Dr. P Wolf (Hyg. xviii. 418) objects to the term specific being considered identical with homoeopathic, chiefly on account of the indefinite meaning attached to it by the ancients. But at the same time he admits,-1st, that homoeopathy has shown that all specific cures depend on a common ground of relationship betwixt the remedy and the disease; 2nd, that the discovery of specific remedies is no longer left as heretofore to blind chance or accident; 3rd, that we now know that there can only be specifics for species of diseases, and this unriddles to us the conflicting statements respecting certain remedies which are variously stated to be and not to be efficacious in cases of gastrodynia, intermittent fever, etc.; disease of totally different species, though having one prominent symptom in common, having been included under one and the same appellation.
Dr. Rapou, jun., in his History of Homoeopathy, devotes a chapter to tracing, in a rapid and attractive manner, the various fates that have befallen specific medicine, from the earliest days until the time of Hahnemann. He shows that in the very earliest ages of the medical art the aim of physicians was almost solely directed to the discovery of specifics, and that such were the only medicines used for the cure of diseases. Melampus, Paeon, the divine Aesculapius himself, acquired their fame by their knowledge of specifics, and the votive tablets that were hung in the temples of Aesculapius were only records of specific cures. Hippocrates and his immediate followers exercised a fatal influence on the treatment by specifics, and introduced the so- called rational system. The empirical school of Alexandria was an attempt to revive the medicine of specifics, but unfortunately it did not exercise any permanent influence on the other schools. Galen gave the finishing stroke to the specific school, and introduced into medicine those miserable hypothesis of his, whose injurious influence on the real progress of the medical art is not unfelt at the present day.
Henceforward the medicine of specifics fell into disrepute, and was practised only by quacks, no physicians who had any pretension to education feigning to occupy himself with anything so irrational. Thus, when Paracelsus, than whom a greater genius never appeared on the medical stage, directed his attention to the discovery of specifics, he was denounced by all his brethren, and that with such effect that his name of Bombastes became a by-word for everything extravagant and absurd, and such was the rancour and the success with which his enemies pursued him, that the impression they created concerning him is retained by our own generation of doctors; and while few have read his works, or even know their titles, almost all can sum you up his character with a confidence that impresses you with the sincerity of their convictions, viz., that he was the greatest quack that ever lived-except one, whom we have of late years heard condemned with equal severity and in equal ignorance.
Van Helmont, like Paracelsus, had a high opinion of specific medicines. The sixteenth century saw the introduction among us of several substances of a specific character. These, for the most part, were introduced into medicine by travellers who had witnessed their successful employment by the savages of newly- discovered countries. From such a degrading source the great authorities in medicines, who were imbued with a belief in the infallibility of Galen’s teaching, would not condescend to accept curative agents; and accordingly we find them stirring up kings and parliaments to issue edicts against their use, and to impose punishments on all who dared to employ them. And when, not with- standing all their bigoted opposition, the remedies they denounced were forced upon them, they endeavoured to explain their utility by all sorts of theoretical speculations. One medicine acted by being a tonic, another by being a debilitant, a third because it was a sedative, a fourth by virtue of its bitterness, a fifth by reason of its acridity. Thus, as is not uncommonly the case, even in our own nineteenth century, fats were made to accommodate themselves to theory, which is to reverse the proper order of things.
Nevertheless, the specifics remained, the theories received decent burial, and are now forgotten. Sydenham, Boerhaave, Van Swieten, and especially Von Storck, devoted themselves to the search for specifics, with more or less success; but still they were obliged to trust to chance mainly for their discovery, and specific medicine still food in antagonism, as a mere empiricism, to so-called rational medicine, until Hahnemann appeared, who, bringing the power of his great genius to bear on the subject, first showed how specifics might be methodically discovered, and from that moment the medicine of specifics ceased to be an empiricism and became rational medicine par excellence, a fact with Hahnemann wished emphatically to register when he gave as the title of the first edition of the book that taught his principles, Organon of Rational Medicine.
Dufresne (Bibl. Hom. de Geneve, 1834) contends that the homoeopathic doctrine of specifics has nothing in common with the old doctrine of specifies, for the homoeopathist does not look to species of diseases as the botanist to species of plants. The homoeopathic specific is, on the contrary, adapted to the individuality and not the species, which is exactly what I have stated on more than one occasion when considering the opinions of others on this point.
To the same purpose Watzke (Hom. Bekehrungsbriefe, p.74) alleges that homoeopathy is the specific method, but not that obscure method of the same name as it exists in the old school, but that disclosed by the principle similia similibus; and Dr. Black in his treatise alleges that the doctrine of homoeopathy is simply the doctrine of specifics.
For my own part, I have not the slightest hesitation in joining heartily in this opinion, it being understood that the specificity of homoeopathic medicines is not of that vague and general character understood by the old school; that in fact, as Dufresne has it, the specificity is not towards species of diseases but towards individual cases of disease; and I think we are justified in saying that while the experimental method of Hahnemann has demonstrated, with respect to all the specifies of the old school, that they act according to the principle in similia similibus, and while the actual experiments of Hahnemann and his followers have vastly enriched our store of specifics, we
may conclude that all unproved remedies that show a specific action cure by virtue of their homoeopathicity. Thus we should consider homoeopathicity and specificity to be convertible terms, under-standing the latter word in the limited sense I have above attached to it.
I shall now pass on to a consideration of the explanations of the curative process offered at various times by Hahnemann, and likewise some of the most remarkable of those of his disciples and others.
In Hahnemann’s first easy On a New Principle etc., (Lesser Writings, p.311) published in 1796, wherein he first broaches the homoeopathic therapeutic law, as it is now termed, and which, as I before stated, he only thought applicable to the treatment of chronic diseases-in this essay, I say, we find the following rule laid down for the choice of the remedy:-
“We should imitate nature, which sometimes cures a chronic disease by superadding another, and employ in the disease we wish to cure (especially if it be a chronic one) that medicine which is able to produce another similar artificial disease, and the former will be cured – similia similibus”.
A little further on he states that it is the direct or primary action of the medicine that must resemble the symptoms of the disease.
No further explanation of the modus operandi is given in this essay, except it be that he incidentally says a little further on, quoting from his observations on bark in his translations of Cullen’s Materia Medica, which he published in the year 1790, that the substance produces a true attack of fever very similar to intermittent, and for this reason it overpowers the latter. The first hint of an explanation of the mode of action of remedies occurs in the Medicine of Experience. We there find the following two maxims laid down:-
“1. When two abnormal general irritations act simultaneously on the body, if the two be dissimilar, then the action of the weaker will be suppressed for some time by the stronger.”
As an illustration of this he cites the suppression of measles by small-pox, and of the plague by the same disease.
“2. When the two irritations greatly resemble each other, then the weaker, with its effects, will be completely extinguished and annihilated by the analogous power of the stronger.”
He illustrates this by stating that cow-pox is annihilated by the supervention of small-pox-that the permanent cure of some cutaneous affections is brought about by cow-pox, provided these were similar to the exanthema that often accompanies cow-pox-that itch is cured by hepar sulphuris, which causes a similar eruption-and a burn is healed by the employment of strong alcohol.
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.