CHRONIC RHEUMATISM by Dr. FORTIER-BERNOVILLE.
When you asked me the other day to prepare this subject of therapeutics, I accepted it without taking into account the difficulties to be overcome and I did not think that an introduction on this subject will be such a delicate problem. I thought that I was competent to answer the question of homoeopathic treatment of chronic rheumatism. Every week I treat a number of rheumatic patients. I treat them with or without success according to the cases; however, i generally get good results, but also like any other doctor, I get some failures, which humiliate me and humiliation is a good quality of a doctor, which checks the momentary exaggerated self-esteem.
Nevertheless, I thought that it was easy to classify and grade the remedies. When I wanted to put down on paper, I was at first surprised to see the difficulty to solve the problem and I asked myself if I would have to write a complete book in order to solve the problem, because if we wanted to study fully the medicines of chronic rheumatism, we would not be able to finish it within this short space. It is a very wide field. On the one hand the remedies proposed by different doctors are numerous and on the other hand the opinions are very different and controversial as to their values. It is difficult to put them in order. Some homoeopathic medicines are very active, the others have questionable value. But the question of doses for many remedies has not yet been solved and above all aetiology and pathology of different forms of chronic rheumatism are hardly yet described, not only in allopathy but also in homoeopathy.
It is true that in homoeopathy we can cure some rheumatic patients whose conditions discouraged the other systems; it is also certain, and we must admit our failures, that sometimes we do not get any result.
It is therefore necessary to try to understand what is chronic rheumatism and how we can treat it. Homoeopathy is a philosophy. Its principal quality is to give to the practitioner “a turn of mind” which is very different from that of the doctors of the other school. We have, as disciples of Hahnemann, some ideas that are as much “supported” as those of biologists, but these ideas are the keys by their general character of fecundity and of clearness, and schematic simplicity. We will have to give to the intuitive genius of Hahnemann some experimental basis as regards psora, sycosis etc.
Those who will follow us will perhaps teach the students who have come to homoeopathy a scheme probably very different from that which we are giving here and which is valuable only for the present.
Bernoville was a major lecturer in homeopathy, and he was active in Liga Medicorum Homeopathica Internationalis, and a founder of the le Syndicat national des médecins homœopathes français in 1932, and a member of the French Society of Homeopathy, and the Society of Homeopathy in the Rhone.
Fortier-Bernoville wrote several books, including Une etude sur Phosphorus (1930), L'Homoeopathie en Medecine Infantile (1931), his best known Comment guerir par l'Homoeopathie (1929, 1937), and an interesting work on iridology, Introduction a l'etude de l'Iridologie (1932).
With Louis-Alcime Rousseau, he wrote several booklets, including Diseases of Respiratory and Digestive Systems of Children, Diabetes Mellitus, Chronic Rheumatism, treatment of hay fever (1929), The importance of chemistry and toxicology in the indications of Phosphorus (1931), and Homeopathic Medicine for Children (1931). He also wrote several short pamphlets, including What We Must Not Do in Homoeopathy, which discusses the logistics of drainage and how to avoid aggravations.
He was an opponent of Kentian homeopathy and a proponent of drainage and artificial phylectenular autotherapy as well.