HOMOEOPATHIC TREATMENT OF CANCER by DR. FORTIER-BERNOVILLE.
To patients and even to physicians cancer gives the impression of being the most terrible scourge, which is fatal, pitiless, irremediable as soon as it fixes its signature on the human being. That isn’t always so. Each of the therapeutic methods employed against cancer has really shown itself capable of curing indisputable cases, and even in certain circumstances, though they are rare, one has seen malignant tumors not only remain stationary but even regress and sometimes disappear. However, it is impossible to make use of these facts for the future because of their inconstancy.
The same holds true for classical homoeopathy. Some good homoeopathic practitioners, as well as some empiricists, after having treated several hundred cases of cancer, have been able to boast, with truth, that they have been able to cure some of these cases. We can admit it, even after excluding the doubtful cases or those unproved because of a lacking biopsy. But one cannot depend on these for they are isolated accomplishments.
The property called homoeopathic treatment can be useful in cancer, however, be it to retard the progression of the cancer, be it to palliate against the pains, be it opposed, finally, to the general intoxication, not only in the phase of the confirmed cancer but especially in the pretumoral phase, prophylactic treatment of cancer or the cure of the precancerous state.
However, modern homoeopaths, knowing that it is necessary to add more efficacious arms to their arms to their traditional arsenal, have been orienting themselves for twenty or thirty years in a channel of septic treatment: nosodes, tumor extracts, isotherapy, dilutions of products, various discovered organisms in the cancerous masses, whatever their significance may be (generators of lesions or saprophytes only). Successively, we shall study:
1. The properly called homoeopathic treatment.
2. The different specific and isopathic methods which are associated to homoeopathy.
Bernoville was a major lecturer in homeopathy, and he was active in Liga Medicorum Homeopathica Internationalis, and a founder of the le Syndicat national des médecins homœopathes français in 1932, and a member of the French Society of Homeopathy, and the Society of Homeopathy in the Rhone.
Fortier-Bernoville wrote several books, including Une etude sur Phosphorus (1930), L'Homoeopathie en Medecine Infantile (1931), his best known Comment guerir par l'Homoeopathie (1929, 1937), and an interesting work on iridology, Introduction a l'etude de l'Iridologie (1932).
With Louis-Alcime Rousseau, he wrote several booklets, including Diseases of Respiratory and Digestive Systems of Children, Diabetes Mellitus, Chronic Rheumatism, treatment of hay fever (1929), The importance of chemistry and toxicology in the indications of Phosphorus (1931), and Homeopathic Medicine for Children (1931). He also wrote several short pamphlets, including What We Must Not Do in Homoeopathy, which discusses the logistics of drainage and how to avoid aggravations.
He was an opponent of Kentian homeopathy and a proponent of drainage and artificial phylectenular autotherapy as well.