Sometimes the characteristic resides in the conditions collectively. We borrow examples from Dr. Drysdale’s admirable Introduction to The British Repertory:
“Pain in the stomach in the morning under thirty-seven.
“Pain in the stomach with nausea in the morning under four only.”
Or it may reside in a concomitant
“Dry retching occurs under forty-five drugs.
“Dry retching in the morning under five.
“Dry retching with eructation under one only-Ledum.”
Every drug-proving, then, is to be studied in a two-fold way: On the one-hand, so as to enable us to attach it in our memory to certain groups of drugs to which it shows marked general resemblances; and, on the other hand, so as to bring not clearly into view those characteristic which distinguish it from all the other drugs of these groups in particular and of the Materia Medica in general. Our study will be at once synthetic and analytic.
Such a study is of necessity comparative in its nature. Each positive step in the study of a drug involves a question of the correspondence or difference of other drugs in respect of that step. An isolated study of all the remedies would not give us an available knowledge of the Materia Medica. It is not enough to know that Pulsatilla, Nux vomica and Chamomilla each produce diarrhoea of a certain kind. We must also know and fix in our minds the similarities and difference of each of these diarrhoeas to those of the two others and of all other drugs. The study of one drug is, in fact, then, the study of the whole Materia Medica. One is never so competent to thoroughly master a proving as when he has already mastered all other provings. The first effort must necessarily be the least satisfactory, the most imperfect.
This is the task to which the student of Materia Medica is invited and at which his predecessors have been laboring for fifty years. Why, he may ask, has not this been wrought out and systematized by those who have gone before? Why is the Materia Medica left in the same state in which Hahnemann placed if fifty years ago?
Our Materia Medica consists of the provings of drugs upon the healthy, made by Hahnemann and his disciples. These provings, as we have them, are, for the most part, a formal arrangement of the symptoms subjective and adjective observed by the prover or his friends. No attempt is made, with but few exceptions, to trace any pathological connection between symptoms, or to give any physiological explanations, or to distinguish between characteristic and generic symptoms. The symptoms alone are given, just as the symptoms of a case of disease would be given by an intelligent but uninstructed patient who unfolds his case to us in as plain untechnical words as he can, leaving to us the task of tracing connections and contriving explanations. There they stand, records of facts made in the plain vernacular, intelligible so long as the language shall endure.
But Hahnemann had a much higher idea of the kind of knowledge of Materia Medica which a physician requires than this statement would imply. In an essay on “The Power of Small Doses,” in Hufeland’s Journal, he describes this knowledge as follows: “What organs it (the drug) deranges functionally, what it modifies in other ways, what nerves it principally benumbs or excites, what alterations it effects in the circulation and digestive operations, how it affects the mind, how the disposition, what influence it exerts over some secretions, what modification the muscular fiber receives from it, how long its action lasts, and by what means it is rendered powerless, etc., etc.” Why, the, did he not construct his Materia Medica on this model? Unquestionably because, with a wonderful sagacity which together with his brilliant genius and his prodigious learning made him the “double-headed prodigy,” which Jean Paul Richter called him, Hahnemann clearly perceived the following truths: that positive facts with which a physician has to deal in constructing a Materia Medica are the observations of the proper recorded in plain, unfigurative, non-hypothetical language. That the construction which he saw to be so desirable must be the result of the application of the science of Physiology and Pathology to these facts. That the fact of the proving being of the nature of positive observation are enduring and unchangeable. But that the sciences of Physiology and Pathology, being incomplete and progressive, are continually undergoing change, and that their terms must therefore be ever varying in significance as the theories on which the sciences are based vary. That, consequently, a Materia Medica constructed by him out of these two elements, one constant and the other variable, would of necessity be transient, could not be enduring, would soon grow obsolete and its decline would carry out of sight the constant element also, and thus the labor of the provers would soon be lost to the world. Such a structure would have involved an intermingling of the current physiological theories with the facts derived from observation. The precise point and extent of the intermingling would soon become indistinguishable and thus a vitiated record would be transmitted to posterity such as the advance of science would soon render useless. A comparison of the present state of Physiology with that of 1800, of which the very terms are almost obsolete, makes the great wisdom of this view apparent. On the other hand, the pure records of observed facts, untainted by theoretical speculations, come to us from the Master’s hand as pure, as intelligible, as available as when first recorded.
We have the same material for the construction of a physiological theory of the drug-action that Hahnemann had, and we can construct it with the advantage in our favor of the great advance which Physiology and Pathology have made since Hahnemann’s day. This is the work which each of us must do for himself. No other can do it for him. The result of his labor may and will differ somewhat from that of every other student, for with the light of the auxiliary science he forms a judgment concerning observed facts, and the significance of a fact is measured by the capacity of the observer. (1 Lest by an omission I expose myself to misconstruction, I may say that inasmuch as advances in collateral medical sciences are affording continually new aids to observation, it is incumbent on each generation to re-prove to a certain extent the remedies of the Materia Medica so as to bring these aids to bear on the study of Pathogenesy).
The student should seek his knowledge of Materia Medica at the fountain head, in the original publications of Hahnemann’s Materia Medica Pura and Chronic Diseases in the provings in Stapf’s Archiv, and in the Austrian and other journals.
The Manuals, however convenient for reference in the hurry of practice, as not suitable for systematic study. In some of them, the phraseology of the prover has been altered. In others, the symptoms, as reported by the prover, have been arbitrarily sundered into fragments and these fragments are scattered throughout the record. Or symptoms ex usu in morbis have been introduced and the names of diseases supposed to have been cured by the drug are incorporated with the pure symptoms. In all of them the arrangement is somewhat altered. In many, attempts at abbreviation have been made, and with no better success than if one should squeeze one’s lemons the lessen the bulk of one’s luggage and yet hope to have good lemonade at the end of one’s journey; for it always happens, and must from the nature of the case, that the skins are the part retained while the juice is thrown away.
If a Manual must be employed, that of Noack and Trinks seems preferable; for it preserves the phraseology of the prover and does not to any great extent sunder groups of symptoms, while it places under distinct headings the pure symptoms, and the clinical effects of the drugs and the theoretical speculations of the compilers, so that the student is in no danger of mistaking the one for the other, a danger to which Jahr’s Manual does certainly expose him, and for which reason Jahr’s work is less desirable than that of Noack and Trinks.
We have dwelt at some length on the sources from which the student should seek his knowledge of Materia Medica- and with good reason! “For, can a bitter fountain send forth sweet waters?” “Do grapes grow on thorns, or figs on thistles?” If the student should fall among false or incompetent teachers, could the doctrine and practice he learns be true and successful? Now, it will be observed that the records and provings and the manuals of Materia Medica to which we have commended the student are all German works, while mine-tenths of our American and English practitioners and students are unacquainted with the German language. It is humiliating to us to be compelled to say that there are no trustworthy manuals in the English language and no translations of the German works which we have named on which reliance can be places. (1 This was written over fifty years ago and is no longer true-Publisher). We have translation of Hahnemann’s Materia Medica and Chronic Diseases and of Stapf’s Contributions to the Materia Medica, by Dr. Hempel. But, either (perhaps we should say both) from lack of moral capacity, or of intellectual and professional acquirements, or
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'.