Doubtless every physician in the medical world is, at heart, desirous of the best curative results; of adopting that course which promises the most for his patients, and of incorporating in to his practice every detail which embodies science, art and skill.
The diversity in practice, then, is only the natural out- cropping of different convictions; and to make a Hahnemannian in such fashion that he will always look like himself, it is necessary to reach his convictions. If this were accomplished even in the homoeopathic ranks, then the exact mode of preparation of drugs, the most efficient doses and the proper period for repeating the doses, would be questions of common understanding, and we would all walk in the footsteps of Hahnemann.
In the preface to the first edition of Chronic Diseases we find the following: “From unbelief in the efficacy of the small and attenuated doses of medicine which I made known to the medical world after a thousand warning trials, as being the most efficient (distrusting my faithful asservations and reasons), men prefer to endanger their patients for years longer with large and larger doses.
Owing to this they generally do not live to see the curative effects, even as was the case with myself before I attained this diminution of dose. The cause of this was that it was overlooked that these doses by their attenuation were all the more suitable for their homoeopathic use, owing to the development of their dynamic power of operation”.
That unbelief is as rank and as general now as when the foregoing was written, though the number of drugs now entering into a compound and the size of material doses have been greatly modified; but what Hahnemann called “small and attenuated doses” were not regarded as doses at all neither by his opponents nor some of his professed followers. And that is just as true today as then.
One so called homoeopath remarked to me that since “regulars have so modified their doses, there is no practical difference now between the two schools.” Such a remark betrays a mental blindness hardly excusable in any one who ever read a homoeopathic book. It is our business as Hahnemannians to impress upon the public mind the fact that however small so-called regulars may administer the dose, that dose is still the crude, material substance.
The impassable gulf between the materialistic mind of allopathy and the conception of the immaterial, spirit-like powers of medicinal substances, has always been and is today immaterial, dynamic medicines; and what has hurt Homoeopathy more than any other fact, has been the induction of materialists, into the homoeopathic kingdom without conversion.
As well talk about that which is material being spiritlike; about the possibilities of an elephant flying, as to talk about a physician of a materialistic stamp practising homoeopathy. A man whose mental constitution compel him to perceive with his fingers, can never be a homoeopathic practitioner.
He must have the intuitive genius to recognize in all crude medicinal substances a remedial power which color, nor taste, nor chemistry, nor laboratory, nor microscope can ever reveal; a hidden down deep and beyond the material recesses of every drug; a power which, before the advent of Homoeopathy, was unknown to the medical world; a power unfolded and developed by a process peculiar to Homoeopathy, and revealed by a practical test in the healthy human organism.
Hahnemanns first motive in potentizing drugs was to diminish the dose. The fact that this process developed the curative power, was discovered afterward. Experience taught him that he dared not employ large doses of crude substances when prescribing by the law of similars.
So he invented the process of potentization and by it “attained this diminution of dose;” but he says “it was overlooked that these doses by their attenuation were all the more suitable for their homoeopathic use, owing to the development of their dynamic power of operation.”.
That is the doctrine. First, diminution of dose; and second, development of dynamic power. First eliminate the material elements of drug that those parts of the patients system not affected by disease, may not be affected by the drug: and second, develop the dynamic power of the medicine that it may be made to correspond to the patients susceptibility and penetrate to the very innermost, thus extinguishing disease and saving life when the same could not be accomplished by any other means.
If any call in question this philosophy, surely it should not be one who professes to practice Homoeopathy; to have graduated in a homoeopathic college; to have imbibed homoeopathic doctrine, and to be a follower of Hahnemann. The double fact here taught by the founder, that potentization diminishes the material and develops the immaterial, explains the very heart and essence of the homoeopathic mode of preparing drugs. But this is where the prevalent unbelief manifests itself–immaterial medicines; “dynamic physician,” as Hahnemann styled the practitioner who employs immaterial medicines and depends upon them as agents of cure.
This infidelity betrays itself in the effort which so many professed homoeopaths make to hide from the public this spirit- like, immaterial, dynamic power which is the very heart of Homoeopathy.
Some even go so far as to employ discs of color, some red, some yellow, some green and nasty looking, and these they medicate generally with a low attenuation, and all to impress their ignorant patients with the idea they are getting material, crude medicines; and thus they bolster up and foster the old school ideas with which their patients have been indoctrinated instead of educating them in homoeopathic principles and giving them the true, clean cut Hahnemannian practice which will accrue to their own interest as well as to those whom they serve.
The founder of Homoeopathy here affirms that the small and attenuated doses are the “most efficient;” and to designate a practitioner who does not believe that, as a homoeopathic physician, is a misnomer; and physicians like Dr. Doe and Dr. Roe and many others who are ostensibly homoeopaths, yet who have nothing on their cards, nothing on their windows, nothing on their doors, and practically nothing in their practice to indicate homoeopathy, are not the type of men who held up the hands of Hahnemann and helped to inaugurate the new system amid derision, persecution and personal sacrifice. Nor is this the type that will perpetuate pure homoeopathy and hand down to succeeding generations the unaltered doctrine of the immortal Hahnemann.
On the contrary there is a call for men who are proud of the distinction, “Homoeopathic physicians;” proud to be numbered with the true adherents of the greatest human physician the world has ever known, and proud to be identified as practitioners of the only system of medicine which has a therapeutic law, the science of cure and the healing art.
Every drug has its own distinct individuality; and that which individualizes it is its spirit, its dynamis, its hidden inner nature when brought in contact with the dynamis of the healthy human body. If in superficial diseases, nature is able to appropriate enough of the dynamic power to cure when the whole drug is administered, it is the spirit of the drug which proves effective, even then.
The reason is, the curative principle does not reside in the material elements, but in the drug-spirit. This tested in the healthy human body reveals the curative principle of that drug and enables us to prescribe it with scientific accuracy and to cure with a satisfying certainty–secundum artem.
The law of similars is magnified in certain quarters, as if that were all sufficient; but the law of similars can not cure deep-seated, miasmatic diseases when crude substances are employed. Even in some acute diseases, such as syphilis and sycotic gonorrhoea, no man can cure by the internal administration of crude medicines. The dose must be diminished by dilution and potentization, as the master ascertained and taught, and the dynamis being thus secured free from its material encumbrance, it must even then be raised to a higher power of development, higher and higher, until it corresponds to the plane of the patients susceptibility.
No one achievement perhaps contributed so largely to the immortalizing of Hahnemanns name, and to the common benefit of the whole human race, as his process of diminishing the dose and of then developing its dynamic power. This places before mankind all medicinal substances in a form at once the most efficient and wholly harmless; for, however poisonous, a given drug in its crude form, or however inert, dynamization renders it penetratingly efficacious on the one hand, and incapable of drugging or killing on the other.
And when we reflect that drug diseases are the most prevalent and the most difficult to cure, it is hard to estimate the ultimate good that will inure mankind because of this homoeopathic process.
