What Can Stop Us From Research And The Use Of The Homoeopathic Remedy


Hahnemann graduated from the college of medicine at Leipzig and was ready to practice at the age of 22 Hahnemann supported himself by making translations. He found much in the writing of the ancients that he considered were facts and applied to the sick of his day. He was ever searching for a key to unlock the door which would lead him to the way that would heal the sick.


History has a tendency to repeat itself. All men are liable to the deceived or misled and regardless of ability, power, or circumstances, may be due for a fall. Climaxes come and go. The only stable force and power is God, who through nature has established certain principles and laws which man has used and kicked around, but never changed. However, he may smother them and hide them so that the thinking public will forget them until some dire circumstances will recall them.

Archeologists discover many facts explaining the culture of ancient civilizations. This leads us to ponder on the fact that any information valuable to mankind may be lost for several generations.

Samuel Hahnemann, the Experimenter, discovered the symptomatic source of both pathologic and therapeutic diagnosis and thereby made the practice of medicine scientific. (James Krauss)

Hahnemann graduated from the college of medicine at Leipzig and was ready to practice at the age of 22 Hahnemann supported himself by making translations. He found much in the writing of the ancients that he considered were facts and applied to the sick of his day. He was ever searching for a key to unlock the door which would lead him to the way that would heal the sick. He discovered by trial and error that the idea of “Contrarii Contrabus” was not the answer to his quest.

Scientific medicine does not guess. In Hahnemanns fifty years he experimented with 99 drugs. He wrote his findings on them. He was as methodical and exact in his research of the 99 drugs as he was in his translations.

In 1790, just outside the gates of Leipzig, he moved his family of six into a peasants cottage where they lived in one small room and he wrote his first book, the small volume. “The Friend of Man” a book of hygiene on the fundamental problems of public health. For two years he remained close to his desk in this room, and in two years he translated twelve volumes of William Cullens. “Treatise on the Materia Medica.”

In his translations he found that pre-Hippocratic medicine was entirely prognostic and prophylactic. The prophylactic medicine was three-fold-first designed to divert disease by ritual sacrifice, second, to abort disease by atonement, and third, to expel disease from the body by the rites of purification.

Disease was regarded as cast upon the soul by some angered infernal gods and spirits. Very few of their drugs are now of use in the laboratory or in practice. Nearly all have mythologic associations.

The empirical therapy became detached from the priestly therapy of the temples. and its secret practitioners came to be regarded as magicians. The savage man confused life with motion. Savages still accept that disease is produced by an enemy that has supernatural powers. He regarded his soul as apart from his body. Disease was the work of offended spirits of the dead.

The savages medicine men assume a terrifying aspect. These medicine men put their patients in a state to quiet their nervous fears, similar to modern methods of some cures. Medicine could not begin to be medicine until disassociated from magic and religion. To this day this form of medicine is still practiced in certain parts of the world.

The Greek physician before Hippocrates remained essentially a surgeon rather than a clinician in his attitude toward his patient, considering only the surface indications. The physicians of that time might have been scientific if they had known how to group and co-ordinate symptoms, and consequently to interpret them. All this was changed with the advent of Hippocrates.

Greek medicine before this time was studied by the philosophers and regarded as a branch of philosophy. Hippocrates had only his open mind and keen senses, and with these reservations, his best descriptions of disease are models of their kind today. He taught that in relation to an internal malady the basis of all real knowledge lies in the inductive reasoning which was better than the haphazard notation of symptoms.

Hippocrates inductive method consisted of going over them again and again until the real values in the clinical picture begin to stand out. Hippocrates was not acquainted with experimentation but no physician ever profited more by experience. He noted that likes were cured by likes but he did not know how to apply the principle.

The 42 clinical cases of Hippocrates are almost the only record of the kind in the next 1700 years. He wrote them down deliberately, believing it to be valuable to learn of unsuccessful experiments and to know the causes of their failure. The patient was the real thing.

Disease was not an entity but a fluctuating condition of the patients body. The patients reaction in each case was individual. In like manner the treatment was centered on assisting the patient to react in his peculiar individual way against the disease.

After the Hippocratic period the practice of taking clinical cases died out. The Roman doctors were surgeons in war but became diplomats in peace. The common people under the rule of the Caesars looked to the Greeks for their medical guidance.

Cato, the dominant Roman, stood in the way of Greek learning for three generations. Cato thought cabbage was good for everything.

Several hundred years later, Galen, commenting on Hippocrates place in medicine said, “I alone pointed out the true method of treating disease. Hippocrates, the discoverer, has not gone as far as we could wish.” Galen said he made the road passable that Hippocrates started. Galen, with all his egotism, gained great fame.

He spread with powerful authority the teachings of Hippocrates over the medical world. The ancient period closes with the greatest Greek physician after Hippocrates, Galen (131- 201 A.D.), the founder of experimental physiology.

A special feature of Roman medicine was the cultivation of warm public baths and of mineral springs. During and following the medical baths as their system of treatment, these people went into a degenerated state of mind and body, with consequent relaxation of morals, followed by mysticism and that respect for the authority of magic which was to pave the way for the bigotry, dogmatism and mental inertia of the middle ages.

But again, culture began to emerge out of this chaos and darkness. Paracelsis was one of the most original medical thinkers of the sixteenth century. He was the son of a learned physician, with whom he began to study medicine. Having the Swiss wanderlust he travelled all over Europe collecting information from every source. He learned a great deal about medical practice and acquired an unusual knowledge of folk-medicine.

He thought and spoke in the language of the people. He was imbued with a life-long reverence of Hippocrates and burned the works of Galen. Here again, we see Hippocrates greatness clouded by the egotism of Galen, and later of Paracelsis.

William George, Honorary Lecturer in Physics, University of Sheffield, says, “The direct applications of science depend upon facts, not upon theories. The discussions, acrimonious or otherwise, in which scientists end by agreeing to differ, are not about facts or coincidence observations, but about theories and the like into which facts are fitted. It will be noted that even in scientific research, as soon as we depart from coincidence observations, we begin to get disagreement between individuals.

Torture a man mentally or physically, or threaten him enough, and he will express agreement with almost anything. There is only one scientific way so far discovered of dealing with differences about facts. That method is by the use of experiment. No amount of discussion alone will settle a difference in judgments of coincidence.”

To a man who had criticised one of his experiments in light, Newton, in a letter written November 13, 1675, pointed out that a difference about what can be observed in an experiment, “is to be decided not by discourse but by new trial of the experiment.” It seems that all human beings must continually assess values, and that such assessments are apt to introduce prejudice and to distort judgment.

The standards of medicine have gradually been raised in the past fifty years and we have all agreeably acquiesced until the standards have gotten into the hands of certain types of specialists and very much out of our hands, and has reached a situation not acceptable, either to the regular general practitioner or to the followers of our school of thought.

James Krauss, in 1921, wrote. “If ever there was a clear scientific induction from scientific observation, it was this induction of Hahnemanns symptom similarity of drugs and tissues which he denominated, Homoeopathy, and for the elucidation of which he wrote his organon of medicine in 1810 and rewrote it in 1819, 1824, 1829, 1833 and finally annotated and amended the 1833 edition for his sixth edition. His last edition was written in 1842.”

Hahnemann said that his doctrine of healing began with “the first pure test upon himself.” He also said, “medicine itself is nothing but a science of experience.

H A Neiswander