History of substances



The former utilised wines on the field of fairs, in cabarets having before them some bottles of wine.

The latter, the diplomats, in order to obtain analogous effects on their interlocutors, used not the wine of a particular taste but some more fine and exquisite paychic medicines. With some appetising foods, some wine of Bourgogne or some champagne or some coffee etc.

But both, the diplomats and the peasants have undergone themselves and their incites a psychic treatment

The wine produces according to the dose used, some different and some opposite effects. Thus, taken in moderate dose it revives all the faculties of the soul, reposes the soul and the body from their fatigue.

But wine taken in large doses, give false courage, makes one indiscrete, quarrelsome, aggressive and angry that leads to brutalising and suicide.

Drunkenness transfers an active, laborious man who is careful for his own self into an apathetic, idle, unclean and even vicious one, tendency to debauchery, to jealousy, to hatred, to suicide and to homicide with hallucination.

Different kinds of alcoholic drinks produce different psychic effects. (The businessmen prefer wine as the best psychic medicine, which is demonstrated by the following fact). One of my friends while staying in strassbourg, wanted to procure himself with an art object and with this aim he went to one of the numerous intermediaries which is habitual in these commercial transactions. The latter told him: “I know the person who possesses the art object and I know in which cafe he generally goes”. Entering in the cafe he saw that man drinking beer and immediately he said to his friend: “Let us get out, we will not be successful with this man, he is drinking beer.” In order to proceed thus the intermediary had several times seen the psychic effects so different provoked by the wine and the beer. In fact, while wine produces the above mentioned effects, the beer provokes the diminution of tendencies which is natural in a man for sociability.

Beer produces heaviness of mind and of the body. It benumbs the high sentiments and the inclinations are debased.

Ceders and wine of white nuts produce the same effects.

Absinth in small dose makes one quarrelsome and wicked.

Brandy makes one angry and aggressive.

The Aniseed cordial in small dose, dissipated cloudiness of the brain and embarrassment.

The Kirsh acts like Aniseed.

The drunkenness i manifested by some psychic symptoms as different as alcoholic drinks that cause them. Thus alcohol of potatoes, of grains produces a comatose drunkenness, whereas the wine alcohol produces gay, noisy and coleric drunkenness.

“Do not give wines to kings, because there is no secret where reigns drunkenness; for the fear they do not drink and forget justice and they would not do equity in the cause of children and poor.”

“Give to those who are afflicted, a liquor capable to make them intoxicated and some wine to those who have bitterness of heart. Let them drink and forget for ever the memory or their pains.” (Solomon: Proverbs).

The treatment of psychic symptoms, or to speak more briefly, the treatment by means of medicines is in such a way in the human nature that in all times, in all countries, men used them unconsciously. It is with this end the Cocoa and Paraguay tea are used in South America; bi-chloride of mercury in Columbia, betel in Hindustan, Opium in Asia and specially in Persia where, by its application they used to get thee pleasure which they want to enjoy. Arsenic in Syria, infusion of mushrooms mixed with musc in Lapons. Alcoholic drinks, tea, coffee, tobacco in all parts of the world.

To show the reality of this psychic treatment thus effected by all the people, it will be sufficient for us to shorten the demonstration by citing Prof. Moleclotte and Prof. Fonsagrieve in order to explain at first the paychic effects of tea and secondly the psychic effects of coffee.

“Tea” says Prof. Molechott, “increases the power to occupy with the impressions received. It is help pensive meditation and inspite of a more lively movements of ideas, the attention stops more easily on a determined object. A sense of well being is experienced, the creative activity of the brain gets more impulse which is maintained within the limits necessary for the attention instead of wandering to the pursuit of strange ideas. United around tea, the educated people become capable to carry on a regular conversation, to examine thoroughly the question and the calm gaiety that provokes tea, leads them to the satisfactory solution. (Of food and regimen, 1858,. 169).

His description of the intellectual drinks, which are given regarding coffee, indicates its exhilarating action on the brain writes Fossangrieves. There is no one who has not himself experienced and with a sense of complacency the effect that produces this drink. The brain is slowly stimulated: one escapes, to some extent, the weight of the sense of reality of the life and the yoke of lassitude. The senses become more sagacious and precise function. The imagination becomes more clear and the work easier. Combinations of meanings become rapid which may be less solid, but more prompt and clearer. The memory becomes unusually active, the ideas flow with unprecedented fluidity. The mind is free from painful preoccupations, becomes free and gay and at the sometime a well-wishing sentiment spreads over the whole economy. There is not doubt a toxic effect in coffee, which is more distinct but less dangerous than that of alcohol but which also calls for, to a certain extent, the warning and watching over the hygiene. Persons who do intellectual works are more addicted to this vice and when they abuse it they have a state of nervous erethysm and emaciation.

I know persons whose brains work slowly and are embarrassed so long as the sting of the tea is wanting to them. I also know persons who cannot give up the habit of this drink without having migraine. From this point of view it is bad like all other addiction. Another question related to its which coffee can give to their thoughts. It causes a cerebral excitation no doubt, but all the faculties are not stimulated inn thee same degree, whence there is certain incoherence in the combination of ideas of which coffee force the emission. They are according to my experience more rapid than solid, they are more numerous, so they are less fundamental; one is less free from his idea; one cannot master them but with difficulty. The judgment and the will are weak and as regards myself, I have given up since long time this uncomodious habit when I have to speak in public. Let the poets continue to drink this liquor which is dear to them (de l’Isle), but let the philosophers and the learned men, avoid it. They will be benefited (Dict. Encycl des Sciences Medicales, t. II, p. 491-95).

But what motivated the use of psychic medicine, is medicine, is that there is in the nature of man to pass alternately from a period of life when his activities and his moral, corporeal and the intellectual activities and the feeling of well-being is in the decline subject to an ennui and always in search of a happiness more or less ideal he is forced to have and prolong that period of so pleasurable physical and psychic uplift and to re-establish the very unstable equilibrium of their moral and intellectual condition, they use some factitious means, the popular psychic medicines (alcohol, coffee, tea, tobacco, opium, hashish etc.).

“Those who take hashish say that human language cannot express the absolute experiences that they have. (Dr. Mure)

But, to this end, they use some primary effects of these psychic medicines, which are pleasurable but their effects are very temporary and followed by some disastrous and persistent effects. Thus for example by the help of coffee, there is a moral and intellectual excitation which are very pleasurable; but to this primary effect which is very temporary, succeeds the secondary effects much more durable and characterised by mental and intellectual weakness.

Hahnemann, and then Claude Bernard have shown that the medicines produce some successive effects, the primary and the secondary effects which are contrary to each other, Prof. Fonssgrieves has just shown the successive effects of coffee. At first mental and intellectual excitation, and shortly afterwards, the following day, mental and intellectual weakness: this last effect is felt by the men of letters who can no more write without the help of coffee.

Mme de Sevigne said that coffee “makes me stupid “. She was referring not to the primary effect of that drink but to its secondary effect characterised by cerebral inertia.

Prof. Malechott has seen, in the action of tea, only the primary effects: tendency to gaiety and to a greater activity of the intellect. But he has not perceived that, to that repeated mental and intellectual excitation, often succeeds the secondary or reactional effect: indifference then egoism, tendency to become annoyed, then the spleen. These effects are seen in the Englishmen and in Chinese people who consume the largest quantity of tea.

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.