Hitherto opium has been almost exclusively employed antipathically or palliatively, and hardly any but its primary actions have been opposed to the contrary morbid states, contraries curentur – except when the physician prescribed (by mistake? Or numinis afflatu?) in a sense exactly opposite to this antiquity hallowed therapeutic rule of Galen’s, and so effected miraculous cures. No medicine in the world has affected more illusory relief, more deceptive concealment and suppression of the morbid symptoms, with consequence more disastrous than the original disease. No medicine in the world has done more harm (with preliminary apparent relief) than this opium.
Opium has been employed as the supposed chief remedy against all kinds of coughs, diarrhoeas, vomiting, sleeplessness, melancholy, spasms and nervous ailments – and more especially against all kinds of pains without distinction.
But all these innumerable affections are not contained in the primary action of opium, but just the opposite. Hence we can easily understand how far from permanent, how far from benificial must be the result of such an employment of this drug in the majority of diseases of body and mind! And daily experience teaches this.
If in some few cases opium removes cough, diarrhoea, vomiting, sleeplessness, trembling and so forth, this only happens when these ailments are of recent date or have arisen suddenly in a previously healthy body, and when they are of a slight character, Thus, for example, a cough brought on by a chill, a trembling caused by recent fright, (Smelling at a globule the size of a mustard-seed, moistened with a potentized dilution of opium, gives almost immediate relief to one how has undergone a violent fright, but only on the condition that he performs the olfaction immediately after trifling cause the fright has been received, If employed later, it not only brings no relief, it rather doe harm.) a diarrhoea suddenly excited by fear, a chill or other trifling case, vomiting and other symptoms produced by mental excitement, loathing, 7c., are sometimes quickly removed by opium, because it is only necessary that it should suppress these ailments in a superficial and temporary manner, in order to restore to the previously healthy body its freedom to ward off spontaneously all further tendency to these affections, and to continue its former condition of health by its own powers (vide Organon of Medicine, 4th edition, ยง 63, note).
Though opium succeeds in the palliative suppression of these rapid trivial ailments in the few instances indicated above, it by no means follows that it possesses a true curative power of permanently removing such affections in every case and under all conditions even when they are of a persistent character. It cannot remove them and restore health when they are symptoms of another disease to which opium does not correspond as a homoeopathic remedy in its primary effects, or if they have already lasted a considerable time, because these ailments are not contained in the primary actions of opium. (They are only to be found in its secondary action (and in the preliminary, momentary reaction – their reflexion – described below).
Hence it has hitherto been universally employed in medical practice throughout the whole, almost always with injurious and disasterous results, in old coughs, persistent diarrhoeas, long-continued sleeplessness, chronic vomiting, habitual spasms, anxiety and trembling. But when these affectiexisted for some time in the system and depended on totally different diseases for which opium is not the homoeopathic remedy, they could never, not in one single instance, be cured by opium, so that permanent health was restored by its use.
In employing opium in the above-mentioned chronic maladies we learn that it effects only at first an illusory alleviation, a transient suppression of the affection for a few hours; that it then ceases to alleviate without increasing the size of the dose, that on further increasing the dose it only allays the symptoms for a short time, and even when it does this it creates on the other hand new affections and a much more serious and a worse artificial disease. Verily this is an injurious, though hitherto universally practised misuse of this gift of God which was created for the removal of quite opposite morbid states. (For where shall we find a remedy equal to opium for the most obstinate constipation and for acute fevers, with umcomplaining stupefied sopor, with snoring from a half opened mouth, and twitching of the limbs, with burning heat of the perspiring body, and in several other morbid states corresponding in similarity to the primary effects of opium.)
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.