In her own way nature asks plainly for what she wants, but her code is not printed in books. While the play of her forces may often seem subtle, she uses enough expressions to make herself clear and her moods perfect their meaning in our understanding. We learn by resemblance and comparison, finding old friends in every crowd. The fellaheen of today looks like his brother in stone four thousand years old. Such is the elemental power that moulds us and at the same time invites our friendship.
It paints the fear of death on the countenance as well as in our dreams and speaks to us in wind and weather, darkness and light, heat and cold, touch, thought and countless other ways. The ancients heard it, and interpreted it in fear but its message is one of guidance; when read through reason: The absurd things of today become fundamental tomorrow, because we have mastered their meaning. We neither despise small things nor magnify them overmuch, but learn their relationship to greater ones. Infinity is written larger in the heavens, but we learn of it through the microscope also and the uncharted fields of nature are boundless when compared with the recorded ones.
In a day when heterodoxy meant vastly more in medicine than in religion, Hahnemann, with a firm grasp of the knowledge of the past, ventured to open up a new path and show its relationship to life. Many of his professed followers do even now not see the marks which he blazed. The earlier homeopaths depended largely upon subjective manifestations, but even Hahnemann began to see their one-sidedness in his later days. Boenninghausen developed the objective and anamnesic phases very fully, but the time was not ripe for either to grasp the full meaning of their relationship to human development and the general harmony of life. The extension of the law, lies before, not behind us, and its fuller grasp has been left for our time. The law is all embracing, in that it is but part of the greater law of harmony, guiding us in everything.
Health is relative, and the subtle juncture of forces which breeds sickness is necessarily evanescent and intangible. Inheritances, surroundings, emotions, vital resistance and much else go to make it up. Gloomy days bring low spirits and relaxation, while a high electric tension gives us joy in living, dear thoughts and sudden sicknesses. The one is slow, the other intense and quick. It is well to know as much as may be of all its bearings in order to build up the reaction which we call life. If we believe-that life is born of action and reaction, then medicines cure like nature does, and all cures are but nature’s ways expedited. But a real cure is this and much more. It means the transfer of energy from sound into sick parts; the conversion of energy. This explains many obscurities.
It accounts for the rapid action of the similimum, whether in quick relief, euthanasia or aggravations which may even be fatal. We draw upon the ebb and flow of life’s forces and symptoms appear like the waves of the sea; now intense and mounting high, again dipping low but always undulating in ceaseless opposites. Life is perpetuating itself in the direction of least resistance, growing upon its surroundings, but carrying the impress of its experiences with it. These and the particular way in which it meets them we must learn and know in order to regulate the expenditure of energy, by applying synchronously acting remedies.
Symptoms tend to arrange themselves in groups; the earlier drug effects being coarser responses and the later, finer and more individualistic. Among many sick we generally fail to find the latter or grasp the state of the mind and soul that so faithfully mirrors the whole organism and holds up the true colours with which the minutia must blend harmoniously. Hospitals serve a good purpose, but they only throw the deep shadows of disease across our path and rarely admit of a dose individual study of the sick. Symptoms remain but fragments until we learn their bearings and see their reflection in the mind, where objective phases and impulses stand uppermost; and as similar causes may excite any grade of reaction we must know the deciding value of individualities, which are always clearest in the mind. If they seem to spring from the mind itself and affect the understanding and memory especially, they are mostly of miasmatic or concomitant origin, and must be treated as such. The state of the emotions is of the most fundamental importance.
In the life history of every substance there is a mark which points towards its application. The doctrine of signatures is not all fancy even if correspondences have mostly been found in forms; a little understood subject. Striking things have their counterparts and their mutual connection is made clearer through symptomatology. While the indications include subjective, objective, anamnesic and environmental effects, drug symptoms are also made up of much more than has been recorded and we read much between the lines. There is an art in matching the peculiarities of the patient with the singularities of drugs which demands a good knowledge of symptoms as well as disease, in order to avoid the dangers of generalisation as well as those of over individualisation. The one leads to the treatment of disease, en masse, and pathological views, the other to symptom covering; yet their connection must be under-stood.
