under the influence of the more refined personal habits which have
prevailed, and the application of various external remedies which repel
the affection from the skin; Psora has revealed itself in these numerous
forms of internal disease, instead of appearing, as in former periods,
under the aspect of an external malady.
These are the three cardinal doctrines of Hahnemann, as laid down in
those standard works of Homoeopathy, the “Organon” and the “Treatise on
Chronic Diseases.”
Several other principles may be added, upon all of which he insists with
great force, and which are very generally received by his disciples.
1. Very little power is allowed to the curative efforts of nature.
Hahnemann goes so far as to say that no one has ever seen the simple
efforts of nature effect the durable recovery of a patient from a
chronic disease. In general, the Homoeopathist calls every recovery
which happens under his treatment a cure.
2. Every medicinal substance must be administered in a state of the
most perfect purity, and uncombined with any other. The union of several
remedies in a single prescription destroys its utility, and, according
to the “Organon,” frequently adds a new disease.
3. A large number of substances commonly thought to be inert develop
great medicinal powers when prepared in the manner already described;
and a great proportion of them are ascertained to have specific
antidotes in case their excessive effects require to be neutralized.
4. Diseases should be recognized, as far as possible, not by any of the
common names imposed upon them, as fever or epilepsy, but as individual
collections of symptoms, each of which differs from every other
collection.
5. The symptoms of any complaint must be described with the most
minute exactness, and so far as possible in the patient's own words. To
illustrate the kind of circumstances the patient is expected to record,
I will mention one or two from the 313th page of the “Treatise on
Chronic Diseases,”--being the first one at which I opened accidentally.
“After dinner, disposition to sleep; the patient winks.”
“After dinner, prostration and feeling of weakness (nine days after
taking the remedy).”
This remedy was that same oyster-shell which is to be prescribed
“fractions of the sextillionth or decillionth degree.” According to
Hahnemann, the action of a single dose of the size mentioned does not
fully display itself in some cases until twenty-four or even thirty
days after it is taken, and in such instances has not exhausted its good
effects until towards the fortieth or fiftieth day,--before which time
it would be absurd and injurious to administer a new remedy.
So much for the doctrines of Hahnemann, which have been stated without
comment, or exaggeration of any of their features, very much as any
adherent of his opinions might have stated them, if obliged to compress
them into so narrow a space.
Does Hahnemann himself represent Homoeopathy as it now exists? He
certainly ought to be its best representative, after having created it,
and devoted his life to it for half a century. He is spoken of as the
great physician of the time, in most, if not all Homoeopathic works. If
he is not authority on the subject of his own doctrines, who is? So far
as I am aware, not one tangible discovery in the so-called science has
ever been ascribed to any other observer; at least, no general principle
or law, of consequence enough to claim any prominence in Homoeopathic
works, has ever been pretended to have originated with any of his
illustrious disciples. He is one of the only two Homoeopathic writers
with whom, as I shall mention, the Paris publisher will have anything to
do upon his own account. The other is Jahr, whose Manual is little more
than a catalogue of symptoms and remedies. If any persons choose to
reject Hahnemann as not in the main representing Homoeopathy, if they
strike at his authority, if they wink out of sight his deliberate and
formally announced results, it is an act of suicidal rashness; for upon
his sagacity and powers of observation, and experience, as embodied in
his works, and especially in his Materia Medica, repose the foundations
of Homoeopathy as a practical system.
So far as I can learn from the conflicting statements made upon the
subject, the following is the present condition of belief.
1. All of any note agree that the law Similia similibus is the only
fundamental principle in medicine. Of course if any man does not agree
to this the name Homoeopathist can no longer be applied to him with
propriety.
2. The belief in and employment of the infinitesimal doses is general,
and in some places universal, among the advocates of Homoeopathy; but a
distinct movement has been made in Germany to get rid of any restriction
to the use of these doses, and to employ medicines with the same license
as other practitioners.
