HINTS FOR BEGINNERS.
I AM a fighting homoeopath and I received my homoeopathic fighting spirit in my mothers womb. My mother had Asiatic Cholera in England just before I was born. Her life was given up by her allopathic attendant. It was homoeopathy, administered as a last hope, which saved her life and the maternal impressions were inherited by me.
By fighting she eventually converted the whole of her family and very many others to homoeopathy. Dr. Thomas Hayle, senior, saviour of my mother, and our subsequent family physician, instructed my mother how to apply homoeopathy to the various family ailments, selecting for her use a large mahogany brass- bound box of medicines and of course a Family Manual of Homoeopathy, for this elderly doctor soon became so busy that he could not get round to every aching tummy, headache and chill.
There were no motors in those Victorian days.
My first personal and remembered lesson in homoeopathy was when I turned out the contents of several bottles of tiny sugar pills on to the tiled hall floor of my grandfathers house, where I was caught licking them up indiscriminately, playing at cows eating some fodder. The lesson learned then, and it is valuable to every mother, was that homoeopathic remedies are harmless if taken by mistake.
When I was sixteen and a half years of age I went to New Zealand, armed with many homoeopathic remedies, which I used with some measure of success. That was in 1878. I am now seventy-two and often pass for under sixty, thanks to Homoeopathy. Before leaving home my mother gave me a case of some fifty odd homoeopathic remedies and told me how to use them. Besides she gave me a second case of larger bottles of medicines for external uses and she coached me for weeks prior to my sailing. It was an interesting game, never to forgotten, and YOU CAN DO LIKEWISE.
During my life in New Zealand, living thirty miles away from a town, I was always being called on for some of my drops or pills, and you can understand my difficulties when I tell you that I practically never spoke to my patients. I did not know for whom I was prescriBing. The cases were generally of too delicate a nature. Therefore “consultation” with a boy of seventeen or 3eighteen was quite out of the question. Yet those people were satisfied. I “Prescribed” purely on the symptoms given to me at second-hand, having often to instruct people how to get hold of the particular symptoms peculiar to the unknown patients.
I shall never forget the steady run on my bottle of Pulsatilla, and how secretly, and with some misgiving, I refilled my half depleted bottle of this drug, fearing that I should destroy its efficacy. I had been taught how to “sucuss”, that is to shake hard and thoroughly, after adding my pure dispensing alcohol, with which I was well supplied.
I had been taught the Hahnemannian method of dilution and succussion and I probably shook all those bottles ten times the requisite pharmaceutical average, to make sure. However, the potency of any one drug I diluted was raised but a decimal point or two, though it seemed to me at that time a terrible lot.
I soon learned by actual experience that it was not the strength of the drug which cured, but its right selection, according to the homoeopathic law. The run on Pulsatilla was mostly for arrested menstruation of travellers and emigrants. Reports of cured patients spread my fame and made me bolder. successes made me a stronger homoeopath and I determined to become a homoeopathic doctor as soon as I saw my way clear. I studied homoeopathy as an interesting “game” ever since.
This work taught me and should teach my readers that if “disease symptoms”, however peculiar, are carefully matched with “drug symptoms”, as recorded in our precious books, CURE MUST ENSUE. TRY IT – as a game, and if you fear to try on your family, try it on the dog, cat, cow, or horse.
Readers must not sneer, or be incredulous. Facts are facts. I assert that more than half of the homoeopathic prescriptions are made by lay believers who follow the policy of “Heal Thyself.”.
I have compiled two International Homoeopathic Directories, in a purely honorary capacity. Whilst working on the 1931 edition, I found that there were only some thirty-five homoeopathic doctors in Holland, whilst in that country there were over 1,200 accredited licensed chemists selling homoeopathic medicines.
This proves that thousand, nay ten thousands, of lay adherents of Homoeopathy in Holland are prescribing satisfactorily and successfully for themselves and their friends when professional aid is not at hand. In many other countries I found that the number of our homoeopathic chemists far outnumbered that of homoeopathic doctors.
What does this convey to the world? That there is a huge clientele awaiting the advent of more doctors who practise the new art of healing. This clientele demands homoeopathy and nothing else. I can imagine many orthodox doctors saying- “What rubbish! How can the Laity diagnose?” I have said nothing about “diagnosis” so far, yet it seems to me that I have read that the late Sir William Osler (Regius Prof. of Medicine at Oxford, and formerly of McGill Medical College, Canada, and before that of Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore), stated that forty-five percent of difficult diagnoses are wrong, and that Dr. Richard Cabot, head of Harvard University, U.S.A., has put this percentage of diagnostic errors in different cases down as high as FIFTY-FIVE PER CENT and, still quoting Cabot, “notwithstanding all the known instruments of precision,” all these errors being learned at post mortems, which the laity naturally shy at, believe it or not.
Treatment requires diagnosis! We homoeopaths do not neglect this matter, but we prefer to base our prescriptions on the actual symptoms given us by the individual patient, at the moment, rather than to prescribe for the name of a disease, which has such an element of error. If the orthodox diagnosis is wrong, what becomes of the prescription?.
Remember many of our hardest cases have been to from two, eight or more allopathic practitioners and specialists. Such cases drift to homoeopathy as a last chance. (Read MR. J. E. Barkers Miracles of Healing and learn all about this “last chance”).
Personally I would rather be treated by a lay man or woman, of average intelligence, armed with a good homoeopathic manual and our special drugs, had I, let us say, pneumonia, than by any orthodox practitioner armed with his allopathic drugs, even it he was a Harley Street specialist.
In early days, when I was very young, I can remember most startling cures, without speaking to, or even knowing, the patients. To illustrate:.
One case was a young woman who had been in the hands of many orthodox doctors, who became so violent at her menstrual periods that at times she whipped everybody out of her home, screaming with her excruciating neuralgic pains (this was the “keynote” of the case). In fact she acted as one possessed. Yet four or six drops of Xanthoxylum fraxinum cured that case quickly and permanently! Was it chance or coincidence? I dont think so, nor did her people, besides which the remedy was chosen “according to Law”. How was this? Study homoeopathy and you can easily do just such miracles.
