anything after it, the dose is considerably dimmished. But if the patient is very sensitive, and it is necessary to employ the_smallest dose possible, and attain at the same time the most speedy results, it will be suffi- cient to let him smell once. (See § 288, note.) 224 ORGANON OF MEDIdNE. the volume of the dose being diminished, it must necessarily follow that it will touch a less number of the nerves of the living organ- ism, by contact with which, it is true, the power of the medicine is communicated to the Avhole body, but it is transmitted in a smaller degree. § 286.—'For the same reason, the effect of a homoeopathic dose is increased when we augment the quantity of the liquid in which it is dissolved to administer it to the patient; but then the remedy comes in contact with a much more extended surface, and the nerves that feel its effects are far more numerous. Although theorists have asserted that the extension of a medicine in liquid weakens its action, experience proves the reverse, at least as far as regards homoeopathic remedies.1 § 287.—It ought, however, to be observed that there is a wide difference between mixing imperfectly the medicinal substance with a certain quantity of liquid, and incorporating it so intimately2 that the smallest fraction of the liquid may still retain a propor- tion of the medicine equal to that which exists in all the others. In short, the mixture possesses a much greater medicinal power in the second case than it does in the first. Rules may be de- duced from this to serve as a guide in the preparation of homceo- 1 Only wine and alcohol, which are the most simple of all excitants, lose a portion of their heating and exciting power when they are attenuated in a large quantity of water. 2 When I make use of the word intimately, I mean to say that by shaking a drop of medicinal liquid with ninety-nine drops of alcohol once—that is to say, by taking the vial in the hand which contains the whole, and imparting to it a rapid motion by a single powerful stroke of the arm descending, I shall then obtain an exact mixture of them; but that two, three, or ten such move- ments would render the mixture much closer—that is to say, they would develop the medicinal virtues still further, making them, as it were, more potent, and their action on the nerves more penetrating. In proceeding, therefore, to the dilution of medicinal substances, it is wrong to give the twenty or thirty successive attenuating glasses more than two shakes, where it is merely intended to develop the power of the medicines in a moderate degree. It would also be well in the attenuation of powders not to rub them down too much in the mortar; thus, for example, when it is requisite to mix one grain of a medicinal substance in its entire state with ninety-nine grains of sugar of milk, it ought to be rubbed down with force during one hour only, and the same space of time should not be exceeded in the subsequent triturations, in order that the power of the medicine may not be carried to too great an extent. More ample instructions on this head are to be found in the first part of my work on Chronic Diseases, second edition. ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 225 pathic medicines, where it is necessary to diminish the effects of the remedies as much as possible, in order to make them support- able to the most delicate patients.1 What parts of the body are more or less sensible to the action of medicines. § 288.—The action of medicines in a liquid form2 upon the body is so penetrating, it propagates itself with so much rapidity, and in a manner so general, from the irritable and sensitive part which has undergone the first impression of the medicinal substance to all other parts of the body, that we might almost call it a spiritual (dynamic or virtual) effect § 289.—Every part of the body that is sensible to the touch is equally susceptible of receiving the impression of medicines and of conveying it to all the other parts. 1 The higher the dilutions of a medicine are carried in the process of de- veloping its power by means of tAvice shaking, the more rapidly and with the more penetrating influence does it appear to affect medicinally the vital power, and produce changes in the economy Avith an energy but little dimin- ished, even if the process of dilution be carried to a great extent; for instance, instead of the ordinary dilution X. (which is mostly sufficient), it be carried up to XX., L., C, and even higher dilutions. "Homoeopathic remedies operate with the more certainty and energy by smelling or inhaling the medicinal aura constantly emanating from a saccha- rine globule that has been impregnated with the higher dilution of a medi- cine, and in a dry state enclosed in a small vial. One globule (of which 10, 20 to 100 weigh a grain) moistened with the 30th dilution, and then dried, provided it be preserved from heat and the light of the sun, retains its virtues undiminished, at least for eighteen or twenty years (so far my experience extends), although the vial that contained it had during that time been opened a thousand times. Should the nostrils be closed by coryza