And Hahnemann showed, farther, that if we could discover substances having such a specific action, and a law by which we should know just when to apply them, we should have accomplished the much needed reform in medical science.
He appreciated so highly the value of the specifics of which medicine was already in possession, that the consecrated his life to the task of discovering a method of increasing their number and of reducing their use to a system.
In this appreciation of the direction in which alone improvement in the curing of diseases was to be looked for, Hahnemann was anticipated, as I have said, by Bacon, Boyle and Sydenham.
Thus Bacon, in the “advancement of Learning,” after a sweeping condemnation of the unphilosophical method of Galen, says: “A work is wanting upon the cures of reputedly incurable diseases, that physicians of eminence and resolution may be excited and encouraged to pursue the matter as far as the nature of things will permit; since to pronounce diseases to be incurable is to exhibit ignorance and carelessness, as it were, and to screen ignorance from reproach.” And again, “I find a deficiency in receipts of propriety respecting the cure of particular diseases.” Again, “They have no particular medicines which, by a specific property, are adapted to particular diseases. I remember a learned Jew physician who used to say, ‘Your European physicians are like bishops; they have the keys of binding and loosing-nothing more!” It would be of great consequence if physicians eminent for learning and practical skill would compile a work of approved and experienced medicines in particular diseases.”
The learned Boyle, the father of chemistry, who had devoted much time to the study of medicine, says: “I cannot forbear to wish that divers learned physicians were more concerned than they seem to be to advanced the curative part of their profession, without which, three at least, of four other parts, may prove indeed delightful and beneficial to the physician, but will be of very little use to the patient, whose relief is yet the principal end of physic. I had much rather that the physician of any friend of mine should keep his patient, by powerful medicines, from dying, than tell me punctually when he shall die, or show me in the opened carcass why, it is supposed, he lived no longer.”
Again he says, when speaking of the need of specifics: “Finding at every turn that the main thing which does prevail with learned physicians to reject specifics is, that they cannot conceive the distinct manner of the specifics’ working, and think it utterly improbable that such a medicine, which must pass through digestions in the body and be whirled about by the mass of the blood to all the parts, should, respecting the rest, show itself friendly to the brain, for instance, or the kidneys, or fall upon this or that juice or humor rather than any other.
“First, I would demand of these objector a clear and satisfactory, or at least an intelligible explication, of the manner of working of divers other medicaments that do not pass for specifics. For I confess that to me, even many of the vulgar operations of common drugs seem not to have been hitherto intelligibly explained by physicians, who have yet, for ought I have observed, to seek for an account of the manner of how diuretics, sudorifics, etc., perform their operations, etc.
“The same objection that is urged to prove that a specific cannot befriend the kidneys, for example, or the throat rather than any other parts of the body, lies against the obnoxiousness of poisons to this or that determinate part; yet experience manifests that some poisons do respect particular parts of the body without equally or at all sensibly offending the rest; and we see that cantharides, in a certain dose, are noxious to the kidneys and bladder, and quicksilver to the throat and glandules thereabout, in a certain dose, are noxious to the kidneys and bladder, and quicksilver to the throat and glandules thereabout, stramonium to the brain and opium to the animal spirits and genus nervosum.”
(1 Russell, History and Heroes of the Art of Medicine, vol. ii. p. 101; art. “Robert Boyle.”)
Sydenham expresses himself on this subject with his accustomed brevity and directness. Speaking of intermittent fever, he says: “we must do one of two things; we must, by careful and anxious observations of the process by which nature relieves herself of this diseases, draw indications as to the manner by which the incipient fermentation may be promoted and the patient restored to health, or else we must discover a specific. By the latter method, we shall attack the malady directly.”
It may be observed that Sydenham did not hesitate to choose the latter method so soon as the specific virtues of Peruvian bark in intermittent fever were recognized, and that he was the chief means of making the value of this great specific known in England; nor have the profession generally, since his day, been disposed to hesitate in their choice between the Hippocratic and the specific methods of treating this diseases, the two alternative which Sydenham so clearly lays down.
He continues: “by no means do I wish to express myself as if wise and learned physicians were to despair; as if they were to think out no better modes of treatment, and as if they were to throw away the hope of discovering nobler and more potent medicines for accelerating the cure of diseases. So far am I from this that I do not despair of finding out, even myself, some such medicines and some such method of curing.”
These things which Bacon, Boyle and Sydenham point out so forcible as the desiderata of Medicine, which Sydenham did not despair of finding out, yet died without discovering- these “specific medicines,” and this “methodus medendi,” were offered t the profession one hundred years later by Hahnemann.
Dr. Lettson tells us, “the great Sydenham, for all his labors, only gained the sad and unjust recompense of calumny and ignominy, and that from emulation of some of his collegiate brethren and others, whose indignation at length arose to that height that they endeavored to banish him from that illustrious society (the Royal College of Physicians), as guilty of medicines heresy.”
And yet Sydenham only longed for, and looked forward to, the discovery of specifics and of the law of their employment. He was the Moses of the specific method. It was, therefore, in the regular course of historic sequence that Hahnemann, the Joshua of that method, who led the hosts of Aesculapius into the promised land of which the Moses had a glorious vision, should be unsparingly denounced as a heretis and actually banished from every well-regulated society!
This, then, is the antagonism. Hahnemann shows that specifics are to be discovered by ascertaining the effects of drugs upon healthy persons; that they are to be applied by giving to a sick person such a drug as would produce, in the healthy subject, symptoms similar to those of the sick person. He presents this discovery to the profession as some-thing in advance of present knowledge. They refuse to accept or even to test it, and they denounce him for offering it. On which side lies the onus of the antagonism?
But it may be said, however true these statements are as regards the age for which Hahnemann wrote, the scientific progress of the last fifty years has changed all that. It has changed the names of things and little besides in therapeutics. We hear no more, it is true, of “temperaments” and “humors,” of the “animal spirits,” of the “Arcoehus,” but instead, the talk is now of “the dyscrasias,” of “diatheses,” of the “cellular pathology,” of “analogies” and “heterologies.”
There is the same endeavor to draw from a theory of the essential nature of the disease a rational indication of cure, of which Hahnemann exposed the fallacy and impossibility. Indeed, Sir John Forbes affirms, in 1846, “The progress of therapeutics (the cure of diseases) during all the centuries that have elapsed since the days of Hippocrates, has been less than that achieved by the elementary sciences of medicine during the last fifty years. This department of medicine during the last fifty years. This department of medicine must indeed be regarded as yet in its merest infancy.”
It should be clearly understood, and I state it most emphatically, that all expositions of the insufficiency and the chaotic state of the prevalent system of medicine- whether by the outspoken leaders of the Old School, like Forbes, or by Hahnemann and his followers-refer exclusively to the department of therapeutics, the science and art of curing diseases by medicines. In the development of the natural history of the healthy and of the diseased body, that is to say, in the science of physiology and physiological anatomy, and of pathology and pathological anatomy, as well as in the departments of hygiene, surgery, obstetrics and medical chemistry, medicine has fully kept peace with the wonderful progress of scientific knowledge in our day. We profit by the labors of our colleagues in these branches, and accord them full recognition and admiration. But the great end and object of all this, they are profitless to mankind. Now, it the same men who have brought these collateral science to such perfection have been unable to bring therapeutics out of what Forbes calls its present chaos of “merest infancy,” is not the conclusion irresistible that they have not yet got hold of the right clue-of the true philosophy of the science?
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'.