What Divides Us (1926)


The manner in which sickness advances step by step, be the time long or very brief, is of the highest import, as its evolution always has its own characteristic movement and is peculiar to each individual case….


Until lately the soul deadening work of groping about in decaying matter in search of the ways of life held a strange fascination for the medical mind. It seemed bent upon staring at the flight of life just as if it could thus find the clue to its constructive activities.

Latterly biology has changed this somewhat, but not enough to overcome its saddening consequences. The serums are the fruit of pathologically minded biologists. No clear thinking brain, viewing life and health as a continuously regenerative process, could be guilty of such specious reasoning. It is certainly a fine illustration of how materialism may become the mother of spiritual involution and its dire progeny negation.

If we call to mind that ultimate good can never be born of evil, we will not allow ourselves to be enslaved into looking callously upon vivisection, injecting dead serums into a live blood stream or converting our public schools into experimental laboratories.

If such practices carried only the wished for results forward, the case would be bad enough, but each one is inevitably accompanied by heterogeneous elements whose ultimation can not be foreseen. It is especially deplorable because the divine harmony of human life is thus rudely broken into. What was it the Master said about entering in by some other way than the door? May I also ask who among you wishes to thus aid in propagating animalistic cell impressions made by adding tissues of a lower order to your own?

Life advances by burning to ashes what it appropriates, and we must either thus live toward a higher plane of development or perish miserably in the rushing, roaring torrent of a discordant materialism, never so menacing as it is today. If the middle ages looked up to the stars for guidance, until recently we have mushed on the trail of disease through cadavers. If the secrets of the heavens were too occult for a former age, this one has not discovered the ways of life by raking over the cold ashes of her dead camp-fires. What further fatuousness will overtake us is hard to say. Only this we know, man is full of follies and never more so than when he lays aside principles for expediency. The shameful mistakes of medicine can all be laid to lack of foresight in this respect. What of its boasted rationalism now? Is it as it should be, an understanding of principles, or just mussing around amongst facts, with an occasional find; just enough to lead into still another delusion?

If we would learn to really know this thing called truth we can not make much permanent progress by first of all laying hold of it amidst the swiftly shifting and ever elusive changes of matter, but we must first see the unity and divinity in all things and then judge results by their conformity thereto. This means a grasp of the laws which uniformly govern both abstract and concrete things and a discarding of all that fails to harmonise with them. It also means that they do not reverse themselves by passing from a higher to a lower phase of action and that that which is contrary to them can, at best be but apparently true and not really beneficial in the end.

In treating sick people the atmosphere charged by the mind of the patient and which the acute physician senses at once, governs much that he outwardly sees, and must be taken fully into account if we wish to do the best possible work. It is here that pure Homoeopathy is far superior to every other form of treatment and the great beauty of it is that every new scientific development only adds strength to its already commanding prestige.

Whenever we look upon diseases as entities instead of expressions of condition, our pathway soon turns into blind alleys at best, or ever more dangerous ways. Particular disease phases are the real things we are looking into and as these vortices of action move swiftly before our eyes, dose observation is the only means by which we may hope to understand and then control them. Just as soon as we begin to sort them into classes our minds are involuntarily coloured by their very designations and we begin to look at them through colored glasses, greatly to the prejudice of the patient and our own embarrassment.

The manner in which sickness advances step by step, be the time long or very brief, is of the highest import, as its evolution always has its own characteristic movement and is peculiar to each individual case: this is the real key to the case and must be searched for and disentangled from amongst a mass of non-essentials if we would do more than chase symptoms from part to part, but never cure.

We can not be said to cure unless each patient feels the vigour of returning health surging within him urging him to activity. A mere recovery which allows innate vitality to slowly recuperate itself is not a cure in any sense of the term. That is what divides us.

DlSCUSSlON

Dr. Hayes: The trouble is, Mr. Chairman, the paper was almost too deep to discuss offhand, but it was just like music to my ears. It is a demonstration of how harmony, rhythm and form may be brought from the immaterial world to our senses and I am sure we discerned all those things in Dr. Boger’s paper and the way he expressed it.

Dr. Boger: I just want to stress one point: we have the things which divide us between ourselves into various schools of thought, but there is still a wider gulf which divides us from the regular school. Now the majority of thinkers in the regular school certainly don’t pretend to cure diseases, but the patients recover. The surgeon does his work and the patient recovers. They give some other treatment of pneumonia, give ammonium carbon, perhaps a new serum, but the patient recovers. Take erysipelas—they use antiseptics, and the patient recovers. Now the thing which divides us from them as by a gulf, is the fact that we give a remedy which makes the patient come up quickly and cures the patient. He is brought again into the natural harmony of life, that is what divides us, and so few even of us can see that point. Too many of us allow our patients to recover. If you can’t do any more than that you are not a Homeopathist, you are not any better than an Allopath—he allows his patient to recover. Some of them are getting sensible enough to lay their medicines aside and let the patient recover.

C.M. Boger
Cyrus Maxwell Boger 5/ 13/ 1861 "“ 9/ 2/ 1935
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