As long as we depend too largely upon scattered facts our claim to be called scientific physicians cannot be said to be the best; on the other hand, science demands more than reason along, which left to itself has slain hosts of human beings.
In to far as the ills of the flesh are many and the art of cur fallible, a natural law of cure is needed; one upon which we must rest the foundation of a systematic analysis, by which cures can be worked out. In so far as the law of similia harmonizes and dovetails with general science in a way that validates its position, even if there are many who fail to see it, it implies a naturalistic view of the functions of medicine; one that looks upon disease as a state rather than a thing although the latter may be an accompaniment; its application teaches discernment, as well as better prognosis; so that we need not measure the works of homoeopathy by allopathic standards.
While the chances for prescribing are many, the occasions therefor are fewer. Ordinarily sickness flies her signals plainly enough; but if they call for a diagnosis only, our sight is poor indeed and our therapeutic nihilism tends to destroy hope and spells out death.
Homoeopathy, in common with the science is on the verge of a new day that is sweeping everything before it; one that demands exact knowledge and weapons of precision for we must realize that the time is here when a melting pot of performance will refine our product. The modern man doesn’t care for your ideas and visions of what may help; to him, the man who knows so well how to diagnose and then cannot cure, is supremely ridiculous; professing an cant of the most offensive kind.
How many men enter the sick room, make an exhaustive diagnosis and then helplessly prescribe upon the filmiest of probabilities; only too often concocted from within their own brains. Such things have helped to elevate surgery and disparage therapeutics; more particularly because the former offers pure chances and less uncertainty than the latter.
In looking about for reasons why therapeutics rests upon so insecure a foundation, it soon becomes apparent that it has suffered more from the frailties inherent to theory than anything else. The professors and of a dead house pathology have hung like a dead weight about its neck and paralysed every movement, but we will gradually come to see that sickness must be weighed solely by the evidence which it produces regardless of all theories and idle speculations. This method is the only way that contains the germs of real curative procedure or can even compete with that physiological prescribing which palliates, but we know never cures.
While we should strive to know the meaning of symptoms, I hold that their ultimate origin lies well beyond our ken; but the more accurately we can photograph their every detail upon our mind’s eye and match its correspondingly from the pathogenesis, the more surely will we cure. This involves much more than the mere statements of the patient, for he does not always speak, or the encyclopedic knowledge of symptoms, for their connections are not always germane. It is these connecting links that given our results and they should control our methods.
Unfortunately we still say that such medicines are good for this or that disease because a certain percentage of cases has been helped thereby. How could an argument be more one sided and lame. Just as though the personal equation upon which disease rests and from which it mainly derives its subsistence, were of no value of all. It is a specious reasoning that makes disease and help with a vengeance and bug hunting a vain-glorious pursuit.
Because casts of mind color ideas and warp our conclusions, reason strives to correct individual opinion by starting our from some fixed point, a premise, as it were. Applied to homoeopathic practice, this resolves itself into locating the part of the body in which distressed vital action is expressing itself; thus touching hands with diagnosis. After finding the seat of disease and collating the remedies which have a decidedly elective action within the affected area or regions, we have in hand a basis from which is various ramifications may be worked out. This is the first and most fundamental step in a natural analysis and the one from which all others must proceed.
Exciting causes and modifying influences individualize sickness, as well as condition the remedies thereof. This entitles the modalities to the second place, for they not only apply to the location found, but, in one way or another also govern all of the symptoms. They are just as important as any regional effects possibly can be and help in many a differentiation.
If regions and conditions outline the forms of sickness, symptoms very generally picture the sensations thereof. Their language is largely ideographic and at times very clear, but also so elastic and variable as to leave much to interpretation.
They may offer the greatest help of the most serious obstacles to the physician and should, for this reason, be assigned to the third place.
Proving cannot be said to be complete until we cab designate the location of each symptom, define the manner of its existence, the modality and tell what kind of sensations it produces. This is the foundation upon which pathogenesy and its understanding must rest.
Hahnemann called attention to the bizarreness of symptoms, as being definitive, whether of direct or correlative origin. While in acute disease this differentiation is easier, in chronic ones our knowledge of the outcroppings of the miasms is more fragmentary, making it harder to separate common from individualistic manifestations.
The tendency to take seemingly, erratic effects as the sole guides for the selection of remedy, regardless of their relative position, is wrong. While it is reasonable to grade a given symptom by its strangeness when the connections harmonize with it, this is not always the case, nor do all odd clinical symptoms fall within the limits of our pathogenesy and vice versa.
The value of indications is determined by their natural setting, stripped of all extraneous and immaterial influences; a point that requires nice discrimination and much knowledge what properly belongs to sickness, what is constitutional and what is negligible. Here it may not be amiss to point out that nature tries to attract our attention to the most important things by developing them last of all; putting them right under noses, as it were. Amazing subtlety; always appealing to out inner senses, she never makes coarse demands.
If we would understand her, we must find our her ways rather than stare at results; we must see more than fever, or weakness, or pain, and in doing so see how she has sickened and why she is unable to reassert herself. The problem is surely large enough, but what we gain by looking into microscopes and examining cadavers is pitifully small as compared with what she freely hands us through signs and symptoms. She doesn’t cry in a loud voice and say, I want?Aconite or Bryonia because I have fever or rheumatism; but she speaks in the particular language of Aconite or Bryonia asking for what she needs according to the signs of different remedies. In order to do better work it is needful to learn how to red these signs in our patients; to lay diagnosis restfully aside, with discretion perhaps, and look at our patients through the eyes of our remedies.
Woe into the victims of the man whose orbs are therapeutically strabismic or cataractous; it were better had they fallen into the hands of an allopathic or surgical philistine. The amount of mischief of which such a man is capable passes all comprehension, and far outweighs the sins of the therapeutic pessimist; he knows just enough Homoeopathy to spoil everything that he touches and sufficient of allopathic practice to make a fool of himself.
We are accustomed to find symptoms in associated groups and guided by their peculiarities search out the similimum for each; an interesting and instructive labour, in that a symptom of a rather common sort may by its relative position and bearing take on an extraordinary value. When this proves to be the case it belongs in the highest rank.
It is notable that most provers develop a few central effects, around which the other symptoms revolve in a greater or less degree. A collection of these constitutes the essentials of our materia medica, especially as they are thrown into various groupings by clinical application. The concordances are condensed cross-references of such associated groups.
While it is theoretically true that symptoms may appear in any combination, it is nevertheless a fact that in acute disease they occur in pretty well defined aggregations, with now-this then-that feature in the lead, according to predisposing, epidemic or other influences. The ruling feature of every case puts the stamp of some particular type, such as bilious, haemorrhagic, etc., upon it, and when we select remedies which in their action and order of development conform to the presenting type, we say that the genius of the drug corresponds to that of the disease.
Born in Western Pennsylvania, he graduated from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and subsequently Hahnemann Medical College of Philadelphia. He moved to Parkersburg, W. Va., in 1888, practicing there, but also consulting worldwide. He gave lectures at the Pulte Medical College in Cincinnati and taught philosophy, materia medica, and repertory at the American Foundation for Homoeopathy Postgraduate School. Boger brought BÅ“nninghausen's Characteristics and Repertory into the English Language in 1905. His publications include :
Boenninghausen's Characteristics and Repertory
Boenninghausen's Antipsorics
Boger's Diphtheria, (The Homoeopathic Therapeutics of)
A Synoptic Key of the Materia Medica, 1915
General Analysis with Card Index, 1931
Samarskite-A Proving
The Times Which Characterize the Appearance and Aggravation of the Symptoms and their Remedies