The exciting causes of acute disease become of less importance as the sickness develops, being replaced by one of the miasma as a maintaining factor. Neglecting this fact yields recoveries but no cures.
Our students are seldom impressed with the comprehensiveness of the law, every teacher seeming bent on showing some special short cut and the result is poor work, although its principle is so fundamental that it helps even such dabblers to some measure of success; but in the main their practice is a miserable bungling, inconsistent with their profession.
Students select homoeopathic schools to learn the better way and they should not be disappointed. Therefore every teaching chair should be filled with enthusiastic men who lay special stress on a knowledge of the law and materia medica. It is the veriest nonsense to imagine that the materia medica can be taught by one or two men in a few years. The work of elucidating the generalities and modalities is alone more than enough for one, not to speak of the different regional effects, mental phenomena, etc. We will not advance until our teachers learn how to make the student see more of the patient and less of the disease; he must view the sick one as a living expression of some particular drug action, regardless of the diagnosis. Fortunately while diagnosis is rapidly multiplying diseases, it is powerless before individuality, which can be learned through our remedies only. This is a great advantage, which our schools are not utilising.
The advocates of diagnostic prescribing have entirely neglected the field of homoeopathic prognosis, and the further they follow modern scientific medicine the less they will know about it. On the other hand the true healing artist knows, by inference, how to fill out a partial symptom picture without awaiting dangerous developments. While this is often a tedious and painstaking process the results go far beyond anything that traditional medicine with its suppressive treatments can accomplish; therefore it is worth while. While the exhibition of the similimum is steadily enlarging the bounds of our hope, the line of demarcation can never be exact; yet a just estimate of probabilities weighs heavily for homeopathy. From every standpoint we see some advantage or other that the law offers over and above so-called rational medicine. The outcome is not uncertain, but our progress suffers from incompetency and poor instruction. The earnest spirits are just as eager as they ever were, but we must meet them half way and show them the path which nature has made for us and which often leads into untrodden but nevertheless true ways, where we will find the true surcease in things well done. If we seem finite, infinity is greater and we are part of it. If we know but little of the law the whole is swallowed up in a divine harmony of which it becomes us to learn more.
DlSCUSSION
IL E. S. Hayes: The thought brought out in this paper about the danger of too much individualisation is a novel one and one not often dwelt on. The usua1 way is to advocate individualisation without limit but there is a limit to that and if carried too far it will lead to many mistakes. We are all apt to fall into that way of handling a case and we do often get brilliant results; I do it myself but once in a while, in fact every now and then I come across a case that will not bear handling from mere symptom-matching and I have to call a halt and look more thoroughly into the matter and prescribe from more fundamental grounds.
R. F. Rabe: There are many interesting points in this paper; one thing that arrested my attention and which I believe to be true is that the exciting cause may start a ease of sickness but it gives it a character only for a short time and then is lost as a cause and the miasm whatever it may be, is responsible for carrying on the symptoms of ill health. In a chronic case we are very apt to hark back to the exciting cause Of indications—it may have been a fall or a fright—and to think that therefore Arnica or Aconite will be the remedy. But this is not always the case for by the time that the patient comes to us the miasm Psora or what not has got in its work and quite another remedy than that demanded by the exciting cause, may be needed.
Born in Western Pennsylvania, he graduated from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and subsequently Hahnemann Medical College of Philadelphia. He moved to Parkersburg, W. Va., in 1888, practicing there, but also consulting worldwide. He gave lectures at the Pulte Medical College in Cincinnati and taught philosophy, materia medica, and repertory at the American Foundation for Homoeopathy Postgraduate School. Boger brought BÅ“nninghausen's Characteristics and Repertory into the English Language in 1905. His publications include :
Boenninghausen's Characteristics and Repertory
Boenninghausen's Antipsorics
Boger's Diphtheria, (The Homoeopathic Therapeutics of)
A Synoptic Key of the Materia Medica, 1915
General Analysis with Card Index, 1931
Samarskite-A Proving
The Times Which Characterize the Appearance and Aggravation of the Symptoms and their Remedies