But most striking was the abuse which all physicians over the whole world down to the present time (Although as long as twenty years ago, I showed incontrovertibly in these very words (in the first edition of the ORAGNON, 1810), the misuse universally made by physicians of opium for pains to be a palpable injury to the well-being of patients, yet we have not seen that their conscience was the least touched, and that they abandoned a practice that is as stupid as it is criminal. To such remonstrances they only exclaim that their routine is interfered with, and they abuse and persecute the man who calls attention to their erronous practice, just as the sinner who feels himself hit the words of a sermon on repentence only abuses the preacher, without reforming his own conduct. But why should I, who feel an inward call to enunciate such important verities, and who have truth and nature on my side, why should I bother myself about these incorrigible sinners?) have made of opium, in prescribing it as a powerful remedy for pains of all sorts, be they ever so old and deeply rooted, it is obviously contrary to common sense, and is almost equal to the folly of a universal remedy, to expect from one single substance the cure of all pains which differ so infinitely among one another. Seeing that the various kinds of pains in diseases differ so much from one another in their seat, in the time and conditions of their occurrence, recurrence, increase and diminution, &c., it might be supposed that the Creator would not fail to create a large number of different medicines for their cure; for every finite thing can only have a finite, limited sphere of action. But opium is precisely not one of those pain-allaying and curing remedies. Opium is almost the only medicine that in its primary action does not produce a single pain. Every other known drug, on the other hand, produces in the healthy human body each its own kinds of pain in its primary action, and hence is able to cure and remove (homoeopathically) similar pains in diseases, especially if the other symptoms of the disease correspond in similarity to those observed from the administration of that medicine. Opium alone is unable to subdue homoeopathically, i.e. permanently, any one single pain, because it does not cause in its primary action one single pain, but the very reverse, namely, insensibility, the inevitable consequence (secondary action) of which is greater sensitiveness than before, and hence a more acute sensation of pain.
Therefore all pains of any duration allayed in a palliative and temporary manner by opium by means of its stupefying and pain-subduing power, return immediately when the stupefying primary action is exhausted, and that at least (Thus WILLIS in his Pharmacia rationalis, p. 298, says: “Opiatas generally allay, the most excruciating pains, and produce insensibility – for a certain time; but when this time is past the pains are immediately renewed, and soon attain their ordinary violence;” and p. 295: “When the duration of the action of opium is over, the abdominal pains return, having lost nothing of their excruciating character, until we again employ the magic power of opium.” )as severely as before, as the experience of all observant physicians testifies, These pains, indeed, generally return in a worse degree, and as long as no better plan than this old injurious routine is adopted, they must be again and again allayed, not only by repeated, but by larger doses of opium, whilst it developes other worse ailments, from which the patient did not suffer previously. Suppressing pain of any considerable duration and intensity by opium is therefore nothing but quackery – nothing but an imposition on the patient and his friends with illusory relief, to be followed by injurious results that are often disastrous, and not unfrequently fatal, but which are alleged by such practitioners of the non-healing art to be new diseases that they have had no hand on producing. (The true (homoeopathic) physician never sees in his practice any inflammation of the brain, except at the commencement of the most dangerous forms of typhus fever, which he cures along with its cerebral inflammation; nor does he ever encounter inflammation of the bowels, except in cases of poisoning and strangulated hernia or ileus; but fatal cerebral and intestinal inflammations frequently result from the efforts of the allopaths to suppress severe headache and intolerable colic by increasing doses 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.