HOMOEOPATHY TODAY



Again the real point at issue may be read shining through all modern pathological literature. It is the demand for that agent which shall meet and reckon with not only the end-products of disease, but their beginnings,.

Antipathy and allopathy have worn themselves out, and are being disowned and discarded in the house of their friends.–M. W. VANDERBERGH, M.D.

What is called progress is medicine depends upon many things. To the homoeopathist it means development of an understanding of the sick and their positive needs. It does not mean a course of experimentation with different medicinal agents to determine their values. Thousands of new ideas and materials for therapy are introduced each year. These are exploited with more or less publicity despite medical ethics and the ostensible condemnation of all advertising. These make more or less impression on the popular mind, are often accepted and tried; and as often go into the limbo of forgotten things. And the public mind is such that it seems hardly to learn anything by the experience. In fact, many men and women seem to enjoy the experience of using once everything that comes along.

It is not only materials intended for therapeutic needs that are welcomed by the masses, it is all the new methods of treatment, the new machinery for diagnosis, much of which may be long considered the sine qua non of the healing art. Thus, the Roentgen ray is believed to tell everything, to illustrate in black and white whatever internal disorder may exist.

The grasp of therapy that is rational and that will meet the approval of the mind of science is hard to find. Perhaps the sensible individual may never have heard of homoeopathy and if he has he may have looked upon it as futile as all other cults that oppose dominant medicine.

However, the patient hears of homoeopathy and secures its aid.

In which case he soon learns that homoeopathy now is at it always has been–a treatment that takes full account of his individual case of disorder and selects the individual remedy that is indubitably called for. That remedy may be in its homoeopathic form a century old, or it may be a new one that was proven yesterday. In either case it is no new or novel procedure but abides by the law given originally.

As to the future of homoeopathy, I am optimistic. We may be temporarily submerged, but our vessel is staunch and seaworthy, and we have chart and compass to guide us on the voyage across the sea of medical knowledge.–MILTON POWELL, M.D.

It is said, and well said, that in no better way can the cause of scientific medicine be strengthened than by its faithful practice. At this point, then, we have proper emphasis given to the art of medicine as the suitable companion of its science. Science is the knowledge of what is to be known; art teaches what is to be done. And if still another definition were required, we might answer that by scientific medicine is meant homoeopathy. Homoeopathy comprises the elements of scientific medicine that are applicable to patients, that provide cure for the sick.

Much sentiment in general medicine leads voluntarily away from the spirit and form of homoeopathy; but this sentiment concerns itself, however, in such manner with facts radiating from the Law of Cure that some discernment of that law must result. In some minds, holding as they will the conviction that medicine is destined to progress by spectacular strides, there is attempt to deny any limitation that might be implied by the recognition of homoeopathy as embodying the law of cure and the science of therapeutics and the art of practice.

Yet, viewing the variety and mutability of popular medicine, we cannot fail to be gratified by that welcome from thinking classes for a declaration of principles which has stood over hundred years. It is evidence that the similimum administered in most serious cases has made a reputation not to be gainsaid.

This position is in a sense militant; it becomes so by virtue of the normal trend and restraint of its practice. It is not indifferent to the character of cures that are such only in name. Accordingly, it is bound to combat the specific idea, which aims to provide the specific remedy for a specific disease, as being false, both theoretically and practically.

The specific idea is fundamentally opposed to the very principles of the similar remedy, for it views disordered health as an entity apart and distinct from the sick individual. It is the false approach to the sick man.

The cancer mortality in the state of New York reaches hundreds of victims a month, and the cases are increasing, the rate not being influenced by season, apparently. It is not to be wondered at that any idea of rescue from such a state of things should be grasped by the public. Not yet is the public ready to understand its cause or its consequences. But when we consider the form which this malady takes in different subjects, the variety of its morbid tissue, the ununiformity of its manifestation, and the possible range and extent of causes, it is impossible for scientific medicine to promise a cure that is specific in the accepted sense.

Homoeopathy combats, in particular, treatment instituted on the basis of bacteriology alone, including, as it does, whatever pertains to serology as such. This treatment is even more unnatural and despotic than forcible depression of high temperature, from which latter practice we are happily able to report reform in the very school of its origin. Today its reference to the febrile process is as a reaction of benefit to the organism, a protective act of nature.

Combated is the tendency to institute circulatory stimulation. How “heroic measures,” as so often described in the case of some noted man at the point of death, is going to help him to live, much less to recover, is going to do anything to but hasten his dissolution, since no strong man in the world when well could safely endure that “heroic treatment,” is one of the mysteries that will probably make history like Herculaneum and Pompeii.

While the truth of homoeopathy is acknowledged, the larger reality of it seems not yet to have been grasped by those modern laboratory scientists of international fame who have paid verbal homage to the fact that homoeopathy embraces features of scientific value which they have occasion to utilize. While the principles of homoeopathy are one by one being steadily incorporated into general medical knowledge, the unique facts of its practice gain but slow recognition in the minds of men whose attention and training have not converged to the special study of homoeopathy.

As infinitesimal doses have demonstrated their efficacy. . . it is necessary to accept and not reject them. . . the facts of creation not being subject to our intellectual capacity, but instead, as they are to an infinitely intelligent and superior power.–JOAQUIN SEGURA Y PESADO, M.D., Mexico City.

It is affirmed that some of our men have been upbraided for giving too low potencies, upbraided by men who not many years ago ridiculed any potency whatever, high or low, as containing too little medicine to produce the slightest possible effect. Now, from the same source comes information that the antitoxic body can be detected in some instances in a dilution of one to 100,000,000,000, distinguished from ordinary chemical action by atomic dissociation that liberates specific electrons.

Further, it is complained that the microscopes have not high enough power to demonstrate that which really exists in known pathology, though it was not so very long ago that friends as well as enemies were telling that no medicinal substance could reside in the medium and high potencies because the microscope could not disclose it. But it comes to the same thing. What homoeopathy said then they are repeating now: “So much the worse for the microscopes!”.

John Hutchinson