residence, to Dessau, in 1781. Here it was, he tells us, that he first turned his attention to chemistry; but at the end of this year he was appointed district physician in Gommern, whither he removed, and her he married, his first wife, whose acquaintance he had previously made in Dessau, she being the daughter of an apothecary of that town: here also he wrote his first book on medicine, which gives the result of his experience of practice on Transylvania, and takes rather a desponding view of medical practice in general, and of his own in particular, as he candidly admits that most of his cases would have done better had he let them alone. After remaining nearly three years in Gommern- where, he naively observes,” no physician had ever been before, and whose inhabitants had no desire for one” — he transferred his residence to Dresden; but with the exception of taking for a year the post of physician to the hospital, during the illness of Dr.Wanger. he does not seem to have done much in the way of practice here.
During the last four years he lived in Dresden and the neighboring village of Lockowitz he published many chemical works, the most celebrated of which is a treatise upon poisoning by arsenic, which is quoted to this day as an authority by the best writers on toxicology. This was probably, the period he alludes to, in his letter to Hufeland, as that when he retired disgusted with the uncertainty of medical practice and devoted himself to chemistry and literature. That he made considerable progress in the former science, his valuable tests for ascertaining the purity of wine and of drugs and this treatise on arsenic testify; and we have likewise the testimony of the Swedish oracle of chemistry, Berzelius, who, knowing well the value of Hahnemann’s service to his own science, is reported to have said, ” This man would have been a great chemist, had he not turned a great quack.” We may take Berzelius’s opinion as to Hahnemann’s skill in chemistry;but try his physic by other than chemical tests.
In 1789 he removed to Leipzic, and in that year published his treatise On Syphilis, Lesser Writings,1. written the year before in Lockowitz, which I must confess, betrays no lack of confidence in the powers of medicine, and shows an intimate acquaintance with the best works of that period on the subject. But what this work is chiefly remarkable for, is its description of a new preparation, known to this day in Germany by the name of Hahnemann’ soluble mercury, and some very novel views relative to the treatment of syphilis; the dose of mercury to be given (which is remarkably small), the signs when enough has been ingested for the cure of the disease, and the denunciation of the local treatment of the primary sore. In 1790 he translated Cullen’s Materia Medica, and discovered the fever-producing property to cinchona bark; which was to him what the falling apple was to Newton, and the swinging lamp in the Baptistery at Pisa, to Galileo. From this single experiments his mind appears to have been impressed with the conviction, that the pathogenetic, effects of medicines would give the key to their therapeutic powers.
He seems, however to have contented himself with hunting up in the works of the ancient authors for hints respecting the physiological action of different substances, and to have tested them but sparingly, if at all, on his own person or on his friends; and in his researches, to have looked more fore the
peculiar and striking effects of the drugs than for those minute shades of symptoms which we find he so carefully recorded in his later years. In fact, he seems rather to have searched for parallels to those abstract forms of disease described in the works on nosology, than for analogues to the individual concrete cases of actual practice. I think any one who will read his first Essay On a New Principle, (Lesser Writings, p. 295), published in 1796, and the two papers, On Continued and Remittent fevers, (Ibid., p.382.) and On Hebdomadal Diseases, (Ibid., p 395.) published in 1798, will agree with me in this opinion.
However, to return to our history. Hahnemann seems to have had little or no opportunity to test his ideas by practice in leipzic and the little village of Stotteritz close by, and must have been completely occupied with with his chemical lucubrations and translations; for he wrote at this period a large number of chemical essays, and translated several chemical and other works, besides Cullen’s just named. His diligence must have been something extraordinary at this time, and no doubt his increasing family was a source of great anxiety to him, and caused him to slave to the extent on which we have evidence from his publications. How sorely the res angusta domi must now have pressed on Hahnemann, longing as he was for the opportunity to pursue the investigations of which he had just discovered the clue! how his great but impatient soul must have chafed and fretted at that oppressive clog of poverty– that necessity for providing bread for the daily wants of his children, which hindered him from soaring on his eagle flight into unexplored, undreamt- of regions of discovery! And the poverty which Hahnemann endured was not merely as income so small as to prohibit an indulgence in the luxuries of life, but often, very often, an actual want of the common necessaries of existence; and this with all the anxiety of an increasing and helpless family of young children!. And yet had it not been for his poverty, Hahnemann had probably never made the discovery on which his fame is built. Naturalists tell us that the oyster forms the lustrous pearl round certain extraneous substances that intrude themselves within the cavity of its shell, and irritate and vex its tender flesh — and so it is with the great and good; the vexations and annoyances of life are often the means of eliciting and developing those pearls of the mind that we admire and marvel
at.
