The objection here, of course, is not so much to the examination itself as to the manner and spirit in which it is done, to the use made of its findings, and to the ignoring of subjective phenomena- in a word, of the man himself.
Physicians and surgeons have so long looked upon man as a machine, a physical, chemical and mechanical laboratory, than many of them have become callous. They have lost sight of the soul of man, of the individual ego, of Life and its processes, and hence have gone far astray and failed to find the key to the problem of real healing. Whether they are aware of it or not, they are denied access to the inmost citadel of life, which they try to take by force, and are baffled in their efforts.
Regarding the body only with the purblind eyes of the anatomist, the physiologist or the pathologist, they do not see the man himself at all. Nevertheless instinct tells them he is there, somewhere. They address him, talk to him, listen to him (with a stethoscope) and order him about as if they had him completely in their power and knew all about him. But the fact is they have come nowhere near him and now next to nothing about him. Pretending a skill and know next to nothing about him. Pretending a skill and night which they do not possess, they try to hide their deficiencies in true knowledge by a display of manual and instrumental dexterity which thus becomes essentially cruel and violent. It is like vivisecting a bird to learn the secret of its song.
After diagnosis comes treatment. And here, as we turn the pages of history, we are introduced into a veritable “chamber of Horrors,” from which one is fortunate to escape with his life and a whole skin, to say nothing about his internal organs, his purse and his jewellery.
In olden times when a man got sick they shut him up in a tightly closed room, smothered him beneath blankets in a bed surrounded with heavy draperies, denied him water to quench his thirst, leeched him, bled him white, poulticed and blistered him, put moxae and setons in his quivering flesh, purged him, puked him and filled him up with all kinds of fantastic compounds of deadly drugs. It was a miracle of medical art if he came through, and “a dispensation of Providence” if he did not.
Later they subjected him, amongst many other methods, to the aqueous processes of the hydropathic system. They hot and cold- packed him, not and cold-douched and sprayed him, sitz-and foot- bathed him flooded him within and without, fully persuaded that they were cleansing him of all his impurities.
Nowadays the patient is submitted to other forms of medical assault and battery. All the batteries and resources of “modern medical science” are turned upon him. He is X-rayed, violet rayed, infra-red-rayed and solar-rayed. He is radiumized, electrified and all but electrocuted. He is chlorine gassed, poison-sprayed, malignant-germed. He is immunized, proteinized, pollenized, endocrinized, serumized, inoculated and vaccinated. He is injected, scraped, scarified, and punctured with hypodermic needles. He is baked, boiled and “roasted.” He is drugged, doped and-deluded, for when all is done he is not cured, and has actually or virtually become an “addict” of one kind or another.
If these diagnosticians and doctors were as humane as the surgeons, who mercifully anaesthetize their victims before operation and studiously refrain from drugging them afterward, one could feel a little more charitable toward them. But they do not. The medical patient must “take his medicine” with as much fortitude as he can summon, smile if he can, and go his way, a victim to violence and misdirected energy. REgarding disease as an entity, something material or tangible, and not a state of imbalance, of dynamical dysfunctioning, they naturally treat it by similar means, chemically, mechanically, materially, forcibly.
The basic idea, the fundamental therapeutic principle of “Allopathy,” or orthodox medicine, is force, or violence, a maximum of means, employed in opposition and resistance.
Again this stands Homoeopathy, the therapeutic science and art of Vital Dynamics, based upon the idea of power, properly directed and flowing gently and smoothly along the lines of least resistance, in accordance with the laws of nature, using always a minimum of means directed toward the removal of opposition and obstruction and the restoration of harmony and balance.
The whole story of the failure of orthodox medicine, like that of all other divinely uninspired efforts of man to overcome the evils of humanity, may be clearly read in Genesis, one of the most ancient documents of the world. Whether it be regarded as history, drama or allegory, the truth is therein written. There we have the account of the introduction into the world, long before the dawn of history, of force, or violence, as the ruling principle of human affairs.
The writer of Genesis places the scene just outside the Garden of Eden, with Cain and Abel as the actors. Into that first”brotherhood” death entered through the passions of anger, envy, jealousy and greed, personified in Cain. He, yielding to them in the murder of his brother Able, became the prototype of violence, the personification of fear and the representative of materialism. From that primeval day to this, violence has been the ruling principle of unregenerate man and the foundation of all human law and government. From his primarily, arose all the evils, pains and penalties of humanity.
There came a time, the Record tells us, when “it repented the Lord that he had made man upon the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. The earth also was corrupt before God and the earth was filled of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and behold I will destroy them from the earth”.
Then came the Deluge, that the ways and laws of God might be justified.
So it has been continuously down through the ages; man forever rebelling against or denying God and refusing to listen to the divine voice within his own soul; forever fearing, envying and hating his brother; forever murdering him and being destroyed by the deluge of pain, disease and death which he vainly tries to oppose by the employment of force and violence. This was and is the ground of his condemnation; that he fills the earth with violence.
No physical force that man can exert or employ, no dam or levee he can erect can hold back the rushing, all-engulfing waters of the mighty Mississippi in flood. He can only cases resisting, take to his ark and float to safety, balanced, suspended, as it were, between heaven and earth until the waters subside.
Infinitely less is man able to resist by violence and physical force the flood of sin, crime, disease and death. He exerts himself mightily in opposition, but in vain. He builds courthouses, prisons and jails. He erects gallows, guillotines and electric chairs. He appoints judges, juries and policemen. He organizes armies and navies. He builds colleges, hospitals and asylums.
He creates Health Commissions, Carnegie Foundations, and Rockefeller Institutes-all founded upon and representing, in the last analysis, the idea of force, or violence. In medicine we have the forcible palliation of pain by powerful drugs and narcotics, the attempted destruction by physical or chemical forces of the supposed material causes of disease, and “immunization” by forcibly injecting into the circulation serums, vaccines and antitoxins derived from diseased organisms.
Man makes many wonderful discoveries and does many wonderful things. For a time, in some parts of the territory, he seems to succeed and is mightily puffed up over it. Actually or metaphorically he impounds this little stream, dams that river, alters the channel of another, builds higher levees on the greatest of all, and thinks he has conquered. But the heavens are opened, the rains descend, the fountains of the great deep are broken up and all his works are destroyed in the twinkling of an eye.
There is as much crime, disease and death in the world today, proportionately and in the aggregate, as there ever was. Their forms change but the things remain, while War, the Satanic apothesis of violence, continually racks, mocks or menaces our boasted civilization in one form or another. Violence has failed and always will fail in any constructive work, for violence is always destructive.
“Men must reap the things they sow,
Force from force must always flow,
Or worse; but tis a bitter woe
That love or reason cannot change.” Shelley.
The Spirit of God by the “Still small voice” within, by the warning dispensations of Providence and by the highest attainments of true science, teaches that Love is the greatest power in the universe; that the mild power rightly directed is the most effective; that nature always accomplishes her constructive purposes with the least expenditure of force; that the Infinitesimal applied at the decisive moment is the mediating agent in every action and transformation in nature, and that the Law of the Least Quantity of Action is the corollary of the Law of the Conservation of Energy.
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.