The Proving of Medicines



If, thought Hahnemann, I can induce a number of my medical brethren to join me in testing medicines on our healthy bodies, there will then be some chance of our being able to obtain in a reasonable space of time a considerable number of well-known curative tools with which work upon diseases. Acting on this thought, he wrote some earnest essays in Hufeland’s Journal, setting forth his new opinions and forcing them on the attention of the profession by the most conclusive arguments and the most striking illustrations. He urgently entreated them to join him in his proposed reform and perfecting of the Materia Medica, and appealed to them to assist in the glorious work with the utmost confidence of their ready response. (Essay on a New Principle, etc., Lesser Writings, p. 295; and On the Obstacles to Certainty and Simplicity, etc., ibid., p.358).

Alas! for the boasted zeal and earnestness of the members of the medical profession, Hahnemann’s appeal met with nothing but derision and contempt from his colleagues. None, not one, saw the utility of putting himself to inconvenience for the purpose of ascertaining the powers of the instruments he was hourly called upon to use in cases of life and death. One and all were perfectly satisfied with the traditional system they and their ancestors had practised; all were content stare super vias antiquas. Again and again did Hahnemann appeal to them, and again and again did he receive the same supercilious treatment.

Hahnemann, whose whole soul was fired with enthusiasm for his profession, and whose only aim was so to perfect his art as that it should be means of curing diseases more perfectly, effectually, and speedily than it had hitherto done, could not understand this apathy. (In later years he was so well aware of the fruitlessness of hoping for anything from the zeal of the great body of medical men, that when his disciple Stapf proposed to appeal to the profession at large to assist in the proving of medicines, ” Your plan,” says he, ” is well meant but impracticable. We should be laughed at for our request, or even treated with contempt. Which of our every-day colleagues would undertake such laborious trials? when he can tap on his well filled prescription-book and exclaim, ‘Thou art my comforter! I am never at a loss to prescribe when I have thee.

However things may turn out with the patient I am safe : these are prescriptions of the great masters; I prescribe them, no one can blame me.’ In all eternity you would never succeed in elevating these gentry to our pure views,” etc. (N. Arch., i.1, 161.)). Do these men, thought he, really believe that the system they and their ancestors have pursued from time immemorial is a rational, an efficacious one? I shall soon show them their mistake. With that he wrote an essay (AEsculapius in the Balance, Lesser Writings, p. 470) pointing out the glaring inconsistencies and absurdities of the old system, and showing clearly what must be done in order to render the art a certain and successful one, in place of a scientific deformity as it was. Simple-minded Hahnemann, better had it been for your own peace of mind had your held your tongue altogether than thus attack time-honoured system.

Joe Miller tells a story of a lady who received with wonderful equanimity all kinds of abuse until the abuser the abuser ventured to call her ugly. This fair lady did not resent the insult with greater bitterness than did the aggrieved partisans of Galenic medicine that offered to them by Hahnemann. Hahnemann had dared to expose the ugliness of their system, the foul-mouthed calumniator! No quarter must be given him. Hahnemann was not a little surprised to find that the sole reply vouchsafed to his scientific criticisms was abuse, scorn, contumely. He could not understand it- Dear Master,

” How green are you, and fresh in this old world.”

He attributed the outcry against him to jealousy of his discoveries. That it was not, but rage that he had exposed the deformity of his enemies in all its hideous nakedness. This could never be forgiven him; Hahnemann was henceforward a marked man. Luther might advance his own peculiar theological opinions, comparatively little notice was taken of him, but when once he began to expose the weaknesses of Rome, the whole thunder of the Vatican was directed against him; and so it was with Hahnemann. Paul was wiser in his day and generation. Had he blasphemed the great goddess Diana, it is doubtful if the unadorned eloquence of the worthy town-clerk would have saved him begin torn to pieces by the incensed Ephesians.

Hahnemann’s assaults on ancient medicine had rendered him thoroughly distasteful to his colleagues; he was now no more to be trusted, and was henceforth regarded as an outcast and a Pariah, whose companionship was to be shunned for evermore. He now saw full well that he must not look to his medical brethren for assistance in his great aim, but he did not despair; on the contrary, this very oppositions of his colleagues made him more resolute in his determination to carry out his plans alone, or with what casual assistance he could procure from non- professional friends.

