How dangerous it is to discuss a questions of science with rhetorical figures!
Dr. C. makes merry over his imagined double-headed monster, for each head of which he provides a club, and he grows happy at the thought that by his two- handed energy he will have destroyed this figurative disease much more quickly than the luckless editor could do it, whom he restricts to the use of a single club to be applied to but one head at a time.
Now, we have always supposed that the efficacy of an armament depended not so much upon the number of efficient weapons as upon the skill with which the weapons existing were used, and one club in a vigorous right hand might do more execution even on a double-headed monster than two clubs even in the hands of our ambidextrous correspondent. But why restrict the monster to the “two-headed” form? If we are to admit the dual or multiple independent co-existence of disease, why not liken it to a centipede, each foot “possessing independent vitality?” With what armament now will our friend cope with his antagonist? Shall he call Briareus in consultation, and arm him with one hundred clubs? We do not believe in the multiple co-existence of disease. Leaving out of view traumatic affections which may supervene during idiopathic sickness, as Drysdale shows, we believe in the unity of disease, and we expect to find one remedy of which the characteristic symptoms cover the whole case.
The figure of the two-headed monster is, therefore, in our view, defective, but, admitting the figure, why must we use clubs at all? In the days when brute force reigned supreme they were well enough. But surely in this day of enlightenment “clubs are not trumps.”
Hercules was the embodiment of brute strength as distinguished from intellectual acuteness and skill. Surely his subjugation of the Lernean Hydra should not serve us as an example in treating disease. We cannot afford to spend so much time as the club treatment requires; for both the experience of Hercules, and that of our Irish friends at Donnybrook Fair, prove that the breaking of heads by clubs is a tedious and uncertain affair. We decline to enter into competition with our friend in the use of his favorite therapeutic agent, the club, whether he use if single, double, or a hundred fold. But, if he insist on a mechanical figure, we will suggest that, while he is counting the heads of the monster and is casting about in his club-room for a bludgeon adapted to each head, and is fitting his hand, for the arduous effort, and is so getting his balance as to make sure that the complex wielding of his numerous weapons shall not trip him up, we shall humbly survey the monstrous form with the intent to study the controlling characteristics of his anatomical structure, and when we shall have learned to what type he belongs and what are his characteristics as an individual, then with one single weapon (a slender sword, it may be, or a bodkin, or a drop of prussic acid), we shall touch the vital part (the heart, or the medulla, or a delicate mucous membrane) on whose integrity depends the life of all the heads and all the rest-and presto-before the ponderous clubs have time to fall on those devoted heads “belaboring them simultaneously” the work is done!
Multiplicity in armament is generally inconsistent with simplicity and efficiency, and is characteristic of a barbaric age or race.
Thus the double-club array is known as the “Indian Clubs.”
The Japanese wear two swords, and yet cannot stand a moment before the single rapier of the Frenchman.
The savage of the Southern States glories in his belt full of six-shooters, and his boot-legs bristling with bowies-knives. Before the single purpose of the Northern Farmer he is rapidly passing into the realm of history.
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'.