None of us is infallible. We all make mistakes. I wish we were more perfect than we are, but we come here, as I said a while ago, to get the rough edges knocked off, that we may appear more polished to the outside world. We want to come here to be broadened educationally and it is only these conditions that bring us around and when we do get to the right thing, I claim, with Dr. Dixon, we grow.
DR. EUGENE UNDERHILL, JR.: I have in mind one case of a lady I had been treating about as constantly as anyone could, ever since 1919. For a long time she came once a week and now she comes once in two weeks. One day I got out her record and blushed for shame to myself at the number of doses of medicine I had given her and, I am sorry to say, the number of different remedies.
As Dr. Dixon has pointed out, when your good old faithful chronics come in every week or two, they are taking an awful chance and putting temptation in our way.
DR. CHARLES A. DIXON: That is just the point, folks. We know better. We all have those old chronics who come in and deserve the best we have and, bless their hearts, they dont get it often unless we do just go through this self-analysis and snap ourselves out of what really is routine, which is a bad thing for a homoeopath to get into. Another human element in it is we dont have enough of these stories come out where we have something to conceal.
These finer details and individualities, these shades of variation and modalities are the only bases upon which to obtain the requisite knowledge of drugs or of good prescribing. So in disease, we must know its objective and subjective symptoms, its method and manner of progression; then we must know the drugs that will produce such symptoms, conditions and modalities.
Symptoms that to the unaccustomed eye seem but shadows, as whether the patient is warm or cold; is better by application of cold or heat; what < the pains of this drug; what > them in another. You would hardly give a patient who was cold and anaemic such remedies as belong to a class that are always too warm, want doors and windows open, and have high degree of arterial excitation, if every symptom that had been developed was covered by the remedy. We can hardly know and be familiar with remedies in both their noxious and their curative power without a strong personal interest. My advice is, cultivate that interest. – J.T. KENT, M.D., 1888.
Akron, Ohio
President, I.H.A.