HAHNEMANN-THE REBEL AND THE REFORMER


The stage was get for mighty happenings. Heroes from every field of human activity trotted over the Western continent. Alas! what about the followers of AEsculapeus? The old Galen, the Roman, seemed to rule the medical section of the arena. Eighteenth century medicine was dominated by theories and systems, by cults and creeds of diverse sorts.


It was two-hundreds of years ago that Hahnemann was born. In a reminiscent mood our mind goes back to the eighteenth-century Europe in relation to the time when he flourished and to his contemporaries amongst who lay his sphere of activity.

The dark ages that swallowed the whole of Europe after the fall of the mighty Roman Empire were over. The sleeping Leviathan was roused from its centuries old intellectual slumber by the rude shock of a call to arms to join the crusade. The light of knowledge which the Europeans received in the shape of Greek culture through the Arabic medium supplied the spark that set the intellectual horizon of the west on fire. They found their lost souls, as it were and the Renaissance set in.

From every part of Europe persons of outstanding merit began to be born and more than compensated for the previous cultural stagnation and degeneration. Poets and philosophers, painters and musicians, mathematicians and scientists appeared in torrents and like an avalanche swept off age-old superstitions and dogmas from the minds of the people and pointed to an age of reason and rational approach to the problems of the humanity. But the greatest liberator of human reason from the letters of academic scholasticism appeared in the person of Lord Bacon of England.

He, through his “Novum Organum” established the Inductive method of Logic and inaugurated the modern scientific era. Each morrow produced something new and broke through some defence line of the citadel of knowledge. The scientific spirit was dawning in the mind of the Europeans. Europe was throbbing with tremendous potentialities. This was no spirit of iconoclasm, of unrest or of discomfort but the evidence of a mind where every avenue was to the approach of truth from every direction.

The stage was get for mighty happenings. Heroes from every field of human activity trotted over the Western continent. Alas! what about the followers of AEsculapeus? The old Galen, the Roman, seemed to rule the medical section of the arena. Eighteenth century medicine was dominated by theories and systems, by cults and creeds of diverse sorts.

Though Royal touch was fast losing its therapeutic efficacy and witchcraft and astrology were slowly but surely giving way to more humane and more rational explanations as to theories about causation of disease, blind respect for traditional authority, the weaving of fantastic and one-sided speculations, shot-guns prescription and loathsome mixtures, blood-letting and cupping and other crude and torturesome therapeutic practices were in vogue and advocated by the leaders of the medical profession of that time.

There was absolute chaos, no general principle, no law guiding therapeutics-though some advances in Anatomy, Physiology, Pathology and Surgery were effected by the two Hunters, Baillee, Morgagni, Scarpa, Winslow, Doughs, Monroe, Meckels, Woolfe, etc.

Towards the middle of the eighteenth century (10th April 1755) we find a precautious German boy, the son of a porcelain painter in a tiny town of Misan in the Dutchy of Saxony, pouring over his books of Latin and Greek and thinking out lessons set for him by his father from day to day. Mediocre as the father was yet was he wise enough to note that knowledge is power and that a pen is mightier than a sword. He was training his son to be an original man and to take nothing for granted unless he had proved it to his utmost satisfaction.

How far his his father succeeded in his attempt has been verified by the future life and achievements of the son who blazed forth as a first-rate original genius. There was nothing which he touched, which was not illuminated by his phenomenal genius coupled with his indomitable will and indefatigable energy and exemplary patience. This boy is no other than Christian Frederick Samuel Hahnemann, the hero of our In memorium, a towering personality in the valhalla of scientists, an arch-rebel in the field of medicine and the founder of a superb system of medical therapy.

The father moulded porcelain and the son, in the full bloom of his career, started to mould the clay of suffering humanity. Such was the consummation of the loving fathers ambition, so devoutly wished for. Gifted with rare intellect and intuition, voracious reader as he was, he quickly assimilated all the medical knowledge available in his time soon after he graduated from the medical college. He got his Doctorate degree, but his mind craved to drink deep the Pyrrean spring of knowledge. The more he engaged himself in the practice of medicine the more dissatisfied he became with the therapeutic practice of his time.

At times his aversion to the practice of medicine rose to such a pitch that he thought of relinquishing the medical profession and taking up the life of a chemist and a literateur. A sudden serious illness of one of his children brought home to him the utter futility of therapeutics as practised then and set him seriously thinking about ending or mending the practice of medicine. His implicit reliance on God showed him the path in the wilderness.

The first streak of light which ultimately turned into a fiery blaze, he saw in 1796 when we find him writing his famous article, “Essay on a New Principle for Ascertaining the Curative Power of Drugs” in Hufelands journal. Hahnemann the Homoeopath was in the making between 1796 and 1809 when we find him writing the following articles: AEsculapeus in Balance (1805); Medicine of Experience (1805); On the value Speculative System of Medicine (1808); Observations on the Three current Methods of Treatment (1809).

Hahnemanns greatest contribution to the field of medicine is the discovery of a new method of studying diseases and drug- actions and a Law of Cure. This method was so radical, the outlook so original and its consequences so far-reaching and damaging to the long-cherished beliefs in medicine that it challenged the very basis of medical learning of his time. It can be easily surmised how much he incurred the wrath of the then medical profession for his seeming impertinence in pointing out the flaws in their arguments and fallacies in their methods.

Hahnemanns discovery is primarily a therapeutic method, a method of scientific study and therapeutic practice, secondly, the facts discovered by the method and thirdly, the theories that have been propounded to explain and correlate those facts, Hahnemann is a discoverer of some truth and not merely of some facts. “For a mere fact is a blind lane, it leads to the infinite” (Tagore). Thus it is that Hahnemann, while discovering a new method of drug therapy, has discovered some truths relating to the mysteries of disease production which are of outstanding importance.

What is the distinctive mode of Hahnemanns approach to the study of diseases and drug-actions? It is the clinical method of approach. Though the human organism combines in itself different aspects viz., physico-chemical, biological (vital), psychological etc., it is the vital aspect that is the most relevant aspect for us as physicians. Similarly it is the clinical aspect of disease, as distinguished from other aspects such as aetiological, pathological, diagnostic and prognostic, which is the most relevant aspect for us as therapeutists whose high and only mission, as Hahnemann puts it, is to heal the sick.

Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, was a master clinician but even he could not dream of its potentiality and applicability in the art of medicine. Clinical science had to wait for centuries till it received its due recognition from Hahnemann. He realised that clinical phenomena are those which render themselves perceptible to our senses as a result of the actions and perceptible to our senses as a result of the actions and reactions of forces, physico-chemical, vital and psychological, operating in and through human organism. Hahnemann discovered a law of relation between clinical aspects of diseases and those of drug actions which will be curative thereof.

The two elements of the relationship here implied are the effects of drugs on the healthy body and the clinical features of diseases; in either case everything is taken into account which is appreciable by the patient and cognisable by the physician but excluding all speculative hypothesis. He took these features as the working basis of his method. Simplicity and certainty were his aim in practical medicine. This validity of clinical aspect of diseases and drug-actions for therapeutic purposes was questioned by his contemporaries but he pointed out that it is the merit of homoeopathy that in it medicine assumes its true place in being an art-the art of healing.

These advanced ideas of Hahnemann proved too hard for his contemporaries to understand and so Hahnemann was misunderstood and vilified. The opposition he met was not scientific and it came more from the vested interests of the apothecaries and pharmacists of his time. The unpardonable crime of Hahnemann was to throw out his new discovery as a challenge to the then medical profession asking them not to condemn it before giving it a fair trial.

N C Das
N C Das
Calcutta