SUPPLEMENT 210
THE OBJECT OF DIAGNOSIS.
According to the “Organon, ” 81 (Annotation I, page 171, 6th Edition):
The true physician knows that he has to consider and to cure disease, not according to the similarity of the name of a single one of their symptoms, but according to the totality of the signs of the individual state of each particular patient.
And in 82, page 172 (6th Edition):
as no real cure of this (the chronic diseases- R.H.) or of other disease. He had already pointed this out in his translation “Treasury of Medicine or Collection of Chosen Prescriptions” (“Thesaurus Medicaminum,” 1800) when he said: I regret that the different kinds of dropsy are not differentiated, and that the same kind of dropsy is always mentioned. The division into leucophlegmatic and inflammatory is not sufficient, just as little as a distinction in mental diseases between mania and melancholia. What would we think of a botanist who had no other divisions for vegetation than plants and herbs?
In 5 of the “Organon” we read: The particulars of the most probable exciting cause of the acute disease are useful to the physician in assisting him to cure them, as also are the most significant points in the whole history of the chronic disease, to enable him to discover its fundamental cause, which is generally due to a chronic miasm.
And in 7, he says: as in disease we can perceive nothing but the morbid symptoms, the totality of these symptoms of this outwardly reflected picture of the internal essence of the disease, that is, of the affection of the vital force. must be the principle, or the sole means, whereby the disease can make known what remedy it requires.
SUPPLEMENT 2II
AUSCULTATION AND PERCUSSION.
Auscultation, invented by Laennec in 1816, is that important branch of medical art which determines sounds and noises in the inner part of the body by applying the ear to the body of the patient, or by placing a listening tube (stethoscope) between the physician’s ear and the patient’s body (over the heart. lungs, pleura, large blood vessels and edges of fractures). Auscultation which requires a keen ear, good tuition and continued practice, was first adopted in France for general use, later the medical schools of Vienna and Prague followed and then through Skoda’s perfecting it, it gradually came into use in Germany.
Percussion stands in close relation to auscultation; it is a method of tapping on the surface of a patient’s body by means of the finger tips or by means of a special hammer. As the organs in the human body, from their construction and position, emit different sounds from the body cavity in which they are enclosed, these different sounds enable us to estimate the condition of the inner organs of the human body. It was first recommended by Auenbrugger (in the year 1761) and it was once more the French who perfected it (Rosiere de la Chassagne, Corvisart, and the above mentioned Laennec). After Skoda had further improved it, he introduced it into Germany. Yet it took more than the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century to secure its adoption.
That is why one of the best known clinicians of his time in Germany, Professor Schonlein of Wurzburg, still made his diagnosis in 1820 almost entirely by basing them upon the symptom picture. Empyema, for instance (a collection of pus in the pleural cavity) was to be recognised from the numbness of the arm, and although the dull sound obtained when percussing with the finger or percussion hammer on the chest wall is a very much better sign, it was unknown to Schonlein, and he, therefore, does not mention it.
Richard Haehl was also an editor and publisher of the homeopathic journal Allgemcine, and other homeopathic publications.
Haehl was responsible for saving many of the valuable artifacts of Samuel Hahnemann and retrieving the 6th edition of the Organon and publishing it in 1921.
Richard Haehl was the author of - Life and Work of Samuel Hahnemann