One great advantage of this explanation is, that it reconciles the homoeopathic or specific curative process with the other acknowledged methods of cure, and does not, like the other explanations that have been proposed, make the homoeopathic an exceptional curative process. As long as the homoeopathic method was so regarded it would tend, on the one hand, to make it rejected and denied by the partisans of the other methods, who, satisfied of the curative power of the treatment they adopted, could not bear to be told that medicines acted on quite another principle than the action of their favourite methods could be referred to; and, on the other hand, it would lead the homoeopathist, who was experimentally convinced of the efficacy of his system, to imagine that by no other method than his own were diseases curable, and to reject scornfully all the methods of the Hippocratic school as necessarily false, because they did not chime in with his own notions of the curative action of drugs. It would be no small gain to homoeopathy and to medical science to show that the recognised methods of cure and the homoeopathic may be reconciled, if we go deep enough and take a more philosophical view of the vital actions than has hitherto been done by the partisans of either method; if we look thoroughly into the actual operations of the organism, and do not allow ourselves to mistake words for ideas, or to accept error, however ancient and time-honoured for truth. What I more particularly allude to as obstructing our path to a clear view of the subject are the doctrines of metastasis, counter-irritation, and revulsion on the one hand, and on the other, the still more ancient and groundless notion respecting the stronger disease overcoming the weaker, which is not a whit more respectable, though it dates from Hippocrates himself, (Aph. 46.) and has been received as an axiomatic truth for nearly twenty-five centuries. A more careful and accurate research, assisted by the lights of modern physiology, would severe to show the inaccuracy of these views, and make an opening for the reception of the truths that are to be found on both sides, and in the end lead to the general acceptance of that method of treatment which offers the mildest, safest, and most certain, because most direct, mode of curing diseases. Where great prejudices prevail, there we may expect that error exists, and to both schools I would address the words of Locke:–
“Those who have not thoroughly examined to the bottom all their own tenets must confess they are unfit to prescribe to others; and are unreasonable in imposing that as truth on other men’s brief which they themselves have not searched into, nor weighed the arguments of probability on which they should receive or reject it.(Essay on the Human Understanding).
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.