d. The temperament and character must be accurately observed, because various medicines largely increase or depress the emotions.
e. After taking each course of medicine, the prover must remain a considerable time under the same regimen, until the action of the medicine be expended.
f. Only those medicines which are prepared according to the instructions given by Hahnemann in his writings are to be employed.
On reading the provings in the named work in appears remarkable how technical medical terms are carefully avoided. It is written in honest German. Hahnemann was not satisfied to state that a remedy produced the symptoms of inflammation of the lungs& c., but he noted conscientiously every symptoms which appeared after medicinal substances had been taken into the human organism. No subjective symptoms complained of by a prover failed appear in the list; and their appearance in order of time is carefully noted.
The number of single symptoms, especially when proved on a large number of persons, is therefore very important and to the beginning in studying the provings, extremely difficult in fact, so much so as to appear almost impossible. There are those who have formed only a superficial acquaintance with homoeopathy to whom subjective symptoms ascribed to definite localities, especially if they relate to the mental emotions always appear stranger, but it should be remembered that Hahnemann pursued a practical design in this provings – that the physician practicing according to his method should not fluctuate, as in the old school, with the ever varying views of diagnosis.
Some of the provings of to-day are of an additional character; we are endowed with registration of the temperature, of the wave of American physician;and it is desires to add the pathological condition of the bodies of poisoned animals & c., In this form it now appears acceptable to many non-homoeopathic physicians, but the next generation may be similarly dissatisfied with it as several of the physicians of the present day are dissatisfied with the labours of Hahnemann, for very many biological questions cannot at the present time be thoroughly answered, because of the yet very imperfect foundations of the majority of the science auxiliary to medicine.
The thread is well in hand but the complete connection fails. Pictures of homoeopathic provings such as non- homoeopathist imagines are rational and authentic models, have either no value, or at the best but a very slight one; for the detailed primary action in wanting, and the secondary action with its pathological changes in various organs of the poisoned animals under investigation, and which are deemed so essential to the experimentalist, cannot be the single thread for the treatment of disease. We teach for instance, that the process of degeneration of the kidneys in chronic phosphorus and arsenic poisonings cannot be distinguished from one another; but phosphorus and arsenic are very different bodies, and it can occur to no intelligent physician to confound them clinically, and this is the case with regard to many other remedies.
With respect to the Hahnemannian provings, Dr. Schlegel, in his Knowledge and Power of Modern Medicine says,” Here we find the uninterrupted voice of nature carefully and honestly sought: these are the disordered manifestations of life, in all their infinite varieties of action, at last recorded with precision and certainty;… these complaints of the patient, speak they ever so loudly are excluded from the nomenclature of the physician, and whatever sympathy he may feel, it is without practical result… for he, the allopathic practitioner; knows not what purpose it would serve to listen to objective symptoms; he is prepared if he knows that he has a case of acute bronchial catarrh before him in the first stage; but it is immaterial to him whether the cough comes on in the open air or in a warm room, whether the aggravation occurs in the morning or evening, whether chilliness or subjective heat is present or what any accompanying subjective symptoms may enact at any time in the processes of organic life… the attacks of pain which may have appeared with such disagreeable certainly at three o’clock in the morning, and the violent burning sensations in the region at the back of the left hip, are to him simply neuralgia, just as any tearing pain in the right half of the jaw, increasing to desperation in the evening, and accompanied by heat of the head and dryness teeth.
The typical character of pains is taken as indicating quinine, then a narcotic, or the method is varied by acting on the entire body with a Turkish bath, or through a powerful derivative, or various manipulation which stand in no kind relationship to the nature of the disease itself but are only employed on the organism is general”. Can such empiric treatment deserve the name science? The provings of Hahnemann furnish the relation of certain medicinal substances to the various structures action, the form in which they are presented by Hahnemann may at first appear impracticable, but it is not actually so, for only on this basis is it possible to effect a positive cure of the various derangement to which we are subject- to form, as Professor von Bakody observe, an exact system of biological medicine; and palliative cases do not enter into the questions, and hence it occurs that many educated laymen who have studied and made use of homoeopathy, can often, in places where homeopathic professional aid is not obtainable, do better with homoeopathic remedies in acute cases, after the allopathic practitioner has pronounced on the nature of the complaint, than can the allopathic doctor himself.
