Bacteriology, with its many ramifications, is a very important subject. It sustains an important relation to homoeopathy, but one that requires careful definition. You may not know that Hahnemann may justly be regarded as the father of medical bacteriology. He was the first to advance the theory that cholera, one of the great, typical germ diseases,is due to the presence of innumerable minute living organism, by which it is propagated and conveyed. This theory he vigorously defended while he urged the adoption of the sanitary measures which it involved.
Later, in his great work on Chronic Diseases, he expanded the theory to include all epidemic, infectious and contagious diseases, acute as well as chronic. He recognized the parasitic or bacterial origin of leprosy and gonorrhoea, and most remarkable of all,he identified tuberculosis, in all its manifold forms and extensions, as of bacillary origin, and all this more than a half a century before the reputed discoveries of Koch, Pasteur and Noeggerath.
Of course Hahnemanns teachings were not set forth in the language and nomenclature of modern bacteriology, for that science had not yet been born but the basic ideas were all there, stated or implied. His “Psora Theory,” for example, covers the entire field of what we now call tuberculosis, and a good deal besides,and in the spirit, if note the terminology of modern science.
I cannot enlarge upon this interesting topic. I simply call attention to it.
I must also give you a word of warning in this connection from the standpoint of homoeopathic therapeutics.
The great majority of medical men today are so completely obsessed by the spirit of bacteriology that they have lost sight of the individual altogether. They are attempting to force the therapeutic application of certain unproved bacteriological theories by methods which are neither legitimate nor scientific. Bacteriology can never give a complete explanation of disease, nor can it be made the basis of a complete or efficient system of therapeutics, because so many other factors besides micro- organisms enter into the production of disease.
Bacteria are a factor in disease, and an important one, but their action is always conditioned upon the existence of many other factors, all of which must be taken into consideration in treatment. Not to recognize these facts is to open the say to grave abuses and misapplications of that which is true in bacteriology.
The current mode of preparing the various serums, vaccines and antitoxins, for example, and the administering of them through the hypodermic needle, in the prevention and treatment of disease, is productive of incalculable injury; while the effect upon the profession, from the scientific standpoint, is deplorable, leading as it does, no narrowness of mind arrogance, bigotry and intolerance. In so far as they are really prophylactic or curative, these substances may all the prepared and used efficaciously by the same simple and harmless methods used for other homoeopathic medicines.
It seems that clinical observation is becoming a lost art. Under the sway of bacteriology modern physicians and surgeons are no longer interested in the clinical history and symptomatology of many of the cases with which they deal. Consequently, orthodox medicine today frequently finds itself therapeutically in a “blind alley”-a narrow passage with no outlet-from which it tries in vain to escape by digging its way through the thick walls with scalpels and hypodermic needles.
Symptoms,which represent the functional changes in the perverted vital processes which we call disease, have little or no meaning for the bacteriologist, except as vague warning signals that something is wrong. When they are brought to his attention, instead of studying the patient, his clinical history, heredity and environment, he merely collects a “specimen” or takes a “culture” and hastens to the laboratory, there to try to identify the micro organism supposed to be the specific cause of the disease.
Having found it, as he supposes, he prepares to administer a serum or a vaccine, vainly imagining that he can effect a cure that way. The patient may, and often does, recover but the dean of Corneal University Medical College is reported to have recently said substantially, in a public address, that “any case of disease which recovered under serum or vaccine treatment would have got well anyhow.” so I am not alone in my strictures upon that kind of treatment. I could cite many others to the same effect it time permitted. But I will only quote briefly from a recent lecture by Professor James Ewing of cornell, generally recognized as one of the greatest pathologists of the world.
