The Galenic maxim, contraria contrariis, finds no favor with Paracelsus. “Contraria a contrariis curantur,” he says, “that is, hot removes cold and so forth – that is false and was never true in medicine; but arcanum and disease, these are contraria. Arcanum is health, and disease is the opposite of health: these two drive away one another; these re the contraries that remove one another”.
In another place he says something similar: “Contraria non curantur contrariis; like belongs to like, not cold against heat, not heat against cold. That were indeed a wild arrangement, if we had to seek our safety in opposites”.
Again: “This,” says he, “is true, that he who will employ cold for heat, moisture for dryness, does not understand the nature of disease.” (Paramirum, p. 68.).
The homoeopathic principle is still more completely set forth in his treatise, Von der Astronomey. He there says: “The nature of the arcana is, that they shall go directly against the properties of the enemy, as one combatant goes against another. Nature wills it that in the combat stratagem shall be employed against stratagem, etc., and this is the natural case will all things on earth; in medicine, also, the same rule prevails. The physician should let this be an example to him. As two foes go out to the combat, who are both cold or both hot, and who attack one another both with the same weapon: as the victory is, so also is it in the human body; the two combatants seek their aid from the same mother, that is, from the same power”.
Still more distinctly he enunciates our principle in these words: “What makes jaundice that also cures jaundice and all its species. In like manner, the medicine that shall cure paralysis must proceed from that which causes it; and in this way we practise according to the method of cure by arcana.” (Archidoxis, vol. iii. Pt. v. p. 18.).
Paracelsus’s system, as far as we can learn it from his works, was a rude homoeopathy, an attempt to discover specifics for the various diseases to which man is liable; but it was not equal in value to Hahnemann’s system, for an uncertainty almost as great as that of the old system attended it. He believed that in nature there existed a remedy for every disease. The physician, from the external symptoms, was to judge of the organ diseased, and for the cure of the disease he was to select that medicine which experience had shown him exerted a specific influence on the organ affected. He would not have us speak of rheumatism, catarrh, coryza, etc., but of morbus terebinthinus, morbus sileris montani, morbus helleborinus, etc.; according as the malady presented the character of one or other of these medicines, that is to say, affected the organs one of them had an affinity for.
This is, as I said, a rude homoeopathy, but a homoeopathy that did not sufficiently consider the character, but only the seat of the affection; and moreover a homoeopathy that wanted the sure foundation of experiment on the healthy as the means of ascertaining the sphere of action of the remedies, but that trusted almost entirely to a laborious and empirical testing of he medicine on the sick-a source of the Materia Medica which Hahnemann has shown to be sufficiently untrustworthy. Still I would not say that Paracelsus was destitute of all knowledge of the pathogenetic effects of medicines, or that he entirely neglected this source for ascertaining the virtues of drugs; for some passages of his works would go far to prove the contrary to be the case. Thus the passage I have just quoted, “What makes jaundice that cures jaundice,” presupposes an acquaintance with what will cause the disease; and we find more evidence of this in other parts of his works. Thus he writes : “When antimony is ingested it causes a dry cough, much shooting pain in the sides, and headache, great hardness of the stools, much ulceration of the spleen, hot blood, it makes roughness and itching, dries up and increases the jaundice.” “Alkali causes oppression of the breathing, and foetid smell from the mouth, causes much koder (whatever that may be) to be ejected, causes much heartburn, griping, and tearing in the bowels, dries up, renders the urine acrid, produces pollutions, also blood form the anus,” etc. Such pathogenetic knowledge, however, is too vague and indefinite to have been of much use in practice; but it shows that Paracelsus was in the right direction, though he wanted the courage or perseverance to subject all his agents to the test of pure physiological experiment, and generally trusted to ascertaining their properties by trying them on the sick; a source be it remarked, en passant, which Hahnemann largely availed himself of, though, as I have just stated, he himself exposed its fallaciousness. Paracelsus resembles Hahnemann in still another point, that he recognised the primary and secondary actions of medicines. Speaking of vitriol, he says: “As surely as it relaxes in its first period, so surely does it constrict in its second period,” etc.
