Alcoholism and Criminality


Having followed these two advices of Hahnemann, I have been able to cure the drunkards of their vice in half of the cases when the vice is not hereditary and this, by giving the medicines to the drunkards without their knowledge….


1000+ 2000+ 4000+ 6000+ 10,000+ 16,000. To avoid any aggravation, a single dose should be prescribed once only, because if the dose is mixed in water and if a spoonful is used once or twice a day for several days, one would risk an aggravation of existing symptoms and this aggravation will sometimes persist for days, weeks and months. The cure will be delayed. Among the different medicine or dilutions administered, there must be some intervals according to the effects produced and according to the persons treated. But as I do it for my clients of my dispensary, it is necessary that the doctor, every three weeks receives the visit of the consultants, either in the chamber or in the dispensary. It is the best method of watch over and to direct the treatment more usefully. But this treatment will produce any result, if the utility of the high dilution used has not been controlled, verified by the dohere the treatment which seemed to me the most useful.

In France there are every year in an average, 121,688 accused before the courts, of which 87, 6000 are alcoholics i.e. 72 Percent (in 1889).

Alcoholism, is, in our time, a scourge which is always increasing amongst modern people: a scourge for the individual of whose it degrades the morality, the intelligence, the health, procreative power and the longivity. Scourge for the species in whom it produces the 5 similar effects, but to a much more intense degree scourge for the family in which it causes discordance, the bad example or the misery; finally scourge for the society in which it contributes to the increase of general misery- two milliards (frs. 1889) spent every year in 400,000 cabarets of France- and above all the increase of criminality-out of 2,950 condemns, 2,124 alcoholics i.e. 72 Percent.

Alcoholic delirium produced in France, every year is in an average 84,600 accused in the whole category.

In order to remedy so numerous dangers of alcoholism the moralists, the economist and the doctors, make conferences, publish small pamphlets which are not real, nor heard by them, whom they are meant for. Therefore the lectures and the flood of prints remain unperceived.

To remedy alcoholism there are two means which are surely much more useful:

1. Societies for temperance, more numerous in England and in U.S. 2. Medical means, hygiene, food, medicines.

Very useful are hygienes and food which must be appropriate for the alcoholics who accept them. But it is almost an exceptional case to find them accept these means.

More useful are the Societies of temperance which sometimes give to the people a moral training to complete abstinence to alcoholic drinks. But this training is often hindered either by sensuality of the alcoholics, or above all by the pecuniary interest of the wine merchants. But the moral alimentation and hygiene certain some of the drunkards may be cured of their habit. But in a greater number among them, the addiction to drunkenness is caused by a kind of morbid impulse more or less irresistible, as it is admitted by a representative of the official medicine, Dr. A Monin, in the following two passages on “Alcoholism” (in-12, 1888), a work crowned by the French Society of Temperance.

“The most true word, perhaps, that has been said on this he is mentally deranged because he is drunk.” (p.111).

“We know how difficult it is to have any real action on the desire to drink, which is a kind of mental perversion beyond rational resources of moral and medicine.” (p.283)

Inspite of some prescriptions sometimes useful given at the end of is book, Dr., Monin, representing the allopathic medicine, declares that generally the moral and the medicine have no power to cure intoxication.

Up to the present time the homoeopathic doctor have proved themselves equally unable to cure drunkenness and inebriety; and this, because, excepting rare cases the homoeopathic doctors, do not know how to use the arms of their materia Medica, and have not followed these two advices of their Master Hahnemann, who says:

(1) For the choice of remedies, one must take into consideration the moral and intellectual symptoms presented by the patients.

(2) In chronic disease the medicine selected should be given once and should be left to act that unique dose for weeks and months.

Having followed these two advices of Hahnemann, I have been able to cure the drunkards of their vice in half of the cases when the vice is not hereditary and this, by giving the medicines to the drunkards without their knowledge, in their foods or in their drinks, the medicine selected for each of them. I will give later on the differential indications of 14 remedies which the clinical experience have shown useful in case of drunkenness and which can help the means used for curing men of this vice.

