If all diseases are the result of some form or degree of poisoning, then in the last analysis *all curative treatment is antidotal treatment, and cure is accomplished by the use of agents which have the power to antidote or neutralize the poisons and remove their effects.
Physiologically, therapeutically and chemically neutralization is essentially an assimilation.
Since all poisons act pathogenetically on the living organism primarily by virtue of their specific dynamical qualities (as distinguished from their physical and chemical qualities), it follows that the law governing the action of antidotes, if there be such a law, must be a dynamical law. The law of cure appears to be a form or phase of the law of assimilation or reciprocal action, which is dependent upon the law of attraction.
Cure, in the strict sense of the world, can only be accomplished by the use of agents which have the power to neutralize the poisons causing the disease and remove their effects. In other words, all true antidotes, in the medical sense, are physiological or dynamical antidotes, which act specifically according to the physiological or dynamical law of assimilation.
Regular medicine knows no such agents or laws and denies that they exist. From its point of view physiological antidotes are merely” “remedies employed to *combat the symptoms or after effects, and to neutralize the effects of poisons after absorption into the system. As their name implies, *they do not act on the poison themselves chemically, * mechanically, *or otherwise, *and they are not in this sense true antidotes.” (Ref. Handbook of the Medical Sciences.)
Upon this point hinges the whole controversy between homoeopathy and allopathy.
Homoeopathy is based, essentially, upon the law of antidotes, which is found by observation, experiment and clinical demonstration to be the law of mutual action or attraction, expressing the equality and contrariety of action and reaction, as manifested in the living organism by similarity of symptoms, and resulting in physiological and chemical assimilation or neutralization.
Antidotes are commonly divided into three classes, according to their mode of action: 1. Physiological or dynamical; 2, chemical, and 3, mechanical.
Dynamical antidotes, in their crude, state, are themselves poisons of varying degrees of power. An antidote, in the physiological or dynamical sense, is a toxic substance which, by virtue of its dynamical affinity for another toxic substance, has the power to neutralize that substance and remove its effects. This constitutes cure, the only true antidoting, the working principle of which is applicable in the treatment and cure of diseases as well as of poisonings.
Physiological or dynamical antidoting requires that the antidotal substance shall be pathogenically similar to the poison, but opposite in the direction of its action. Action is directly upon the organism and indirectly upon the poison. Physiological antidoting takes place between drugs according to the law of the Repulsion of similars.
“Medicines producing similar symptoms are related to each other and are mutually antidotal in proportion to the degree of their symptom-similarity.” (Boenninghausen.) Hence, the rule, “Let similars be cured (treated) by similars” – *”Similia Similibus Curentur.”
Chemical antidotes act on the poisons themselves rather than against their effects. Their action depends upon their property of uniting chemically with poisonous substances and altering their chemical and physical character. By their use soluble and absorbable substances are converted into insoluble or partly soluble substances, which may then be removed from the body by physical or other means. Their use is restricted to cases in which the poison is known and capable of being directly acted upon chemically. The remaining dynamical effects of the poison, if any, must still be antidoted dynamically.
So-called “mechanical antidotes,” while necessary and useful, do not properly come under the head of antidotes. They are merely means of accomplishing physical expulsion of the poisonous substances from the body, after which dynamical antidotes are required to remove the pathogenetic effects of so much of the poison as has been absorbed, exactly as in cases where chemical antidotes are used.
A true therapeutics, therefore, stands as the connecting link between pathology and pharmacology. Without an adequate therapy, pathology and pharmacology have only an academic interest for students and savants who love to dig curiously into the things of nature. With and adequate and efficient therapeutics they become powerful agencies for benefitting humanity. With a false therapeutics they become a curse to the world through the countless evils of drug addiction, prolonged, perverted and suppressed disease, ruined lives, crippled and mutilated bodies and blasted minds. The shores of time are strewn with pitiful wrecks, victims of false therapeutic systems and methods, “science falsely so-called.”
Science is erected upon a foundation of facts, principles and laws. Science is related, systematized knowledge.
