HOMEOPATHY.

BY E. B. De gersdorfF, M. D., PROFESSOR OF PATHOLOGY AND THERAPEUTICS, B. U. S. OF M.

[Read before the Faculty and Students, April 12, 1882.]

PART II.

ENOUGH has been said by way of philosophical introduction; let us now with the lecturer on materia medica approach the subject of homoeopathy itself, and judge it on its own merits as it were. He reminds us that, like other great advances in science, so homœopathy was and is a historical necessity: it had to come. By the end of the last century, of all medical branches, therapeutics was in the deepest mire of superstition and ignorance, until Hahnemann's word brought hope and daylight into it. Henceforth a new era in medicine. Great opposition and strife arose, but that is much better than stolid indifference. He settled, first of all men, what materia medica pura was and ought to be; each ingredient of it as a drug per se received its own physiological character and individuality by the provings established by him, and thus disappeared the former more or less misapplied adjectives of the various drugs, like emetics, astringents, antiphlogistics, tonics, and emulcents, and the drug remains on the value of its own qualities, to meet, to oppose, and to cure any individual case constituted by the totality of symptoms; for Hahnemann was so wise that, in the consciousness of his ignorance of the nature of disease, he omitted. no symptoms, but relied on the totality of them. All this did his genius accomplish with his idea of similarity, and thus did he even outstrip his contemporaries in pathology; for it took forty years more before the nonentity of disease was acknowledged by modern scientists. Henceforth no old belief in certain medicines was tolerated, but provings on the healthy and at the sick-bed were demanded; and thus have we gradually got at the truth, and nothing but the truth, of each drug's power, down to the smallest and up to the greatest effect. No more generalizing, but individualizing; and thus became the homoeopathic materia medica ready to meet the new cellular pathology far better than the old pharmacology ever could be expected to do; thus became his therapeutic rule "similia similibus" an empirically ascertained deduction from facts; and no new facts that have arisen in natural science since have as yet proved its absurdity. Thus, finally, under this new therapeutic rule, diagnosis of disease and of drug are bound to go hand in hand; therefore materia medica and pathology become inseparable: one represents the +, the other the (positive and negative); they are complementary. After

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expatiating on Hahnemann's own explanation of the theory of cure in the "Organon," and on that of Dudgeon, Grauvogel, and others, all of whom assume vitality and vis medicatrix or life power, but all of which the shortness of time does not permit me to repeat, he continues to say of drugs, that in their relation to the organism they are substances which at first make it peculiarly sick, therefore they are also able to bring it back to health, and always did this from the beginning of the world, in a homœopathic sense; for their pathogenetic power becomes their therapeutic power as powerful or as mild as you please, all by the rule of similarity, which, however, need not entirely exclude anæsthetics, palliatives, and surgical or mechanical interferences and aids.

Of what he says of the dose, with an authority which we all here may be proud to claim for him, I will only repeat, first: that qualities are not necessarily governed by quantities, and different states of the living body require different doses; but so much is sure, that, to obtain the peculiar effect of a drug, you must give it in a small dose; and a less dose is necessary to affect a sick person than a healthy person, their reaction only, not their sensibility, being lessened by disease; and the dose must be small and big enough to bring about finally the right balance. Now all this has been done and shown by experiments and not by theory; and, furthermore, that if a remedy in homoeopathic practice be a wrong one, the effect is not as fatal as in allopathy. As to what he says of the preparation of the medicines I will only repeat : attenuation must be, but infinitesimal attenuation of matter is nonsense eo ipso; does not exist. Medicine can only act as long as it contains or is medicine; therefore no potency, no dynamis, need to be called in aid to the cure. He proved, also, and I can only uphold him in it, that Hahnemann was not the main starter nor the final defender of the so-called high potencies, shaking and bottlewashing included. He concludes, after describing the various aberrations in homoeopathic pharmacology, that any disputes about the dose are impediments to the progress of our science. Microscopic examinations prove that there is an end to the divisibility of matter; and there is also a limit to solubility and solutions as well as triturations. When and why, then, do we use attenuated doses? Because there is a natural law, that organic bodies have a power of assimilating those minute elements which they require in larger proportion than they are contained in food, water, and soil. The sponge in the sea thus attracts and receives its iodine, the bone its phosphorus, the shell its lime, the milk its iron; therefore our medicines act similarly to the constituents of food only when they are contained in a highly diluted form.

The department of materia medica in homoeopathy, though

not so familiar to me as teacher in this school as that of pathology, is, nevertheless, to me, as to every homoeopath, a constant source of research, investigation, learning, experimenting, and proving, of gathering up of new facts and thereby corroborating old experiences and deductions therefrom for the future, or of detecting former errors and wrong conceptions in the daily hard work of proving medicines on the patients. Though so hard work, it is not discouraging: there is life, there is promise in it, there is progress in it. Our work in this field is not yet ended, it is hardly begun; and, although a great deal has been done, a great deal must be done over again. I say this with all reverence to Hahnemann and his first disciples in proving. The glory of having begun it remains theirs forever. But I am for my part not yet satisfied with our materia medica, even not with that which is contained in the many volumes of Dr. Allen's Encyclopædia. Certainly, on the other hand, I glory in the fact that we have a number of simple and individual remedies on hand, completing in their totality thousands of peculiar symptoms, counterparts to those thousands of symptoms of all the ailments human flesh is heir to, not one of which remedies needs a special drummer or pedler sent round by the enterprising chemist, to be talked up and pushed into the market if not into use, such as we find our colleagues of the old school are encouraging, but each having its place and time in the law of similars; and still I trust that modern experimental physiology will yet, in connection with drug-proving, bring about a still more reliable pathogenesis than we possess, enabling us to sift the chaff from the grain; and that it will be ours, the homoeopaths' glory in the future to have accomplished this pathogenetic work to the end.

