“Tis true, a scorpion’s oil is said
To cure the wounds the vermin made;
And weapons dressed with salve restore
And head the hurts they gave before. (Hudibras, Part iii. Cant. ii., l.1029.)
From these few examples, and many more might be adduced had I thought it necessary to extend my researches relatives to this subject, it will be evident that the doctrine of the cure of diseases of certain organs by the corresponding organs in other animals, and that of the cure of diseases by their own morbid products or supposed exciting causes, are, far from being a novelty, on the contrary of very ancient date.
There is no doubt to whom belongs the honour of having introduced isopathic heresies into the homoeopathic school. It was our transatlantic friend Dr. Constantine Hering who gave the first impulse to isopathy, for we find him in 1830 (Arch., x.2.) proposing as a remedy for hydrophobia the saliva of a rabid dog, as Xenocrates had done before him; for small-pox the matter from variolous pustules; for psora the matter of itch. Nay, he asks, may we not expect, if this doctrine be true, that we shall find the specific remedy for every epidemic pestilence in the first case of it that breaks out, and that the matter obtained from this one will serve to check the disease in all the rest? and this plan he actually proposes in a later paper. He recommends us to potentize the watery excrements of cholera, the black vomit of yellow fever, the desquamated skin of malignant scarlet fever, and to bind bags of milk-sugar in contact with the skin of typhus patients, and all these extraordinary medicines will serve as the remedies for these several diseases. In 1833 Dr. Hering wrote a long paper, (Arch., xiii.3.) wherein he extols the efficacy of the prepared itch-matter, which he now calls psorine. He there declares this psorine to be equal to our very strongest medicines in power; that it has a great power of producing eruptions; that it is one of the most efficacious means for restoring the loss or weakened action of the skin; that it is the most important remedy in every from of scabies, and that it is a prophylactic against infection with itch. He found that a globule of the 30th dilution the best dose to give, and that it is most expedient in every case, where possible, to give the patient psorine prepared from his own body, in other words what he calls auto-psorine; of course this is only possible if the patient has the psoric eruption upon his person at the time. Under the head of psora, be it remembered, Dr. Hering included many varieties of cutaneous diseases. In his experiments and observations he discovered that the psorine, from whatever form of cutaneous eruption he obtained it, was always equally efficacious.
He suggests that the seeds of plants potentized may possibly be the means of eradicating and destroying such plants, and that insects potentized may be capable of destroying the life of their own species; and then he exclaims what a blessing this discovery will prove to farmers in getting rid of weeds, and to house wives in freeing their houses and children from vermin. He does not mention how he supposes the potentized nettle-seeds are to be administered to those plants, and I must confess I would be sorely puzzled to give a dose of pediculus 30 to a louse, or cimex 30 to a bug. “First catch your hare,” writes Mrs. Glass, and “first catch your louse” would doubtless be Dr. Hering’s advice; but having caught our louse, I think it would be as superfluous an operation to give him the dose of his potentized relative, as it would be to put the salt on our sparrow’s tail after having ensnared him. Dr. Hering, rather hopelessly I imagine, begs all farmers and housewives who are inclined to try his method of extirpating weeds and killing vermin (which he generously refuses to take out a patent for), to record the results of their experience in the journal wherein he makes these revelations.(Arch., xiii, 3, 37.)
He takes the opportunity to mention that a bug potentized up to the 30th dilution will cure bug-bites (which I do not in the least doubt, as I have observed them to be cured by much more insignificant means, viz., by nothing at all); he has moreover found that the bites of other insects are cured by similar means. We may from this discovery of Dr. Hering’s be now enabled to guess at the uses of some of those wonderful substances in Dr. Hornbook’s laboratory, inventoried by the poet Burns, such as–
“Mite-born savings, filings, scrapings, Distilled per se, Sal-alkali o’ midge-tail clippings And mony mae.”
