their symptomatology was given almost throughout in schema. This was pardonable, and perhaps unavoidable, in the older works, where the great preponderance of material existed only in this form. But Dr. Allen had to his hand a wealth of detailed provings, the translation and collation of which would have been an incalculable boon to the profession; and I must keenly regret that he should have cut up these, and also the records of poisoning he has employed, into the fragments of the Hahnemannic arrangement. His last volume suggests that the same regret has been growing on his own mind; for the fresh material given in its appendix has suffered no such distortion.

For this reason, and for many others, bearing on questions of trustworthiness and accuracy, it became our persuasion in this country that the work must be done over again; and the British Homœopathic Society determined to undertake it. It made overtures to the American Institute of Homœopathy, which also had the subject on its mind; and the result was the appointment of editors and consultative committees from the two countries, and an agreement as to the principles on which the new Materia Medica was to be constructed. This was in 1884; and, the work being at once taken in hand, by the end of 1891 the "Cyclopædia of Drug Pathogenesy" was completed. Leaving Hahnemann's work in this department to stand on its own merits, it collates all available material accruing since his time or from outside his sphere in such a form as to make it alike genuine and intelligible. Genuine, because all versions and copies have been (where possible) traced back to their ultimate originals, and verified, corrected, or reproduced therefrom; because all "clinical" (i.e., merely cured) symptoms and supposed medicinal aggravations have been excluded, and phenomena observed in patients taking drugs accepted only on amply sufficient evidence; because provings themselves have been critically scrutinised, and not admitted (at any rate to full-sized type) unless their source and method seemed free from objection. And intelligible, because all observations and experiments have (again where possible) been related in detail or sufficient summary, so as to preserve the order of evolution of the drug's effect; and, where this could not be, the symptoms of each prover given separately, so that some approximation might be made to the same type. We thus have a series of individual pictures of the morbid conditions induced by our medicines; and have only to fit these to idiopathic disease on the principle similia similibus to have the homœopathic method at our full disposal.

When I say this, I am thinking of disease as clinically studied; for here again the phenomena, in their totality, are those which

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claim our most earnest attention. The aspect of disease chiefly utilised for homoeopathic therapeutics must have its complement in the acquaintance we make with medicines to obey the law of similars we must have wholes to compare with wholes. In the ordinary practice men aim at knowing what drugs can do, that in disease they may induce such effects with them when they deem it desirable. In old days, accordingly, they cared only to learn whether a given one could purge, or puke, or sweat, that they might class it as cathartic, emetic, or sudorific; and now they correspondingly limit their investigations to the question whether it is an excitant or depressant of certain nerve-tracts. For such purposes dumb creatures suffice; and hecatombs of these unfortunates are now annually sacrificed in enquiries as to drug-action. The differences of result, and therefore of opinion, are endless; and the gain is proportionately small as our General Medical Council, by banishing "Pharmacology" from the place they had given it among subjects for students' examinations, seems to have come to think. We, on the other hand, have wanted the whole picture of the effects of drugs for comparison with the phenomena of disease, and have gone to work accordingly. As it is human disease to which we need similia, and as this is largely made up of subjective symptoms, it is on the human subject that we experiment; and we faithfully record the whole series of morbid changes which occur after the ingestion of a drug. We test the effect of single full doses to get analogues of acute disease; and of long-continued small ones, that chronic maladies may find their antitypes. Thus our pathogenetic knowledge, when truly obtained and registered, is like a picture-gallery, in which the discerning eye may perceive the lineaments of all morbid conditions known or likely to occur. Our provings minister to medicine as an art: they are synthetic and sensuous, full of colour and detail. Those of the other camp are analytic, appealing to the reason; and are available only so far as morbid processes are scientifically understood. The record of the one recalls the graphic pictures of Hippocrates and Sydenham and Watson, to whose ever-fresh lineaments the mind returns with pleasure, wearied with the merely intellectual refinements of modern nosography. The work of the physiological laboratory goes hand in hand with that of the deadhouse: Hahnemann's pharmacology and pathology alike move in the region of life.

