But Hahnemann was not made of the stuff that could compromise, for personal ease and prosperity, the charter that God had given him for the benefit of the race. He refused to give up one particle of anything which he deemed essential to the purity and perfectness of his system, and so he has left it to us, pure and perfect!
Let us remember his example when prospects of ease and consideration, and of the cessation of strife for the truth, tempt us to compromise unworthily with any portion of the Old School of medicine.
For there are those among us, as there are men in other walks of life, who, for the sake of what they all peace and union, would join hands with what they known to be false! aye, even though to do it, they should have to “cut off the fanatics,” who adhere strictly to Hahnemann, to leave the “brains” of their system “out in the cold.”
This is the origin and the personal history of the antagonism between Homoeopathy and the dominant school of medicine. Hahnemann showed the imperfections of the current methods. Nobody disproved what he said. Everybody agreed with him and everybody sighed for something better. He discovered something better and offered it to his colleagues, with demonstration of its value; he begged them to investigate it; and in case they should find it better than the old method, to use if for the good of mankind, and give God the glory! Then, with one accord, they denounced him as as a vile impostor, and chased him from their midst, nor have they yet ceased to heap ignominy on his name!
I may be objected that I have not stated the whole grounds of the opposition of the Old School to Homoeopathy, inasmuch as I have said nothing about the “little doses.”
It this true, it would not alter the bearings of the case, because the doctrine of the “little doses,” like all the rest of Hahnemann’s method, was offered to the professions, to be by them submitted to the test of experience, by which, like all the rest, it should stand or fall. But, in point of fact, Hahnemann came very slowly to see the necessity of giving small doses when he prescribed according to the law of Homoeopathy; and he did not express himself authoritatively upon this subject until long after the opposition to him and the prosecutions in the name of the apothecaries were in full blast! Therefore, this opposition could not have originated in the doctrine of the dose.
Nor is the question of the dose at all essential to the experiments which Hahnemann invited his professional brethren to make for the purpose of testing his system. Intelligent experiments with doses of ordinary size would convince any physician of the truth of the Homoeopathic law; and if he continued the experiments, the inconveniences that he would find to result from the use of such doses would inevitably lead the experimenter, as they led Hahnemann, to continually diminished the dose, until he should become convinced of the truth of Hahnemann’s dogma on this subject also.
This has been the uniform experience of all physicians who have become convinced, through experiment, f the truth of Homoeopathy, and have adopted the method in practice. And the more strictly they conform to Hahnemann’s method in prescribing, the more exactly do they agree with him respecting the dose. The number of these witnesses amounts t-day to many thousands, and their concurrent testimony does not admit of dispute.
Let us now consider this antagonism from a philosophical point of view.
As I have already said, Hahnemann perceived that the prevailing method of treating disease comprised two processes.
One of these processes was what was then, and is still, called the “Rational.” It involved a theory of the cause and essential nature of the disease, and the resort to some expedient which would be likely to remove this supposed cause of the disease, and to bring about a contrary state, and so conduct to health. Of this kind was Galen’s method, which divided diseases into hot, cold, moist and dry; made a similar classification of remedies, and applied to each disease a remedy from a class of the contrary nature. Less glaringly absurd, but in no way different in nature, are the theories which hold that certain diseases, for example, are caused by accumulation of the blood in certain organs, and are to be cured by abstraction of blood; that others depend upon what is imagined to be want of tone, and are to be cured by remedies which are assumed to be tonics; that others are due to a languid state of the “animal spirits,” and are to be encountered by the administration of “stimulants”, etc.
That these were the grounds upon which the prevalent methods, in the generation preceding Hahnemann, were based, is shown by Cullen’s theory of the action of bark, and also by the following passage from “Sydenham on Pleurisy:”
“After attentively considering the various phenomena of this disease, I think it is a fever originating in a proper and peculiar inflammation of the blood, an inflammation by means of which nature deposits the peccant matter in the pleurae. In my treatment, I have the following aim in view: to repress the inflammation of the blood, and to divert those inflamed particles which have made an onset on the lining membrane of the ribs (and which have lit up so much mischief) into their proper outlets. For this reason, my sheet-anchor is blood- letting.”
