Registrar of the Faculty and Professor History of Medicine, Organon and Medical Technology in the Denver Homeopathic Medical College.

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY OF MEDICINE, ORGANON AND MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY, DENVER HOMEOPATHIC MEDICAL COLLEGE. (Continued from April number.)

Homeopathy is the only system of therapeutics based upon a law of nature. Similia Similibus Curantur, like affections are cured by their likes, expresses the law for drug selection for all curable forms of disease. By its application the curative remedy is found in curable cases, and in uncurable cases the same law points to a remedy that will act palliatively in most conditions. This law forms the basis of homeopathy (Gr. homeoios like and Pathos affection,) and therapeutic method that applies the principle that any drug which is capable of producing symptoms of disease in the healthy will remove similar symptoms when found in the sick.

While not the first to call attention to similia similibus, Hahnemann was the first to persistently advocate it and to prove drugs so that it might be given a practical test. He first promulgated the principle in 1796, six years after he commenced experimenting with cinchona bark, in which experiments he was struck with the similarity between the symptoms produced and those cured by cinchona.

It will thus be noted that Hahnemann did not advocate the application of similia until he had carefully investigated the matter. He instituted careful experiments with various drugs to learn the truth; patiently searched recorded medical literature to find data bearing on the subject, proved medicines on himself and friends to get their symtomotology, and as a result we have Hahnemann's Materia Medical

Pura, one of the very best homeopathic materia medicas in existence to-day, and the basis of nearly all others published.

The most marked feature of early homeopathy was its entire freedom from all theory and hypothesis. It was a protest against any pathological theory as a basis of therapeutics..

As taught, it was the true science of therapeutics, based upon exact observation of natural phenomena in disease and drug action, and noting the law governing their mutual relationship.

On this solid ground of scientific observation, all homeopathists base their practice.

Whatever differences exist have arisen from the publication of Hahnemann's theory of chronic diseases and drug dynamization, and in not clearly distinguishing between Hahnemann's discoveries and facts on the one hand, and his illustrations and men theories on the other.

Whatever Hahnemann published as a fact has never been disproved. His theories are not proven. It is here that our friends of the old school always assail us, seeming to think if Hahnemann's theories of chronic diseases are disproved, that the foundation of the school is gone. When the fact is that his theories are only attempts to explain known facts and are subsequent to the establishment of the law of similars. If similia depended upon and was reached through his theories, then would their mode of attack be legitimate? The theories being subsequent to and to a large extent, independent of the law of similars, may stand or fall, without in any way affecting the truth or falsity of similia. This is a point that you, as advocates of homeopathy, never want to lose sight of for a minute when in controversy with men of opposite faith.

Hahnemann disregarded all theories, even those of his own fabrication when they came in opposition to the result of pure experience. He lived in an age of theorizing and to some extent fell into the spirit of the age.

The great central truths of homeopathy are:

I. The totality of symptoms of the patient constitutes the disease for the purpose of cure.

2. Drug experimentation on the healthy, so called drug proving,

is the only reliable method to arrive at a knowledge of the effects of drugs.

3. The curative relation between these two sets of symptomatic facts is the law of similars, similia similibus curantur.

4. The administration of one single remedy at a time.

5. The minimum dose that will bring about a cure.

6. Repetition of the dose should cease when marked improvement sets in.

Isopathic Medication.

Besides the homeopathic medication in which drugs are given which produce in the healthy symptoms similar to those present in the patient to be relieved, we have the isopathic (isos, equal and pathos, disease), medication in which morbid products of a disease are employed for the cure of the same disease. This system was taught 400 B. C.-Xenocrates; it was introduced into homeopathy by Dr. Lux in 1823, and in part adopted by Dr. Hering.

Lux taught that the toxins found in the body, properly attenuated are capable of producing the very diseases that give rise to them-that is, that every disease is supposed to have within itself its own antidote.

forty years later

In 1830 Hering proposed as a remedy for hydrophobia the properly attenuated saliva of a rabid dog. About a half century later Pasteur advocated practically the same thing, he putting the virus through various cultures and injecting the sufferer. Having also proposed phthisine as a remedy for tuberculosis and it, too, received popular and scientific endorsement by Koch and others. As early as 1834, Wopf, one of the greatest of early homeopathists, says, "I do not doubt that the discovery of the curative action of morbid matters, in diseases that produced them, to be one of the most important discoveries that has been made since the beginning of our school."

Nosodes (fr. Sr. Nosos, "disease") is the homoeopathic disignation for such morbid products, which an animal alkaloids (ptomaines fr. ptoma "cadavin"), produced by the decomposition of animal substances.

At first ptomaines were restricted to alkaloids produced by cadavric decomposition, but now they also include alkaloids of animal