In conclusion, we may assume the following points to be established by induction and by direct experience:
In order to obtain an exhaustive proving:
1. We must prove the drug both in dilutions and in massive doses.
2. The proving should be commenced with dilutions: and high dilutions should be employed until satisfactory evidence is obtained that the prover is not susceptible to their action. We thus obtain one of the unknown quantities of our problem, viz., the measure of the susceptibility of the prover.
3. Where a keen susceptibility is found to exist, the greatest care must be exercised to avoid blunting or perverting it. With this view, repeated experiments should be made at long intervals, with high potencies, until no new varieties of symptoms are evoked. Then, after a long period of non-medication, the prover should take lower potencies and then small doses of the crude substance repeated at intervals, and finally after another long period of repose, large doses of crude substance. A thorough proving after this fashion may require years for its completion-but it will have an advantage over most of our recent provings, in the fact that it will be thorough, and that it will be of permanent and certain use to the practitioner.
4. In proving with dilutions, as well as with massive doses, a long period of time should be occupied in testing each preparation, in order that the full effect may be seen in the production of dyscrasias, etc.
5. The greatest care should be exercised in verifying symptoms be repeated experiments, in order that “imaginary” symptoms on the hand and chemical and mechanical symptoms on the other may be excluded. The fashion, which has become very prevalent of late, of including in the pathogenesis every sensation which occurs during the proving, without distinction or verification-and which may be called the Pre-Raphaelite method of proving-cannot be too strongly rebuked.
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'.