If, for example, the proposition is accepted that infant mortality is lessened, though even then the means may not be accepted, what shall be said for the astonishing mortality in middle years? Does it never occur to the scientist that abnormal care of the body may result in disaster in later life, even if infancy and childhood, by virtue of fresh vitality, endure and survive for a time the inroads of ill considered measure? Look at the daily prints and note the deaths of prominent men and women in early adult and middle life.
These fatalities are often attributed to heart disease. How does it happen that so many hearts are diseased so early in this era of great medical progress? What is the explanation of the incidence of fatal pneumonia? Why the enormous increase in cancer? What about tuberculosis and its eradication that does not win on bacteriological effort?.
Another Hahnemann is needed to combat the notion that a wise man is authorized to fool with the human being much as he does with rats and rabbits in the laboratory. Yet another Hahnemann should not be needed, since the first one refuted the values of such issue by his sane labors, sanely recorded, and available for all time. For the vital need of mankind is constant. What nourished it in the nineteenth century will do so if availed of in the twentieth. Anything wrongly assumed to be appropriate in sickness will surely cause other disturbances and often worse than the original sooner or later.
It is this narrow view of human ills that is exasperating to the student of the Law of Similars, especially when he must contrast the two attitudes towards the problems of health and disease. Materialistic medicine that is almost mechanical in its routine irrespective of the individual patient has something about it and all over it that is essentially brutal.
Study, laborious, persevering, self-sacrificing study, unswerving and inflexible to our law, all have made Homoeopathy what it is. Without these we should still be groping in the obscurity and uncertainty of old physic – A.R. MORGAN, M.D.
Health culture is an accomplishment that few persons seem to aim for. Disease is the all-absorbing topic when the physical side of life is considered. To the average mind. Disease stalks abroad and one must try to avoid him, though by what means is forever a problem. Germs have not solved it. Thus the fundamental point is badly understood, and so the bulk of mankind pursues a phantom, a phantom none the less terrible than as if it were seen in its potential horror.
There need be no trouble in changing all this if the point of view could be uplifted. But the point of view cannot be changed except from the foundation up. It would be necessary to begin as Hahnemann did to study the beginnings of health deflections and their origin. The study is wholesome and absorbing and rewarding in its fruitfulness. There is need of this intensive study since all the generations of men are degenerating physically. The mortality of all races is greater year by year. True some correction has been made as to infant mortality, but that is more than canceled by the shortening of adult years. This is a matter of dire eloquence. It evidence a great wrong somewhere. And the wrong is inherent in our outlook on vital conditions.
The world has for far too many centuries looked at medicine in a fragmentary way. It has lost sight of the fact life is a unit, not a matter of separate functions of the body; but that, since these bodily functions exist most conspicuously they must also be known as coordinated into one unique force that dominates supremely.
Preventive medicine is said to have begun activity applied directly to masses – military and naval – which of course is unlike the aim for individual protection from his innate physical shortcomings and tendencies, the masses being protected from epidemic typhus, scurvy, and other disease peculiar to limited sanitation and other causes either known or unrecognized as the case may be. The crowded city slums require one order of prevention quite different from the prevention in the case of the individual from his own weak tendencies irrespective of external influence.
Preventive medicine in respect to individual protection from the trend toward unhealth never reached a worthy culmination in actual importance and practical benefit adequate to the occasion, until the practice of homoeopathy began. Worthy preventive medicine is guardianship of personal health, insuring its permanence as far as possible. This is accomplished by measures that favor the best growth and development of the individual, the unit of population, thus forecasting the needs of the organism, needs otherwise inadequately met, and so foreseeing and forefending.
And so, unfortunately, the item of disease comes in for notice. It is disease and not health that is discussed. It is disease as an entity that gets all the exploitation. The mass mind is full of the proposition that to avoid disease one must avoid germs, and that all the effort should be concentrated to prevent their entrance into the body. Taking the stand that disease is an entity that stalks everywhere by means of the bacterium, multitudes are receiving daily the prophylactic serum that is proffered as relief or succor from that which may indeed otherwise never arrive nor even approach in any event.
Typhoid, diphtheria small-pox, measles, the common cold and so on are all looked upon as likely to attack anybody at once of seriatim, and so the antidotal poison is administered wherever possible.
Reflect, for a moment, on this gross, crude, barbaric substitution of infection for the same commodity of health, untainted vitality, natural vigor!.
Is it good sense to entertain the propaganda of preventive medicine in this way? Should we accept through our blood channels the foreign elements that are offered?.
It is not true that most of the remedies in common use have an individuality, as Dr. H.C. Allen calls it, that serves to distinguish them from all others? A.B. RICE, M.D.
In the world of medical healing it is very important to consider, in respect to the patient, his age. This has a definite bearing on his condition and its cure. While the extremes of life provide the most striking diversity that age can suggest, all the intermediate periods have their place in the necessary analysis of the patients specific needs. Though this statement may seem a trite one to the reader, it is not a platitude, and in consideration of the fact that the popular mind takes little note of its truth, emphasis is not out of place. It may also be said that the fact is neglected in much medical analysis.
It is the habit to think of illness itself in terms of disease or care without reckoning with the patient of whom the illness is predicated. That is, in an epidemic, for instance, it is the disease and its remedy irrespective of the persons attacked that we have in mind. But this is or should be only a starter. When the individual case of the malady is met, then comes the propriety and the necessity of devoting full attention to the characteristic state of the patient himself, with his age of primary significance.
Age in years, age in development, age in mentality, as well as in physical status – maturity or immaturity according to years. This is particularly imperative when it comes to the selection of remedies and their dosage. Also it applies to the matter of remedy differentiation, since all medication has its own range of power and safety which must be fully, adhered to in reference to every factor in the patients condition, including his age in years. This need deserves more than separate analysis in the utilization of the Homoeopathic remedy.
The biblical estimate for the age of man is not reached today in the case of many important figures in all walks of life. Instead of three-score years and ten, the number may be anywhere from forty to sixty-five. And this fact is verified so repeatedly in the news that the assertions of longevity through medical science seem ironic.
The world needs today rational medicine just as much as it needed it a century ago. As to whether the world is now getting what it needs in the way of health and the maintenance of health and the cure of the sick is an open question.
