AT this time of year when Congresses and Academic Associations are accustomed to take stock of the intellectual values of their position and prospects it behoves the Homoeopathic body to justify the faith that is in it. The order of the day, now and always, for Homoeopathy is the finer adjustment of remedy to malady. What is the scientific basis of this procedure?.
THE WARRANT OF LOGIC.
Logic has been styled “the grammar of science”; and that intellectual prodigy, John Stuart Mill– facile princeps among logicians — has succinctly stated the Homoeopathic position. “Let the subject of enquiry”, says he, ” be the conditions of health and disease in the human body, and let it be limited to this. Is, or is not, some particular medicament, Mercury for instance, a remedy for the given disease? The case”, says Mill [ Mills Logic, eighth edition. Book III, Art. “Induction”], “is naturally susceptible of the deductive method of investigation: the instrument of deduction alone is adequate to reward the complicated proceeding from this source.”
Then follows this luminous description: “If for instance we try experiments with Mercury upon a person in health, in order to ascertain the general laws of its action on the human body, and then reason from these laws to determine how it will act upon persons affected with a particular disease, this may be a really effective method, but this is deduction”.
But this also is Homoeopathy pure and simple !.
THE MATHEMATICS OF HOMOEOPATHY
“The common basis of all the physical sciences is the mathematical measurement of weight and length and number.” Thus Lord Kelvin. “Homoeopathy in excelsis is the fine adjustment of remedy to malady. But can the essential element in any remedy be adjusted to the essential element in any malady ? Let us see.
That fine adjustment can only be effected by instruments of precision. Those best known in Homoeopathy are the potentizer or dynamisateur for the preparation of potencies. With one of these instruments working day and night it takes about three weeks to prepare the 10,000th potency. These instruments are seen at their best on the Continent, particularly in the productions of Dr. Nebel of Lausanne and Dr. Pierr Schmidt of Geneva.
Another precision instrument is that of Boyd — the Emanometer, which subdivides remedies according to their emanation wavelengths. These results apply to remedies; the equivalent in the emanation of the malady is derived from one or other of the fluids of the body, whose emanation rates are measured in exactly the same ratio as those of remedies. Thus are obtained definite indices for comparison between the emanation response of the body in a given state of disease and that of remedies emanometrically tested in health.
This is a method of precision which requires instruments of precision; it works not with symptoms, which are “end results” but with those underlying processes of disease actually in operation. Actually in practice its working is beyond praise.
Of such instruments of precision there are lamentably few, and there is room for many more — such for instance as those indicative of the degree and kind of internal secretions present in the circulating blood at any time: or the earliest indications of the existence and whereabouts of a precancerous state in any of the tissues.
