Disease products for the cure of the same disease? Again, unconscious homoeopathy; and again, dating from Hahnemann. He discussed them – were they homoeopathy or isopathy? “The cure in such cases,” he asserts, “is homoeopathy…… it is the application of absolute simillimum to simillimum…… the administration of a highly potentized and altered miasm to a patient.” (By miasm, Hahnemann means germ-disease.)
Hahnemann says that homoeopathic prescribing “is the only correct, direct means of cure, as it is only possible to draw one straight line between two given points”.
It is true that, in medical conceptions, and even practice, the two schools are slowly, yet surely, converging. Yet the straight line remains straight, and the approach is all on the other side.
Led by restless energy, by ambition, by daring experimentation, but unguided by law, men stray into devious paths, where there is much science but little art, much treating and little healing.
A university professor said to me, “I don’t know what is going to happen to our students. We are teaching them all wrong. What we want is men of the old type of physician, who sees the patient”.
This feeling is voiced in a little article by “A Physician” entitled, “Are Doctors too Clever?”
The author says that the wisest and most experienced heads in the medical world are seriously concerned with the fact that doctors have acquired too much knowledge. As much of it as can be pumped into each student for five years and then he is let loose to cope with this mass of facts, which he fears to apply. So he falls back on a specialist for this, another for that, till his patients, or rather little bits of them, are treated not by one man, but by a committee of experts. Where is all this leading us? he asks. We are treating diseases, sometimes only separate bits of disease, instead of treating patients. We are dividing the body into water-tight compartments, forgetting that patients are sick and suffering fellow creatures. In our dependence on tests and apparatus, we are losing personality and insight – even the skill of finger and eye – for which our predecessors were famous. Only the other day at Guy’s Hospital, at the centenary of Richard Bright, Dr. Thayer, Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the John Hopkins University, Baltimore, spoke of this tendency. He said, “The increase of our knowledge and technical skill had brought it about that men might devote a whole career to the practice of specialities of surprisingly limited boundaries, specialities which had given rise to a terminology bordering sometimes on the ludicrous.”
It was against this treating diseases, or “bits of diseases”, instead of treating patients, that Hahnemann waged war: “this dividing the body into water-tight compartments, and forgetting that patients are sick and suffering human beings.”
For Hahnemann disease was merely the expression of the suffering vital force appealing through symptoms for its treatment; and where it was a question of treatment he knew no diseases, only sick persons.
And the “symptom-complex” that expressed the totality of the disease had only to be matched with some drug symptom-complex in order to arouse vital reaction.
Sir William Milligan, M.D., recently wrote: “The early stages of disease are often insidious, its symptoms mainly subjective, and its diagnosis difficult from the absence of gross pathological changes. These early changes are, however, just the stages where the physician has the best chance of curing his patient, and of nipping disease in the bud.”
It is here that homoeopathy scores. The old school physician is helpless till the pathological changes appear; he is absolutely at sea. He cannot even diagnose.
But a patient, before actual pathological changes appear, has symptoms. He feels ill. He can tell his deviations from his normal. And the homoeopath, in treating the symptoms that do exist, saves his patient more often than he knows from serious illness.
The late Sir James Mackenzie also contended for the fact that the patient himself is our problem. He is a very cosmos in himself, unlike any other human being that exists. His reactions and response to stimuli, whether of drug or of disease, are of special interest and importance. Diagnosis must go deeper than the mere proximate causation – deeper than those previous conditions which have permitted the disease – deep down into the hidden life-activities, with which curative response is indissolubly bound up.
Much of Mackenzie’s work might have been written by Hahnemann. He, with Hahnemann, says, “What is important to us is the unusual, the unexpected in the patient’s reaction to stimuli, external or internal, mental or physical, connected or not with disease, as giving us some inkling of the inner and deeper workings of life”.
Hahnemann says, “The more prominent, uncommon and peculiar characteristic features of the case should be especially, and almost exclusively, noted: for these in particular should bear the closest similitude to the symptoms of the desired medicine, if that is to cure”.
Papers to be read in our Section will deal with various points in homoeopathic prescribing, but I will run briefly through the subject. It is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, what is involved in PRESCRIBING, AS LAID DOWN BY HAHNEMANN.
First, and most important, the remedy.
Dr. Tyler will go more fully into TAKING THE CASE, with DIFFERENT WAYS OF FINDING THE REMEDY. But I must say a few words here.