Professor Ewing says:
“there are limitations to the significance of the purely. bacteriological knowledge of disease. The old morphologists. believed that bacteriology could never give a complete. explanation of disease-a view which receives increasing. support in modern times. Modern bacteriology is getting. away from the study of bacteria themselves and turning more. and more to the questions of predisposing and contributing causes of disease. In other words, it is reverting to the field of general pathology”. And again;
“The acute interest in immunology is not quite so intense as it was five years ago. when bacteriology takes refuge in almost invisible filterable viruses, it comes to a dead standstill, as in influenza and poliomyelitis”.
And still again:
“Much more can be accomplished by study of the clinical conditions under which disease develops!”.
Thus Professor Ewing, on this important subjects aligns himself substantially with those followers of Hahnemann who have never departed from his strict, inductive,individualizing method in therapeutics, based upon pure clinical observations and experience,and guided by the natural law of cure.
And now, in the time that remains to me, let me try to give a brief and somewhat cursory review of homoeopathic philosophy as it has been gradually developed since the time of Hahnemann.
Primarily the philosophy of homoeopathy, as originated by Hahnemann and developed by later thinkers, is based upon the recognition of Life as the fundamental energy, power, principle and substance of the universe, individualized in every living being. It is distinctively a vitalistic philosophy. It recognizes life in the abstract as energy, and in all its manifestations in the concrete as a force. It holds that, in the last analysis, all energy is living energy.
It recognizes life in organism as the primary and direct cause of all organic functioning. Life is the motive power here in the same sense that electricity is a motive power in mechanics. Functioning normally the organism is in the state of order, or health. Functioning abnormally as a result of some influence inimical to life the organism is in a state of disorder,or disease. Health and disease are not thing, or entities, but conditions or states of the organism in which life resides. Disease is merely a morbid or disorderly vital process, not a thing in itself, as orthodox medicine implies and as we are apt to think.
Homoeopathic philosophy teaches that the things that cause or cure disease do not directly and solely by virtue of their own inherent powers or properties, but in conjunction with, and by reason of, the existence of life-in-organism which alone has the power to react. Medicines act only because the living organism has the power to react to their impression. A medicine makes no impression on a dead body because there is no living principle in it to react. As Grauvogl put it: “Substances taken into the organism from without, remain passive the organism, while the organism toward them active”.
Observe, I am referring to organic vital, not inorganic chemical reactions. Inorganic chemical reactions in the external world are of an entirely different order. Life is a chemistry of its own,which man can only feebly initiative. Certain chemical actions and reactions are constantly going on in the living body, but they are conditioned and modified by the existence of the individualized life principle. These latter we recognize as physiological or pathogenic chemico-vital operations which take place only in the living body. The cannot be reproduced in their entirety in the laboratory. There is always something lacking-something which eludes the chemist-and that something is Life, which cannot be created by man.
Imprecisely the same way as in regard to life, the homoeopathic philosophy is based upon the recognition of Mind,in its subconscious and conscious aspects, as the intelligent power and principle of the universe, individualizing itself in every material concrete form.
Dr. Close was born November 24, 1860 and came to study homeopathy after the death of his father in 1879. His mother remarried a homoeopathic physician who turned Close's interests from law to medicine.
His stepfather helped him study the Organon and he attended medical school in California for two years. Finishing his studies at New York Homeopathic College he graduated in 1885. Completing his homeopathic education. Close preceptored with B. Fincke and P. P. Wells.
Setting up practice in Brooklyn, Dr. Close went on to found the Brooklyn Homoeopathic Union in 1897. This group devoted itself to the study of pure Hahnemannian homeopathy.
In 1905 Dr. Close was elected president of the International Hahnemannian Association. He was also the editor of the Department of Homeopathic Philosophy for the Homeopathic Recorder. Dr. Close taught homeopathic philosophy at New York Homeopathic Medical College from 1909-1913.
Dr. Close's lectures at New York Homeopathic were first published in the Homeopathic Recorder and later formed the basis for his masterpiece on homeopathic philosophy, The Genius of Homeopathy.
Dr. Close passed away on June 26, 1929 after a full and productive career in homeopathy.