ORGANS OF ART OF HEALING by BALDWIN
1. The physician’s high and only calling is to restore health to the sick, which is called healing.
2. The highest aim of healing is the speedy, gentle, permanent cure of the sick according to clearly intelligible reasons.
3. The physician should understand :
1st. What is curable in disease in general and in each individual case in particular;
2nd. What is curative in drugs in general and in each individual drug in particular;
3rd. How to apply, with distinct reason, what is curative in drugs to what is curable in diseases,
I. E.-A. How to match the proper remedy to the sickness,
B. How properly to administer the proper dose.
C. How properly to repeat the dose;
4th. And how to recognize and remove obstacles in the way of recovery.
4. The physician should be able to recognize and remove causes of sickness from the healthy.Sanitation and Hygiene.
5. The physician should be able to recognize the presence of chronic sickness.
6. The physician should understand that the observable morbid signs and symptoms represent the changes from normal in each individual disease, and that these observable signs, symptoms and sensations, taken together in their to totality, represent the disease in its full extent. And the physician should understand that only with these changes in the sensorial condition of the body and mind, discernible through the senses, should he concern himself as an observer of individual cases of sickness. In the examination of any particular case the physician should not speculate or generalize and should not be biased by any previous observations. The unbiased observer observes he does not speculate. He understands the futility of transcendental speculation unsupported by experience.
7. In disease, presenting no manifest exciting cause for removal, the totality of symptoms is the outward image of the inner disease, of the suffering vital force, related as cause and effect. These symptoms alone must constitute the medium through which the disease demands and points out its curative agent.
In each case of disease only this totality of symptoms is to be recognized and removed, by the art of healing, that it may be cured and converted into health.
8. When all the symptoms disappear, health remains. The cause removed the effects cease.
9. In health the vital force rules supreme, unhampered by any morbific influence. It harmonizes the vital processes, feeling and function is normal, there is a feeling of well being, the mind looks out, the senses are alert, the sense perceptions are clear and normal. In disease, the vital force in disorder, under the influence of a morbific potency, disorders the vital processes, feeling and function is abnormal, there is a feeling of ill being, the mind looks in, the attention is attracted by the perverted sensations of abnormal organ function that pass unperceived when normal. Thus in disease the fundamental sense of existence becomes distorted and mental concepts perverted. This phenomenon shows in the profoundest manner the indissoluble connection between psychic and physiologic life. The body is cognized subjectively not objectively.
10. The organism without the vital force is without conscious state or feeling and is dead. There is no reason in the attempt to divorce the psychic from the physical. The two are essential and indissoluble, in this life, forming the perfect unit. Consciousness is a manifestation of life not life of consciousness.
11. The organism, with the automatic vital force, to which is added a morbific influence, exhibits morbid abnormal function and sensation which is sickness, represented by symptoms of disease which are the whole perceptible effects of the vital disorder.
12. Therefore the disappearance of morbid feelings and function must prove restoration of vital force to normal and return of health to the vital organism.
13. Hence the idea that disease is a thing, separate and distinct from the living whole is preposterous and unthinkable. Disease is a condition not a thing, a cause producing effects perceptible to the senses and discernable even by the untrained observer, but more accurately by the trained physician.
14. In perfect accord with the infinite goodness of the omniscient Preserver of humankind, there is no curable, undiscernable, invisible morbidities or pathologies in the whole phenomena of disease.
There can be no curable symptoms that escape the attention of the patient and the notice of the astute physician. There can be devised no rational therapeutic procedure, to meet a hypothetical morbid state, or a baseless guess concerning the cause or nature of sickness.
15. The organism and the vital force are a unit not a duality. They are separated into two ideas only for convenience of comprehension. They stand related as producer and product. This producer, morbidly altered, producing a complex of externally perceptible symptoms, and the spirit-like dynamis animating our body in health and residing unseen in its interior, is one and the same.
16. The spirit-like dynamis, when disordered, is affected only by spirit-like morbid agencies. Hence dynamic action of remedial agencies must be used for purpose of cure. Life is the chemistry of the infinitesimal, the infinitesimal only can alter its processes or correct its disorder.
17. A cure cancels the inner change of the invisible vital force and thus removes the entire complex of perceptible effects, removes sickness in toto.
18. Hence, the totality of symptoms, being the only visible aspect of the phenomena of sickness, is the only guide to the remedy.
19. Therefore the curative power of medicines must rest alone on their power of altering the sensorial condition of the body, thus demonstrating their power of affecting the spirit-like dynamis.
20. Drug effects cannot be determined by reason or conjecture, but only by proving. A curative remedy does not have anything to do with causes attacking man from without. That is purely a problem of sound hygiene.
21. Therefore a drug’s capacity for curing sickness will be determined by its capacity for producing symptoms on the healthy human being.
22 Disease is manifest in its totality of symptoms. Drug action is manifest in its totality of symptomatology. Drugs must be applied, as remedies, to similar or contrary symptoms of disease as experience dictates.
23. Experience abundantly proves that palliation is transient and that the drug, selected as a remedial agent by the allopathic method, does not act curatively, but sets up opposite or contrary symptoms, which temporarily relieves the sick symptoms or ultimately suppresses or complicates them but never CURES them.
24. Therefore there remains no other method of applying drugs in the treatment of disease but the homoeopathic method, in accordance with which a drug is selected, having a totality of pathogenesis that matches, most nearly, the totality of the symptoms of the case of sickness to be treated. The drug should possess the power to produce an artificial condition most similar to that of the natural disease.
25. Experience abundantly proves that a drug properly potentized, that is having its infinitesimals properly liberated or rendered nascent, will cure that totality of sick symptoms most similar to its total pathogenesis. Q. E. D. Homoeopathic law. Similia, similibus, curantur.
26. This Homoeopathic law hitherto recognized but unacknowledged, but at times ignorantly used, is observed to operate when similar disease manifestation appear, simultaneously in any person.
27. Hence the healing power of medicine depends upon their power to produce symptoms similar to disease only more certainly.
28. This natural law of cure has been verified by every pure experiment and genuine experience and its faithful employment invariably yields a brilliant triumph of applied science, however an attempted scientific explanation of its mode of action is, probably, of little importance. Nature keeps upon her secrets a seal which no man can break. He may look, listen and use but he may not understand.
29. Nevertheless the following rule holds good, as the most probable one, since it is based entirely on empirical premises. Here follows a statement of the probable technique of the cure with a drug that drug must be selected as a remedy that will augment the natural healing reactions of the diseased organism by introducing by introducing into the presence of its vital forces an artificial sick producing influence (irritant) most similar in its effects to the symptoms of the sickness to be cured. And the remedy must be administered in such potency as will not overwhelm the vital reactions of the organism. Thus the homoeopathic remedy by exciting the identical reaction necessary to the elimination of the disease restores health to the sick without additional discomfort when the proper dose is properly administered and repeated.
This explanation may be correct. Examine it and have your own opinion. Nature’s facts and forces are used without being understood.