Of course the first mentioned must have been employed on this isopathic principle of Drs. Hering and Dioscorides for the cure of the bites of the acarus tribe, one of which at least is said to be endemic in Scotland; and the last was beyond all question the isopathic specific for the deadly bite of the sanguinary midge or gnat.
But greater discoveries are revealed in this wonder-disclosing essay of Dr. Hering’s. He states that he has ascertained that the fluids, and solids of healthy individuals (of course duly potentized) have a very powerful medicinal action on the human subject. No doubt the cannibalistic propensities of sundry aboriginal tribes is the instinctive perception of these medicinal properties of the human solids and fluids; and the “cold missionary on the side board,” prefigured by Sidney Smith as forming an essential part of a New Zealand banquet, doubtless, served the guests the same purposes as our fashionable dinner- pill.
In a subsequent communication, dated 1833, (Arch., xiv.2, 99.) Dr. Hering reiterates his assertion of the wonderful powers of potentized portions of the human body, and further states that these preparations act chiefly on the corresponding organs of the living human being.
He again asserts that all morbid products, of whatever kind, exert a powerful influence on the diseases that produce them. He mentions leucorrhoeal matter as being curative of leucorrhoea, gleet-matter of gleet, phthisine of phthisis, ascaridine of children’s vermicular diseases. Still he admits that all these isopathic preparations cannot be regarded as absolute specifics, but only as chronic intermediate remedies, which serve, as it were, to stir up the disease, and render the reaction to the homoeopathic remedy subsequently administered more permanent and effectual. This assertion he repeats in 1836, (Arch., xiv.3, 146.) and states that he has never succeeded in curing but only in ameliorating diseases with their own morbid products (with the exception of psora). Thus in a case of occult syphilis, that would not come properly out, after having tried in vain mercury and other antivenereal remedies, he gave syphiline, whereupon a cutaneous eruption appeared, and afterwards a regular chancre, which was perfectly cured by mercury and lachesis.
In the North American Homoeopathic Journal for November, 1852, Dr. Hering again writes at considerable length in defence of the so-called isopathic preparations. He entitles his paper “the chemical rescue of psorinum.” I hoped to have found something in this paper justifying on chemical principles the employment of psorine, but was disappointed to find that the only decided thing on the subject is this: he states, namely, that when the alcoholic solution of the pus out of itch pustules is placed on a watchglass and allowed to evaporate, small needle-shaped transparent crystals of a cooling pungent taste are left. This salt he believes to be the cause of the morbific effects of psorine; and though he did not analyse it, he believes that it is some combination of sulpho-cyanogen, and he states his intention on some future occasion to ascertain exactly its chemical composition, to manufacture it in the laboratory, and then prove it, when he expects to get similar results to those obtained from the provings of the natural morbid product. (Twenty years previously (Arch., xiii.3, 65) he informed us that the chemical analysis of psorine was a desideratum, and that he had not then succeeded in ascertaining its precise composition; so that it does not appear that “the chemical rescue” of this curious medicine is much further advanced now than it was then.)
This is all very vague and unsatisfactory, but what makes it worse is, that we are not satisfied from Dr. Hering’s statement that the morbid product he obtained was actually what he asserts it to be, viz., the secretion from scabies. He got the matter, he tells us, from some full large yellow pustules, on the fingers, hands, and forearms of a young and otherwise healthy negro, in whom these pustules had been produced by handling some stuff from Germany. He is unable to state whether the characteristic acari were present or no. Now, it is very improbable from this account that the disease of this negro was true itch, for, as far as we know, itch is always propagated by contact with an itchy person, and its eruption, when not altered by art, is a small vesicular not a large pustular one. The circumstance of having obtained a salt as here described proves nothing, for all animal secretions contain salt of some kind or other; and even had Dr. Hering demonstrated that the salt was a compound of sulpho-cyanogen, that again would have proved nothing, as we know that a similar compound exists in several healthy as well as some morbid secretions.
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.