It seems to me that many of the best practitioners we have come over from that kind of teaching into our dynamic philosophy, without any trouble at all. Dr. Neiswander himself is a good example of it. His paper does not sound as if he had to be introduced through the modern laboratory method of study.
I want to compliment him on his paper as an example of the possibility of teaching homoeopathic philosophy, from the very beginning, in our own way.
DR. A.H. GRIMMER: I wonder if Dr. Green could find out how many mental symptoms Dr. Boyd got in his experiments, to bring the old school men to the idea of dynamics.
DR. C.M. BOGER: Practically, there must be some bridge for the ordinary student to come to study homoeopathy in homoeopathic colleges. There must be a bridge somewhere. The bridge is not found in the organ. There is a midstep somewhere which the student is not able to make. Practically speaking, I have found that bridge to consist of pure philosophy, mixed up with the teaching, or stepping up to that from the teaching of evolution, to somehow show how evolution, its teachings and conclusions, are all based on pure philosophy. That is the bridge that I have followed, and I believe successfully.
DR. W.J.S. POWERS: I might say, from my experience with the students, that the bridge is the intelligence of the individual who is to be taught, his ability to appreciate truths when they are shown to him. It is a mistake for a person who is trying to teach homoeopathy to contaminate his philosophy with the philosophy of the old school, which we known is the wrong philosophy. The only thing for us to do is to stand firmly on our philosophy, and not admit for a moment that it can be bridged from one to the other. It is the one or the other, and it is for the individual student to be able to grasp that from an intelligent point of view.
DR. EVELINE B. LYLE: It seems to me there is something back, even before that, and that is the personality of the person who is studying and later practicing medicine. If the person is a real healer, it doesnt make any difference whether he belongs to the old school or the new school. The idea is exactly the same. Hahnemann did it for the same reason. He wrote that I think in the first two or three lines in the Organon. I am of the old school myself. I am also a homoeopath. My idea was to heal in the easiest and quickest, the best and most permanent manner, under the old school, as under the homoeopathic.
When you have been in practice long enough, it doesnt make the slightest difference what your training is. If you are a young doctor and cure a lot of measles and scarlet fever, you pat yourself on the back and think you have done a wonderful thing. But in chronic work you come to the point, if you are a real physician, where you fail under the old school. I was so dissatisfied with medicine that I wound have been perfectly willing to go out and scrub floor, because I knew I could do it better. I was not healing a large number of people. There were complaints and I could not find out what the trouble was, but the patients were sick.
If your doctor has the knowledge of failure, he will hunt until he finds the bridge, and you wont have to lead him up to it. He will be perfectly willing to be shown, and he will be perfectly willing to learn, and he will understand your words, he will understand what you are talking about, and he will be a good homoeopath, better than many of those who are now being trained.
DR. W. J.S. POWERS: I think Dr. Lyle has proven exactly what I said.
DR. E.B. LYLE: Exactly! That is why I said it.
The power of disturbing the functional integrity of the organism clearly shows Clematis medicinally to be the embodiment of a malign and obstructive force, interfering with the flow of orderly life from nerve centres to circumference, from more vital organs to the outskirts of the body. By means of the operation of our law for the selection of a remedy, we make use of these very disturbing and obstructive possibilities of the drug and concert them to perform useful service for the restoration of health whenever the vis medicatrix naturae is found to working harmoniously with these efforts of nature and aid therefore the vital reaction of the suffering body and the remedy in this way tends to restore health.
The conversion of a malignant or hurtful force to benign and useful service is expressed by Mephistopheles and constantly illustrated by the practice of homoeopathy. “I am the force that ever seeks to do the wrong and is forced to do the right.” WM. BOERICKE, M.D., 1899.
