LAYMENS DEPARTMENT


In Hahnemanns time, which was more than a century ago, doctors assumed that the special focus of sickness was the blood and other body fluids. So they drained people, sometimes quite to death, in the endeavor to drain off sickness. Was the man then sick? No, they thought the fluids of his body were sick.


High among the duties of a true science is to be clear about definitions. No body of thought meets that duty more squarely than does homoeopathy. For example, since all medicine is intended to heal the sick, and since the very first sentence in homoeopathys first broad textbook — The Organon of Medicine by Samuel Hahnemann– is this: “The physicians high and only mission is to restore the sick to health”, then it becomes necessary to be very clear who are the sick and what is sickness.

In Hahnemanns time, which was more than a century ago, doctors assumed that the special focus of sickness was the blood and other body fluids. So they drained people, sometimes quite to death, in the endeavor to drain off sickness. Was the man then sick? No, they thought the fluids of his body were sick.

Since Hahnemanns time that theory has undergone change. Laboratory methods of the most wonderful intricacy have come into play, seeking the sickness of man not only in his body fluids but in his tissues (cell tissue), as well. His separate organs and their cells are given study in the greatest detail.

Applying that theory to medicine, patients today are sent from one doctor to another, each a specialist in some portion of the body; they have “general examinations”, and often are told that they are sound in every part and therefore are not sick, when in fact a homoeopathist making his examination through symptoms would find them very sick indeed. These patients often suffer, know themselves that they are miserable. The point is, laboratory examination assumes that sickness resides in the tissues. Is the man then sick? No, they think that his tissues, his organs, or some part of them, are sick.

This theory, in both its older and its more modern forms, regards the mission of the doctor as driving out disease from a sick body.

Now, homoeopathy finds evidence of a different kind. Observing sick people with the most careful discrimination, homoeopathy notes first of all that they are by no means alike. Though they may have the same disease, they do not show sickness in the same ways. If the disease, or if the sick organ, were all, then these differences between people would be quite accidental if indeed they even appeared. But the evidence goes farther. Putting these individual differences down on paper in order and giving them thorough analysis, homoeopathy finds that they express the individuals themselves far more than do the mere symptoms of the disease. Symptom analysis homoeopathically done is a form of character study. Characteristic differences between patients give direct evidence that the patients were sick before their body fluids, or their body tissues, or their organs, were sick. This in turn points to the necessity of treating people, and not merely driving out diseases.

To homoeopathy, therefore, there are no diseases, but sick people. To come over from the traditional assumptions about sickness to this way of regarding it wrenches the mind, but also clears it. For every step of way has been marked by experiment and test of the most rigid sort. No theory is this, but a principle which demonstrates itself.

This kind of thinking about sickness and the sick, so different from the usual thought of recent decades, prepares the physician to become a competent homoeopathist, and the layman to become an intelligent and helpful homoeopathic patient. Upon that thinking is founded the rest of homoeopathic philosophy, a philosophy indeed that pervades more than the mere medical field, that relates itself with the unfailing sources of orderly energy, with the great discoveries as to the laws of physics, chemistry, even music, and, if you will, religion. So simple is the truth that as it grows in the mind it inspires reverence. The more clearly it grows the more homoeopathic-minded it makes one.

Homoeopathy, then, treats not diseases, but man himself. Next month we shall consider “man himself”, because we have now clearly before us that it is man who is sick before his body or any of its parts show sickness.

Your comments, suggestions, questions, are welcome. Send them to the office of the Recorder, care of the EDITOR FOR LAYMEN.

Julia M. Green