Reference, in passing, has already been made to the liberality of the veterinary profession in the matter of creeds: this was no mere figure of speech thrown out as a sop to mollify the injured feelings of the allopathic practitioners: I am very happy to say, it is a fact which ten years of active life serves to confirm: during this period, as some of my clients, medical friends, and professional brethren know, I have from time to time, as opportunity offered, reported cases and advocated the cause of Homoeopathy by the use of the pen, and on no occasion have any of my literary efforts been declined by our veterinary journals, the editors of which knowing full well the while what my medical tenets always have been.
How does this compare with the treatment meted out to the many members of the medical profession who have sought to discuss the merits of the homoeopathic system in the Lancet and other similarly conducted medical periodicals? It may then very reasonably be asked, if the veterinary profession and the veterinary journals are so liberal and so pacific in their attitude towards one whose professional sympathies in favour of Homoeopathy are so well understood and accepted, how is it that so few, such an insignificant minority, is found converted to the ranks of Hahnemann’s followers?
I commend it to these who do me the honour of perusing these pages, to answer this question; I confess myself to be unable to answer it satisfactorily. One thing I can state as the result of my ten years’ professional experience, and this is, the fault is not in the system. I have been instrument in making cures as striking and marvellous as any that I have ever heard or read of as attained by the medical profession; and many cases, that under orthodox allopathic treatment have been pronounced hopeless and incurable, have been raised up to ordinary health and usefulness after being treated on strictly homoeopathic lines by myself: therefore I cannot and do not allow for one moment that the members of my profession have any warrant or reason for abstaining from an honest and intelligent investigation of the truth of the homoeopathic law on the ground of insufficient results.
I do believe, however, that, as in some other branches of science, veterinarians have allowed themselves to be unduly biased, without making reasonable personal investigation, by the allopathic members of the medical profession and by the allopathic journals and periodicals: the childish vapourings against Homoeopathy and the virulent diatribes against its followers which formerly used to form a portion of the literary productions of the Lancet and its contemporaries were, in cases that came under my personal observation among professional friends, accepted as affording good reason for taking no trouble to look into a system which was treated so contemptuously by leading authorities, or rather, I should say, by those who were, and are still, looked up to as leading authorities in matters medical by the many who, unhappily for themselves and their reputation, are content to allow any one to think for them rather than expend a little of their own time and a modicum of their own brains in thinking for themselves.
It seems as though the medical profession never could forgive Hahnemann for discovering a law in medicine, and it pleases the members of this liberal (?) profession to contemptuously push aside even the bare possibility of the existence of such a law; indeed, to hear some of the learned magnates of this profession pour out their effusions, one would conclude that drugs generally were a delusion and a snare and that the only scientific study worth a moment’s consideration is concentrated in Bacteriology, and next to that how the living organisms which are included in that science may be combated by certain undefined and extremely variable systems of inoculation, all of which have up to the present time proved futile and not infrequently a great deal worse than useless, as witness the large percentage of deaths due to Pasteur’s so-called anti-rabic inoculations.
This, at the present time, is the fashionable craze among the medicos, and consequently veterinarians seem to think they must follow suit, and act accordingly. It is not to be wondered at then, if poor despised Homoeopathy is allowed to pass unheeded, and that so few trouble to make themselves acquainted with its advantages. In some measure, then, we can account for the apathy of veterinarians towards Homoeopathy.
I now propose to examine the DISADVANTAGES and the ADVANTAGES of the system in its application to the work of the veterinarian, so far as I am able to do so from a personal experience of ten years. The dis- advantages are certainly not very numerous, and there are but few that, given a firm determination to supersede difficulty, cannot be overcome.
The most powerful factor among the hindrances to the more general adoption of the homoeopathic law is IGNORANCE; there is no doubt, whatever, that to thoroughly understand and properly appreciate the real meaning of all that is involved in the word Homoeopathy, demands the most studious, patient, and conscientious enquiry. Only those who have mastered the study are competent to express an opinion upon it, and I am quite confident that there is not one educated homoeopathist who would venture to contradict the assertion: a successful homoeopathist must be a strict precisionist.
Having admitted thus much, is it to be wondered at, that coachmen, grooms, horse-keepers, cattle attendants, shepherds kennel men and the like, from a simple want of knowing what Homoeopathy really means, and from an incapacity to grasp the theory of the system, should look with contempt upon it, when all they ever heard was that it consisted in the administration of minute globules; it is a pardonably natural conclusion for them to arrive at, bearing in mind how from their youth up they have been accustomed to see Aloes administered by the five-drachm bolus and Epsom salts by the pound, the consequences of which are more easily imagined than described.
It may be quite true that poor old Mary Jones who has “for years been eaten up with the rheumatiz” or poor little Nellie Robinson who was “down real bad with the measles,” may have been prescribed for to their unmistakable advantage by some enthusiastic amateur, who, with nothing more than a few globules of Rhus and Belladonna, utterly but to shame the treatment of the local physician, who in his turn sought to convince the too sceptical minds of their friends that it was simply impossible any such rubbish could do any good; and ignorance of the educated only fostered the ignorance of the uneducated, and in this way has ignorance been perpetuated.
This is usually what takes place in the country; in towns and large centres of population where the enlightened homoeopathic physician is in evidence, and the dispensaries and hospitals flourish, matters assume an altogether different phase; there the success of the system is palpable and, as people judge of Homoeopathy by its results, converts are numerous; still, it is not because the system is scientifically understood, and though belief in Homoeopathy is firmly rooted, the public is not generally able to give a scientific reason for the faith that is in it.
It may be said that two degrees of ignorance prevail: first, that which is due to an obstinate and perverse determination to know nothing of the system; this deserve censure because it exists, in the main, among members of the two professions which ought to be the very first to hail any improvement upon the empirical methods of the self-styled orthodox school; and second, a want of knowledge which, while not of the perverse type, is satisfied to judge from the practical standpoint of results only, without wishing to know wherein the real difference between the old and new schools of medicine consists.
This indifference to a true appreciation of the scientific meaning of Homoeopathy places its lay adherents at a great disadvantage, and does much to hinder the spread of truth. The majority of the lay public seems to think that Homoeopathy means infinitesimal doses and nothing more, and entirely overlooks the fact that while allopaths have no guiding principle to go upon in the selection of suitable drugs, homoeopathists endeavour always to prescribe according to the now recognised law of Nature that likes are cured by likes.
Of Course it is a very difficult matter to convince a too credulous public that the noble profession of medicine was, till Hahnemann’s time, floundering in the dark, with nothing more tangible than experience gained by experimentation to trust to, and with no definite principle to go upon in selecting what are proper drugs to administer in particular disease; but so it was, and so it is now, with all who practise other than according to Hahnemann’s principle. The more this is clearly understood the better for all concerned; unfortunately, this want of knowledge serves as a hindrance to many whose common sense must otherwise enable them to discern that the school of medicine–though for the time numerically in the minority–which is guided by a law of Nature and a recognised principle in prescribing for disease, deserves to be better trusted than one that has nothing definite to guide it and which rather plumes itself upon declining to recognise the existence of any fixed law in drug selection for the cure disease.