To the doctors who have the taste and the aptitude for this branch of medicine, I strongly advice to try to complete, by their practical experiences, my clinical studies on this point. They may find what I have not found so as to extend the field of application of this new therapeutics. As regards the doctors who have neither the test, nor the aptitude for it, I say not to be occupied with it because they may compromise it by their failures. “Natura repugnant omniu uana” says very wisely Hippocratis.

II

Medical treatment of alcoholism is but one of the numerous applications of paychic treatment or treatments of vices, defects of character or intelligence and of which I will show further on the antiquity, universality and opportunity.

The doctors up till now, have practised only a kind of veterinary medicine applied to man, because they have only treatment in them the somatic symptoms or corporeal symptoms, but never, at least not daily, the psychic, moral or intellectual symptoms.

Assuredly, it is indispensable to treat the disease which are prejudicial to the individual, to the family, to the society. But it is much more indispensable to treat the passion and defects of character and intelligence, because they are also prejudicial to the individual and above all to the family and to the society. What a peace, what a happiness will prevail in fact in the families and in the society, if one could have been able to banish from them the passions and even defects of character and intelligence of their member. Never one will be able to obtain completely this good result, but one may obtain partially and almost in half of the cases which will mean already a great progress. I have arrived at this conviction by the experimental method, which I am going to relate.

From the year 1854 to `874, I have practiced, like all other doctors that kind of veterinary medicine applied to man about which I have said above. But since 1871, some results, at first rare, afterward more and more numerous, observed in my patients have to me that one may practice in man, a really human medicine by curing them not only of their disease but also of their passions and defects of intelligence and character. My conviction became more and more firm on this point, at the sametime with my knowledge from experiments in the practice of the treatment of psychic symptoms and to be more brief, of the psychic treatment, when I believed myself sufficiently capable for applying it, I was not satisfied to take the advantage of it, exceptionally in some of my patients who paid me for the treatment of different disease, but I wished still to some poor people and this by establishing for them a dispensary exclusively meant for the application of psychic treatment. Free dispensary which started on the 9th February, 1886 which continued since that time every Tuesday morning.

It was really a new spectacle to see every Tuesday in my reception room, 12, 15, 20, 25, 28 and up to 36 persons of indigent classes without human respect of the experimental method, to come and ask for some members of their families, always treated without their knowledge, so moralising psychic treatment, of which the name and the existence were unknown by the academic and by the learned societies.

I have been well recompensed for my initiative seeing that this dispensary or polyclinic of new type opened a vast filed for charitable works, and a field no less fecund for the instruction of doctors who, after having obtained fortunate results on their patients, may use these results for developing this new science.

Let us read again the following passage of the Bible of St. Augustin and of Socrates, and act accordingly. (Ecblesiastics, ch. 38, 84, verse 25):

The man who sins before the eyes of Him w2ho has created him will fall in the hands of a doctor.

(Is it for being treated for his occasional disease caused by his sins or rather for being treated of his passions, defects of character and intelligence, either a morbid latent condition, or of his temperament? Passions and defects which goads him to commit crime.)

1. Honour the doctor because of the necessity, because it is God who has created him.

4. The very High has created medicines on the earth and a prudent man should not be away from them.

Jean Pierre Gallavardin
Jean Pierre Gallavardin (1825 – 1898) was a French orthodox physician who converted to homeopathy to gain international renown. Gallavardin was a Physician at the Homeopathic Hospital in Lyons.
Gallavardin set up a homeopathic Dispensary for the cure of alcoholics, often working in conjunction with priests, and he wrote several books on this subject.
Jean Pierre Gallavardin wrote Psychism and Homeopathy, The Homoeopathic Treatment of Alcoholism, How to Cure Alcoholism the Non-toxic Homoeopathic Way, Repertory of Psychic Medicines with Materia Medica, Plastic Medicine, and articles for The British Journal of Homeopathy, On Phosphoric Paralysis, and he collated the statistics on pneumonia and other cases for the United States Journal of Homeopathy, and he contributed widely to homeopathic publications.