Why do we bother so much about General Symptoms (or Generals,) the patient’s reactions as a whole (not bits of him) to such conditions as heat and cold, damp and dry, thunder, times of day and night, special hours and such other conditions?
Because no two of us are alike in regard to these things, even when suffering from the same malady.
It is useless to diagnose “rheumatism” and then prescribe a rheumatic remedy.
A “rheumatic” patient limps in, “Doctor it’s one of my bad days. It’s raining.” A second follows with “I’am fine to-day. Look! my joints are free, and I’ve no pain; I’am always like when it’s pouring.”
Rhus tox. and Causticum are “rheumatic remedies”. But Rhus will never help the man who is worse in dry weather, not will Causticum the man who is worse in wet. These two drugs may affect the same tissues, but they will not cure the same patients.
Therefore such symptoms, if well marked, are important guides in the choice of the remedy.
Take thunder again. Some of us are ill in a thunderstorm. Many know hours before the storm bursts. Dr. Wheeler suggests that this effect may be chemical. It is very real. Shock and fear, as we know, alter secretions, perhaps by liberating auto- toxins. The milk of a nursing mother, under stress of emotion, poisons her babe. A man who had been farming said, “One night strange dogs broke into the fold and frightened and worried the sheep. We found them all huddled together in terror in the morning. It was curious, but all the lambs were ill for days afterwards-scoured.”
But cow’s milk in the dairy is soured in thundery weather; and, anyway, thunder may have to be reckoned with in the make-up of a patient.
The strange symptoms of remedies – and of patients – have met with a certain amount of derision and incredulity. But they are very real; and they get, from time to time, outside confirmation.
Effects of the moon are among these. A brigadier who was with `Kitchener in his advance on Khartoum says, “Certain ordinary, well-conducted Egyptian and Sudanese soldiers periodically break out into frenzied madness about the time of full moon, and in a day or two become absolutely rational again.” Again, Dr. Lindsay, of Paraguay, writing to the British Medical Journal, in regard to the tropical full moon, says that it has such a powerful effect upon all forms of life, that towards and during full moon, the nervously disposed require to take greater care of themselves, and keep themselves under greater restraint. Epileptics, lunatics and alcoholics all have their conditions aggravated during full moon.
Time aggravations are among our valuable symptoms. They are very definite.
Arsenicum…… 1 a.m.
Kali carb……. 2-3 a.m.
Nat. sulph……. 4 a.m.
Chamomilla…… 9 a.m.
Nat. mur……. 10 a.m.
Sulph……. 11 a.m.
Belladonna…… 3 p.m.
Lycopodium…… 4, or 4-8 p.m.
and many others.
But not only people, flowers also have their definite hours of activity and fragrance. So much so that gardens have been planted in such a way as to make a floral clock, where each flower, opening at its own particular hour, tells the time.
The day’s eye uncloses its petals with the break of day. The evening primrose opens about 6 or 7 p.m. Cactus grandiflorus, the night-blooming cereus, about midnight, at which time many of its symptoms are worse; the scarlet pimpernel at mid-day, and so on.
Remedies, to be useful, have to fit not only the disease, but this individual with the disease.
A man wants to suit of clothes. It is not enough to phone a tailor, “I want a suit of clothes for a man.” It would be quite easy if we only needed to say, “I want a remedy for vomiting – for bronchitis”, as if that were all to it.
Weir received his medical education first at Glasgow University MB ChB 1907, and then on a sabbatical year in Chicago under the tutelage of Dr James Tyler Kent of Hering Medical College during 1908-9. Weir reputedly first learned of homeopathy through his contact with Dr Robert Gibson Miller.
John Weir wrote- Some of the Outstanding Homeopathic Remedies for Acute Conditions with Margaret Tyler, Homeopathy and its Importance in Treatment of Chronic Disease, The Trend of Modern Medicine, The Science and Art of Homeopathy, Brit Homeo Jnl, The Present Day Attitude of the Medical Profession Towards Homeopathy, Brit Homeo Jnl XVI, 1926, p.212ff, Homeopathy: a System of Therapeutics, The Hahnemann Convalescent Home, Bournemouth, Brit Homeo Jnl 20, 1931, 200-201, Homeopathy an Explanation of its Principles, British Homeopathy During the Last 100 Years, Brit Homeo Jnl 23, 1932: etc