A system, to be scientific, must be capable of including, explaining and using all the facts upon which it is based, Its fundamental law or principle must include and be harmonious with all its subordinate and related laws and principles. Its technic or practical methods must be based directly upon and conform to the principles which it seeks to apply. Ethics, it hardly needs to be said, requires that its representative shall consistently “practice what he preaches.”
A true science of pathology must include and be able to explain all the symptoms of disease – the finer, subjective individual symptoms as well as the general functional, organic and objective changes that occur in disease.
A true science of therapeutics must correspond and connect at every point with its correlated science of pathology, and be capable of adaptation and application to the needs of individual cases of disease.
The identity of the individual must not be lost in the class. A scientific therapeutic system must be broad enough to cover the needs of the individual as well as the class. It will not do to reject one class of basic phenomena (subjective, for example), and attempt to formulate a system upon the remainder.
Therapeutics, as a science exemplified in homoeopathy, rests upon two series of phenomena; the phenomena of diseases and the phenomena of drugs or agents used in the treatment of diseases. These two series of phenomena are connected by a general law. Systematized knowledge of the phenomena of diseases constitutes the science of pathology. Systematized knowledge of the phenomena of drugs constitutes the science of pharmacology. Systematized knowledge of the laws, principles and methods which connect the two sciences constitutes the *science of therapeutics and the effectual use of these in treating and curing the sick constitutes the *art of healing, or applied therapeutics.
In a true science of medicine, pathology, therapeutics, pharmacology and toxicology as well as medical, physiological and pharmaceutical chemistry are fundamentally one, in having for their principal, object the observation, study and treatment of the effects of all agents which act either pathogenically or therapeutically upon the living organism, whether it be in a mechanical, chemical, electrical or dynamical manner.
One fundamental principle underlies them all-the law of reciprocal action or equivalence.
The law of chemical affinity and definite proportions; the law of physiological or dynamical affinity; the law of assimilation; the law of antidotes or the repulsion of similars (upon which is based the theory of cure) are all phases of the universal law of mutual action, which governs every action that occurs in the universe.
Every agent or stimulus, external to the organism, which has the power to excite a vital reaction in the organism, comes legitimately under the universal law and may be applied for therapeutic purposes in accordance therewith, when the corollaries of the law are known.
Pharmaco-therapeutics finally resolves itself into a process of physiological or dynamical antidoting, based upon the law of attraction, affinity or mutual action and governed by the principle of symptom-similarity.
Predisposing, exciting and contributing causes of disease all come to this in the end- that by some condition or combination of conditions they ultimate in the production of a *poison the action of which is the proximate, efficient or specific cause of the reaction of the organism which constitute disease.
Hence, diseases always bear the symptomatic likeness of drugs, or poisons. By mechanical dilution and potentiation poisons may be deprived of their lethal qualities and transformed into healing remedies normally assimilable by the sick organism. Similarity of symptoms is, therefore, the natural guide to the curative remedy, as well as to the true diagnosis of the disease, and comparison of symptoms is the process by which the conclusion is reached.
Dr. Close was born November 24, 1860 and came to study homeopathy after the death of his father in 1879. His mother remarried a homoeopathic physician who turned Close's interests from law to medicine.
His stepfather helped him study the Organon and he attended medical school in California for two years. Finishing his studies at New York Homeopathic College he graduated in 1885. Completing his homeopathic education. Close preceptored with B. Fincke and P. P. Wells.
Setting up practice in Brooklyn, Dr. Close went on to found the Brooklyn Homoeopathic Union in 1897. This group devoted itself to the study of pure Hahnemannian homeopathy.
In 1905 Dr. Close was elected president of the International Hahnemannian Association. He was also the editor of the Department of Homeopathic Philosophy for the Homeopathic Recorder. Dr. Close taught homeopathic philosophy at New York Homeopathic Medical College from 1909-1913.
Dr. Close's lectures at New York Homeopathic were first published in the Homeopathic Recorder and later formed the basis for his masterpiece on homeopathic philosophy, The Genius of Homeopathy.
Dr. Close passed away on June 26, 1929 after a full and productive career in homeopathy.