His works will live after him; coming generations will profit by them, and like the present will honor his memory.
Dr. John C. Morgan being called upon addressed the chair as follows:
It is honourable to mankind that we love to praise the dead. But it is no ordinary eulogy that we pass upon him of whom we speak today. A personal friend has been torn from us; our most venerable leader has departed. Nestor no longer lives. How shall we fifty recount his worth? And where begin?
The magnanimous generosity of Dr. Hering to his colleagues and pupils of this city ought not to be unrecorded. In one respect he was lavish exceeding anything I ever saw. A man of such abundant literary productiveness, and of such great usefulness to the profession, and to the interests of Homoeopathy, could not have found much time for making money by practice.
A large and select practice he always had; and he acquired a modest competency; only that. But I confidently venture the assertion, that no homoeopathic physician ever enjoyed intimacy with him, but he has not only been deeply instructed, but also more than once or twice surprised by his transfer to him of valuable cases, and of excellent families, who had applied to him. The practitioners of surgery and midwifery, especially, have reason to remember the unexampled friendship of Dr. Hering.
Unflinching in devotion to law and principle; merciless, possibly, in denouncing license under the law of our art; upright and downright in his consistency; successful in his practice; classic in his teaching; to these traits he added the humanities which today bind to his memory that innumerable host, who, in all ways the better and the happier for his living; and above all that phalanx of true workers who oft times filled their exhausted pitchers from his neverfailing fountain of knowledge and encouragement.
I thought this morning of that unfinished work The Guiding Symptoms. Who will take it up? Who will take up any of the work he has been doing? Upon whom shall his mantle fall? May we not pray that his mantle may fall upon all of us, and shall we not take up the work upon which he has so nobly spent his life?
I must, for a moment, refer to another aspect of the subject must allude to the lifelong hostility of some who are today reaping where he has sowed. For many years I myself was kept aloof from him, whilst practising homoeopathy, by the assertion of some who professed to know him, that he was dogmatic, like his master Hahnemann; that he was visionary, like his master Hahnemann; that he was unreliable and ultra, like his master Hahnemann. Great, then, was my surprise when I came not to know him for myself.
I thank Providence that I have lived long enough to learn better of him, and of his master Hahnemann. I have ever found Dr. Hering most pliable to the force of sound reason, and thus ever open to conviction. I have never met a man so willing to take suggestions from juniors as was Dr. Hering. I Have never met a man so humbly a learner from all sources; never met a man in the homoeopathic ranks who was so completely en rapport with all the departments of modern science.
Were there new discoveries made, who was so eager to grasp them as Dr. Hering? When the spectroscope was introduced, who knew it so soon, and so well, as Dr. Hering? When Hausmann, the professor in the University of Pesth, Hungry, published his great work, showing, from the homoeopathic standpoint, parallel lines of evolution of both organic beings and their organic pabulum- when, I say, that great book hardly understood to this day, in Europe or America, appeared, who introduced it? Who, of all the homoeopathic profession, took up that book and interpreted it to the profession? Who, but Dr. Hering? In all these things Dr. Hering has been found in the very front rank of medical and collateral science; and I wish to give this testimony as one somewhat intimate with him. He was as far from being the dogmatic extremist-the visionary symptomist-he has been represented, as was possible; may, who does not admit, now, that he was in the very front rank of the medical men of our day?
Dr. Herings influence as a teacher in Homoeopathy is today felt everywhere. An incident will illustrate it. A very successful physician in Illinois, a graduate of the Philadelphia College, said to met that while a student he attended Dr. Herings private lectures also added- I studied general medicine from a homoeopathic standpoint in the college; but I really learned Homoeopathy from Dr. Hering in that back-office of his.
Dr. Hering was not only, however, a teacher of men. He humbled himself in an unusual way. His love, I may say reverence for children, was characteristic and unique. The simplicity of his own heart found its counterpart in them. When the Homoeopathic Fair was organized in 1869, he insisted that a prominent place must be assigned to a Childrens Table, asserting that no good would come of the enterprise were the children left out. He poetically said that they, having lately arrived from heaven, have the angels still with them; and that they are ever nearer heaven than their elders. He had convictions, strong convictions, why not? And he felt that he had a mission in life.
It has been said, whosoever wishes to live in this world in comfort and in quiet, let him beware of a man with a mission. That is a true saying. Let a man who wishes to be at his ease keep at a respectful distance from a man with a mission. Dr. Hering was a such a man. He was alive to the question mooted, and particularly to the recent departures from first principles from some in the homoeopathic ranks. He had the convictions that he should resist them to the utmost. He believed in his own mission. Only a few weeks ago he said to me, referring to recent denatures from fundamental Homoeopathy, and his purpose to defend it. The Lord has kept me alive for that.
A man with such a conviction of his mission and the divine origin of it, and with such a knowledge of his subject, might be expected to appear dogmatic. Coming in contact with generation after generation of dogmatic tyros, let us rather say, such a man could not be expected to pause in his great lifework, to come down, on command, and wipe away all the cobwebs woven by their experience, with a gentle hand.
Dr. Hering has been among us as a teacher Let us than reverse, for their great worth, his teaching, as we all do his memory. Dr. Augustus Korndoerfer spoke as follows: I scarcely know how to express myself on this occasion. In fact, I had thought that I should say nothing, as being truly unfitted to express the depth of my feelings, at the death of our old friend. Dr. Hering.
I have been intimately connected with him during a decade. From the first of my acquaintance I felt that he was my friend. He had a firm and abiding friendship, and event at times when it seemed as though he were not the friend that you thought him, it was that he might do you good.
I would like, in addition to what has been said, however, to speak more fully of his great friendship to the young practitioner. His knowledge, his labors, his wondrous store of information. we all of us know,; but not all knew how uniformly kind he was to the beginner in medicine. Hours were all as minutes to him, if he might help the young men, and the labor was pleasure to him, if he could render assistance to them. I well remember, during the early days of my acquaintance with him, how utterly he abhorred the idea of keeping a secret from the profession; how earnestly he insisted on every member of the profession making known, in season and out of season, every fact which might tend to the healing of the sick or rendering assistance in the slightest degree to the suffering. It is this phase of his character which has attracted me more than any other, for he showed it so freely during the many years.
In regard to his work, it has been said by some, as intimated by Dr. Morgan, that his work, was unreliable because dogmatic. I can only say that the man who says that, utters what he knows to be worse than a falsehood. It is infamous Dr. Hering never put his pen to paper except where he had the fullest authority for the truthfulness of what he wrote. Every word and line he wrote bore not only the evidence of having been taken from some authority, but of being from his own authority, because he accepted the diction of no man.
It has been said by some that he made notes and memoranda of the most ridiculous experiences of physicians; but as the doctor remarked to me in reference to this: Yes, I do take notes of everything; a great deal of which I only find fit for the waste- basket; but I take notes. There might be some truth in them which only the future will reveal. This exactness, this slow work, was simply the result of the overcarefulness that characterized him- his perfect desire to give everything, in its perfect shape, to the profession.
This I learned from intimate acquaintance with him. He lived in faith; faith in homoeopathy and the divine mission he was called to fulfil. And he left it almost fulfilled. He left it with conviction that he could now leave it to be finished by other hands. He said to me only a short time ago that we had men left in the ranks who could go on finish what he, for want of time, could not complete.
In 1878 and 1879 he published 2 editions of his book, Sunstroke and Its Homeopathic Treatment.
Upon Hering's death in 1880 Knerr became responsible for the completion of the 10-volume Guiding Symptoms.
Dr. Knerr wrote 2-volume Repertory to the Guiding Symptoms,