Accordingly he set himself to his task con amore, and in a few years more he was able to give to the world a tolerable array of medicinal substances whose pure pathogenetic action he had ascertained by experiments on himself, his family, and a few friends. He did not, however, give these results as anything like complete, and indeed merely styled them Fragmentary Observations relative to the Positive Powers of Medicines on the Human Body. This work was merely an earnest of what was to come; it was published in 1805. Later in the same year he published his celebrated essay called The Medicine of Experience, (Lesser Writing, p. 497.) and in this essay he details at length how experiments with medicinal substances are to be conducted in order to ascertain their pathogenetic effects. I shall now give you the substance of what he there says. (Ibid., 515.)

“Every simple medicinal substance, “causes a peculiar specific disease-a series of determinate symptoms, which is not produced precisely in the same way by any other medicine in the world. As every species of plant differs in some way from every other species of plant, and as every mineral and salt differs from every other mineral and salt, so do they all differ among themselves in their medicinal properties, that is to say, in their morbific powers; each of these substance effects an alteration in our state of health in a peculiar determinate manner. Medicinal substances manifest the nature of their pathogenetic power, and their absolute true action on the healthy human body in the purest manner, when each is given singly and uncombined. Many of the most active medicines have already occasionally found their way into the human body, and the accidents they have given rise to have been recorded (e. g., poisonings accidental and intentional, and their histories). In order to follow up still farther this natural guide and to penetrate more profoundly into this source of knowledge, we administer these medicines experimentally, the weaker as well as the stronger, each singly and uncombined, to healthy individuals, with caution, and carefully removing all accessory circumstances capable of exercising an influence. We note down the symptoms they occasion precisely in the order in which they occur, and thus we obtain the pure result of the form of disease that each of these medicinal substances is capable if producing, absolutely and by itself, in the human body.

“In order to ascertain the effects of less powerful medicinal agents in this manner, we must give only one pretty strong dose to the temperate healthy person who is the subject of the experiment, and it is best to give it in solution. If we wish to ascertain the remaining symptoms which were not revealed by the first trial, we may give to another person, or to the same individual, but only to the latter after the lapse of several days, when the action of the first dose is fully over, a similar or even a stronger portion, and note the symptoms of irritation thence resulting in the same careful and sceptical manner. For medicines that are still weaker we require, in addition to a considerable dose, individuals that are healthy, it is true, but of very irritable delicate constitutions.

“The more obvious and striking symptoms must be recorded in the list, those that are of a dubious character should be marked with a sign of dubiety, until they have frequently been confirmed. In the investigation of these medicinal symptoms all suggestions and leading questions must be carefully avoided. It must be chiefly the mere voluntary relation of the person who is the subject of the experiment-nothing like guesswork, nothing obtained by dint of cross-questioning,, that should be noted down as truth, and still less expressions descriptive of expressions that have been suggested to the experimenter. But how,” he add, and this observation has more significance than we might at first sight suppose, “how, even in diseases, amid the symptoms of the original disease, the medicinal symptoms may be discovered, is a subject for the exercise of a higher order of inductive minds, and must be left solely to masters in the art of observation.” I think it a pity, for the sake of the purity of the Materia Medica, he had not for ever retained the opinion he expresses some years previously regarding this same giving of medicines to unhealthy subjects for the purpose of ascertaining their effects; for we find in the Essay on a New Principle (Lesser Writings, p. 309.) the following statement. After saying that the only way to ascertain the effects of drugs is to test them on the human body, he writes :- “The necessity for this has been perceived in all ages, but a false way was generally followed, inasmuch as they were only employed empirically and capriciously in diseases. The reaction of the diseased organism, however, to an untested or imperfectly tested remedy, gives such intricate results that their appreciation is impossible for the most acute physician. Either nothing happens, or there occur aggravations, changes, amelioration, recovery, death-without the possibility of the greatest practical being able to divine what part the diseased organism, and what the remedy played in effecting the result. They teach nothing, and only lead to false conclusions.”Ten years later, as I have shown, Hahnemann thought he was in a condition to determine what share the disease and what the remedy had in the result brought about by the administration of a medicine in disease, but I confess myself more disposed to agree with him in his former than his latter opinion.

R.E. Dudgeon
Robert Ellis Dudgeon 1820 – 1904 Licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh in 1839, Robert Ellis Dudgeon studied in Paris and Vienna before graduating as a doctor. Robert Ellis Dudgeon then became the editor of the British Journal of Homeopathy and he held this post for forty years.
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.