” A thenth of a grain,” I hear some one say, “is the smallest quantity the etiquette of the profession allows us to prescribe. Who could write a prescription to be made up at the apothecary’s shop for a smaller quantity without rendering himself ridiculous?”
Oh, indeed! A tenth of a grain sometimes acts so violently as to endanger life, and the etiquette of your clique does not permit you to give less- very much less. Is it not an insult to common sense to talk in this way? Is the etipuette of the profession of the code of rules to bind a set of senseless slaves, or are you men of free will and intelligence? If the latter, what is it that hinders you to give a smaller quantity when a large quantity might be hurtful? Obstinacy? The dogmatism of a school? Or what other intellecual fetters?
” Arsenic,” they protest, “would still be hurtful, though given in much smaller quantity, even if we were to descend to the ridiculous dose of a hundredth or a thousandth of a grain, a minuteness of dose unheard of in the posological maxims of our materia medica. Even a thousandth of a grain of the arsenic must still be hurtful and destructive, for it always remains an incontrollable poison. So we affirm, maintain, conjecture, and assert.”
What if with all this complacement asserting and conjecturing you have for once blundered upon the truth. It is evident that the virulence of the arsenic cannot oncrease, but must decrease as the dose is reduced, so that we must at length arrive at such a dilution of the solution and diminution of the dose as no longer possesses the dangerous character of your regulation dose of a tenth of a grain.
” Such a dose would, indeed, be a novelty! What kind of dose it would be?”
Novelty is, indeed, a capital crime in the eyes of orthodox school, which, settled down upon her old lees, subjects the reason to the tyranny of antiquated routine.
But why should a pitiful rule – why, indeed, should anything – hinder the physician, who ought by rights to be a learned, thinking, independent man, a controller of nature in his own domain, from rendering a dangerous does mild by diminishing its size?
What should hinder him, if experience should show him that the thousandth part of a grain is too strong a dose, from giving the hundred-thousandth part or the millionth of a grain? And should he find this last act too violently in many cases, as in medicine all depends on observation and experience (medicine being nothing but a science of experience), what should hinder him from reducing the millionth to a billionth? And if this prove too strong a dose in many cases who could prevent him diminishing it to the quadrillionth of a grain, or smaller still?
Methinks I hear vulgar stolidity croak out from the quagmire of its thousand-year-old prejudices: “Ha! ha! ha! A quadriollionth! Why, that’s nothing at all!”
How so? Can the subdivision of a substance, be it carried ever so far, bring forth anything else than portions of the whole? Must not these portions, reduced in size to the very verge of infinity, still continue to be something, something substantial, a part of the whole, be it ever so minute? What man in his senses could deny this?
And if this (quadrillionth, quintillionth, octillionth, decllionth) continue still to be really an integral portion of the divided substance, as no man in his senses can deny, why should even such a minute portion, seeing that it is really something, be incapable of acting, considering that the whole was tremendously powerful? But what and how much this small quantity can do can be determined by no speculative reasoning or unreasoning, but by experience alone, from which there is no appeal in the domain of facts. It belongs to experience alone to determine if this small portion has become too weak, to remove the disease for which this medicine is otherwise suitable, and to restore the patient to health. This is a matter to be settled not by the dogmatic assertion of the student at his desk, but by experience alone, which is the only competent arbiter in such cases.
Experience has already decided the question, and is seen to do so daily by every unprejudiced person.
But when I have finished with the wiseacre, who, never consulting experience, ridicules the small dose of homoeopathy as a nonentity, as utterly powerless, I hear on the other side the hypocritical stickler for caution still inveigh against the danger of the small doses used in homoepathic practice, without a shadow of proof for his reckless assertion.
A few words here for such persons.
If arsenic in the dose of a tenth of a grain be, in many cases, a dangerous medicine, must it not be milder in the dose of a thousandth of a grain? And, if so, must it not become still milder with every further diminution of the size of the dose?
Now, if arsenic (like every other very powerful medicinal substance) can be merely diminishing the size of the doses, be nut rendered so mild as to be no longer dangerous to life, then all we have to do is merely to find by experiment how far the size of the dose must be diminished, so that it shall be must enough to do no harm, and yet large enough to do no harm, and yet large enough to effect its full efficacy as a remedy of the diseases for which it is suitable.
Experience, and that alone, not the pedantry of the study, not the narow-minded, ignorant, unpractical dogmatism of the schools, can decide what dose of such an extremely powerful substance as arsenic is, so small as to be capable of being ingested without danger, and yet of remaining sufficiently powerful to be able to effect in diseases all that this medicine (so invaluable when sufficiently moderated in its action, and selected for suitable cases of disease) was from its nature ordained to do by benificient Creator. It must, by dilution of its solution and diminution of the dose, be rendered so mild that while the strongest man can be freed by such a dose from a disease for which it is the appropriate remedy, this same dose shall be incapable of effecting any perceptible alteration in the health of a healthy infant. (A medicine homoeopathy chosen, that is to say, a medicine capable of producing a morbid condition very similar to that of the disease to be cured, affects only the diseased part of the organism, therefore just the most irritated, extremely sensitive part of it. Therefore its dose must be so small as only to affect the diseased part just a little more than the disease itself did. For thus the smallest dose suffices, one so small as to be incapable of altering the health of a healthy person, who has naturally no points of contact sufficiently sensitive for this medicine, or of making him ill, which only large doses of medicine can do. See Organon of Medicine, § 277-279, and Spirit of the Homoeopathic Medical Doctrine, at the beginning of this volume.)This is the grand problem that can only be solved by oft-repeated experiments and trials, but not settled by the sophistical dogmatism of theschools with its guesses, its assertions, and its conjectures.
No rational physician can acknowledge any such limitations to his mode of treatment as the rusty routine of the schools – which is never guided by pure experiment combined with reflection – would dictate to him. His sphere of action is the restoration to health of the sick, and the countless potent forced of the world are freely given to him by the Sustainer of life as implements of healing; nought is with-held. To him whose calling it is to vanquish the disease that brings its victim to the verge of corporal annihilation, and effect a kind of recreation of life ( a nobler work than most other, even the most vaunted performances of mankind), to him the whole broad expanse of nature, with all her curative powers, and agents, must be available, in order to enable him to perform this creative act, if we may so call it. But he must be at liberty to employ these agents in the exact quantity, be it ever so small or ever so large, that experience and trials show him to be most adapted to the end he has in view; in any form whatever that reflection and experience has proved to be most serviceable. All this he must be able to do without any limitation whaysoever, as is the right of a free man, of a deliverer of his fellow creatures, and a life – restorer, equipped with all the knowledge pertaining to his art, and endowed with a god-like spirit and the tenderest conscience.
From this God-serving and noblest of all earthly occupation let all hold aloof who are deficient in mind, in the judicial spirit, in any of the branches of knowledge required for its exercise, or in tender regard for the weal of mankind, and a sense of his duty to humanity, in one word who are deficient in true virtue! Away with that unhallowed crew who merely assume the outward semblance of health – restorers, but whose heads are crammed full of vain deceit, whose hearts are stuffed with wicked frivolity, whose tongues make a mock of truth, and whose hands prepare disaster!
Hahnemann's three major publications chart the development of homeopathy. In the Organon of Medicine, we see the fundamentals laid out. Materia Medica Pura records the exact symptoms of the remedy provings. In his book, The Chronic Diseases, Their Peculiar Nature and Their Homoeopathic Cure, he showed us how natural diseases become chronic in nature when suppressed by improper treatment.