The next name of importance as an authority in the medical art whom we find distinctly enunciating the principle of homoeopathy, is the author who wrote under the pseudonyme of Basil Valentine, a Benedictine monk it is believed, who lived about the year 1410, in the convent of St. Peter at Erfurt. His words are : “Likes must be cured by means of their likes, and not by their contraries, as heat by heat, cold by cold, shooting by shooting; for one heat attracts the other to itself, one cold the other, as the magnet does the iron. Hence prickly simples can remove diseases whose characteristic is prickly pains; and poisonous minerals can cure and destroy symptoms of poisoning when they are brought to bear upon them. And although sometimes a chill may be removed and suppressed, still I say, as a philosopher and one experienced in nature’s ways, that the similar must be fitted with its similar, whereby it will be removed radically and thoroughly, if I am a proper physician and understand medicine. He who does not attend to this is no true physician, and cannot boast of his knowledge of medicine, because he is unable to distinguish betwixt cold and warm, betwixt dry and humid, for knowledge and experience, together with a fundamental observation of nature, constitute the perfect physician.
(De Microcosm).
Theophrastus von Hohenheim, commonly known by the name of Paracelsus, who flourished in the sixteenth century, was a reformer of much the same character as Hahnemann, and though his doctrines never obtained for him the same number of followers as Hahnemann has, and though the school he founded soon perished and disappeared, and his name was only remembered as that of a great charlatan, this was not owing to the unsoundness of the therapeutic doctrines he enunciated, which scarcely differed from many of those of Hahnemann; but the ephemeral character of is school was owing to the want of an express foundation for his therapeutic maxims in that great and signal merit of his modern rival, pure experimentation, or the proving of medicines on the healthy. I say an express foundation; for though, as I shall presently show, Paracelsus alludes to, he scarcely insists on the necessity of, pure physiological experimentation, giving no directions how it is to be carried out, and leaving its necessity rather to be inferred than enjoined. With a vigour equal to that of Hahnemann, he attacked the absurd methods of treatment prevalent in his time, for he saw as clearly as Hahnemann the defects of the ancient system, which, however, his assaults failed to overthrow; for the accusations he brings against the physicians of his age might be repeated of those of the present day, and were in fact re-echoed by our modern reformer. I may give a specimen of the mode in which he ridiculed the practice of the day, whereby you may judge of the resemblance betwixt his writings and those of Hahnemann “Suppose,” says he, “the case of a patient sick of a fever, which ran a course of twelve weeks and then ended; there are two kinds of physicians to treat it, the false and the true. The false one deliberately, and at his ease, sets about physicking; he dawdles away much time with his syrups and his laxatives, his purgatives and gruel, with barley-water, his juleps, and such- like rubbish. He goes to work slowly-takes his time to it-gives an occasional clyster to pass the time pleasantly, and creeps along at his ease, and cajoles the patient with his soft words until the disease has reached its termination, and then he attributes the spontaneous cessation of the fever to the influence of his art. But the true physician proceeds to work in a different manner. The natural course of the disease he divides into twelve parts, and his work is limited to one part and a half.
“That man is a physician,” he goes on to say, “Who knows how to render aid, and to drive out the disease by force; for as certainly as the axe applied to the trunk of the tree fells it to the ground, so certainly does the medicine overcome the disease. If I am unable to do this, then I acknowledge readily that in this case I am no more a physician than you are.”
Some of his contemporaries, however, were not so ready to admit themselves to be no physicians, though they could not cure; for an amusing anecdote is related of Sylvius, who, having an epidemic fever to treat, was so unsuccessful, that two-thirds of the respectable people of the town died. But this worthy was far from acknowledging that he was no physician in this instance; on the contrary, he wrote a very long and learned treatise on that disease, in which he alleges that his art was of the very best, and his remedies the most appropriate, but that God had denied his blessing to them, in order to punish the ladies and gentlemen of the place for their sins. A most pious and satisfactory reason for the great mortality, we all must admit.