or polypus, the patient may inhale through his mouth, holding the mouth of the vial between his lips. It may be applied to the nostrils of 6mall children while they are asleep with the certainty of success. During these inhalations the medicinal aura comes in contact with the nerves, which are spread over the parietes of the ample cavities through which it freely passes, and thus influences the vital power in the mildest yet most powerful and beneficial manner. All that is curable by homoeopathy may with certainty and safety be cured by this mode of receiving the medicine. Of late I have become convinced of the fact (which I would not have previously believed) that smelling imparts a medi- cinal influence as energetic and as long-continued as when the medicine is taken in substance by the mouth, and at the same time that its operation is thus more gentle than when administered by the latter mode. It is therefore requisite that the internals for repeating the smelling should not be shorter than those prescribed for taking the medicine in a more substantial form. 15 226 ORGANON OF MEDICINE. § 290.—Next to the stomach, the tongue and mouth are the parts most susceptible of receiving medicinal influence. How- ever, the interior of the nose, the intestinum-rectum, the genitals, and all parts endoAved with great sensibility, are equally suscep- tible of the influence of medicines. This is the reason that Avhen the latter are introduced into the body, through wounds or ulcers, they act as energetically as if administered by the mouth. § 291.—Even those organs which have lost the sense that was peculiar to them—such for example, as the tongue and palate deprived of taste, the nose of smell, &c.—communicate to all the other parts of the body the effects of the medicines acting imme- diately on themselves, in as perfect a manneras if they were in pos- session of their own peculiar faculties. § 292.—Although the surface of the body is covered with skin and epidermis, it is not less accessible to the action of medicines, especially of such as are liquid. However, the most sensitive parts of this covering are those which have the greatest tendency to receive it.1 Animal magnetism (mesmerism). On the application of positive and negative mesmerism. § 293.—I again find it necessary, in this place, to say a few words on the subject of animal magnetism, the nature of which differs so greatly from that of all other remedies. This curative power (which should be called mesmerism, after the name of its in- ventor, Mesmer), of whose efficacy none but madmen can entertain a doubt, which, through the powerful will of a well-intentioned indi- vidual, influences the body of the patient by the touch, acts ho- moeopathically by exciting symptoms analogous to those of the malady—and this object is obtained by a single transit, the deter- 1 Rubbing-in appears only to favor the action of the medicine so far as it renders the skin more sensitive, and the living fibre more apt, not only to feel in a certain extent the medicinal virtue, but also to communicate the sensation to the whole of the economy. After having rubbed the inner part of the thighs once, it will suffice afterwards merely to lay the mercurial oint- ment on the parts, to obtain the same medicinal result as if direct friction had been used. What is called " rubbing-in" is of questionable utility, as it is not certain whether the metal in substance can, by this process, pene- trate the interior of the body, or be taken up by the lymphatic vessels. The homceopathist has little to do with rubbing-in, and makes no use whatever of mercurial ointments in his method of cure. ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 227 ruination being moderately fixed, and gliding the hands slowly over the body from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet.1 In this form it is applicable to internal hemorrhages in their last stage, when they threaten death. It acts likewise by imparting a uniform degree of vital power to the organism when there is an excess of it at one point and a deficiency at another—such, for example, as where there is a determination of blood to the head, or when a patient, in a state of debility, is subject to insomnolency, anxiety, &c. In this case, a single transit, similar to the pre- ceding one, but stronger, is to be practised. Finally, it acts by immediately communicating a degree of vital power to a weak part or to the entire organism—an effect that cannot be produced by any other means with such certainty, and without interfering with the other medical treatment. This' third indication is performed by assuming a very firm and decided manner, and applying the hands or tips of the fingers to the weak part, which an internal chronic affection has made the seat of its principal local symptom—such, for example, as old ulcers, amau- rosis, paralysis of a limb, &c.2 To this class belong certain ap- parent cures that have, in all ages, been performed by magnetizers who were endowed with great natural strength. But the most brilliant result of the communication of human vigor to the entire organism is where, by the resolute and fixed determination of a man in the full vigor of life,3 it recalls to life persons who have 1 The smallest homoeopathic dose, when properly applied, effects wonders. It not unfrequently occurs that patients are overwhelmed, by incompetent homoeopathists, with a rapid succession of remedies, which, though well se- lected, and of the highest potence, yet produce a state of such excessive irritability that the life of the patient is placed in jeopardy, and another dose, however mild, may prove fatal. Under such circumstances, the hand of the mesmerizer, gently sliding doAvn, and frequently touching the part af- fected, produces a uniform distribution of the vital power through the sys- tem, and rest, sleep, and health are restored. 