In case of similar exhaustion, facial Neuralgia of a regularly intermitting character sometimes occurs and bids defiance to Therapeutics, the patient meanwhile declining rapidly in strength and health until, medicine being perhaps altogether discarded, but the patient induced to wean her infant and thereby enabled to take hearty food, strength and flesh return, and the Neuralgic pains cease. In this case, also, the restoration may be accelerated by a judicious recourse to Therapeutics, but here too Therapeutics must be subordinate to Hygiene.
Once, more, a patient, who exhibits signs of depraved nutrition, complains of a burning pain under the angle of the right scapula, with a tight aching across the back between the scapulae. I fear that repeated prescriptions will fail to relive this burning pain unless the physician’s knowledge of pathology shall have suggested to him that the symptoms results ultimately from a too steady use of the needle with too rapid a motion, and unless his skill in Hygiene shall have enabled him so to order her mode of life as to combine due recreation and exercise in the open air with her necessary labor. Here, as in other cases, Therapeutics may of course come in and play subordinate part.
Finally, a patient has severe darting and aching in the shin, especially at evening, with coldness of the extremity, and, after the pain has lasted an hour, great sensibility to touch, relieved by warmth and by continued motion. This case has been treated by a variety of Therapeutic agents in the hands of several learned practitioners, but with no success. It is noticed that the patient, in the course of his business, incurs great exposure to dampness and cold. A woollen stocking is advised, and the enjoys ever after adopting it almost complete freedom from suffering, and which is rendered absolutely complete by a few doses of Rhus toxicodendron. It must be remarked that this remedy had been previously administered in every variety of potency and dose.
Instances of a similar character to these might be indefinitely multiplied. They go to show, not that medicines are vain or unnecessary, but that very many cases of severe suffering and even of what threatens to become fatal disease occur in general practice, which call for and are successfully met by the application of scientific knowledge apart from Therapeutics. They show that an extensive and thorough knowledge of Physiology, Pathology and Hygiene are indispensable to the physician to enable him to make that preliminary analysis of a case by which he will determine under what category the case belongs, and whether or not calls for treatment by medicines in part or entirely-whether it comes under the domain of Therapeutics or not. They show, moreover, that, inasmuch as Homoeopathy directly involves the science of Therapeutics alone, there is a large field which is occupied and cultivated in common by Homoeopathists and practitioners of the Old School. They serve in part, also to mark the boundaries of that field in which “Rational Medicine” may legitimately claim dominion, in which her chief honors have been won, and in which the great advances which she boasts of having made in the treatment of diseases within the last thirty years have almost exclusively been achieved-the field of Hygienes. It is fitting that we study for a few moments this territory of Hygiene, which is common to practitioners of all the varieties of Therapeutics faith and practice, this science on which, together with the science of Therapeutics, the whole are of medicine is bases its subjects, limits, conditions, and mode of growth.
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'.