“Mark, how that rooted mandrake wears
His human feet, his human hands;
Oft as his shapely form he rears,
Aghast the frighted ploughman stands.”
May it not have been this resemblance to a homunculus that secured for this plant a great celebrity as a promoter of fecundity? a celebrity, indeed, that dates as far back as the days of the patriarchs; for it will be remembered that Rachel and Leach had a little domestic altercation about the mandrakes that Leach had to procure in order to obtain renewal of her child- bearing power.
I might multiply illustrations of this practice of judging of the medicinal powers of substances from their external physical properties almost ad infinitum, but I shall terminate the series by citing one from the writings of a more modern authority in medicine, viz., Riviere, who has the following passage:- “Sanguis menstruus muliercularum, praecipue bene valentium, odorem calendulae florum spirat, hinc conjicio similitudine quadam substantiae calendulam movere menses” (Obs. com., Obs. 30); thus finding the signature of the medicine in its odor. These examples will suffice to show you the great prevalence of the doctrine of signatures among the learned as well as the unlearned of almost all periods; and though it is impossible to accord any credence to such a doctrine, its existence and long prevalence is an importance fact, for it appears to me to be a type of the truth existing in an age of ignorance, but, like all types, only intelligible to those who are familiar with the truth it represented, to all others unintelligible and ridiculous.
It was the idol that was worshipped whilst the god remained concealed; the worship was false and absurd, but it typified and attested the existence of the god, and foreshadowed his future discovery and purer worship. Perhaps, too, it indicated the former existence of a knowledge of the truth, which had been lost or obscured in the lapse of ages, and of which the doctrine of signatures only remained, like a mysterious monument that marks the existence of a lost art, or an unmeaning ceremony that has survived the occasion that gave rise to it. However this may be, we, who are now in possession of the truth by original discovery or, it may be, by recovery, can see in the doctrine of signature a rude testimony of a barbarous age to the truth of what we now know to the the one true law in medicine; an expression of the instructive feeling that drugs must in some way give a priori indications of their remedial powers, and a protest against the doctrine that these powers could only be ascertained a posterior by experiments on the sick.
I now come to those authors, the immediate predecessors or contemporaries of Hahnemann, who have likewise in some measure acknowledged the Homoeopathic therapeutic law. Hahnemann himself cites a number of passages where the law Hahnemann himself cites a number of passes where the law is more or less fully recognized. Thus, Boulduc perceived that the purgative property of rhubarb was the cause of its curative power in diarrhoea. Detharding inferred that it was the colic-producing property of senna that gave it the power to cure colics. Bertholon observed that electricity removed pains similar to those it produces. Theory proved that electricity quickened the pulse in the healthy, and diminished its frequency when it was morbidly quick. Von Stork asks it stramonium ought not to be useful in insanity, as it possesses the power to cause derangement of the mind; and a Danish army physician, called Stall (not the great Stahl, as is generally represented), distinctly states: “The rule generally acted on in medicine, to treat by means of oppositely acting remedies, is quite false, and the very reverse of what ought to be. I am, on the contrary, convinced that disease will yield to and be cured by remedies that produce a similar affection; burns by exposure to the fire, frost-bitten limbs by the application of snow and the coldest water, inflammation and bruises by distilled spirits; and, in like manner, I have treated a tendency to acidity of the stomach by a very small dose of sulphuric acid with the most happy results, in cases where a number absorbent remedies had been fruitlessly employed (Organon, pp.167, 108).
Riviere, to whom I have formerly referred, relates the case of a man who was stung on the neck and face by a number of bees, whom he treated successfully with scorpion’s oil, garlic, etc. The sting, however, on the cartilage of the ear having put on a dangerous action, Riviere ventured to apply a small blister to it, ” because,” says he, “the cantharis is a kind of fly like the bee.” The disease, he tells us, disappeared in the course of a quarter of an hour, before the blister had time to redden the skin.
Dr. Rapou, pere, mentions that the women of a hamlet in the department of the Loire cure themselves of metrorrhagia by means of the geranium cicutaria; and the only reason they could assign for using this plant, was, that their cows became affected with that disease when they fed on the plant.