3. The doctrine of the origin of most chronic diseases in Psora,
notwithstanding Hahnemann says it cost him twelve years of study and
research to establish the fact and its practical consequences, has
met with great neglect and even opposition from very many of his own
disciples.
It is true, notwithstanding, that, throughout most of their writings
which I have seen, there runs a prevailing tone of great deference to
Hahnemann's opinions, a constant reference to his authority, a general
agreement with the minor points of his belief, and a pretence of
harmonious union in a common faith. [Those who will take the trouble
to look over Hull's Translation of Jahr's Manual may observe how little
comparative space is given to remedies resting upon any other authority
than that of Hahnemann.]
Many persons, and most physicians and scientific men, would be satisfied
with the statement of these doctrines, and examine them no further.
They would consider it vastly more probable that any observer in so
fallacious and difficult a field of inquiry as medicine had been led
into error, or walked into it of his own accord, than that such numerous
and extraordinary facts had really just come to light. They would feel a
right to exercise the same obduracy towards them as the French Institute
is in the habit of displaying when memoirs or models are offered to it
relating to the squaring of the circle or perpetual motion; which it is
the rule to pass over without notice. They would feel as astronomers and
natural philosophers must have felt when, some half a dozen years ago,
an unknown man came forward, and asked for an opportunity to demonstrate
to Arago and his colleagues that the moon and planets were at a distance
of a little more than a hundred miles from the earth. And so they would
not even look into Homoeopathy, though all its advocates should exclaim
in the words of Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins, vender of the Metallic
Tractors, that “On all discoveries there are persons who, without
descending to any inquiry into the truth, pretend to know, as it were
by intuition, that newly asserted facts are founded in the grossest
errors.” And they would lay their heads upon their pillows with a
perfectly clear conscience, although they were assured that they were
behaving in the same way that people of old did towards Harvey, Galileo,
and Copernicus, the identical great names which were invoked by Mr.
Benjamin Douglass Perkins.
But experience has shown that the character of these assertions is
not sufficient to deter many, from examining their claims to belief.
I therefore lean but very slightly on the extravagance and extreme
apparent singularity of their pretensions. I might have omitted them,
but on the whole it seemed more just to the claims of my argument
to suggest the vast complication of improbabilities involved in the
statements enumerated. Every one must of course judge for himself as to
the weight of these objections, which are by no means brought forward as
a proof of the extravagance of Homoeopathy, but simply as entitled to
a brief consideration before the facts of the case are submitted to our
scrutiny.
The three great asserted discoveries of Hahnemann are entirely
unconnected with and independent of each other. Were there any natural
relation between them it would seem probable enough that the discovery
of the first would have led to that of the others. But assuming it to be
a fact that diseases are cured by remedies capable of producing symptoms
like their own, no manifest relation exists between this fact and
the next assertion, namely, the power of the infinitesimal doses. And
allowing both these to be true, neither has the remotest affinity to
the third new doctrine, that which declares seven eighths of all chronic
diseases to be owing to Psora.
This want of any obvious relation between Hahnemann's three cardinal
doctrines appears to be self-evident upon inspection. But if, as is
often true with his disciples, they prefer the authority of one of their
own number, I will refer them to Dr. Trinks's paper on the present state
of Homoeopathy in Europe, with which, of course, they are familiar, as
his name is mentioned as one of the most prominent champions of their
faith, in their American official organ. It would be a fact without a
parallel in the history, not merely of medicine, but of science, that
three such unconnected and astonishing discoveries, each of them a
complete revolution of all that ages of the most varied experience had
been taught to believe, should spring full formed from the brain of a
single individual.
Let us look a moment at the first of his doctrines. Improbable though
it may seem to some, there is no essential absurdity involved in the
proposition that diseases yield to remedies capable of producing like
symptoms. There are, on the other hand, some analogies which lend a
degree of plausibility to the statement. There are well-ascertained
facts, known from the earliest periods of medicine, showing that, under
certain circumstances, the very medicine which, from its known effects,
one would expect to aggravate the disease, may contribute to its relief.
