We are the followers of Hahnemann, working in the light of his wisdom. Let us take up the torch of homoeopathy that the light may shed its radiance everywhere, bringing new hope and new miracles of healing, restoring the sick to the fullness of life and to WHOLENESS of mind and body.
PHILADELPHIA, PA.
DISCUSSION.
CHAIRMAN PULFORD: This paper seems to confirm the old saying to the effect that many a true word is spoken in jest. Is there any discussion of Dr. Underhills very fine paper?.
DR. ALFRED PULFORD: I think if my good friend Charlie Vicks were here, he would say that was a right good paper.
It illustrates and verifies what I stated some time ago, that surgery cures nothing, it merely eliminates the parts and diverts the disease into other and more serious channels. It was ignorance of medicine that bred the present supremacy of surgery.
DR. H.A. ROBERTS: Dr. Underhill has touched in a very graphic way a very essential thing, suppression. It is the one thing that the Hahnemannian homoeopath has to contend with all the while on cases that come to him from the other school and from physicians who ought to know better because they have been somewhat trained in homoeopathy.
This last winter we have had a clinic in New Haven in connection with the class that we have had studying Hahnemannian Homoeopathy, and we had a case come in that just illustrates the real fact as Dr. Underhill has brought it out.
This woman was thirty-two years of age. When she was seventeen she had scarlet fever and she was sick six months, under the old school treatment. She recovered sufficiently and then, about six months afterwards, developed a case of inflammatory rheumatism. She was relieved of that after three or four months, as she expressed it, and was able to get about.
At twenty she married and come to this country. She had two children and after the last child was born, she had an attack of multiple arthritis that was very severe. The doctor investigated her teeth and they were extracted. The rheumatism wasnt relieved and he extracted the tonsils as a focal infection. Then she began to have pus around the cervix and he did a repair work at the cervix and curetted the uterus. Then she had a condition of distress in the kidney and the pus was coming out from kidney. He found the ureter was convoluted, by x-ray, and he suspended the kidney thinking that he would get better drainage. that didnt work because next she had an attack of fallopian tube trouble and a whole hysterectomy was performed.
The patient got better after some of these attacks, considerably better for a while, and then would sink right back into the same old arthritic condition.
This doctor was taking this course of work under homoeopathy and he brought this woman in to see what we could do for her. She couldnt get up alone out of bed. She couldnt turn over alone in bed. She couldnt walk without help.
It was a case of suppression and I asked the man what he was going to operate on next. He said, “I dont know”.
I said, “You are not going to operate at all”.
He said, “Where is the mistake?”.
I said, “The mistake was made back in the fact that she wasnt cured of her scarlet fever, and you have been chasing focal infection ever since”.
We got that woman so she could walk and turn over in bed herself, so she could get up and walk around and assist some in her work, and she went back to England and that is the last I heard of her. I sent her to Dr. Julian, at Liverpool, and he is taking care of her now.
That bears out this one fact: You can have surgical suppression as well as suppression of things from other causes, and the basis of nine-tenths of our troubles in acute diseases of that kind is suppression of one thing, chasing it in, making it go to a more important organ every time. Every time you eliminate one thing without curing, you go back to a deeper-seated proposition.
DR. CHARLES A DIXON: I cant keep still after hearing Dr. Underhills paper. I want to thank him for it and there is one angle of it to which I want to add an appendix (we have been talking appendix) and that is how to combat this wholesale conviction on the part of people that surgery cures.
We know that surgery doesnt cure because it deals with effects and doesnt go back to cause. That is the crux of the whole thing and that is what we have to combat among people who think that surgery cures. They think that no matter what the trouble is surgery will cure it. We must fight this conviction and we have got to put out seeds that will grow and show that lopping off does nothing for cure or removing the cause. I do it every day in my humble way.
Of course, I have my methods and you have your methods and I think we ought to talk over that because we have to fight that fight.
This is the way I do it: I say that removing effects cant go back to causes. If we use our philosophy to cure a patient, the cause has to be gone into. I can quarrel about a statement that was made here in this room yesterday by one of our essayists. He said, “Go back to causes.” He was talking about focal infection. You have got to be sure that you are right in your philosophy and that you have the right cause. I dont believe that focal infection in a tonsil or a tooth is going back to causes. They are effects.
If a tooth goes bad, there has to be a reason for it. If a tonsil goes bad, there has to be a reason for it, and here is another little thing: Did you ever start a hedge around the front of your lawn? You start out with three or four bushes. As soon as they get a little irregular, you trim them off, and what happens? A half-dozen sprouts come up every time. The first thing you know, you have a mass of it, and that is what this surgery is. Every time you lop off one of the dead teeth or dead tonsils something comes to take its place. It is not going back of it.
DR. M.I. BOGER-SHATTUCK: That is not always true. I will defend the surgeon a little bit.
I had a patient, who was raised under Dr. Kent in Chicago, treated homoeopathically all her life. She came to me. I doctored her for a period of two or three years as conscientiously as I could prescribe for anyone. At the end of that time she developed a jaundice. We had her x-rayed and we couldnt see anything. We called in a surgeon and removed a hydrops gallbladder with a large stone in the common duct, as big as a pint milk bottle. The woman has been perfectly well ever since. I dont say that anything was healed by surgery except the end result of her original trouble. She would have died had she not been operated on, and she is well today.
I do think there is too much unnecessary surgery done but, on the other hand, I know many good homoeopaths who are slipping on little points such as this. They will not see, and they absolutely do close their eyes to a surgical condition which requires a surgeon, and anybody who can remove with a homoeopathic remedy a gall-stone as big as a pigeons egg from a common duct of the gall-bladder and a hydrops gall-bladder behind it, I would like to see. I have never seen it done.
DR. A.H. GRIMMER: I should like to make one remark about the doctors paper and also about what Dr. Dixon said. There is altogether too much surgery. I think no intelligent homoeopath denies that end results may get so far before he sees a case that it is surgical. Those cases we will let go by, but I should like to see Dr. Underhills paper struck off to be distributed through the country. I think that would be a very effective thing to do. This paper has the advantage that it would appeal to the great multitude. The weapon of ridicule many times strikes home to the common mass where reason and logic fail to register.
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Never having belonged to the exclusive high dilutionists, nor much less to the exclusive low ones, and having met with more beginners, as well as older practitioners, than any other physician in our ranks, I have had the opportunity to get acquainted with their powers of observation.
Among all of the exclusive high dilutionists I did not find a single one that was other than a close observer. Among the exclusive low ones, the majority being such who shunned the “too much trouble” system, yet, when they had learned to observe, they were willing, at least in some cases, to make use of the higher potencies. – C. HERING.
Has chemistry ever been able to say why Aconite will destroy life and a cup of ginger will do no harm? Is there anything in chemico-physics that will tell you why Arsenic will destroy life, while a teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda will do no harm? The dynamis of Arsenic has its own identity, produces its own force, and conforms to its own laws and to no others. All substances that have individuality, that have an independence, has each its dynamis, and by this dynamis it is known, identified and reproduces itself, and this is all there is of that given thing that is distinctive. – JAMES TYLER KENT, M.D., 1889.
Eugene passed away at his country home on Spring Hill, Tuscarora Township, Bradford County, PA. He had been in ill health for several months. His wife, the former Caroline Davis, whom he had married in Philadelphia in 1910, had passed away in 1961. They spent most of their marriage lives in Swarthmore, PA.
Dr. Underhill was a member of the United Lodge of Theosophy, a member of the Philadelphia County Medical Society, and the Pennsylvania Medical Society. He was also the editor of the Homœopathic Recorder.