Chronic diseases only are the test of the genuine healing art, because they do not of themselves pass into health; slight ailments that have come quickly pass away with or without medicine – evidently by the inherent powers of the organism; but with medicines acute diseases must distinctly yield more quickly and permanently than when left to themselves, if what can be called a cure is accomplished.
If opium sometimes seems to remove pains in a acute diseases, this is owing to the very obvious fact that such diseases, if they do not kill, run their course spontaneously in a few days, and disappear together with their pains.
Opium can only seem really to cure pains in those rare cases where it corresponds homoeopathically in its other primary effects to the symptoms of the disease, and so removes the disease itself, for then the pains also must naturally depart; but this is only an indirect cure of the pains. For instance, as every dysentery depends on a retention of faeces in the upper part of the intestines, some varieties of it accompanied by heat and stupefaction can be cured by opium, because these symptoms will be homoeopathically removed by the similar primary action of opium, and as a necessary consequence their attendant pains also, because these generally depend on spasmodic retention of the faeces in the bowels.
In like manner opium cannot stop the pains of lead colic until it has homoeopathically removed the obstinate constipation produced by the lead by virtue of its constipating primary action; in this case also the cure of the pains is indirect and not owing to the stupefying power of the opium, as it is given in small, not stupefying, doses. But opium is never able to remove pains directly without injury; on the other hand, it is a principal remedy in those stupefactive diseases where the pain of a serous malady in those stupefactive diseases where the pain of a serious malady is not felt by the patient, as for example, in dangerous bed sores, where the patient, in the stupefied state of his consciousness, cannot complain of any pain, &c.
The painful diseases of acute and chronic character can (whatever the whole worldful of anthipathic and allopathic physicians may allege to the contrary) only be cured and altered into health of a permanent character by a medicine which, besides corresponding in similarity in its other primary effects to the symptoms of the morbid state, is at the samtime able to excite pains very similar in kind to those observed in the disease. If such a medicine be selected then pain and disease disappear together in a marvellously rapid and permanent manner, when the smallest dose is administered, as is taught in the Organon of Medicine, and as experience will convince every one.
But as this method was not employed, and as all kinds of pains were anthipathically treated by opium alone, many injurious results were observed from its use; stupefaction, constipation, and other troublesome and dangerous symptoms which naturally resulted from this inappropriate anthipathic employment of it, and these are the peculiar effects of opium, without which it would not be opium. But these inevitable disastrous effects of such an employment of opium were not regarded as being what they actually are, to wit, the essential characteristics of opium, but as a kind of bad behavius inherent in it, which must be eliminated from it by all sorts of devices, in order to render it innocuous and well-behaved. Under this delusion attempts have been made from time to time, for now nearly two thousand years, to do away with this pretended improper action by means of so0called correigenta, so that it should henceforth be taught to allay pains and spasms without producing deliruim or constipation, check vomiting and diarrhoea without exciting heat, and without leaving behind it headache, trembling, exhaustion, chilliness and prostration.
Hence pungent spices were combined with it in order to prevent the chilling propensity observed in the secondary action, and purgatives and salines were added in order to counteract its constipating misconduct, &c. More especially was it sought to separate from it its crude, and alleged useless and hurtful resin by repeated solution in water, filtration and inspissation, and also to deprive it of the volatile, and supposed poisonous, narcotic quality attached to it by macerating it for months; and practitioners even went so far as to attempt to refine it and render it mild by roasting it over a fire, and in this way they imagined that they had produced a precious penacea for all ailments and troubles, for pains, sleeplessness, diarrhoea, &c., which was free from all the well-known evil propensities 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.