This plane of central life – mechanism is the dynamic plane according to Hahnemannian terminology. This is the plane of sensations and functions relating to gross material body as well as of thinking, willing, feeling, desires and aversions (though, according to correct psychological ideas these are a mixture of mental and vital phenomena as they appear in the surface being). As disease is nothing but altered life – it, in its primary condition and intimate nature, is also dynamic: it precedes, underlies, evolves, determines, embraces, transcends and rules the anatomical state.
So disease in its primary condition, consists of altered ideas, emotions, feelings and physical sensations. These are things which we cannot weigh in our most sensitive balances invented as yet; measure by our finest scales; split up by our crucibles; or describe in any terms save those which are often disregarded and set aside; and the patient whose story of disease is made of them, is thought fanciful, hypochondriacal, hysterical nervous or unreal; because, after we make him undergo any physical examination, a clean bill of health is granted to him because of absence of any visible or demonstrable change in the structure of his tissues or organs.
At this stage he is supposed to be suffering from disease as the condition may not yet admit of being labelled with a particular name from the stock of nosology. Still he is miserable, inspite of placebo and assurance that there is nothing organically wrong: Somehow he feels below par – a feeling which cannot be measured with mathematical exactitude and with all the technique (employed in relation to the physical sciences) that are at our disposal. So these deviations from health are disregarded and with them those warnings which come to him from apparently trivial deviations from health often lead to some terrible catastrophe?
Do we not see minds gradually breaking down while we say there is no organic change in the brain? Hearts suddenly ceasing to do their work, when after careful auscultation and reading of the electro – cardiographs we have said there is nought to fear? Suicide or sudden death sometimes disturbs the calm surface of our scientific prognosis of no danger. We may be startled and may then see all that we ought to have seen before. But if the up – surging waves that such unforeseen events have occasioned on that smooth surface subside, we go on as we have already done, and still pay but little attention to what the patient feels, and delight ourselves in the precision of our knowledge with regard to physical conditions of which he may know nothing and may care still less.
But Hahnemann draws our attention to the subtle fact that the structural change is not the disease, it is not co – extensive with disease; and even in those cases where the alliance appears the closet, the statical or anatomical alteration is but one of other effects of physiological forces, which acting under unphysiological conditions, constitute by this new departure the essential and true disease. That is why sir Andrew Clarke spoke in his presidential address at the Clinical Society of London in 1883:
These papers were published as Editorials in Hahnemannian Gleanings and were read before the Bengal Homoeopathic Institute.
