I went up to see her again but could get no definite symptoms, no new ones, at all. I sat and talked and laughed with her but I was trying to think. She had been losing her hearing for ten or twelve years and my conclusion was that the woman had suffered from grief and nothing else during this period.
I had no symptoms whatever to prescribe on, except the one of suppressed grief, I didnt find an Ignatia symptom about her. I gave her Ignatia, however, and she has never had the pain since, so I infer that Ignatia was her remedy. With pathology we get the same thing.
DR.STEVENS: In a good many of these cases that have been cited, it seems to me that the question is reduced to finding the cause, and that is one thing that we have to stress over and over again. If we find the cause, it may be part of the clinical pathology, but it certainly leads us to the remedy.
DR. FARR: There are one or two points which have come up in the discussion that I want to mention. I am glad that the point has been brought out relative to the totality of the symptom, because I consider that the whole story, and that was the thought that was in my mind when I prepared the paper. the whole schema of homoeopathic prescribing is to fit the totality of the symptoms to the similimum and anything can be used which will help to produce this result.
To attempt to detail the symptoms of all the drugs that cure catarrhs, I should have to read the materia medica from beginning to end; not only read the nasal symptoms of each drug, but detail the peculiarities of each, noting all accessory symptoms: for if a patient presents himself to us asking to be cured of the catarrh, he makes a great mistake; he wants to be cured as a patient, and we are bound to cure him as such. If he speedily dies of consumption, the catarrh disappearing, we have lost the patient even though the catarrh be cured.
Further, the local catarrh manifestations are of the least importance in finding our remedies. Six patients may, any day, come to us with organic changes in the nasal passages; the extent of change may be equally great and yet six different remedies will have to be given. The treatment must, in the highest sense of the word, be constitutional.-T.F.ALLEN, 1865.
We claim superiority homoeopathy in that it gives us the means of selecting our remedies with a reasonable certainty of their effects, and we rightly claim that medicine should not rest content with anything short of a method which, given the symptoms of a disease, points us to a certain remedy if our materia medica contains it; or, given the pathogenesis of a drug, indicates to us, a priori, the complex of symptoms which the drug will remove. – American Homoeopathic Review, 1864.
