We have just emerged from reading Prizes Essays on homoeopathy printed in the July 1930 issue of the Journal of the A.I.H. These essays contain some very excellent matter, but also some assertions, both qualified and unqualified, which, if brought before a tribunal of real Hahnemannian homoeopaths, would not pass muster, let alone draw a prize. And, since those “Essays” are to go before the public as truly representative of homoeopathy, with the stamp of approval of those who have assumed to control and represent homoeopathy and homoeopaths, we shall therefore be judged accordingly by the public in general. Therefore, the public should be set right on the questionable assertions and the misinformation contained therein, and informed of the truth. Apparently those intelligent men of the A.I.H. have yet to learn that it is impossible to pollute a stream and draw from that stream pure water.
These statements we will number and refer to those numbers in our comments:
(1) “Immunity to disease by serums” sanctioned.
(2) “Vaccine virus is essentially homoeopathic”.
(3) “Homoeopathy is not a system of medicine”.
“Homoeopathy is not dosage”.
(4) “In homoeopathic therapeutics the size of the dose is incidental”.
(5) “Why there need be any failure with the homoeopathist to cure”.
(6) “It would be absurd to advocate a remedial cure for cancer, tuberculosis, etc”.
(1) Real immunity to disease consists, as Spencer said of life, “in the ability of the internal relations to adjust themselves to the external relations”. If these relations work harmoniously life and health ensue, if interfered with, disease or death will be the result. Can this ability to adjust be facilitated by throwing obstacles in their course? Once this balance becomes deranged disease ensues, when lost, life becomes extinct. What is disease, then? Merely the result of this unbalance. The ultimate result of this unbalance depends entirely, not on the original factor, but on the course which that factor takes. Disease represents but one tree, with but one root, but with myriad branches. And, since we see the activity of but one branch at a time, it is that branch only that we attempt to assail and remove, or-to suppress.
Homoeopathy produces its immunity by striking to the trunk of that tree, leaving no budding joint to resprout; not by merely rendering that branch inactive. This, then, is the removal of a predisposition, resulting in cure, not prevention. In other words, prevention of an external manifestation by the eradication of an internal predisposition, which can only be brought about when that internal predisposition is known to exist. Its existence is made known long before its external manifestation appears. The “prevention”, advocated and sanctioned in one essay, and palmed off as “homoeopathic”, is merely, if disease does exist and its product interferes with natural adjustment, suppressive; if disease does not exist, useless.
So that in either case it is injurious, and too often fatal; of which we have too much heart- rending proof. Who of us has ever seen a disease? Who of us knows just which one of those branches is going to become uncovered and active next? Now, then, since we cannot see a disease, and do not know which one of those branches is going to become uncovered and active next, just how are we to know positively when, and when not, we have prevented, or produced immunity against, any disease? Is this, then, not all theoretical speculation, endangering life and inviting dangerous, false “security”? It would be beautiful and comforting were it other than speculative theory, and dangerous at that.
The essayist explains that “diphtheria antitoxin produces passive immunity”. What is “passive” immunity if not suppression or diversion? The ultimate result must of necessity be disastrous, as witness the innumerable number of deaths produced thereby. As a single example, the 41 children killed at Luebeck, Germany, out of 246 innoculated, a rate of nearly 17 percent, to say nothing of the untold thousands of whom we never hear. In this essay we are regaled with a beautiful theory of how these sera act. If that were known, then it fully explains why and how every remedy acts. If you know the action of one you know the action of all.
This fact alone condemns the theory about the action of the sera. When we speak of disease, the mind of the allopath, as well as that of the so-called modern homoeopath, reverts at once to its external manifestation solely, because it is at once visibly, tangibly and ocularly demonstrable; but when a Hahnemannian homoeopath speaks of disease his mind reverts to something invisible, intangible and undemonstrable, at least ocularly. We know that disease is present for it discloses its presence to us in sensory and ocular manifestations. We also know that homoeopathy dispels disease because it causes these appreciable manifestations to disappear.
Since, then, this disease proper is invisible, unseeable and ocularly undemonstrable before it makes its presence felt by its appreciable manifestations, who of us is endowed with sufficient insight to glimpse the future and tell positively that any given set of external manifestations are actually going to appear? What a boon to humanity if we only could! We can repeatedly demonstrate a cure but prevention must rest purely on theoretically speculative ground, a ground very, very apt to be injurious, if not fatal. Homoeopaths cannot sanction hypodermic therapy of any kind and be honest.
(2) “Vaccine therapy is essentially homoeopathic.” Since when, may we ask? That is a very rash statement. Even Crookshank and Creighton proved them by no means similar, thus not, as used, homoeopathic. They are only homoeopathic to their own pathogenesis, as are Psorinum, Medorrhinum, etc., and that pathogenesis is as limited as that of any other remedy. If they are anything, they are isopathic as used promiscuously, and that is a long, long way from homoeopathic. Promiscuous hypodermic therapy is not only unhomoeopathic but it is reprehensible, full of pitfalls and a veritable death trap born of ignorance and fostered by laziness.
If Nature could not use these vaccinal and seral products in their original state, (the reason she threw them our in the first place), is it logical and a mark of intelligence to assume that she can use these same products in the same crude state after they have been rendered still more unusable by the admixture of other foreign products, without first having the opportunity to change them? Evidently the users of these sera and vaccines do not understand that foundation of medicine, physiology; neither do they seem to grasp the full intent of that wonderful laboratory, the digestive apparatus.
It looks to the man on the outside as if the essayist was getting his dates badly mixed when he states that “vaccine therapy is essentially homoeopathic”, and that without qualification; and also when he tries to palm off isopathy as homoeopathy, and attempts to mislead a confiding public that homoeopathy embraces and sanctions or indorses all kinds of questionable methods of treatment.
(3) “Homoeopathy is not a system of medicine.” May we, ever so gently, refer to that great fountain of information, Websters new International Dictionary, where one may ponder over the definitions of “system” and “medicine”, and see if a gave mistake has not been made. If homoeopathy is not “a mode of operation governed by a law” then it is nothing. If homoeopathy is not “the science and art of dealing with prevention, cure and alleviation of disease”, then it is, again nothing. On the contrary homoeopathy is the personification of those very two. Just what does so-called modern medicine contain to make it a “system”? We homoeopaths can make “cures” without similia? Not without first proving the law of similars wrong.
Who is able to do this? This makes homoeopathy the only system of medicine extent today. “It will ever more gloriously unfold its banner, ever more gloriously beam in the firmament of science and ever more show its curative virtues if not adorned in false finery or covered with false jewels and ornaments”, so said good old Boenninghausen.
Homoeopaths seem to be divided into three camps: First, those who believe in the similar remedy and ignore modern medicine; second, those who believe in the most similar remedy, but who are as yet ungrounded in the principles of homoeopathy and its philosophy, and who find that they must step over into the old field occasionally, (for the same reason that the demure maiden publicly wishing to denounce Satan to please her friends, told him to get behind her, but aside, not too far behind), their faith or rather lack of faith in themselves, making them want to feel that each is within easy reach when wanted; third, the rest, of whom the least said the better, who firmly believe in the course of least resistance, and would rather sell out homoeopathy than do anything to defend it against its enemies.
