“If the experts who made the recommendations wish to have cancer detected early, they are satisfied to have it detected in the early stages of the local tumor. That may be early to the experts, but late to Homoeopathy. By that time a long series of maladies, evidences of disorder, evidences of chronic disease, have come and gone, leaving the patient and his attending physician under the impression that they have been successively cured, and the disorder itself has persisted and finally ultimated.
“The important thing is to know that the problem in cancer is not to be solved by any study of cancer itself, but by mastering the laws of medicine which permit the physician to treat the entire person. It is safe to say that if all people throughout their lives had the benefit of constitutional treatment by the principles of medicine known as Homoeopathy, cancer would be an extreme rarity”.
So much for cancer. Now, ladies and gentlemen, the same is true for all the other disease ultimates, or end results, or by- products, or anything else you may want to call them; for most chronic, lingering diseases especially when improperly treated tend thus to ultimate themselves.
These other end-results may be cysts and tumors of various organs, enlargements and swellings of glands and other tissues, like those of the neck, goitre, tonsils and adenoids and so on; degenerative changes anywhere, discharges from body outlets, and all the so-called skin diseases. Surgical operations though necessary at times remove only the effects of disease without however any concern for the cause that produced them. In other words, cancer and all these other things are not the disease, but only the effects of disease.
We must treat disease itself, then, at its very inception, in its first stages, during which no physical manifestations have as yet presented themselves, but only dynamic disturbances like easy fatigue, nervousness, sleeplessness, various aches and pains, headaches, neuralgias, loss of appetite, apathy, mental depression, indolence, irritability, sensitiveness, palpitation, tendency to take cold, and all the other innumerable subjective complaints that people feel in the beginning of some illness.
The most precise diagnostic instruments of today are unable to detect any changes anywhere in the tissues and organs at this stage. Once, however, these changes are found, the disease has already made considerable headway in the bodys economy; it has already grown deep and strong roots in the patients soil. Present-day medicine bases the diagnosis and treatment of disease on these physical findings, disregarding the primary subjective symptoms, or else regarding them as of little or no significance, or useless for the purposes of treatment.
Fellow workers, these and many other facts need to be presented to all fair-minded and unprejudiced people everywhere.
Our task, however, does not end here; there is much other work ahead, and it must be accomplished if we want Homoeopathy to make further progress. Hahnemann, as you know, proved-tested-over 90 remedies. If we should want to give an idea of the extent of this task, we would simply need to say that any physician proving or testing the action of one drug alone for purposes of ascertaining its medicinal properties, would by so doing cause his name to be remembered for many, many years. But Hahnemanns chief work is his Organon of Medicine, a treatise on the true nature of disease, and how to cure it in the shortest, most reliable and most harmless manner according to certain natural laws and principles.
Other men, as you well know, have made similar contributions in the past – von Boenninghausen, Hering, the Allens, Kent Knerr and many others. The practice of Homoeopathy, as you will all agree, is no easy matte; in fact it is tremendously difficult. Dr. Guy Beckley Stearns, one time professor of homoeopathic materia medica in the New York College, used to say that it would require at least ten years of real, hard study in order to become a good Homoeopathic prescriber. It is therefore incumbent upon us who are living today to do all we can to lighten the burden of prospective students of homoeopathy and at the same time assist in her progress.
Let us see what we can do: (1) – Revise the Organon by rewriting it in more simple language, without the terribly long and involved sentences of the present edition. Simplify it by including only the most essential matter. This work, I, myself am trying to do. (2) We need a good repertory of the nosodes, eventually to be incorporated with Kents repertory. (3) The latter itself needs revision with Bogers additions included, as well as anyone elses, plus symptoms and remedies in Knerrs, Allens, and Von Boenninghausens not found in Kents. This of course is the work of years of many collaborators.
Some of us here no doubt have made our own additions to Kents from time to time. There is at least one serious fault with Kents repertory which must be corrected, because you quite often miss your remedy as a result. Many general rubrics in which you would expect to find the remedy you are looking for omit the remedies given in a sub-rubric. Still we are told to work from generals to particulars. For instance the general rubric on page 1303, “Milk agg.” omits the remedies Nicc. and Podo., found in another rubric on page 614, “Diarrhea after milk”. Now, is not diarrhea after milk an aggravation from milk? Again, Ferr. and Ferr. phos. are given in the sub-rubric “Epistaxis”. There are many such omissions.
(4) We need a comprehensive materia medica giving only the essential indications and characteristics of each remedy. (5) We need a differential diagnosis of our remedies. Those of course that are similar. Dr. Roberts has done a splendid work in this field. He should continue in it and give us more. I have begun to collect the striking similarities and differences between remedies by jotting them down on index cards whenever I meet with them in the course of reading or studying the materia medica or other work, and expect to have fairly good collection in ten years from now. (6) Farringtons Clinical Materia Medica is to my mind a very valuable book, but it is too cumbersome. Some time ago I set to work to make an abridgment. It is now half finished. (7) All the questions and answers on various homoeopathic subjects published in the Homoeopathic Recorder should be put in book form, or at least those that seem more important.
(8) And last, but not least, we should have a book, clearly and simply written, on questions dealing exclusively with problems in Homoeopathic philosophy. I am attempting to do some of this work by the same method of jotting down on cards some point on philosophy, whenever the opportunity offers.
A rather large order you will say. Yes, indeed; but it must be filled sooner or later. And now, in conclusion, let me express the hope that in a not too distant future, we will live to see the day when homoeopathic hospitals, and ultimately Homoeopathic colleges, will again be established throughout the land. Then will Homoeopathy assume her rightful place in the world.
NEW YORK, N.Y.