A modification of this process is that which is known as the Hippocratic method of observing and following the indications of nature; in the words of Sydenham, “watching what method Nature might take, with the intention of subduing symptoms by following in her footsteps.” According to this method, if, in any disease, recovery was preceded by a critical evacuation, such as a copious sweat, this was assumed to be nature’s method, and sudorifics were accordingly resorted to in similar cases.
Now, independently of the fatal objection, that this method would confine our curative power to such diseases as Nature herself is wont to cure by critical discharge, etc., the very diseases, therefore, in which medical aid could be best dispensed with, while it makes no provision at all for such diseases as rarely or never get well of themselves, such as nature never cures by critical discharges, the very cases, therefore, in which there is most need of the intervention of art, Sydenham tells us that the “found that spontaneous sweats often did good.” “But these,” he says, “were very different things from forced ones.” And Hahnemann showed that “in such cases the critical discharges and the recovery were simultaneous; that the discharge was the consequence and announcement rather than the cause of the recovery; and that to infer from such a state of things that we could bring about a cure by inducing an artificial sweat, would be like ringing bells and lighting bonfires to secure a victory instead of a announce one.”
(1 Russell, History and Heroes of the Art of Medicine. “Sydenham”.)
The other process, which Hahnemann perceived to be comprised in the prevailing methods of treatment, was- administering, in the case of a very few diseases, of which fever from marsh miasma may be taken as the most illustrious example, certain remedies which had been discovered to possess, in some unexplained way, a power to cure these diseases. Such remedies had been discovered by the merest accident. No method was known by which others could be discovered: no method had been suggested by which it could be more clearly ascertained and defined for what particular varieties of the diseases in question these “specifics”, as they were called, were especially appropriate.
Hahnemann showed the fallacy of the philosophy on which the “rational” method was based. He showed that, even admitting that accumulations of blood do exist as the “proximate cause” in certain diseased conditions, yet these accumulations cannot be regarded as the essential cause of the disease. On the contrary, that cause must be sought in that force which regulates the circulation and preserves its equilibrium. This force have been set into abnormal action, in order that an accumulation could take place in any particular organs; and, therefore, in the accumulations we see, not the essential cause of the disease, but only one of the results of that cause. To undertake, then, by abstraction of blood to remove a result of the cause, is not to cure the disease by removing the cause, but only to seek to palliate it by carrying away some of its products. He showed, further, that this abnormal condition of one of the dynamic forces, the action of which constitutes the life of the body, is beyond the sphere of our observation. Like the healthy action of these same forces-in a word, like life- it is an ultimate fact, behind which we cannot penetrate, and which, therefore, we cannot study as a cause of disease and seek to remove by direct rational means.
But Hahnemann went farther, and showed that, although we cannot investigate the ultimate nature and causes of those modifications of the dynamic forces of the organism, which are the essential causes of diseased action, and then remove them, as a “rational” method would propose to do, yet that if, while a disease is in full vigor, we administer a remedy which causes a sudden cessation of the morbid action without any abstraction of the fluids or any derivative action whatever, we are then justified in concluding that the remedy we have given has, in some way or other peculiar to itself, reached that force which was in a state of abnormal action, and has so modified it as to bring it back to a condition of normal action; that this remedy has a “specific” effect upon that force under certain conditions; and we draw this conclusion upon the general principle that when an effect ceases we may conclude that the cause has ceased to act.
Dr. Dunham graduated from Columbia University with Honours in 1847. In 1850 he received M.D. degree at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York. While in Dublin, he received a dissecting wound that nearly killed him, but with the aid of homoeopathy he cured himself with Lachesis. He visited various homoeopathic hospitals in Europe and then went to Munster where he stayed with Dr. Boenninghausen and studied the methods of that great master. His works include 'Lectures on Materia Medica' and 'Homoeopathy - Science of Therapeutics'.