With what eagerness must not Hahnemann now have accepted the offer of the reigning Duke of Saxe Gotha to take the charge of an asylum for the insane in Georgenthal, in the Thuringia forest, — a charge which would give him a present competency, and, above all, leisure to pursue his now painfully interesting investigations, and an opportunity of putting his discovery to the test. Here, then, we find him settled for a time in 1792. A cure that he made in this institution of the Hanoverian minister Klockenbring, who had been rendered insane by a satire of Kotzebue’s created, we are told, some sensation; and, from the account he published in 1796 of this case, Lesser Writings p. 395. we find that he was one of the earliest, if not the very first advocate for that system of treatment of the insane by mildness of coercion which has become all but universal. ” I never allow any insane person, ” he writes, ” to be punished by blows or other painful corporeal inflictions, since there can be no punishment were there is no sense of responsibility; and since such patients cannot be improved, but must be rendered worse, by such rough treatment.” May we not, then, justly claim for Hahnemann the honour of being the first who advocated and practiced the moral treatment of the insane? At all events, he may divide this honour with Pinel; for we find that towards the end of this same year 1792, when Hahnemann was applying his principle of moral treatment to practice, Pinel made his first experiment of unchaining the maniacs in the Bicetre. Hahnemann does not seem to have remained long in this situation; for the same year he removed to Walschleben, where he wrote the first part of the Friend of Health, (Lesser Writings, p. 189.) a popular miscellany, on hygiene principally, and the first part of his Pharmaceutical Lexicon, and in 1794 he went first to Pyrmont, a little watering-place in Westphalia, and thereafter to Brunswick.
In 1795 he migrated to Wolfenbuttel, and thence to Konigslutter, where he remained until 1799. In this interval of comparative settlement he gave out the second parts of his Friend of Health (Ibid., p. 240.) and Pharmaceutical Lexicon; and he had leisure to pursue his investigations, and to write, in 1796, for his friend Hufeland’s Journal, that remarkable Essay on a New Principle for ascertaining the Remedial Powers of Medicinal Substances, (Ibid., p. 295.) wherein he modestly but firmly expresses his belief that, for chronic diseases at least, medicines should be employed that have the power of producing similar affections in the healthy body; and the following year he published in the same journal an interesting case illustrative of his views; (Ibid., p. 353.) and wrote another essay on the irrationality of complicated systems of diet and regimen, and complex prescriptions. (Ibid., p. 358.) Several other essays followed this in rapid succession; among which I may mention that on antidotes, (Ibid., p. 374), and those on the treatment of fevers, (Ibid., p. 382), and periodical diseases. (Ibid., p.395.) But already the hostility of his colleagues began to display itself. Hahnemann, who had now abandoned the complicated medication of ordinary practice, and who had exposed, though gently, the absurdity of giving complex mixtures of medicine, forbore to write prescriptions, and himself gave the medicines, which he now invariably administered singly and alone. The physicians of Konigslutter, jealous of the rising fame of the innovator, incited the apothecaries to bring an action against him for interfering with their privileges by dispensing his own medicines. It was in vain Hahnemann appealed to the letter and spirit of the law regulating the apothecaries’ business, and argued, that their privileges only extended to the compounding of medicines, but that every man, and therefore still more every medical man, had the right to give or sell uncompounded drugs, which were the only things he employed, and which he administrated, moreover, gratuitously. All in vain: the apothecaries and their allies, his jealous brethren, were too powerful for him; and, contrary to law, justice, and common sense. Hahnemann, who had shown himself a master of the apothecaries’ art, by his learned and laborious Pharmaceutical Lexicon, was prohibited from dispensing his own simple medicines.
Robert Ellis Dudgeon practiced at the London Homeopathic Hospital and specialised in Optics.
Robert Ellis Dudgeon wrote Pathogenetic Cyclopaedia 1839, Cure of Pannus by Innoculation, London and Edinburgh Journal of Medical Science 1844, Hahnemann’s Organon, 1849, Lectures on the Theory & Practice of Homeopathy, 1853, Homeopathic Treatment and Prevention of Asiatic Cholera 1847, Hahnemann’s Therapeutic Hints 1847, On Subaqueous Vision, Philosophical Magazine, 1871, The Influence of Homeopathy on General Medical Practice Since the Death of Hahnemann 1874, Repertory of the Homeopathic Materia Medica, 2 vols 1878-81, The Human Eye Its Optical Construction, 1878, Hahnemann’s Materia Medica Pura, 1880, The Sphygmograph, 1882, Materia Medica: Physiological and Applied 1884, Hahnemann the Founder of Scientific Therapeutics 1882, Hahnemann’s Organon 1893 5th Edition, Prolongation of Life 1900, Hahnemann’s Lesser Writing.