In 1828, Dr. Ant. Friedr. Fischer of Dresden, detailed in “Hufeland’s Journal” (Part 2, page 42-46):
Homoeopaths do not shed blood, and God only knows how they reach their objective in all those cases where the only help is to be found in the withdrawal of blood. There are many lay people who do not like venesection and these seek the homoeopath. We must, therefore, try to make venesection as superfluous as possible by a mode of living which does not promote the production of blood.
In another passage the same Fischer says: How injurious are the consequences of neglected venesection! If they do not kill the patient at once they increase his sufferings because he will become septic, or drift into a long protracted and incurable disease, which will kill him in a most painful manner-and yet the homoeopathic school boast that they can do without drawing blood! And in a daring and impudent way, they a vow that without fear of the consequences, they act in accordance with the caprice of a man who only delights in contradictions, and who without troubling about the harm he does, endeavours to work against the experience of a thousand years. Homoeopathy must appear to every intelligent person as the result of a mind whose brain has already become corrupt within the living body.
SUPPLEMENT 219
FIGHT AGAINST MIXTURES OF MEDICINE.
In “Cure and Prevention of Scarlet Fever” (1801), Hahnemann writes:
Here we often see the non plus ultra of the grossest empiricism; for each single symptom a peculiar remedy in the heterogeneous and repeated prescriptions: a sight that cannot fail to inspire the unprejudiced observer with feeling at once of pity and indignation!
And on the same question, he says, in “Hufeland’s Journal” against Brown:
Quackery always goes hand in with much mixing, and he who can teach it” (let alone allow it as Brown did-R.H.) as far removed from nature and its laws.
In 1805 in “The Medicine of Experience” we read:
The best results are always obtained by one simple suitable remedy, without any other addition. It is never necessary t mix two together.
In “AEsculapius in the Balance” we find the sentences:
For, with the exception of what a few distinguished men, for example, Conrad Gesner, Stork, Cullen, Alexander, Coste, Willemet, have done, by administering simple medicines alone and uncombined, in certain diseases, or to persons in health, the rest is nothing but opinion, illusion deception.
And in another place he says: footnote:
This is the general but most unprofitable procedure of our medical practitioners-never to prescribe single drugs-no always in combination with several others in an artistic prescription. “No prescription can be properly termed as such,” says Hofrath Gruner in his Art of Prescribing,”which does not contain several ingredients at once,-so in order to see clearer you has better put out your eyes!”
In 1808, Hahnemann wrote in “On the Value of the Speculative Systems of Medicine”: One might have expected that in the cure of disease they (the physicians-R.H.) would invariably have employed a single simple medicine, and watched its effect according to the general rule binding on all: where a single remedy is efficacious, we should not use compound ones. In direct opposition to plain common sense, they attack disease by complex mixtures of medicines with none of which they are more than superficially acquainted, and of these medicinal mixtures they often give several simultaneously and many in one day. Even supposing the virtues of each medicinal substance were accurately known, yet the administration of these multifarious compounds, this haphazard administration of several substances at one time, each of which must have a different action, would in itself be very absurd and only lead to a blind and confused practice. But it is still worse, and more reprehensible (to prescribe very complex medicines) when we consider that all of these divers substances thus mixed together are each of individual great but unascertained efficacy… This motley mixing system is nothing but a convenient makes shift for one who, having but a slender acquaintance with the properties of a single substance, flatters himself, though he cannot find any one simple suitable remedy to remove the complaint, that by combining a great many there may be one amongst them that by a happy chance shall hit the mark.
Hahnemann then further proves that the same medicinal compound can never have precisely the same effect which repeated, first of all because each ingredient and its action on the mixture is unknown, and secondly because a compound can never be prepared again identically as it was before, on a previous occasion or by a different apothecary.
In the Introduction to the “Organon,” page 77, Annotation:
Thus Marcus Herz (in Hufeland’s Journal, II, page 33) reveals the pricks of his conscience in the following words: “When we wish to remove the inflammatory state, we do not employ either nitre or sal-ammoniac or vegetable acids alone, but we usually mix several, and often only too many, so-called anti- phlogistics together, or we give them to the patient in alternation. If we have to combat putridity, we are not content to look for the attainment of our object from the administration of large doses of one of the known antiseptic medicines, such as cinchona bark, mineral acids, arnica, serpentaria, etc., alone; we prefer associating several of them together, and count upon their community of action; or from our ignorance as to the action of which is the most suitable for the case in question, we combine a number of different substances and almost leave it to chance to effect the end we have in view, by means of one of them. Thus we seldom excite perspiration, purify the blood (?) overcome obstructions (?) promote expectoration, or even evacuate the primae viae by a single remedy; our prescriptions for the objects are always composite, hardly ever simple and pure, consequently neither are our observations reliable in reference to the actions of each individual substance contained in them. To be sure, we learned institute certain grades of rank among the remedies in out formulae; on the one on which we mainly rely for its action, we confer the title of base (basis), the others we call helpers, supporters (adjuvantia), correctives (corrigentia), etc. But this classification is evidently almost entirely arbitary. The helpers and supporters have just as much part in the whole action as the chief ingredient, although, from want of a standard of measurement, we are unable to determine the degree of their participation in the result. In like manner the influence of the correctives on the power of the other ingredients cannot be quite immaterial; they must increase or diminish them, or entirely alter their action; and hence we must always regard the salutary (?) change which we effect, by means of such a prescription, as the result of all its ingredients collectively, and we can never obtain from its action a pure experience of the individual efficacy of any single ingredient of which it is composed. In fact, our knowledge of what it is essential to know respecting all our remedies, as also respecting the perhaps hundred-fold relationship among each other, into which they enter when combined, is far too little to be relied on to enable us to determine with certainty the degree and extent of the action of a substance, apparently quite unimportant, when introduced into the human body in combination with other substances.
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