The second object would be accomplished by introducing into or applying to the organism agents of an irritant character, capable of acting either directly or by sympathy on the seat or disease. Of such a character are the greater number of the remedial means employed in all ages in the treatment of disease, by whatever name these may be called, whether evacuants revulsives, counter- irritants, stimulants, tonics, or specifics Among the means employed in ordinary practice, I may instance as examples of the indirect application of the irritation, the employment of a blister on the skin for the purpose of removing an inflammation of a serous membrane, or a mustard-bath to the feet to relieve a headache; and, as examples of the direct application of the irritation, the treatment of burns by the application of heat, of erysipelas by caustics, or cynanche tonsillaris by a gargle of cayenne pepper. In the first case, the irritation applied at a different part is propagated to the diseased part by sympathy, and in order that this may happen, the part where the morbid action is going forward must have a specific susceptibility for such irritation; where this is not the case no curative effect will result, and hence the frequency of the failure of this means. In like manner, the irritant directly applied to the diseased part will equally fail to produce a curative action if the affected apart have not susceptibility four its irritation; in other words, if it be not laboring under a morbid state similar to that excitable by the irritating agent employed for its cure. This seems to be the reason why the application of nitrate of silver will cure some nut not all inflammations of mucous membranes, why caustic potash will cure some of those not curable by nitrate of silver, and why blisters of cantharides will only cure a limited number of ulcerations and other affections of the skin. The action of specifics may be explained income cases by direct, in others by indirect; in others by indirect or sympathetic irritation.
As long as the crude and general doctrines of counter irritation and revulsion prevailed, it was natural that medical men should seek for agents that produced a medical men should seek for agents that produced a strongly irritant effect on the skin, on the bowels, on the kidneys; or elsewhere, it did not matter very much where; and during the prevalence of Brunonianism, which consisted mainly in attributing disease to a certain general, indefinite debility, the treatment by an as general as indefinite stimulation was the natural deduction from such premises; hence the brandy and opium which John Brown held up as he panacea for all the ills tat flesh is heir to, and to the immoderate use of which he himself fell a victim. Brown’s doctrines of general debility, though they had a partial foundation in nature, were not a whit less pernicious in their effects on practice that the opposite but still analogous doctrines of the talented founder of the so-called physiological school, Bruises, who generalized white as much as Brown, attributing disease to a fierce central inflammation of the stomach and bowels, against which all conceivable fire- extinguishing or antiphlogistic appliances were to be used, until it was utterly annihilated; but such attempts to extinguish the supposed fire often snuffed out the “vital spark of heavenly flame” itself.
The more correct doctrine, so lucidly set forth by Fletcher in the works already cited, that every organ of the body has a peculiar kind of irritability, adapting it to be acted on by certain stimuli more remarkably than by others, had it been generally revived or in calculated, would necessarily have led medical men of the school of Brown to search for the specific stimuli of the organs the subjects of disease in those maladies they were called on to treat, well assured that such agents must be the remedies they sought for.
The only way to ascertain the peculiar stimuli of the different organs is to test on the healthy organism the action of the various substances known or presumed to have a disturbing effect upon the system.
But it is well known that in many diseases it is impossible to ascertain the exact organ affected, consequently, the only way we have of recognizing such disease is to not the discoverable objective and subject symptoms, and thus it is that, with many diseases, it is the array of symptoms that makes up the idea of the malady; and even though we may not have a motion of the organ or tissue specially affected, we do not the less recognize the disease s a distinct and definite one, and differing from all others. In like manner, it is not necessary for therapeutic purposes that we ascertain the precise organ or tissue on which our curative agent acts; it will suffice for us that it is capable or developing a series of symptoms similar to those of the disease before us, to enable us to predicate of it that it acts as a stimulus on precisely the same organ or organs as are affected in the disease, and we may confidently prescribe it for the cure.
Again, if we reflect that the condition of the disease part is one of under stimulation, and that what is required is, that it should only be stimulated, so to speak, up to the line of health, and if we attend to the familiar examples of direct curative stimulation, as for instance, the cure of a burn by heat, etc., we shall perceive that for the curative action there is required a smaller degree of stimulation than what was requisite to produce the morbid action; and this will lead us to infer that the quantity of the curative agent required should be less than what will produce the diseased state.
Thus we perceive that, starting with the probable pathological doctrine of disease being a condition of diminished vital action on the one hand, and the rational physiological doctrine of the specific irritability of every organ, the logical deduction is, that disease should be treated by agents capable of producing in the healthy symptoms similar to their own, which is the homoeopathic principles; and this again involves the proving of medicine on the healthy, and the administration of doses smaller than those capable of producing morbid symptoms in the healthy.
These conclusions were arrived at by Hahnemann by an entirely different route; and I may now briefly trace the mode in which he discovered the therapeutic law with which his name is connected.
After pursuing the ordinary practice of medicine for some time, and even writing some works upon the treatment of disease, which, though they betray no little amount of originality, do not lead us to believe that the doubted of the existence of a tolerable amount of certainty in the treatment of diseases under the ordinary methods, we find that, like many others of mature years, he gradually became disgusted with the uncertainty of medical practice, which he relinquished altogether, and, as he informs us, occupied, himself solely with literary labors and chemical studies.
His attention, however, seems to have been ever and anon directed to the therapeutic powers of drugs, and sickness invading his own family led him to aspire more earnestly after some sure guiding principle in medicine, and possibly his literary labours served to furnish him with many hints respecting the homoeopathic law, until at last he became satisfied that the evidence was very strongly in favour of it. At this period viz., in the year 1790, his attention was particularly drawn to the febrifuge power of cinchona bark, which he had tested in some cases of tertian and quotidian fever. Here, thought he, doubtless, I have a medicine whose power to cure a certain well marked disease I am thoroughly convinced of, not only from the testimony of authors, but from may own personal experience. Here, then, is a suitable medicine with which to test the accuracy of my surmises as to the rule of cure, which I cannot doubt really obtains in nature, though whether this be undiscoverable, as the obscurity that exists on the subject among all writers from Hippocrates downwards might lead me to suppose, or whether it differ in regard to every disease and every drug, as some authors would have us believe, or whether the principle broached by one of the Hippocratic authors and formulized by Galen, that all medicines cure by virtue of their power to produce a state the exact contrary of the disease, be the universal law of cure, or whether the exact contrary of this, viz., that medicines cure by virtue of their power to produce a similar disease, be true, as was admitted regarding some disease, be true, as was admitted regarding some disease by the author of the Hippocratic book On the Places in Man, and was hinted at in his peculiar mystic manner by the much decried but talented Paracelsus, and had been occasionally enunciated by esteemed medical men-among the rest by Boulduc with respect to the power of purgatives to cure diarrhoea, by Detharding with respect to the colic-relieving power of the colic-causing senna, by Von Storck with respect to the virtues of the mania-producing stramonium in mental disorders, and by the Dane Stahl with respect to all remedies- remains still to be ascertained. A contemplation of the fixed principles which guide all other phenomena of nature would prevent me ever entertaining the almost blasphemous idea that medicines do not also act according to some fixed rule.
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.