Who can measure the stupendous harm that is now here and will increase in the future from the unlimited taking of the myriads of coal-tar drugs; to mention but a few, the barbitals, the aspirins, the anacins, the sulpha drugs, the acetanilids, pyramidons, and innumerable others that flood social life by way of radio, newspaper and magazine advertisements, where the public without hindrance or medical advice may procure unlimited amounts of these insidious poisons for the relief of pains of all kinds, insomnia and infections of every sort. Is it any wonder that heart and kidney disease together with cancer and many forms of mental and nervous diseases are increasing as never before?.
And what does empirical medicine say about these things? Nothing, because if it did, it would undermine its own very shaky position. It can not condemn the very methods it employs for the treatment of the sick. As long as millions of dollars are made by these harmful nefarious means, there will be no criticism from those who profit by such methods. And so long as commercialized medicine maintains its position in the world, homoeopathy will be opposed and ostracized by the dominant school.
With them the sacred precincts of the profit system in medicine must not be invaded or hampered. But in spite of opposition and selfish greed, homoeopathy will stay and contend for the right and true. Human progress has always come only through sacrifice and contention. Only those souls who love and value truth better than material things are the instruments chosen to carry the standards of progress to the citadels of a better order in the world.
The homoeopathic physician is such an instrument in the divine scheme of things. Touched by the power of the love of healing, no work is too tedious or difficult for him, no sacrifice too much if it but sustains and perpetuates the principles of his art and science. If need be he stands alone, unafraid and resolute in the face of ridicule and calumny.
If medicine ever progresses above the traditions and superstitions of the dark ages, it will come only by the light of the homoeopathic philosophy. The simple knowledge and application of the Law of Similars apart from the philosophy built up around it can do only simple and acute work; it can never fathom the complexities and persistence of chronic disease. We have seen several phases of the law practised under other names without the philosophic complement and they are far from complete.
Biers irritation theory of disease and its cure and McDonalds hydration concept of disease, while doing more good and less harm than regular medicine, do not approach the possibility of cure that obtains with the complete homoeopathic concept of sickness and its law of cure. Those of us who have dedicated our lives to the divine attribute of healing through the medium of the law and the philosophy of homoeopathy want our children and their children to be born and reared under the benign power of homoeopathic healing.
In no other way can a more healthy and better race with ideals and intelligence to banish from the earth the scourge of war and universal disease be brought into being. The homoeopathic potencies properly applied have the inherent power of touching and tuning into harmony the deepest centers of the human organism and they bring back the light of health from the darkness of disease.
To rationalize and control the emotions, to banish fear and instil hope, thereby purifying the life force of the whole being, that will enable it to build and sustain a more perfect physical body to perform better uses in a suffering world, is reason enough for our united efforts for homoeopathys perpetuation in the archives of medicine. And our efforts are only exceeded by an abiding faith that this benign doctrine of healing must live and grow with other great truths of nature in the hearts of men through time and eternity. CHICAGO, ILL.
DISCUSSION.
DR. WAFFENSMITH: This paper is full of meat for discussion and surely touches the heart of anyone who specializes in the homoeopathic treatment of chronic disease. We are inclined to think that it is only the homoeopath who realizes how serious drug toxicosis is, but let us not be deceived in this illusion.
In 1901 and 1902, which were the last two years, the junior and senior years of my course in the “old school” college from which I graduated, we had a professor in theory and practice of medicine, as the Chair was called in that day, who repeatedly impressed upon the class the maliciousness, the seriousness of shotgun prescribing, and he, in my estimation, was a real single- remedy man, not that he advocated homoeopathy. The fact is, I dont know whether he knew anything about homoeopathy, but let us not deceive ourselves by thinking that there are not many of the “old school” men who realize how serious this matter is.
After I had practiced for some six years, I also want to state here while I have the opportunity, I took a year of postgraduate work in Hering, and our good colleague, Dr. Grimmer, was assistant to Professor Kent during that year, so I am one of Dr. Grimmers “boys”, and this paper bears out fully what he and Dr. Kent taught us during that year.
Do we realize that today in England the question of sedation is the most important question that is facing the medical profession? Who can solve it but the real homoeopathician? That brings us to the validity and importance of the resolution presented by Dr. Wright Hubbard for us to get down to business and begin to investigate methods and ways to educate the medical profession– and I dont mean only in the homoeopathic profession but the medical profession in general and the layman in particular.
Dr. CARR: It was my good fortune to be in Chicago in the month of February, when the Chicago Medical Society put on a symposium and clinic for three days. I was deeply interested to know that the allopaths were trying to put a muzzle on them in the sedation proposition, for one paper was wholly on the effects of bromides and barbiturates in mental or psychiatric cases.
This doctor made a survey in his own hospital and he definitely had discovered over the year that they had entered in, admitted in that mental hospital, from twenty-five to fifty positive drug cases. He gave the symptoms from potassium bromide, also the symptoms of the barbiturates. Now, that is only one mental hospital in this whole United States. What it is in hundreds of hospitals that are being filled with drug bromides and barbiturates, we dont know.
We have them come in there in our own institution for confused mental states– impossible to put a diagnosis on them. You invariably leave them alone a week or ten days and they clear up of the mental state. We know it is bromides or barbiturates, and it is surprising that so many of the allopathic physicians of prominence are using bromides and barbiturates beyond the point of self-determination and realization of what it is leading the patient into, you might say.
DR. BOGER-SHATTUCK: I may not be in order, and I expect to be shot, but I wonder just what progress we really are making. Christian Science is going forward by leaps and bounds. I am not here to advocate Christian Science, but when men like Richard Cabot come out in favor of spiritual healing by the positive statement of God within us so created and asks us to deny the things and to reassert our power of dominion over the darker forces, and they are giving over whole wards of treatment of mental cases in our mental hospitals to Christian Science, which is going on the State of Massachusetts today, I am wondering just what we are actually accomplishing in lots of these cases.
As you know, I happen to have been in the war zone, and had to submit myself to a lot of inoculations. I not only gave a lot but I had to submit self to others, also. As I didnt have a homoeopathic armamentarium close at hand, I decided that I would try this positive statement of fact. I am very susceptible to all types of serums, or thought I was up to that time, but as I went up to be inoculated, each particular time I asserted to myself that I was a child of God and the thing would have no reaction whatsoever upon me, and despite the fact that I was inoculated time after time, three times in very short succession, I didnt get so much as a sore arm out of it.
The first time that my daughter was inoculated, I tried to talk this into her, but a child is very hard to talk it into exactly, but, having no homoeopathic remedy, Pulsatilla or other things, at hand, which I would ordinarily give– an antidote for a lot of these things– she tried it. Well, here tetanus gave her a terrifically sore arm, and the second time she said, “Mummy, I am going to try your way,” and went up and steeled herself. We waited in the long line to be shot, five minutes, and even though I went out and immediately started shooting other people with the hypodermics, she had no sore arm otherwise.
In his book The Collected Works of Arthur Hill Grimmer, Grimmer spoke out against the fluoridation of water and vaccinations. Grimmer wrote prodigeously, Gnaphalium, Homeopathic Prophylaxis and Homeopathic Medicine and Cancer: The Philosophy and Clinical Experiences of Dr. A.H. Grimmer, M.D.