CHINA


CHINA symptoms of the homeopathy remedy from Homeopathic Drug Pictures by M.L. Tyler. What are the symptoms of CHINA? Keynote indications and personality traits of CHINA…


Introduction

      THOUGH Hahnemann wrote in his wonderful preface to the Provings of CHINA-Cinchona Bark-Cinchona officinalis-“Excepting opium I know no medicine that has been more and often misused in diseases, and employed to the injury of mankind, than cinchona bark,” yet, it was quinine that revealed Homoeopathy to Hahnemann.

This is how he describes that epoch-making discovery|-

“As long ago as the year 1790 (see W. Cullen’s Materia Medica, Leipzig) I made the first pure trial with cinchona bark upon myself, in reference to its power of exciting intermittent fever. With this first trial broke upon me the dawn that has since brightened into the most brilliant day of the medical art; that it is only in virtue of their power to make the healthy human being ill that medicines can cure morbid states, and, indeed, only such morbid states as are composed of symptoms which the drug to be selected for them can itself produce in similarity on the healthy.

“This is a truth so incontrovertible, so absolutely without exception, that all the venom poured out on it by the members of the medical guild, blinded by their thousand years old prejudices, is powerless to extinguish it; as powerless as were the vituperations launched against Harvey’s immortal discovery of the greater circulation in the human body by Riolan and his crew to destroy the truth revealed by Harvey. These opponents of an inextinguishable truth fought with the same despicable weapons as do to-day the adversaries of the homoeopathic medical doctrine. Like their modern congeners they also refrained from repeating his experiments in a true, careful manner (for fear lest they might be confuted by facts) and confined themselves to abuse, appealing to the great antiquity of their error (for Galen’s predecessors and Galen himself had arbitrarily decided that the arteries contained only spiritual air (.), and that the source of the blood was not in the heart but in the liver), and they cried out, Malo cum Galen errare, quam cum Harveyo esse circulator. This blindness was in those days not more stupid than the blindness of to-day, and the present aimless rancour against homoeopathy which exposes the pernicious rubbish talked about ancient and modern arbitrary maxims and unjustifiable practices, and teaches that it is only by the responses given by nature when questioned that we can with sure prescience change diseases into health rapidly, gently, and permanently.”

He says the ordinary physicians were guided by an utterly false principle: they confirmed the reproach he had so frequently made against them, that they had hitherto sought in traditional opinions, in guesses prompted by false lights, in theoretical maxims and chance ideas what they could and should only find by impartial observations, clear experience, and pure experiment, in a pure science of experience such as medicine from its very nature must be.

He tells us that in his day cinchona bark was regarded as “perfectly innocuous-as a wholesome and universally beneficial medicine in almost all morbid states, especially where debility was observed”: whereas, setting aside all guesswork and traditional unproved opinions, and adopting the method of experiment, he found as with other medicines, that as certainly as it is curative in some kinds of diseases, so surely it can develop the most morbid symptoms of special kind in healthy human: symptoms often of great intensity and long duration, as he shows by the provings. And “thereby, the prevailing delusion of the harmlessness, the childlike mildness and the all-wholesome character of cinchona bark is refuted.”

He tells us that this is one of the most powerful of vegetable medicines. Where it is accurately indicated in a patient suffering from a disease that China is capable of removing, he finds that “one drop of diluted tincture of cinchona bark, which contains a quadrillionth (1/000000,000000,000000,000000th) of a grain of China-power, is a strong (often too strong) dose which can accomplish and cure all alone all that China is capable of doing in the case before us a second dose being rarely, very rarely, required.”

He says, “in the case neither of this nor of any other medicine did a preconceived opinion or an eccentric fancy lead me to this minuteness of dose. No, multiplied experience and faithful observation led me to reduce the dose to such an extent and these smaller, and very smallest doses proved sufficient to effect a complete cure, and that they did not display the violence of larger doses, which tend to delay the cure.”

Again he tells us that, “A very small dose of China acts for hardly a couple of days, but a large dose, such employed in ordinary practice, acts for several weeks, if not got rid of by vomiting or diarrhoea, and thus ejected.”