I may be permitted to allude, in the most general way, to the case in
which the spontaneous efforts of an overtasked stomach are quieted by
the agency of a drug which that organ refuses to entertain upon any
terms. But that every cure ever performed by medicine should have
been founded upon this principle, although without the knowledge of a
physician; that the Homoeopathic axiom is, as Hahnemann asserts, “the
sole law of nature in therapeutics,” a law of which nothing more than
a transient glimpse ever presented itself to the innumerable host of
medical observers, is a dogma of such sweeping extent, and pregnant
novelty, that it demands a corresponding breadth and depth of
unquestionable facts to cover its vast pretensions.
So much ridicule has been thrown upon the pretended powers of the
minute doses that I shall only touch upon this point for the purpose of
conveying, by illustrations, some shadow of ideas far transcending the
powers of the imagination to realize. It must be remembered that these
comparisons are not matters susceptible of dispute, being founded
on simple arithmetical computations, level to the capacity of any
intelligent schoolboy. A person who once wrote a very small pamphlet
made some show of objecting to calculations of thus kind, on the ground
that the highest dilutions could easily be made with a few ounces of
alcohol. But he should have remembered that at every successive dilution
he lays aside or throws away ninety-nine hundredths of the fluid on
which he is operating, and that, although he begins with a drop, he only
prepares a millionth, billionth, trillionth, and similar fractions of
it, all of which, added together, would constitute but a vastly minute
portion of the drop with which he began. But now let us suppose we take
one single drop of the Tincture of Camomile, and that the whole of this
were to be carried through the common series of dilutions.
A calculation nearly like the following was made by Dr. Panvini, and may
be readily followed in its essential particulars by any one who chooses.
For the first dilution it would take 100 drops of alcohol.
For the second dilution it would take 10,000 drops, or about a pint.
For the third dilution it would take 100 pints.
For the fourth dilution it would take 10,000 pints, or more than 1,000
gallons, and so on to the ninth dilution, which would take ten billion
gallons, which he computed would fill the basin of Lake Agnano, a body
of water two miles in circumference. The twelfth dilution would of
course fill a million such lakes. By the time the seventeenth degree of
dilution should be reached, the alcohol required would equal in quantity
the waters of ten thousand Adriatic seas. Trifling errors must be
expected, but they are as likely to be on one side as the other, and any
little matter like Lake Superior or the Caspian would be but a drop in
the bucket.
Swallowers of globules, one of your little pellets, moistened in
the mingled waves of one million lakes of alcohol, each two miles in
circumference, with which had been blended that one drop of Tincture
of Camomile, would be of precisely the strength recommended for that
medicine in your favorite Jahr's Manual, “against the most sudden,
frightful, and fatal diseases!” [In the French edition of 1834, the
proper doses of the medicines are mentioned, and Camomile is marked
IV. Why are the doses omitted in Hull's Translation, except in three
instances out of the whole two hundred remedies, notwithstanding the
promise in the preface that “some remarks upon the doses used may
be found at the head of each medicine”? Possibly because it makes
no difference whether they are employed in one Homoeopathic dose or
another; but then it is very singular that such precise directions
were formerly given in the same work, and that Hahnemann's “experience”
should have led him to draw the nice distinctions we have seen in a
former part of this Lecture (p. 44).]
And proceeding on the common data, I have just made a calculation
which shows that this single drop of Tincture of Camomile, given in the
quantity ordered by Jahr's Manual, would have supplied every individual
of the whole human family, past and present, with more than five billion
doses each, the action of each dose lasting about four days.