Paracelsus’s system was eminently a system of specific medicine, and in many points his therapeutic rule resembles that of Hahnemann, and occasionally he makes use of a truly homoeopathic phrase. Thus he says, “likes must be driven out (or cured) by likes;” but the meaning of this, in the Paracelsian sense, generally comes to this, that the disease of the brain, the heart, the liver, etc., must be expelled by that medicine which represents the brain, the heart, or the liver, in consequence of its specific action on one of these organs.
Thus he says: “Heart to heart, lung to lung, spleen to spleen – not cow’s spleen, not swine’s brain to man’s brain, but the brain that is external brain to man’s internal brain.”
The next sentence I have to quote explains his meaning more thoroughly. “The medicinal herbs are organs; this is a heart, that a liver, this other a spleen. That every heart is visible to the eye as a heart, I will not say, but it is a power and a virtue equivalent to the heart”.
Another point of resemblance betwixt Paracelsus and Hahnemann is observable in the great partiality shown by both for extremely minute doses. In his book On the Causes and Origin of Lues Gallica (lib. v. cap. 11), Paracelsus compares the medicinal power of the drug to fire. “As a single spark can ignite a great heap of wood, indeed, can set a whole forest in flames, in like manner can a very small dose of medicine overpower a great disease. And,” he proceeds, “just as this spark has no weight, so the medicine given, however small may be its weight, should suffice to effect its action. “How like this is to Hahnemann” “The dose of the homoeopathically selected remedy can never be prepared so small that it shall not be stronger than the natural disease, and shall not suffice to cure it.”(Organon, Aphorism cclxxix.).
The following passage shows that Paracelsus anticipated Hahnemann in the employment of medicines by olfaction. Speaking of specifies, he says: “They have many rare powers, and they are very numerous; there is, for instance, the Specificum odoriferum, which cures diseases when the patients are unable to swallow the medicine, as in apoplexy and epilepsy.” (Parac. Opium, vol.iii. pt.vi. p.70. Basel, 1589.).
I shall close my quotations from Paracelsus by a passage, which shows that, like Hahnemann, he considered the medicinal power as
something spiritual, and separable from the material medicine-in idea, at least, if not in fact: :”The medicine lies in the spirit and not in the substance (or body), of or body and spirit are two different things”.
I have said enough to show you the great analogy, the very striking resemblance betwixt Hahnemann’s and Paracelsus’s doctrines. I could not quote to you all the passages that are strikingly analogous to many in Hahnemann’s works, but what I have adduced will have enabled you to judge of this great likeness for yourselves. It it impossible at this moment to say if Hahnemann was acquainted with Paracelsus’s writings. From his extensive familiarity with the writings of medical authors, both ancient and modern, I should hardly suppose that he had not read the works of one so world-renowned as Paracelsus; but then not a syllable occurs in all his works regarding this wonderful and most original writer and thinker. The resemblance of some passages in the Organon, and in the minor writings of Hahnemann to some parts of Paracelsus’s workers is so very striking, that it is difficult to believe that Hahnemann did not take them from Paracelsus; and yet had be done so, would be not have acknowledge the fact” It may be, after all, that the resemblance is purely accidental, and that the ideas that seem borrowed are just those that must necessarily occur to one who, like Paracelsus, had shaken himself free from the trammels of an antiquated and false system, and had set himself to study nature with his own eyes, unblinded by the distorting spectacles of the schools.
One of the immediate followers of Paracelsus, Oswald Croll, who has been accepted by Sprengel and others as a good exponent of Paracelsus’s system, seems to have but ill understood his master’s maxims when he says, “Cerebrum suillum phreniticis products; ideo etiam ii, qui memoriam amiserunt, cum juvamento nascuntur cerebro porcino cum myristica et cinnamomo aromatisato; “for, as I showed you just now, Paracelsus distinctly says,:”not swine’s brain to man’s brain.”? The idea of Croll, however, is a further proof of the notion of a necessary analogy between disease and remedy.
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.