“If the homoeopathic law be right-as it incontestably is right without any exception, and is derived from pure observation of nature”, viz. “that medicines can only easily, rapidly and permanently cure, where the disease-symptoms match the drug- disease symptoms discovered by the administration of the drug to healthy persons, then we find, on a consideration of the symptoms of China that this medicine is adapted for but few diseases, but that where it is accurately indicated, owing to the immense power of its action, one single, very small dose will often effect a marvellous cure.”

Then Hahnemann defines CURE. “I say cure, and by this I mean a ‘recovery undisturbed by after sufferings.'”

“Have practitioners of the ordinary stamp another, to me unknown idea of what constitutes a cure? will they call cures the suppression by this drug of agues for which bark is unsuited? I know that almost all periodic diseases, and almost all agues, evens such as are not suited for China must be suppressed and lose their periodic character by this powerful drug, administered usually in enormous and oft-repeated doses: but are the poor sufferers thereby really cured? Has not their previous disease undergone a transformation into another and worse disease. Thus, they no longer complain of their paroxysms appearing on certain days and at certain hours; but note the earthy complexion of their puffy faces, the dullness of their eyes! See how oppressed is their breathing, how hard and distended is their epigastrium, how tensely swollen their loins, how miserable their appetite, how perverted their taste, how oppressed and painful their stomachs by all food, how undigested and abnormal their faecal evacuations, how anxious, dreamful, and unrefreshing their sleep! Look how weary, how joyless, how dejected, how irritably sensitive or stupid they are, as they drag themselves about, tormented by a much greater number of ailments than afflicted them in their ague! And how long does not such a china-cachexy often last, in comparison with which death itself were often preferable.

“Is this health? It is not ague, that I readily admit: but confess-and no one case deny it-it certainly is not health. It is another, but a worse disease than ague. It is the china-disease.” And he says, “should the organism, as it sometimes will, recover from this china-disease after many weeks, then the ague (suspended by the superior force of the dissimilar china- disease), returns in an aggravated form, because the organism has been so much deteriorated by the improper treatment then, if the attack be renewed still more energetically with cinchona bark, and continued for a longer time in order to ward off fits, there becomes established a chronic cinchona-cachexy.”

One finds it difficult to stop, but wanders on with sentence after sentence extracted from this delightful and illuminating little preface. But the above picture of what China can do to pervert health, is the exact picture of what China can cure, provided it be administered after the manner of Hahnemann.

But, why stop? Why not go on extracting and epitomizing? for, after all, it is Hahnemann’s Drug-picture of China. Here, as everywhere, it is the exact and absolute precision of the Master that makes the phrasing, at times, somewhat heavy and involved, and, one tries to catch the meaning and simplify, without sacrificing the idea.

And, in regard to DEBILITY, where he found China so useful, and where old school also esteems it, Hahnemann says:-

“How can they ever imagine they can strengthen a sick person whilst he is still suffering from his disease, the source of his weakness? Have they ever seen a patient rapidly cured of his disease by appropriate remedies who failed to recover his strength in the very process of the removal of his disease? These practitioners cannot cure diseases, but they attempt to strengthen these uncured patients with cinchona bark. How can such a stupid idea ever enter their heads? If bark is to make all sick persons strong, active and cheerful, it must needs to be the universal panacea which shall at once deliver all patients from all their maladies. As long as the plague of disease deranges the whole man, consumes his forces and robs him of every feeling of well-being, it is a childish, foolish self-contradictory undertaking to attempt to give such an uncured person strength and activity.”

Margaret Lucy Tyler
Margaret Lucy Tyler, 1875 – 1943, was an English homeopath who was a student of James Tyler Kent. She qualified in medicine in 1903 at the age of 44 and served on the staff of the London Homeopathic Hospital until her death forty years later. Margaret Tyler became one of the most influential homeopaths of all time. Margaret Tyler wrote - How Not to Practice Homeopathy, Homeopathic Drug Pictures, Repertorising with Sir John Weir, Pointers to some Hayfever remedies, Pointers to Common Remedies.