Yet this is given only at the quadrillionth, or fourth degree of
potency, and various substances are frequently administered at
the decillionth or tenth degree, and occasionally at still higher
attenuations with professed medicinal results. Is there not in this as
great an exception to all the hitherto received laws of nature as in the
miracle of the loaves and fishes? Ask this question of a Homoeopathist,
and he will answer by referring to the effects produced by a very minute
portion of vaccine matter, or the extraordinary diffusion of odors. But
the vaccine matter is one of those substances called morbid poisons, of
which it is a peculiar character to multiply themselves, when introduced
into the system, as a seed does in the soil. Therefore the hundredth
part of a grain of the vaccine matter, if no more than this is employed,
soon increases in quantity, until, in the course of about a week, it is
a grain or more, and can be removed in considerable drops. And what is
a very curious illustration of Homoeopathy, it does not produce its most
characteristic effects until it is already in sufficient quantity
not merely to be visible, but to be collected for further use. The
thoughtlessness which can allow an inference to be extended from a
product of disease possessing this susceptibility of multiplication when
conveyed into the living body, to substances of inorganic origin, such
as silex or sulphur, would be capable of arguing that a pebble may
produce a mountain, because an acorn can become a forest.
As to the analogy to be found between the alleged action of the
infinitely attenuated doses, and the effects of some odorous substances
which possess the extraordinary power of diffusing their imponderable
emanations through a very wide space, however it may be abused in
argument, and rapidly as it evaporates on examination, it is not like
that just mentioned, wholly without meaning. The fact of the vast
diffusion of some odors, as that of musk or the rose, for instance, has
long been cited as the most remarkable illustration of the divisibility
of matter, and the nicety of the senses. And if this were compared with
the effects of a very minute dose of morphia on the whole system, or the
sudden and fatal impression of a single drop of prussic acid, or,
with what comes still nearer, the poisonous influence of an atmosphere
impregnated with invisible malaria, we should find in each of these
examples an evidence of the degree to which nature, in some few
instances, concentrates powerful qualities in minute or subtile forms of
matter. But if a man comes to me with a pestle and mortar in his hand,
and tells me that he will take a little speck of some substance which
nobody ever thought to have any smell at all, as, for instance, a grain
of chalk or of charcoal, and that he will, after an hour or two of
rubbing and scraping, develop in a portion of it an odor which, if the
whole grain were used, would be capable of pervading an apartment, a
house, a village, a province, an empire, nay, the entire atmosphere of
this broad planet upon which we tread; and that from each of fifty or
sixty substances he can in this way develop a distinct and hitherto
unknown odor: and if he tries to show that all this is rendered quite
reasonable by the analogy of musk and roses, I shall certainly be
justified in considering him incapable of reasoning, and beyond the
reach of my argument. What if, instead of this, he professes to develop
new and wonderful medicinal powers from the same speck of chalk or
charcoal, in such proportions as would impregnate every pond, lake,
river, sea, and ocean of our globe, and appeals to the same analogy in
favor of the probability of his assertion.
All this may be true, notwithstanding these considerations. But so
extraordinary would be the fact, that a single atom of substances which
a child might swallow without harm by the teaspoonful could, by an easy
mechanical process, be made to develop such inconceivable powers, that
nothing but the strictest agreement of the most cautious experimenters,
secured by every guaranty that they were honest and faithful, appealing
to repeated experiments in public, with every precaution to guard
against error, and with the most plain and peremptory results, should
induce us to lend any credence to such pretensions.
The third doctrine, that Psora, the other name of which you remember, is
the cause of the great majority of chronic diseases, is a startling
one, to say the least. That an affection always recognized as a
very unpleasant personal companion, but generally regarded as a
mere temporary incommodity, readily yielding to treatment in those
unfortunate enough to suffer from it, and hardly known among the
better classes of society, should be all at once found out by a German
physician to be the great scourge of mankind, the cause of their
severest bodily and mental calamities, cancer and consumption, idiocy
and madness, must excite our unqualified surprise. And when the
originator of this singular truth ascribes, as in the page now open
before me, the declining health of a disgraced courtier, the chronic
malady of a bereaved mother, even the melancholy of the love-sick
and slighted maiden, to nothing more nor less than the insignificant,
unseemly, and almost unmentionable ITCH, does it not seem as if the
very soil upon which we stand were dissolving into chaos, over the
earthquake-heaving of discovery?
