These observations of Hahnemann are always incorrectly quoted, and it was always been affirmed by his opponents who have never investigated the history of the discovery of homoeopathy that Hahnemann said that Peruvian bark produces an artificial ague when administered in health. But homoeopathy stands on the principles of the employment against disease of a remedy which has produced similar symptoms in health. It is impossible to produce an artificial ague in healthy persons in the strongest doses of Peruvian bark or of quinine, and it is erroneous to ascribe such teaching to homoeopathy at any time.
In fact, it needs no elaborate explanation, for many patient who have taken a full dose of quinine have had precisely the same symptoms appear as Hahnemann observed, and probably considered buzzing in the ears. For, although the temperature of the body had not at the time been taken by the thermometer, the appearance of cold shivers preceding heat was regarded as characteristic of ague, and Hahnemann had not noted cold shivers as produced by Peruvian bark.
Besides this, Hahnemann was far removed from forming his doctrine on one experiment alone, but carried on his investigation with other remedies, and arrived at the conclusions the one medicine at a time should alone be administered in order to act directly on the disease part and support the healing power of nature, while his contemporaries “sought to relieve congestion, expel, accumulated and inflamed blood, by alternative, resolvents tonics and astringents,” which mode of treatment Hahnemann described as “taking, in a dark wood, a path which ends in a precipice.”
By degrees his labours took definite form for the employment of medicine and in the year 1796 there appeared in Hufeland’s Journal his thesis, which may be taken as the precursor or foundations of the homoeopathy of to-day ” to employ that remedy in a disease which is found from observation to produce the nearest possible resemblance to it when taken in health.”
This, however was not the doctrine of homoeopathy, for until the year 1808 he indicated the method of treatment with the action of drugs proved in health as that of “specific” remedies, specific against supposed entities of disease,, but this gave way to the terms ” Homeopathy” and “Homoeopathic”. It even almost appears as if these terms were in the first place used by his opponents and then accepted by him with the same signification, as with a well known composer the term ‘music of the future” was similarly received.
After hahnemann had prepared his contemporaries by a significant publication adapted to the desired reform, he stepped forth resolutely, and published in 1805 a work in two volumes Fragments de viribus medica menatorum positive, sive in sano corpore observatis, and in Hufeland’s Journal vol. 22, his Medicine of Experience. This last work is the actual forerunner of his Organon of the Healing Art.
In this he enunciated his theory of the action of medicines; that two irritants which have great resemblance to one another cannot exist together in the living body, but that the stronger destroys and expels the weaker, and hence, against the existing unnatural irritant of disease, another disease -producing power of similar action to that the disease exhibits, must be opposed. ‘And for this purpose, in order to know the action of medicine, it is necessary for physician to have them thoroughly investigated by careful proving on a large number of persons in health, and that by this and no other mode could knowledge be obtained of their action.
Thus by the inductive method, is the key discovered, which alone is valuable at he bedside, and which raises treatment with homoeopathic specific remedies to n exact method; here lies the central point of Hahnemann reform while all farther opinion attached to it, although in harmony with the spirit of the times in which he lived, were but secondary or erroneous. As for instance the view he assumed, that by taking a similarly acting medicine a similar medicinal disease, —- an artificial disease is set up in the patient and that it first attacks the locality of the disease and is then easily removed by the organism.
This view completely resembled the neurapathological doctrines of the theoretical physician at the beginning of the century, and if Hahnemann had formed any other he would probably have made a similar concession to the spirit of the times; and in fact he later on changed this opinion, when as seen in the fifth edition of the Organon, he speaks (Aphorism 29) of an increased energy of life- power by means of the simile. And the later declarations is the only one permissible, and is besides, particularly one of our opponents in reference to confirm3d experiments with single remedies.
His doctrine of the “specific ” action of drugs was not apprehended by his contemporaries, for they understood by it, as is understood at the present day by the profession, medicine which are in reputation for treating disease known under assigned names, as, for example, rheumatism of the joints, gout, & c. But with Hahnemann the term does not signify the general application of the name ion old physic, but a something special which is subordinate to the individuality of the case, and on this ground he repudiated the use of names assigned to diseases for, to him, disease was simply life under altered conditions, a disturbance of the equilibrium between the various organs, an abnormal mode of action of the vital functions to which no formal designations can be applied; and so much specific remedy has no influence.
This it is which has been so little understood both by his contemporaries and by the opponents of homoeopathy since his time, for to-day as it was then, the physician who is not homoeopathist finds in diagnosis rather than in cure the chief labour of his calling. Hahnemann truly observed that of the names of disease which were employed at the beginning of the century only a few are still in use; and it may also be noted that many of those which were generally current twenty years ago, and were esteemed scientific are to-day obsolete; similarly will the majority of the terms in the present nomenclature which refer to pathologico-anatomical products be discussed in the future.
And Professor Virchow states in his Efforts for Unity in Scientific Medicine that twenty years ago the pathological system was but a makeshift and superfluous, and in the transactions of the Medical Society of Berlin in 1884, he observed that the well known term Croup has fallen into destitute and that the continence of the employment of the term Diphtheria is only a question of time because a morbid process may have very various causes and by mistake only one of the theses may have suitable treatment. He adds” The pathological system belongs to the past; the system of morbid conditions is the only one possible and Guerin’s demand to aim at aetiological medicine (the doctrine of causes) is entirely justified.
For it diseases is no other that life under changed conditions, then cure signifies no more than the restoration of the usual normal conditions of life or her restoring of the ordinary state by removal of the cause of derangement “. So that the very idea for which Hahnemann so earnestly strove is revived, in oblivion of the fact that the doctrine of an artificial aetiological basis for the mode of treatment is already to be found in his works; that his first offense against recognized medicine was in this respect; and that for seventy years a foundation has existed as the standpoint for medical science as a biologic-medical method of treatment. For in all those cases, be they either medical or surgical, where a palliative is not necessary to mitigate some existing suffering, medicines can do act only on the law discovered and maintained by Hahnemann;and this is wholly independent of the restorative power of nature unaided by medicine, and of the result of the physiological application of remedies, or other non-homoeopathic methods.
Hahnemann did not, however, merely limit himself to stimulating this reform of the theory of medicines, but he also undertook the practical task of proving a series of remedies, sixty-one in number, on himself and his friends. The result of these proving is contained in his Pure Materia Medica, a work in six volumes which appear during the years 1811 to 1821, at the same time that he was engaged as a private teacher in the University of Leipzig; and it is important to note the conditions under which the proving were made :
a. The proving of medicines must only be made on such persons as are bodily and mentally healthy and who have the ability to express themselves clearly.
b. The proving must take place on as many persons as possible of both sexes, and of all ages, and who have very different habits and customs.
c. The state of health of each prover must be thoroughly ascertained by a physician, and especially whether mind and body have the normal balance; and the prover must farther engage, during the continuance of the proving to continue his or her ordinary mode of life.
