Biological products, when first adopted in medical practice, were given through mouth. They did not yield the expected results, and it did not take long to discover that our stomach readily digests these before they can act otherwise. The first biological product was Adrenalin, introduced in 1898, and it is now used almost exclusively by injections. Monoglandular products were similarly used first by mouth, their failure brought into use polyglandular therapy by mouth, and these are again replaced now by monoglands administered by injections.
What an ever-changing kaleidoscope! Thus, speculations and experimentation are eternally going on in the old school because it is not based upon truth, it h as no law to guide and control, while Hahnemanns system has for its anchor and compass the eternal and indubitable law of nature-Similia Similibus Curantre.
Intravenous injection was started first with transfusion of blood. Saline transfusion was introduced by Col. Rogers about the year 1904 in Cholera. Other medicines through veins came into practice later. The necessity for intravenous use of some medicines was felt when their intramuscular or intradermal use was found irritating and often unsafe. If we call a medication Homoeopathic it must answer Aphorism No. 2 of the Organon.
Some people are prone to lay stress on the patients faith in treatment, but we assert that in Homoeopathy there is no question of “faith-cure.” It is solidly based upon positive facts. It stands with its own luminous glory upon facts elemental, as also upon mental and physical morbidity of all living beings. The artificial morbid symptoms of the provers were not due to any faith-either irrational or hypnotic.
Where the lunatic is cured by Homoeopathic treatment, does any question of faith arise? In pediatry, nobody counts upon the faith of the child-patient. In veterinary practice of Homoeopathy the Vet does not invoke any faith in the animal for his tiny globules to act and cure. Thus, the class of critics that the cure effected by homoeopathy depends upon the faith of the giver and the taker, is futile.
Another sect of practitioners seem to be over head and ears in love with Isopathy, and they claim this mode of therapy as a modified form of Homoeopathy. Isopathy is a so-called theory of cure by identical and idem, while Homoeopathy is a mode of cure with a single drug dynamis whose pathogenetic symptoms are found to be the most similar to the totality of symptoms of the natural disease under treatment and in the smallest possible dose. Full details of Hahnemanns instructions in this regard is to be found in his Organon of Medicine.
Unlike Vaccine therapy or Isopathy, the Homoeopathic system of treatment does not claim to attack micro-organisms directly and kill them. Homoeopathy goes much beyond that sphere, it alters the morbid condition of the individual sick and restores his health, so that no bacteria can grow, thrive, multiply and ultimately destroy the host; it also increases the resisting power of the vital force against infection; it sterilizes the living body so as to say.
It is a mighty fight of Force against Force, energy, on the principles of Similia, the homoeopathic physician possessing powerful instruments by way of potentized drugs whose strength and energy he can increase or decrease as needs be to meet the morbid force and vanquish it. Nothing material on either side comes for the consideration of the homoeopathist.
Material morbid substances, e.g., pus, ulcers, boils, skin lesions, morphological changes (unless resulting from palpable external injuries), irritations, inflammations and innumerable other external morbid conditions are only the results of the invisible disease-force manifesting itself in those visible and sensible forms which are fully sufficient to enable the physician to cure in-an arrangement by which the Lord of life in His infinite kindness reveals to our sense what is to be removed for the restoration of health.
After all these years the advocates of tuberculins fight shy to apply it broadly in positive tuberculous cases, for the safety of its application is yet doubtful. Potentized tuberculin is much widely employed by the homoeopathist in various diseases, guided by its pathogenetic symptoms, and they employ it per oral.
In 1885 Koch declared his treatment of rabies, but the causative organism has not yet been isolated. Pasteur discovered that by drying the spinal cords of rabid animals for varying periods of time he could prepare a series of viruses of different strength. In 1903, Negri reported the constant finding of definite microscopical bodies in certain brain cells of animals dying from rabies. In Homoeopathy, Lyssin (Hydrophobin) in potencies per oral yields most encouraging results.
When a tiny little globule of a potentized Homoeopathic medicine is dissolved in a tumbler ful of water and the solution is taken in teaspoonful doses, or only such a globule is put dry on the tongue, or such a globule is dissolved in a dram of alcohol and the patient only inhales from the phial once through each nostril, no medicinal substance is detectable through the most powerful microscope or by chemical analysis; hence it cannot be conceived to have got into the gut of the patient and absorbed from there, or to have at once got into the gut of the patient and absorbed from there, or to have at once got into the blood- circulation and fight the micro-organism playing in the blood stream.
Homoeopathic medicinal dynamis instantly touches the lingual or olfactory nerve, strikes upon the sensory system and drives to the seat of the disease a similar yet stronger artificial disease-force, thus dislodging the natural disease- force that has manifested all the visible morbid derangements. Here is the fundamental difference between the Hahnemannian method and the injectional method of administering medicine.
Dr. Mahendra Lal Sircar, M.D., C.I.E. recommended and personally employed mustard plaster, internal administration of chloroform and hypodermic use of morphia solely for the palliation of that vexatious symptom of hiccough which sometimes appears in cholera patients and obstinately refuse submit to the carefully selected homoeopathic medicine. He cited these measures only as palliatives, and in the whole of his valuable literature not in a single instances he advised to employ Homoeopathic potencies by injections.
Under aph. 67 of his Organon Hahnemann permits palliation in emergent cases only. He remarks: “And yet the new sect that mixes the two systems appeals (though in vain) to this observation, in order that they may have an excuse for encountering everywhere such exception to the general rule in diseases, and to justify their convenient employment of allopathic palliatives and of other injurious allopathic trash besides, solely for the sake of sparing themselves the trouble of seeking for the suitable homoeopathic remedy for each case of disease- and thus conveniently appear as homoeopathic physicians without being such. But their performances are on a par with the system they pursue; they are corrupting.”
I, for one, do not bear any particular hostility against injections. But when it comes to be styled as homoeopathic injection (this very name being self-contradictory) and when it is sought to be applied not only in the most urgent cases threatening imminent death, but is propagated for general application in all conditions of sickness, I should, before I adopt it, ask for its thorough proving under a group of competent physicians in a hospital on healthy human beings and the results be made known to the public, without withholding the name and the method of preparation. Hahnemann and his co-provers, the immortal Herring and all the American and British provers did not keep the names and method of preparations of any of their proven medicines in eternal oblivion. That would be tantamount to fostering patent medicines.
Calcutta
Chief Editor, Homeopathic Herald