In like manner has even the immediate future responded to the impulse given by our Organist. Could he have foreseen the medicine of to-day, how much there would have been to gladden his heart. He lived in a time when heroic antiphlogisticism was in full force; when physicians “slew,” as in Addison’s day, “some in chariots and some on foot”; when every sufferer from acute diseases was drained of his life-blood, poisoned with Mercurials, lowered with Antimonials. and raked by PURGATIVES. He denounced all this as irrational, needles, injurious, and it has fallen never, we trust, to resume its sway.
The change thus wrought even in the practice of the old school would be a matter for thankfulness on his part; but how his spirit would have bounded when he looked upon the band of his own followers! The few disciples made during his life-time have swelled into a company of over twelve thousand practitioners, who daily, among the millions of their CLIENTELE, in their hundreds of hospitals and dispensaries and charitable homes, carry out his beneficent reform, making the treatment of disease the simple administration of a few (mostly) tasteless and inodorous doses, and yet therewith so reducing its mortality that their patients lives can be assured at lower rates.
He would see the Aconite and Belladonna, the Bryonia and Rhus, the Nux vomica and Pulsatilla, the Calcarea, Silicea, Sulphur, which he created as medicines, playing their glorious part on an extensive scale, robbing acute diseases of their terrors and chronic maladies of their hopelessness. He would see his method ever developing new remedies and winning new victories evoking Lachesis, Apis, Kali bichromicum, Gelsemium, and earning laurels in Yellow Fever as green as those which crowned it in the visitations of CHOLERA.
He would see his principles gaining access one by one to the minds of physicians at large the proving of medicines, the singled remedy, the fractional dose already accepted, and selection by similarity half-adopted under other explanations and names. He might well feel, like Bacon, about the “Philosophia Secunda” which should end his Instauratio Magna. He had given its “Prodromisive Anticipationes”: “The destinies of the human race must complete it in such a manner, perhaps, as men looking only at the present would not readily conceive.” The destinies of the human race, in respect of disease and its cure, are completing it; and will be yet more profoundly modified for the better as that completion goes on.
Hughes was a great writer and a scholar. He actively cooperated with Dr. T.F. Allen to compile his 'Encyclopedia' and rendered immeasurable aid to Dr. Dudgeon in translating Hahnemann's 'Materia Medica Pura' into English. In 1889 he was appointed an Editor of the 'British Homoeopathic Journal' and continued in that capacity until his demise. In 1876, Dr. Hughes was appointed as the Permanent Secretary of the Organization of the International Congress of Homoeopathy Physicians in Philadelphia. He also presided over the International Congress in London.