None of my five senses has aught to do indicate towers and windows, and whether they be open or shut.” His perceptive powers, too, remain intact in the dark. He recognizes the fact that c cloud darkens the sky. At the close of the interviews the remark is made, a new field of investigation is here opened to scientists.
We doubt not that this blind man is a sensitive, and that he perceives the Od emanations from objects at some distance. He recognizes the cloud from the cutting of the sun ods. Reichenbach says, Sec. 2589, that sensitives in the dark never stumble they have previously become conscious of the Od emanations, a fact I have often verified.
From Rademacher we learn that in epidemic catarrhs liver R.R. may be indicated. Reichenbach gives proof of this (Sec. 2043), “Miss Z., by tactile sense, recognized my condition of ill health before I myself was cognizant of it. She felt especially about the hepatic region. In the dark room she saw through my garments the oblique margin of liver shining forth as large as the hand. At the same time she declared both sides of my forehead (frontal sinuses) markedly illuminated.
I give the facts, their significance I do not know.” But we do. Reichenbach had busied himself little with observation of disease in the dark room, yet he considered that the interests of pathology demanded further fundamental and many-sided study in this direction, and that a time would come when every large hospital would consider a dark room indispensable to diagnosis.
I could related to you much more from this remarkable book, but will spare your patience.
In closing, I give the polar characteristics of the Od. “The Od goes hand in hand with the forces light, warmth, electricity, magnetism; it appears, everywhere simultaneously with them; it divides into poles, is imponderable and evasive as these forces; it is a part of inorganic and organic nature, and being in such universal relationship with these forces, it is also a force”.
The sources of Od in man are partly mechanical, partly chemical. The blood circulation and all voluntary movement produced positive Od; the chemistry of respiration, of digestion, of metabolism is the genesis of negative Od.
“Very probably the Od itself is a factor in life”.
The above are the chief points in Reichenbachs theory which have interested me. I am convinced, however, that each colleague who shall study the Od, will find others, so rich is the subject. If so much has been made of sensitivity and Od as one man, Reichenbach, has given us, what rich harvests await us when whole scientific bodies with more perfect apparatus and greater powers develop the subject.
I would not hold that the Od theory offers at present anything iconoclastic, but maintain that we may expect much of the future if we follow the indicated lines. Great is the progress that the healing art owes to similia and potentization, yet it will become still more perfect through the merging of the two realms of investigation of those two greatly misunderstood thinkers, Hahnemann and Reichenbach. Dr. Kirn (in the Zeitschrift des Berliner Vereines homoeop. Aerzts. Band. XXII).
