On the one side, the tension of a dangerous and enervating form of birth control with his wife, and on the other, the uncontrolled abandon with the other woman. The second bleeding took place again after an excessive bout of venery. Now, with this which you find as characteristic in Phosphorus-sexual desire easily aroused, the tendency to haemorrhages, fear of the dark and of being alone (a combination to be fond almost exclusively in Phos.), impulsiveness, desire for cold foods and drinks lead you straight to Phosphorus and its later relative Tuberculin, without taking into consideration a single physical symptom. This must work, AND IT WORKED.
What does this show? That in man there is a deep-lying unconscious emotion which may also become the conditioning agent and work as concretely as any other agent of injury. It is being increasingly realised by progressive allopaths, unfortunately seldom to be found in India, that in many cases it is a matter of comparative indifference what the specific stimulus may be. It may be meningococcus, worry, Physical strain or emotional shock, what the psycho-analysis call “Psychic Trauma.” Each in itself represents a form of sudden overloading of the average environment with which the potential sick man had successfully coped with before, but now is unable to, and therefore manifests signs of disease, really meaning discomfort. And this may arise in any and every phase of his environment.
Thus, it is reasonable to assume that every ailing human being, by virtue of his personal identity or constitution, is in part responsible for the special form of illness in which he or she may be involved. The average allopath in incapable of understanding the old biological truth, now being slowly realised, that it is impossible to think of a living organism apart from its environment. Let us admit that man and his environment are both highly complex, and let us remember that the former will always remain the riddle for all time. May I remind you of Alexis Carrels book “Man the Unknown”? With regard to environment, broadly speaking, all human beings experience much the same sort of blows from fate or environments; differences are only a matter of degree.
The manner in which a particular man reacts to them in health and disease is the sole and chief measure of his personality and should be the chief concern of the physician. In reality the physicians duty is not to measure the strength of the hammers blow, but to assess the ringing sound it has produced on the metal it has struck. In other words, we must pay special attention to the patients personal capacity for illness. And of all of them, the language most characteristic and peculiar to the patient is the expression and reactions of his emotional life, which Hahnemann called the mental picture of the patient.
These emotions are like “These spirit of the past that whisper,” accessible only through the symbolic content of reality in the form of his symptomatic disturbances; for, as Bergmann has shown, symptoms come far in advance of organic structural changes. And, if aroused by the appropriate symbol, they may be capable of acting with terrific force upon physiological functions. This is what the majority of allopaths do not realize. Here is a case as illustration :-
A young woman of 23 was having off and on severe epileptic fits. They became so dangerous that she was not allowed to go on the streets alone. The fits came on most often when she was falling asleep, and very often when she tried to cross a street but only at a junction. These attacks have been going on for about five years. To the allopath epilepsy is nothing but Wernickes theory of irritation of the cerebral cortex. All the barbiturates and bromides only make her dull, but did not stop the attacks. To me there were two peculiarities which I could not understand and which puzzled me. Why epilepsy only when falling asleep? Why epilepsy only at street corner junctions? Now, you know that psycho-analysis like Steckel and Frenczi have made a study of the so called hystero-epilepsy is a defensive-escape mechanism.
It took me nearly one month of four sittings to get the facts our of her. She was raped by a male cousin, a year or two older than her, at her aunts house one night five years ago just when she was falling asleep. Secondly, that cousin was knocked down later by a motor bus and run over while crossing a street corner junction. Each memory of either of these two events threw her into epileptic attacks. This is Natures escape-mechanism to prevent dangerous physical damage. No amount of mere repertorising and symptom-matching would have clarified the picture of the physiological disturbances based on emotional crises.
If we cannot discover or uncover the cause, as far as we can analyse it, no amount of palliation will do much good. But it is not often easy or even possible to know the cause or causes. It was Frazer Mackenzie who said that the patient speaks to you in the language of his symptoms, and even allopaths, at least some progressive ones, like Rivers, say, “Dont devote all your energies to the study to the Medicine; from time to time study a patient comprehensively and not merely according to existing medical curriculae and horizons.”
But exactly here begins the greatest difficulty. These symptoms to an allopath point to the name of a disease. To the good homoeopath, they point to a drug that cures. Here again arises a difficulty. Few homoeopathic provings have been driven so far as to create widespread pathological changes. In actual experience the appearance of morphological pathology means that we have come too late in the day for a cure. A prescription on pathology alone is worthless or of little value because it limits itself to the low level of the tissues. On what should a prescription be based and what are the symptoms that should be valued?
The experience of the homoeopaths has shown that only those symptoms are of value that speak of the peculiarities of the patient. A patient reacts towards his unfavorable environments, with a picture of disease released by the peculiarities of his constitution. These peculiarities must be found also in the provings of our materia medica. If these are not there, the patients peculiar picture has not found its equivalent and there will be no cure. But exactly what is this peculiarity ? A rare symptom, a parodoxical reaction, reflex behavior in him-not to be found in his neighbour, gives him the differentiation form any other case because it presents the character of its protoplasmic origin (race, family) and all the “time-stamped events along the paths of his growth and development.”
The principles underlying a good biological novel and a case-history are the same. Both should leave behind in ones mind an intimate picture of a complete personality as vivid as though one had known him intimately a life long. Ideally such a medical history, like the moving picture of a career, should project the character as it appeared at every moment in its journey through life.
With the homoeopath this motion picture of a complete life has to be reversed; that is, starting from this day that the patient presented himself to you you must work backwards to the very origin of his life, his parents and grandparents for “the moments of the past that whisper,” those residues of ancient protoplasmic qualities, intra-uterine impressions and the hard knocks of the infant years which together mould our constitution and or reactions to life which together make us what we are today.
As in very science, there are certain tabulated and worked out schemes which guide us in making an investigation; these are only means to an end, but not an end in themselves. Rigid or mere schematic adherence to their rubrics will tend to make the whole procedure mechanical; and while a mass of detail will be collected, the living picture will be missing. The difference between the artist and the mechanical reproducer is the sureness with which an artist produces a living, pulsating and…. withal, complete picture with a few well executed strokes, with a minimum of effort and the minimum of detail.
Out of a chaos of isolated facts, a vivid living picture must be made. That can only come into existence with the perception of artist who knows how to use the mass of material at his disposal. If you have accepted the general thesis I have put before you this evening, you should have no difficulty in following the technical details of history taking as very well discussed in Kents Lectures on Homoeopathic Philosophy, Pages 184-214, and still more clearly explained by Roberts in his Principles and Art of Cure, pages 75- 91. But may I warn you:
The technique alone may give us the material, it may give us the correct material; but a great task is still there, of interpreting and synthesizing them to express the living totality of the patient. The taking of the case is an exact science. Its interpretation is an art.