A young relative of Dr. Dessaix having been suddenly seized with symptoms resembling the intoxication caused by the lolium temulentum, was eagerly advised by the farmers to ear some of their bread, which they knew to contain darnel: “because,” said they, “it often causes us exactly the same symptoms as those you are suffering from, and therefore it must need cure you.”
Dr. Ste. Marie of Lyons published his work, entitled Nouveau Formulaire medicine., in 1820, in entire ignorance, it is presumed, of Hahnemann’s discovery; not he least to be wondered at, by-the-bye, in a Frenchman, as our colleagues across the Channel are generally remarkable ignorant of everything of everything that occurs out of France. In this book, Ste. Marie says: “It is certain that we sometimes cure, whilst acting in the same directions natures, and completing, by our remedial means, the salutary effort which she has commenced, but has not the power to complete.” In support of this proposition he cites many cases of the cure of diarrhoea by purgatives, of debilitating perspirations by sudorifics, comatose fevers by opium, of epilepsy by medicines capable of causing epilepsy. And, he adds: “(It is impossible that these facts can be only lucky accidents’ they are undoubtedly connected with some grand therapeutic law which I have perhaps partially revealed in the principle established above, but which still remains to be more definitely determined than I have been able to do.”
I need not multiply instances of the acknowledgment of the therapeutic law of like cures like by those who wrote after Hahnemann discovery, for it is impossible to know whether its enunciation under such circumstances was not a plagiarism. I have, I believe, brought forward sufficient number of proofs of the substantial recognition of homoeopath from the medicinal writing san popular beliefs of many ages before Hahnemann.
I might, if I chose, bring almost an unlimited number of facts from the records of ancient medicine to show that the homoeopathic law was constantly acted on unwittingly in the cure of diseases, but such proofs are totally foreign to my object, which was to show to that the principle has not only been acted on, but recognized and taught, sometimes more, sometimes less distinctly, in every period of medical history.
Some zealous partisans of homoeopathy have undertaken to show the acknowledgment of a homoeopathic principle in other things beside medicine. Thus Mr. Leadam in a paper published some years since in the British Journal of Homoeopathy, sees, in the elevation of the brazen serpent by Moses in order to cure those that had been bitten by serpents, a probable intimation of he homoeopathic law of cure; and Dr. Buchner of Munch finds the whole scheme of Christianity to be a Homoeopathic process for the cure or salivation of the human soul. I need not go into his arguments, however, as they are irrelevant to our subject, and might be considered irreverent by some of my hearers.
Homer is stated to have alluded to the homoeopathic principle when the describes the spear of Achilles as the only remedy for the wounds which his spear had inflicted.
Among the precepts of the Scholar Salanitura, we find the following:-
“Si nocturna tibi nocet potatio vini
Hoc tu mane bibus item,”
an advice which in the vernacular, would read, “take a hair of the dog that bit you.”
The great poet of the human race, who seems to have had almost a prophetic insight into all truth, has been quoted as a witness of the homoeopathic truth in morals and in medicines. Thus his play, the Taming of the Shrew, is started to be an instance of the cure of a bad temper in Katherine by the exhibition, on the part of Petruchioi,. of a feigned temper similar to her own; (A similar idea forms the ground work of a tale by Remained, entitled, “The Alp-King and the Misanthrope.” The hero is a sour, ill-tempered, abusive man who maltreats his wife, children, relatives, and friends. This disposition at length renders every one intolerable to him, and he retires to a lonely forest in disgust at all mankind. Here he meets the Alp-King, who tries in vain to persuade him that his conduct is greatly to blame. He succeeds, at last, in convincing him of his bad behavior, by bringing him back to he society of his friends, and acting the part of misanthrope. Our hero, who could not perceive that his own conduct was blame worthy, is highly displeased at it in another; as a spectator, he is not slow to condemn the part which he had formerly acted with perfect satisfaction, and he becomes cured for ever of his misanthropy. In this case, as the German’s would say, the offensive objective faults cured his own similar subjective faults. something in the same way as the ancient Spartans used to cure their you men of drunkenness, or deter them from the vice, by exhibiting to them their slaves in a state of beastly intoxication.
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.