And when one man claims to have established these three independent
truths, which are about as remote from each other as the discovery
of the law of gravitation, the invention of printing, and that of the
mariner's compass, unless the facts in their favor are overwhelming
and unanimous, the question naturally arises, Is not this man deceiving
himself, or trying to deceive others?
I proceed to examine the proofs of the leading ideas of Hahnemann and
his school.
In order to show the axiom, similia similibus curantur (or like is cured
by like), to be the basis of the healing art,--“the sole law of nature
in therapeutics,”--it is necessary,
1. That the symptoms produced by drugs in healthy persons should be
faithfully studied and recorded.
2. That drugs should be shown to be always capable of curing those
diseases most like their own symptoms.
3. That remedies should be shown not to cure diseases when they do not
produce symptoms resembling those presented in these diseases.
1. The effects of drugs upon healthy persons have been studied by
Hahnemann and his associates. Their results were made known in his
Materia Medica, a work in three large volumes in the French translation,
published about eight years ago. The mode of experimentation appears to
have been, to take the substance on trial, either in common or minute
doses, and then to set down every little sensation, every little
movement of mind or body, which occurred within many succeeding hours
or days, as being produced solely by the substance employed. When I have
enumerated some of the symptoms attributed to the power of the drugs
taken, you will be able to judge how much value is to be ascribed to the
assertions of such observers.
The following list was taken literally from the Materia Medica of
Hahnemann, by my friend M. Vernois, for whose accuracy I am willing
to be responsible. He has given seven pages of these symptoms, not
selected, but taken at hazard from the French translation of the work. I
shall be very brief in my citations.
“After stooping some time, sense of painful weight about the head upon
resuming the erect posture.”
“An itching, tickling sensation at the outer edge of the palm of the
left hand, which obliges the person to scratch.” The medicine was
acetate of lime, and as the action of the globule taken is said to last
twenty-eight days, you may judge how many such symptoms as the last
might be supposed to happen.
Among the symptoms attributed to muriatic acid are these: a catarrh,
sighing, pimples; “after having written a long time with the back a
little bent over, violent pain in the back and shoulder-blades, as
if from a strain,”--“dreams which are not remembered,--disposition to
mental dejection,--wakefulness before and after midnight.”
I might extend this catalogue almost indefinitely. I have not cited
these specimens with any view to exciting a sense of the ridiculous,
which many others of those mentioned would not fail to do, but to show
that the common accidents of sensation, the little bodily inconveniences
to which all of us are subject, are seriously and systematically
ascribed to whatever medicine may have been exhibited, even in the
minute doses I have mentioned, whole days or weeks previously.
To these are added all the symptoms ever said by anybody, whether
deserving confidence or not, as I shall hereafter illustrate, to be
produced by the substance in question.
The effects of sixty-four medicinal substances, ascertained by one
or both of these methods, are enumerated in the Materia Medica
of Hahnemann, which may be considered as the basis of practical
Homoeopathy. In the Manual of Jahr, which is the common guide, so far as
I know, of those who practise Homoeopathy in these regions, two hundred
remedies are enumerated, many of which, however, have never been
employed in practice. In at least one edition there were no means of
distinguishing those which had been tried upon the sick from the others.
It is true that marks have been added in the edition employed here,
which serve to distinguish them; but what are we to think of a standard
practical author on Materia Medica, who at one time omits to designate
the proper doses of his remedies, and at another to let us have any
means of knowing whether a remedy has ever been tried or not, while
he is recommending its employment in the most critical and threatening
diseases?