There has already been excellent work done in both these lines. The movement shows no lack of talent, no lack of willingness, and some of the best writing in all medicine has come down to us from the masters of other years. What is lacking is integration. For efforts along single lines seldom stand by their own strength. If homoeopathy is to be well presented to thinking people, there must be not only these organs of speech and writing, but a source from which they spring, a central library containing all the authorities, the facts, the reports of proceedings, the statistics, under the care of one who loves the work. And pouring into that reservoir a stream of new facts, new bond with related sciences, broadening fields for homoeopathy, coming from research.
The movement must be alive, and so manifest itself to the modern world. Into such a movement as that, aspiring young people may be invited with pride, and urged to consecrate their lives as the homoeopathic physicians of the future. They can feel that they are joining a moving cause, a science of profound importance, to keep abreast of which they will need to keep themselves awake throughout their years. They can feel that they can step into practice without wasting half their strength trying to be understood.
In homoeopathy, as we have heard it expounded, the whole is greater than any of its parts. If homoeopathy is then organized in fidelity to its own principle, these four parts go together, for there is no whole without all its parts. In spite of the excellent work that has already been done in the way of teaching homoeopathy, proving new remedies, putting statistical records in shape, writing books, still the main problem is unsolved, the main need unfulfilled. The work has been spotty, detached. What it needs now is articulation. Any one of these four departments taken alone will dwindle and face away again, just as in the past. No more can the movement be made out of a medical course alone, let us say, than a man can be made out of a right arm. The movement consists in linking together the profession and its laity, but even more in pressing forward in all four departments equally, so they may sustain each other and produce a vital integrated whole:.
1. Training for physicians, post-graduate.
2. Research in homoeopathy, and demonstration of its laws.
3. Library of authorities, reports, accumulated data.
4. Presentation of homoeopathy to its public.
That is the American Foundation for Homoeopathy in principle, and its principle and plan have use for your earnest consideration, your support, your devotion, to the end that the movement may realize that value and progress which the people so greatly need.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Let me now, for the present, ask you to cease looking through your microscope for the evidence of the remedial power of drugs and for the cause of disease, for there is nothing material about either they are both imponderable powers; you doubt this I know, but do not say you will not believe before you have done what is only reasonable that is, to investigate honesty and prove it to your satisfaction. In doing this you must conform to the law of cure, as it is exacting, and will tolerate no deviations; and I would here remind you that this law does not require a high dynamization, but absolutely the similimum of selection to the case, and this cannot be done by multiple prescription.
As to the efficacy of the higher powers, this knowledge is obtained only when a thorough realization of the law is acquired; they are preferred by those only who, by long practice, have conformed to the law of cure.- J.A. BIEGLER, M.D., 1888.