All honor to the great pathologists of the past and present era, especially the men of Vienna and Berlin; but when we ask, how is it with their therapy, the answer must be, they have not cultivated it with as much favor or clinical success. The modern therapy of this school is without compass and rudder, aiming at nothing specific; it is often only expectant, and when active, it is grossly empiric and behind its own pathological and physiological standard; it is at most palliative, or even only anæsthetic, or unintentionally homoeopathic. But a time will come when these pathologists will be less flushed with their success in diagnosis, their patients becoming more and more impatient, and they will turn their attention again more to a method of curing rather than of diagnosing disease, and will look around with earnest and longing spirit for an equally-well based therapy, -a therapy which might meet them at each point and corner of their minutest exploration in diseased matter, — and then perhaps they will find that that school, overlooked if not despised at first by

them as unscientific, which has for more than eighty years piled up, by innumerable experiments with provings of drugs on human organism, a pathogenetic symptomatology, has prepared the way to a new era in medical science as well as themselves, while in addition it has practically all along done its work in the field by its method of curing the sick, and still has lost no time by self-conceit, but has appropriated its opponents' learning and teachings in pathology. So much for materia medica. When a great discovery in science or art has brought about, in course of time, a more or less extended reform, which is always done, owing to the perverted human nature, with a great deal of difficulty, opposition, and strife, if not bloodshed and martyrdom, — when, after two or three generations, this reform is still going on and gaining ground, the intrinsic value or amount of this reform cannot be easily stated; and, if we thereby should mean the success of the reformers as a body or a party, it is often not commensurate with the effect which the reform has had on its opposers, namely, inasmuch as it may have changed their actions, in spite of all their still continued opposition as a school or party. This has been, as I understood it, the object of the next and fifth lecture on the "Leaven of Homoeopathy." We all know how, in spite of all the opposition, open or covert, of oldschool faculties and medical societies, as such, to our cause and teachings, in spite of the ridiculous phariseeism of the old-school practitioners, who hold themselves up as the only scientists in medicine, the new empiric law of medicine has gained ground among the people as fast and as far as they were allowed to approach it, and finally it changed the real practice, i. e., the prescriptions of the physicians of the old school, if not their doctrines. And this red line of homoeopathicity in the labyrinth of the oldschool materia medica was traced by the lecturer skilfully and eloquently. It was natural that homoeopathy evinced its most decided superiority over the old-school practice in the beginning of this century, when it flashed upon the converts like a revelation, and when diagnostics, owing to the still prevailing ignorance in pathology, were in their infancy, when decoctions and theriacs with twenty ingredients still carried off the patients and enriched the apothecaries. Both schools have learned since then; but, while any new scientific fact in pathology, as in therapeutics, ought to be and is common property to all schools of treatment, and we as homoeopaths freely make use of them, and especially learn thereby better to understand the language of the symptom of the sick man calling for its therapeutic counterpart, while we acknowledge on our side nowadays with thankfulness what we owe to physiology and pathology, the old school refuses still to learn from us in therapeutics, and still with supercilious blindness

shuts its eyes against the new therapeutic light; but at the same time their treatment has undergone an enormous change, if not improvement; not merely is the lancet set at rest and calomel a rare prescription, but the rule of giving one medicine at a time, and that in small doses, is generally followed: everything so called specific, this dream of the past with us, is tried for a while in parvula dose, "only never as homoeopathic, rather give it another name,”—I say, if they formerly cured at times homoeopathically without knowing, they were less enlightened then, but more honest than at present, when they constantly ransack our materia medica, draw on the wealth of our method of cure, but give no credit to us, but a false name and a false motive and explanation to their proceedings.

While we thus in a measure would be entitled to say that an improvement in the therapeutics even of our opponents, owing, however, to the homoeopathic irrepressible leaven, can be perceived, the history of homoeopathy, on the other hand, has shown that all the detractions and persecutions which we as followers of Hahnemann have received and suffered at their hands have in every way eventually done us good service; for it has roused up our energies and enabled us to fight the fight of reform. This is only the natural course of events, namely, the prevailing of all that is sound at the root and true in the end; it cannot be stamped out.

You have in the sixth and last lecture of this series, on the "Past, Present, and Future of Homoeopathy," heard the stirring suggestions and energetic arguments for further continuation of our work by our Dean; they are still ringing in our ears with all the convincing plausibility and hopefulness of offered statistics of the past and present, and all the earnest invitation to join in the necessary work of further organization; therefore I need repeat no sentence of it, as your hearts must be still stirred up by it. All great truth, when once the seed of it is laid in the human mind, will take root, and, sooner or later, it will spread and bear fruit. Then arises opposition, the forming of parties for and against it, and then the necessity of organization; and this era of organization on a broader scale in the ranks of homoeopathy has been reached now, and here especially in this free country. Here, and especially by you, the younger workers of the future, it will have to be proved whether you have followed in homœopathy an ignis fatuus, or whether there is a real light of scientific truth contained in the simile and its application as a therapeutic rule. All condemnation ex cathedra, all ridicule of poetasters, will not hurt it or suppress it; but superficiality, unfaithfulness, cowardice, if you would become guilty of it, might blight its future. But I have good hope in you and in the future of