Theory of the Dynamization of Medicine



It will be sufficiently evident from what I have adduced concerning Mr. Jenichen’s exploits, that his mode of procedure in the making of those preparations he termed high potencies was quite arbitrary and un-Hahnemannian, and doubtless the notoriety they obtained was mainly fostered by his making a profound secret of his process. Jenichen’s first essay with high potencies was with the medicine Plumbum, for an affection of the foot, and curiously enough, his last feat was to fire a ball of the metal through his head. Peace be with his ashes! let us say; though his unhappy invention brought no peace but rather great strife into homoeopathic camp.

Of course that eminent discoverer of homoeopathic mare’s nests, Dr.Gross, took up Jenichen’s new preparations with great zeal, and as he had previously stated of Korsakoff”s pretended discovery and of Hering’s isopathy, so he now vehemently asserted of Jenichen’s absurdity, that it was a new era in homoeopathy; and he went farther, for he pretended that cures were never made till this mighty Nimrod had furnished us with such remarkable remedies. Stapf, Hering, Boenninghausen, Rummel, and several others, joined in Gross’s eulogies. One and all asserted that these high dilutions possessed almost uncontrollable power, and their incautious use was highly dangerous; indeed Boenninghausen killed two mad dogs dead on the spot with a globule of one of them. (Allg. hom. Ztg., xxxix. 98.) Jenichen, encouraged by his patrons, went on potentizing terrifically, Hering all the time shouting to him across the Atlantic, “Higher, higher! every year higher! ” a suggestion poor Jenichen was not slow to obey, for from 100 he soon got to 200, 500, 800, 1000, 1500, 2000, 10,000, 50,000, and even as high as 60,000. It is impossible to say how high he would have gone in the course of time, had he not providentially shot himself after he got to 60,000.

Hahnemann was so fearful of hyper-potentizing the medicines, that he ordered no more than sixty shakes to be given in the preparation of the 30th dilution, but our hero Jenichen thought nothing of giving 600,000 to one preparation.

Jenichen tells us he worked five hours a day at his preparations. Supposing each succussion occupied a second of time, and he worked during all these five hours continuously, without stopping for an instant, to potentize one single medicine up to the 60,000th potency would take him nearly five weeks of hard labour. We may make ourselves perfectly easy in this point, and are quite justified in saying that his potencies, so called, were nothing more than a disreputable catch-penny, puffed into unmerited notoriety by few credulous homoeopathists, who should have known better than lend their reputations to the propagation of what five minutes’ calm calculation might have convinced them was an impossibility and a cheat.

But I have said enough of the Jenichen delusion. I trust it is now on the fair way to die a natural death, and the sooner it is decently interred the better for the scientific aspect of homoeopathy, and the claims to common sense of its advocates.

Let us now see what has been done and said by Hahnemannic theory of the dynamization of medicines.

All that is mystical, mysterious, and hypothetical in Hahnemann’s writings finds an apt commentator in Dr. Hering of Philadelphia, and the dynamization-theory among the rest.

Believing that there was some real and novel change effected in the drug by means of the homoeopathic processes, Dr. Hering felt it necessary to ascribe this to some new and unheard-of natural force, which he proposed to call Hahnemannism, just as we apply to other natural force the terms Mesmerism and Galvanism, after Mesmer and Galvani, their discoverers. The part performed by this new force he conceived to be the communication by certain atoms of their essential character to other atoms. He employed the word tension to indicate the division of the matter, and he promised to explain the whole affair in a book he was engaged in, but which has not yet made its appearance, though thus heralded to the world some fifteen years since. It is difficult to see how he can prove to us that the great divisibility of substances and their capability of acting on the organism can constitute a force, it being rather a property; and it is certainly an arbitrary assumption, incapable of proof, to say that the properties of medicinal substances can be transferred to non- medicinal ones. Dr. Hering, in the same article, (Arch., xv. 1.) alleges that none can resist the action of the so called potencies, that every person is susceptible to them, that it is a law that the medicinal power becomes freer the more the mass of the medicine is diminished; that, finally, we should set some bounds to our succussions, and guard against hyper-potentizing.