Nothing could show more forcibly than this how deep a hold Homoeopathy has with the people. Hahnemann’s views of his contemporaries in respect to treatment still unfortunately hold good of the current practice of to-day. He expressed this in the second edition of his Pure Materia Medica, “The ordinary medical world knows no better than to write compound prescriptions; they are very imperfectly acquainted with the individual action of the drugs when given by themselves, and far more so when in combination, not withstanding the supposed scientific arrangement of the several ingredients of a prescription. And in this routine practice they are content to continue, without attempting to find out what is possible with single remedies.
The employment of one medicine at a time also brought about the emancipation of Hahnemann from being at the mercy of the druggists, and led to the discovery of the dose of homoeopathy. At first, in selecting the one drug on the law of likes, he employed rather large doses, such as are common in the old system, but he learned by experience that these doses caused a primary aggravation of the disorder, so that he was compelled to gradually diminish them. He says respecting it in his Pure Materia Medica: ” If a dose of a tenth of a grain of arsenic is in many cases dangerous, must not the quantity be diminished so that even, if necessary, only a thousandth of a grain is administered?… If now arsenic like many other powerful drugs, can by subdivision be rendered no longer dangerous to man one has only to find how small the dose must be to do not injury, while it is yet large enough to completely carry out its action as a curative remedy in suitable cases of disease”.
This subdivision of doses led him to a very ingenious method, that of triturating solids thoroughly in the proportion of one part to ninety- nine of sugar of milk, so that one grain of the trituration contains one hundredth was taken and rubbed up with ninety-nine more of sugar of milk, forming the second trituration; and fluid remedies he mixed with spirits of wine in the same proportions. Through the application of small doses in this manner he obtained the remarkable result that many medicaments, especially if they underwent farther dilution in a non-medicinal vehicle, as sugar of milk or spirits of wine, suffered no weakening of power of action when administered in disease on the law of similars, and these preparations he hence named Potencies.
The cause of this development of power he believed must be sought in the powerful agitation of the bottles and their contents in the preparations of these potencies, and homeopathy has hence undergone many attacks, having been declared unreasonable or that no medicine at all can be present in the higher potencies. The opponents of homoeopathy reason from mathematical and chemical grounds; homoeopathists appeal to their experience with these potencies at the bedsides. To-day we know from physics, mathematics and physiology that attenuation of substances is not necessarily synonymous with loss of power.
Dr. Doppler, professor of Physics, says, “Before this supposed insignificance can be banished to the realm of chimeras, the unity which is thereby supposed to he destroyed must be demonstrated. With what right can the action of medicines in the body be limited by their weight, and not much more according to the extent of their effective surface? Under the physical surface of a body, in opposition to the mathematical, one understands the contents of all the molecules of that body, which are necessarily surrounded with other molecules; so that bodies which are in any manner divided, must gain important increase of surface, because more molecules, which were previously in the interior of the mass, in contact with the surrounding portions of the mass, are brought forth and form a part of the new surface. And it is similarly evident that several bodies of the same kind which previously formed a whole at least so far as intimate contact of their particles, where every intervening substances is conceived to be absent, must suffer loss presentation of their mutual surface, so that it is evident on due reflection that the collective whole of the surface is necessarily increased in greater proportions as the diameter of single parts is diminished. The material being thus rendered more efficacious, the particles must then be kept in this state of separation, and this can hardly be effected in any other manner than by mingling with a foreign body, such as sugar of milk, as a medium, and then triturating as at first, and this vehicle must be mixed in adequate quantity.” It is also well known that already in the last century three celebrated mathematicians, d’Alembert, maupertius and Euler discovered, through the differential calculus, the economic law of nature from which it is found that she at all times and everywhere works with the smallest quantities; and it is by similarly reckoning by means of infinitesimal quantities that the greatest problems in applied mathematics, astronomy, & c., are solved.