But you will remember that, when speaking of the knowledge of disease, we saw that their clinical aspect is not the only one in which we should regard the ills which flesh is heir to. From pathology-the science of disease-its phenomena are always

illuminated, and sometimes even rendered transparent so that through them we can see the noumena. Pharmacology should seek a standpoint no less advanced. Provings correspond with our studies at the bedside or in the consulting room; but as to interpret these we go to the dead-house, so to provings we must add where possible-poisonings and experiments on animals, that the lesions wrought by drugs may be positively ascertained. Records of this kind should find place in the actual Materia Medica of Homœopathy. This, in the "Cyclopædia," has been done; but yet our work is not over. We must use these facts also as materials for inductive generalisation; we must seek to connect, classify and interpret them, to ascertain their laws, to trace them to their causes. In proportion as we do so, we make our pharmacology a worthy mate for the pathology which is growing into maturity beside it. In neither do we content ourselves with generalisations alone; the clinical history of diseases and the detailed provings of drugs must ever form the basisand the visible basis-of any super-structure which may be reared. But while (to employ another figure) these are the text of our Materia Medica, we should read it with the help of a commentary which may illuminate it by the best available lights. There are some who think they are best following Hahnemann by shutting their eyes and ears to all that has been learned since his time; by recognising nothing in disease but the patient's sensations and obvious appearances, and nothing in drug-action but a scattered heap of symptoms of like kind. We should not go to the other extreme, and ignore any aid which may thus be gained in practice. But we should regard the human body, whether idiopathically or medicinally disordered, as one of whose order we are not wholly ignorant— as a sphere in which we are to some degree at home, and where we may speak and act as no mere strangers. In studying the Materia Medica we are to be more than symptom-rememberers, in applying it more than symptom-coverers: we are cleri and not laici here, and we fall short of our vantage ground if we work mechanically only.

Whether such commentary should form part of the Materia Medica Homœopathica is a moot question. The editors of the "Cyclopædia of Drug Pathogenesy" have thought it should not. They have had the records of proving, poisoning, and experiment on animals given apart by themselves just as elicited from nature, without touch of human hand in the way of either explanation or transposition of features. But as on the one side the last is required, in the form of a schematic index, for the needs of the practitioner, so on the other the student should have an introduction and companion to the text, supplying him

with illuminative and exegetical commentary. In monographs on medicines, like those of the Hahnemann Publishing Society, all will go together; but for the Materia Medica at large separate treatises seem necessary. I have done what I could in this way in my "Pharmacodynamics"; Dr. Hempel, in his "Lectures," had preceded me, and Dr. Burt, in his "Physiological Materia Medica," has followed me. Under the guidance of one or other of us, and in the new form in which our pathogenetic records are now presented, we hope that the student may find these, though perhaps "a mighty maze," yet "not without a plan."

LECTURE VI.

SIMILIA SIMILIBUS.

We have studied together the two elements contained in the maxim similia similibus curentur-the phenomena and sensations of disease and of drug-action respectively. It now becomes our task to see how we are to put the similia together so as to curare by their means. Before we can do so, however, we must enquire if the whole series of drug-effects on the healthy are available for the treatment of the sick after this manner; and we shall soon find that some of them are by their nature excluded from the category. Thus :

1. Drugs, being material substances, must, if introduced in sufficient quantity into the body, act mechanically, by their bulk and weight, and so forth. Such properties of theirs have found little use in medicine-the swallowing of crude mercury to overcome intestinal obstruction, of olive oil to detach biliary calculi, being the only familiar instances. Whatever its valueand the latter practice seems effective and is certainly harmless-it has nothing to do with our present subject; similia similibus has no application here.

2. Drugs, when taken from the mineral kingdom, have chemical properties; and they exert these within the organism as they do outside it, with such modification as the higher laws of life there reigning impose upon their action. An alkali will neutralise an acid in the stomach as in a test-tube, and so may give immediate relief to heart-burn. A solvent of uric acidsuch as the boro-citrate of magnesia seems, and piperazin is reputed, to be-will act thus upon it in the kidney almost as well as in the apparatus of the laboratory. These are examples of the chemical action of medicines. They might be multiplied largely, and would bring us at last into more debatable regions, as the treatment of rheumatic fever by potash salts because of a presumed excess of lactic acid in the blood. Stopping short of these, in the cases I have instanced it is obvious that homœopathicity plays no part, and yet that they are rational enough in themselves. We have better remedies for the tendency to gastric acidity and to renal calculus; but when these products are formed, and are causing distress by their presence, if we can remove the symptoms by chemically-acting drugs we are bound to use them.