Nor is friend Hering alone in his dread of this excessive trituration and succussion, for Jahr, of Manual renown, states z Preface to Jahr’s Manual. that the system may be permanently ruined by the continued employment of the higher potencies.

But to return to Dr. Hering, he states, as something peculiar, that potencies of different degrees may be made by altering the proportion of medicine and vehicle, and that the effect of these is different according as they are made in the proportion of 1 to 10, of 1 to 100, of 1 to 1000, or 1 to 10,000. Hahnemann himself, we shall find, when we come to consider the subject of the dose, employed at different periods different proportions of drug and vehicle. Hering naturally took up Korsakoff”s notion of the medicinal infection of non-medicinal substances, and he even extended it to a still more extravagant length; thus he said that one globule of the 30th potency made, with the cubic inch of air in the bottle where it lay, a now potency; the whole air of the room must also be penetrated by the power of the globule, and become a potency, if the right proportion existed between them, but as the proportion of the air was in excess this penetration did not take place, and the air of the room did not become a new potency. Glass, cork, are, according to Hering, as efficient insulators of Hahnemannism as they are of electricity. It is melancholy that men of real genius like Hering will waste their energies following out such absurd and useless trains of thought as this which I have just given you a specimen of; they cannot lead to any useful practical end, and are not even serviceable in convincing any one of the rationality of homoeopathy, but rather the reverse. However, it must be confessed that Dr. Hering has rendered and still continues to render such important services to practical homoeopathy that we can patiently bear with him when he mounts his theoretical hobbies. Still, we prefer vastly to meet him on the field of practice than on that of theory.

To account for the supposed great development of power produced in the medicine by the Homoeopathic pharmaceutic processes, many physicians have on many occasions stated that by them electricity was set free; but dose not clearly appear what this free electricity has to do with the medicinal action for none will contend that medicinal action has the slightest resemblance to electrical action. However, this was and is still a favourite idea with some. Surgeon Tietze (Arch., xii. 1.) convinced himself of it by finding that when he rubbed up his medicine with milk-sugar in a glass mortar, with a glass pestle, the particles were attracted and repelled in quite an electrical fashion, and he found that a luminous appearance was produce produced during the the trituration in the dark; phenomena which, we all know, will occur with plain sugar or milk-sugar independent of all medicinal admixture.

Several homoeopathic authors have made examinations of the appearance of the homoeopathic preparations under the microscope, and their labours have been rewarded by the observation of some interesting appearances presented by the medicinal substances and preparations so investigated. The first that directed his attention to this subject was Dr. Segin, who made a series of observations with the microscope, in order to show that the so- called infinitesimals really contained discernible particles of the medicines subjected to the homoeopathic processes. (Hyg., vii. 1.) Under a microscope that magnified seventy five diameters, Dr.Segin examined the first six triturations of metallic copper, prepared according to the centesimal scale. In each of these triturations he distinctly recognized the blackish- brown particles of the metallic copper equally mingled throughout the milk-sugar. He could no longer detect them in the seventh trituration. In after years he subjected some other preparations to the action of the solar microscope, and imagined he could still detect particles of metallic copper, even in the 200th dilution of that metal. an observation the accuracy of which I must take leave to doubt, and to suggest that Dr. Segin must have deceived himself, especially as the solar microscope is not at all calculated for such investigations. Although Dr. Segin’s observations were neither very numerous nor complete, as far as they went they bore out Hahnemann’s first expressed idea, that the attenuations still contain some of the original medicine, and they also seemed to refute Hahnemann’s subsequent idea that there was a dematerialization of the medicine, a spiritualization of it, produced by the homoeopathic processes. It is interesting that Dr. Segin’s observations attracted great attention among the adherents of the allopathic school, and were transferred into the columns of an allopathic journal.

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.