This book comprises of a series of lectures delivered at the New York Homoeopathic Medical College. Stuart Close (1860-1929) was a student of P P Wells and Bernhardt Fincke. This book is one of the clearest statements about the philosophical basis of homoeopathic study ever compiled.
Truth is Life, Mind, Spirit: absolute, infinite and immortal. Organisms in which truth embodies itself are transitory. They change, decay and pass away, but life is continuous. Truth, like the fabled phoenix, burns itself on the altar and arise from its own ashes….
Homoeopathy, as a science, rests fundamentally upon four general principles; Similarity, Contrariety, Proportionality and Infinitesimality, reducible to the universal principle of Homoeosis, or Universal Assimilation. …
Schools of Philosophy like Materialism, Idealism and Substantialism are discussed along with Hahnemann’s approach and view point….
Homoeopathy as a therapeutic method is concerned primarily only with the *morbid vital processes in the living organism, which are perceptibly represented by the symptoms, irrespective of what caused them….
Close discusses the need to treat the man as a whole. He argues that we don’t need specialists who fail to see the patient as a whole….
This classification of the phenomena of disease into miasms, led to the broadest generalization in pathology and etiology that has ever been made, and greatly simplified and elucidated the whole subject….
Natural recoveries following treatment consisting of mere palliation of symptoms should not be mistaken for cures nor falsely paraded as such. A Cure is Always a Result of Art and is Never Brought About by Nature….
It is not against disease that we struggle, but against the causes of disease. The actual causes of disease in the last analysis are from without. They do not exist in the life substance itself….
By susceptibility we mean the general quality or capability of the living organism of receiving impressions; the power to react to stimuli. Susceptibility is one of the fundamental attributes of life….
There is a class of cases which require for their cure, only the correction of faulty habits and the removal of exciting causes. They should be given placebo instead of a remedy….
Hahnemann defines symptoms broadly as, “any manifestation of a deviation from a former state of health, perceptible by the patient, the individuals around him, or the physician.” We have here the basis of the common division of symptoms into two general classes- Subjective and Objective….
The technique of an examination for the purpose of diagnosing the disease is quite different from that of the examination for making the homoeopathic prescription….
The selection of the dose is as much an integral part of the process of making a homoeopathic prescription as the selection of the remedy, and often quite as important. A well selected remedy may fail utterly, or even do injury, because of wrong dosage. …
Struck by the idea of the development of latent powers through what Hahnemann had at first considered merely as dilution, he ceased calling the process : dilution,” and named it “potentization” or “potentiation”…
The theory of the drug potential appears to be a logical corollary of the dynamical theory of life, the law of similars and the law of potentiation. Taken together they make up the great trait of fundamental principles in the Hahnemannian philosophy. …
Every one of homeopathy’s processes, from the conduct of the proving to the making of a curative prescription is governed by the principles of inductive as well as deductive logic….
Dynamism, The Vital Force, Potentiation and the Infinitesimal Dose: Around these three subjects have centered the hottest controversies in the history of homoeopathy; and these are the newly treated subjects in the Sixth Edition of “The Organon.”…