Aphorism 4.
He is likewise a preserver of health if he knows the things that damage health and cause disease and how to remove them from persons in health.
Aphorism 5.
Useful to the physician in assisting him to cure are the particulars of the most probable exciting cause of the acute disease, as also the most significant points in the whole history of the chronic disease, to enable him to discover its fundamental cause, which is generally due to a chronic miasms. In these investigations, the ascertainable physical constitution of the patient character, his occupation, mode of living and habits, his social and domestic relations, his age, sexual function, & c., are to be taken into consideration.
Aphorism 6.
The unprejudiced observer-well aware of the futility of transcendental speculations which can receive no confirmations from experience-be his powers of penetration ever so great, takes note of nothing in every individual disease except the change sin the health of the body and of the mind (morbid phenomena, accidents, symptoms) which can be perceived externally by means of the senses; that is to say, he notices only the deviations from the former healthy state of the now disease individual, which are felt by the patient himself, remarked by those around him, and observed by the physician. All these perceptible signs represent the disease in its whole extent, that is, together they form the true and only conceivable portrait of the disease.
Aphorism 7.
Now, as in a disease, from which no manifest exciting or maintaining cause (causa occasionalis) has to be removed, we can perceive nothing but the morbid symptoms, it must regard being had to the possibility of a miasm, and attention paid to the accessory circumstances, Aphorism5) be the symptoms alone by which the disease demands and points to the remedy suited to relieve it-and, moreover, the totality of these its symptoms, of this outwardly reflected picture of the internal essence of the disease, that is, of the affection of the vital force, must be the principal, or the sole means whereby the disease can make known what remedy it requires-the only thing that can determine the choice of the most appropriate remedy-and thus, in a word, the totality of the symptoms must be the principal., indeed the only, thing the physician has to take note of in every case of disease, and to remove by means of his art, in order that it shall be cured and transformed into health.
2.THE LAW.
Aphorism 25. Now, however, in all careful trials, pure experiment, t he sole and infallible oracle of the healing art, teaches us that actually that medicine which, in its action on the healthy human body, has demonstrated its power of producing the great number of symptoms similar to those observable in the case of disease under treatment, does also in does of suitable potency and attenuation, rapidly, radically, and permanently remove the totality of the symptoms of the morbid state, that is to say, the whole disease present, and change it into health; and that all medicines cure, without exception, those disease whose symptoms most nearly resemble their own and leave none of them uncured.
Aphorism 26.
This depends on the following homeopathic law of nature which was sometimes, indeed, vaguely surmised but not hitherto fully recognised, and to which is due every real cure that has ever taken place:-
A weaker dynamic affection is permanently extinguished in the living organism by a stronger one if the latter (whilst differing in kind) is very similar to the former in its manifestations.
Aphorism 27.
The curative power-of medicines, therefore, depends on their symptoms, similar to the disease, but superior to it in strength, so that each individual case of disease is most surely, radically, rapidly and permanently annihilated and removed only by a medicine capable of producing in the human system) in the most similar and complete manner the totality of its symptoms, which at the same time are stronger than the disease.
3.ACUTE AND CHRONIC DISEASES.
Aphorism 72.
“…The diseases to which man is liable are either rapid morbid processes of the abnormally derange vital force, which have a tendency to finish the course more or less quickly, but always in a moderate time-these are termed acute diseases; or they are diseases of such a character that, with small, often imperceptible beginnings, dynamically derange the living organism each in its own peculiar manner, and cause it to deviate from the healthy condition in such a way that the automatic life energy called vital force, whose office it is to preserve the health, only opposes to them at the commencement and enduring their progress imperfect, unsuitable, useless resistance, but is unable of itself to extinguish them, but most helplessly suffer (them to spread and) itself to be ever more and more abnormally deranged, until at length the organism is destroyed; these are termed chronic disease. They are caused by infection from a chronic miasm.”.