3 Although this operation of locally supplying the vital power, which ought to be occasionally repeated, cannot effect a durable cure when the local affection is of an ancient date, and depends upon (what very frequently occurs) some general internal malady, still the positive communication of the vital power, which is no more a palliative than food and drink to hunger and thirst, is of no slight aid in the radical cure of the entire affection by antipsoric remedies. 3 Particularly one of those men, of whom there are but few, who, possess ing great goodness of disposition and complete bodily power, have a very 228 ORGANON OF MEDICINE, remained in a state of apparent death during a long interval of time,—a species of resurrection of which history records many examples. § 294.—All these methods of applying mesmerism depend unon the afflux of a greater or less quantity of vital power in the body of the patient, and are, on that account, termed positive mesmer- ism.1 But there exists yet another, which deserves the name of negative mesmerism, because it produces a contrary effect. To this class belong the customary transits to awaken a subject from a state of somnambulism, and all the manual operations which are designated by the names calming and ventilating. The most simple and certain means of discharging, by the aid of negative mesmerism, the excess of vital power accumulated in any part of the body of a patient who has not been weakened, consists in pass- ing, in a rapid manner, the right arm, extended at about the dis- tance of an inch from the body, from the croAvn of the head to the soles of the feet.2 The quicker this passage is performed, the stronger is the discharge that it produces. It can, for example, when a woman, previously in the enjoyment of health,3 has been plunged into a state of apparent death by the suppression of her menses, occasioned by some violent mental commotion, recall her to life by carrying off the vital power which probably accumulated in the precordial region, and reestablish the equilibrium in the dat incinationf exual intercoure, and are able without difficulty to suppress all their desires; in whom, consequently, an abundance of the subtle vital energy, which would else be employed in the secretion of semen, is disposed to communicate itself to other men through the medium of the touch, seconded by a strong intention of the mind. Some such powerful mesmerizers whom I have known had all these singular peculiarities. 1 In treating here of the certain and decided curative virtues of positive mesmerism, I do not speak of the frequent abuses that are made of it, where, by repeating the passages during half an hour, and even a whole hour, daily, they occasion, in patients laboring under nervous affections that vast revolution of the human economy which bears the name of somnambulism— a state in which man, removed from the animal world, appears to belong more to the spiritual world, a highly unnatural and dangerous condition, by means of which a cure of ohronic diseases has frequently been attempted. * It is a well-known rule that a person subjected to either positive or ne- gative mesmerism, ought not to wear silk on any part of the body. * Consequently, a negative transit, particularly if it is very rapid, would be extremely injurious to a person who had been for any length of time in a weak condition, or in whom the vital powers were not very active. ORGANON OF MEDICINE. 229 whole organism.1 In the same manner a slight negative passage, that is less rapid, frequently allays the great agitation and fatiguing insomnolency which are the results of a positive pas- sage that is too strong when exercised upon a very irritable patient. 1 A country lad, of robust constitution, about ten years of age, was mes- merized for some slight indisposition by a woman, who performed several Btrong passages on him with the ends of her two thumbs, from the prgeeordial region down to the termination of the ribs; the boy immediately fell pale as death into such a state of insensibility and immobility that all means were tried in vain to recall him to life, and he was thought to be dead. I caused his elder brother to make as rapid a transit as possible on him from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet; he immediately recovered his senses, and was healthy and cheerful. \\3 , -4 S mr.-* -;»• v''--f/inM/i;i»^itf^i«(f->!»!i^«tA*'i.>-K-vv.»«^ ^.*5.