It surpasses our understanding what stand in the way of amalgamation of these institutions on the face of such a grand opportunity that has presented itself for the cause of Homoeopathy and Homoeopathic practitioners. The future of Homoeopathy stands at a cross-road; our attitude and line of action might make or mar the destiny of such a superb system of Healing Art. Let it not be said that we were weighed in the balance and found wanting. Let not posterity point their disdainful finger at us who might be accused of failing to rise up to the occasion. Time and tide wait for no man and we should take time by the forelock if we do not wish to miss the bus.
Our appeal to the authorities of the Homoeopathic institutions concerned, will, we hope, not go in vain. The whole homoeopathic profession, the students of homoeopathy and even the lay public-should all put their shoulders to the wheel to get the car of homoeopathy going smoothly on its triumphant march to reach its destined goal. Bengal is the home of homoeopathy in India and the burden of responsibility on the shoulders of the Bengalee homoeopaths is too precious to throw it away. If such an unfortunate thing come to pass history will condemn us, posterity will not forgive us and the soul of Hahnemann will turn in his grave and curse us to eternal damnation. Friends, beware!
We will be failing in our duty it we do not mention the signal services rendered by Dr. J.N. Majumdar to the cause of homoeopathy and the active and leading part taken by him in the deputations to Central Health Minister and participation in the deliberations with the planning Commission and Ad Hoc Committee under the chairmanship of D.G.H.S.
$ Concepts Of Health And Disease With Reference To Psychosomatic Medicine [Concepts Of Health And Disease With Reference To Psychosomatic Medicine].
The Homoeopathic Herald By Das N C.
# 1953 Nov Vol 14 No 8.
^ Bomford R R.
~ Philosophy and discussion.
` ==.
“Literature of “Psychosomatic Medicine”.
The literature on so-called psychosomatic medicine – I shall come back to that term later – is already considerable, and I shall not attempt to review more than a very little of it, partly because such an attempt would need to occupy at least several lectures, and partly because I believe it would be unprofitable. For I suspect that a persons attitude to what may be called the psychosomatic method in medicine depends less on an intellectual evaluation of the literature than on his attitude to neurosis.
Just as an overtly neurotic patient tends to arouse irrational feelings in most of us, so does the suggestion that illness, needless to say in ourselves as well as in our patients, can be fully explained only when psychological and physical factors are taken into account. We resist this suggestion as applied to ourselves, and we tend to deny it in our patients.
Earlier I quoted an article by Pickering (1950) in which he dismissed what he called the psychosomatic hypothesis in a few lines on the ground that the small amount of critically established fact on which it was based could be explained in other ways. But in doing this he makes an assumption: he assumes, it seems to me, that a satisfactory account of the causation of disease states, or some of them has been, or can be, given in purely physical terms; and that it therefore behoves those who are interested in the so-called psychosomatic hypothesis to prove their case by proving critically established fact.
But this is a big assumption, and I would ask those who make it to consider carefully in how many chronic diseases can they give a satisfactory account of the aetiology in purely physical terms? We come to nearest to giving such an account, I suppose in nutritional deficiencies and in certain chronic infections, where again one factor in the environment is of particular importance. But is that factor, even in these instances, the whole story? A great deal is known, for instance, the whole story?
A great deal is known, for instance, about the tubercle bacillus; but can we really explain on humoral grounds why some people become ill with tuberculosis while others do not, and, of those who do become ill, why in some the process is a arrested while in others it is not? I doubt if we can, and I believe that studies of personal factors which may be concerned in the onset and course of tuberculosis such as those of Wittkower (1949) and of Day (1951, 1952), even though they do not amount to “Critically established fact”, are still of great interest and importance in this connection.
I would like to suggest that we may equally, and indeed with much more reason, start from the historically older and philosophically more satisfactory assumption that illness is a state of the whole man – in the sense that it is a state of a body-mind unity, and ask those who doubt the importance of psychosomatic method to establish their case by giving a satisfactory account in purely physical terms of the aetiology of even one of the chronic conditions which are at present described as of unknown aetiology. Peptic ulceration, ulcerative colitis, hypertension with all its sequelae , rheumatoid arthritis, and asthma to name but a few, await such an explanation.
But, it may be said, since rheumatoid arthritis can now be dramatically if not completely relieved by supplying the substance cortisone, we can surely regard rheumatoid arthritis as a purely physical abnormality, curable by physical means. And doesnt this make the complicated and difficult psychosomatic approach unnecessary?
Those who use this kind of argument are confusing mechanism with aetiology. The discovery of cortisone and A.C.T.H. has brilliantly illuminated, or bids fair to illuminate, the physico- chemical mechanism of rheumatoid arthritis amongst other things, but it has brought us no nearer being able to answer the question why a given person is taken ill with rheumatoid arthritis or how this illness can be prevented – just as the discovery of insulin and vitamin B12 had led to very great advances in our knowledge of the physico-chemical mechanism of diabetes and pernicious anaemia without telling us why some people develop these conditions or how they may be prevented.
Medicine in undergraduate teaching schools, as Halliday puts it, has shown hitherto a distinctly mechanismic bias, in the sense that it has devoted enormous energy to the explanation of the mechanism of disease in physico-chemical terms, relatively less to the environment, and still less to the person. But there are signs that this is changing. There have been, for instance, numerous psychological studies of personality types in different illnesses, notably the very extensive contributions of Dunbar (1943), and her colleagues from the psychiatric and medical divisions of Columbia University.
My own feeling is that these and other personality studies, though of great interest, are somewhat inconclusive in that they seem to depend so greatly on the subjective interpretations of the observer, and it remains to be seen whether independent observers will always find the same personality types or range of types in the same illnesses. At the same time a start has been made on the more accurate study of physical types by means of Sheldons method of somato-typing (Tanner, 1949).
To my mind the outstanding recent contribution to the study of man, rather than mechanism, has been the work of Wolf, Wolff, and their colleagues and Cornell University Medical Colleges, over that last 10 to 15 years.
For details of their methods and results one must read at least their two monographs (Wolf and Wolff, 1943; Grace, Wolf, and Wolff, 1951). Very briefly, one patient with a gastrostomy and four with prolapsed colonic mucosa were studied over considerable periods. The rate of blood flow, as judged by colour changes in the mucosa, and secretory and motor activity of the stomach and colon were measured in a variety of circumstances, and notes made on the effect upon them of ordinary physiological stimuli, of drugs, of the patients life situation, and sometimes of emotionally coloured happenings, either occurring spontaneously or provoked deliberately during the course of the experiments.
I believe these are important studies for several reasons. They were performed on man, and intact man, except for the accident by which either gastric or colonic mucosa was visible. Instead of trying to standardize the conditions of their experiment by avoiding the complication of using conscious human subjects, or by what might be called eliminating the human factor, these observers standardized all the other conditions of their experiments so far as possible and deliberately set out to study, among other things, the effects on the stomach and colon of human situations and emotions.
What emotion the subjects were actually experiencing in the different experimental situation had, of course, to be inferred. But, given that the authors inferences were substantially correct, their results are of the greatest interest. I would like to mention one or two points which seem particularly relevant to my lecture. In an animal preparation the actions of a drug are usually constant and predictable. In these observations on man there are several instances where this was not so, and there the actual effect of a drug appeared to depend not on its pharmacological action but on the meanings of its administration to the particular subject.