Hahnemann, we know, classified all the methods of treatment under three heads, enantiopathic, allopathic, and homoeopathic. Paracelsus divided doctors into five classes, under the names of Naturales, Specifici, Characterales, Spirituales, and Fideles. The first class corresponded to Hahnemann’s enantiopathic, the second more closely resembled the homoeopathic; but Paracelsus differed from Hahnemann in this, that whereas the latter denies that the enantiopathic and allopathic cure at all, Paracelsus says that each sect is capable of curing all diseases, and an educated physician may choose whichever he likes.
With the apothecaries Paracelsus was, like Hahnemann, on very bad terms. As in the case of the modern reformer, Paracelsus was first attacked by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, and he returned their persecution by withering sarcasm and contemptuous depreciation. The great ground of complaint on the part of the worthy fraternity was, that Paracelsus did not write long and complex prescriptions but contented himself chiefly with simples, which brought no grist to the apothecaries’ mill.
“So shamefully do they make up the medicines,” he exclaims, “that it is only by a special interposition of Providence that they do not do more harm; and at the same time so extravagantly do they charge for them, and so much do they cry up their trash, that I do not believe any persons can be met with who are greater adepts in lying.”
That the apothecaries of our own country were not much better about that period, or a little later, is evident from the expression of Walter Charleton, physician to Charles II, who says of them, “Perfida ingratissimaque impostorum gens, aegrorum pernicies, rei medicae calamitas et Libitinae presides”.
The apothecaries,” continues Paracelsus, “are so false and dishonest, that they lead the know-nothing doctors by the nose. If they say, “This is so and so’, Dr. Wiseacre says, ‘Yes, Master Apothecary, that is true.’ Thus one fool cheats the other: Apothecary Quid-pro-quo gives Dr. Wiseacre merdam pro balsamo; God help the poor patients that come under their hands!”.
Hahnemann himself had not a greater horror of hypothesis in medicine than Paracelsus.
“The physician,” he says, “should be educated in the school of nature, not in that of speculation. Nature is visible (sichtig), but speculation is invisible. The seen makes the physician, the unseen makes none; the seen gives the truth, the unseen nought.
To the theorizing adherents of Galen, he cries: “You are poets, and you carry your poetry into your medicine.” He calls those authors who indulge in their subtle theorizing, “doctors of writing, but not of the healing art.” He ridicules the idea of learning diseases or their treatment in books. “That physician,” he says, “is but a poor creature, who would look to paper books alone for aid.”
Paracelsus rails in good set terms at the compounding of several medicines in one prescription, and he exposes the folly of composite recipes with a vigor, logic, and satirical humor not inferior to that displayed by Hahnemann.
Like Hahnemann, he laughs at the notion of attempting to reduce all diseases to a certain number of classes and genera. “You imagine you have invented receipts for all different fevers. You limit the number of fevers to seventy, and what not that there are five times seventy.” How like Hahnemann, who says (Organon, Aphorism73, note), “the old school has fixed on a certain number of names of fevers, beyond which mighty nature dare not produce any others, so that they may treat those diseases according to some fixed method.” How like the commencement of Hahnemann’s introduction to Arsenic is this passage of Paracelsus:- “What is there of God’s creation that is not furnished with some great quality that may tend to the weal of mankind?” And yet he truly remarks, many things, if used rightly, are beneficial; if the reverse, poisonous. “Where is a purgative, in all your books, that is not a poison, that will not cause death or injury, if attention be not paid to the dose in which it is given? You know that quick-silver is nothing but a poison, and daily experience proves it to be so; and yet it is your custom to smear your patients with it thicker than the cobbler smear his leather with grease. You fumigate with its cinnabar, you wash with its sublimate, and you are displeased that it should be said it is a poison, which it is; and this poison you throw into human beings, alleging it is healthy and good; that it is corrected by white lead, as though it were no poison”.
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.