There cannot be any science without intelligent correlating of facts. Nowadays, if you are accused of being a philosopher, it is something terrible. We will not really be able to present our view, as it were, to the world unless we know clearly that it is philosophy that we have to uphold and that a new philosophical concept of science has to arise from us.
We never can present homoeopathy in an apologetic manner, trying to make it conform with the completely-or, lets say, mostly wrong-philosophical and scientific activity of present-day science. Homoeopathy is unacceptable to them because it does not agree with their premises but it is not homoeopathys fault that their premises are wrong. Therefore, the proper presentation of homoeopathic science on scientific lines as Dr.Grimmer has presented will be our task.
DR. ROGER SCHMIDT [San Francisco, California]: I would like to mention a very important book that I happened to read a few months ago which will help us all along that same line because we cannot deny the tremendous importance of the right philosophy.
If you have the right philosophy, then you can expand and you are on safe ground. This book is the book of “Science and sanity” by Korzybski. It is a master work that embodies the new tendencies of philosophy in science and knowledge and a new theory and philosophy of man, and I will bring that subject up tomorrow in my paper, and I am more and more enthused and impressed by the importance of any acquaintance with that new tendency which certainly will save the shattering decomposition of the world as it is going today.
DR. MARION BELLE ROOD [Lapeer, Michigan]: Before we get off this subject of reference to books, there is a historian named Toynbee who has written a twelve-volume work on “The Study of History,” not yet complete, in which he reminds us that all civilizations come to this denoucement: where a dominant minority replaces a creative minority. Our science was a creative minority which has been taken over enthusiastically by its profit side, big industry, and turned into a dominant minority. This dominant minority then succeeds in extorting from the people against their will where it was once a creative minority enthusiastically supported by their full cooperation.
The net result is an internal, displaced, dissatisfied proletariat. Militarism rises. The dominant minority using force creates war and one war begets another war. There becomes on the outlying border of this civilization now in place of our barbarian world, once charmed, the antagonistic external proletariat and when the internal proletariat joins the external proletariat, the dominant minority is all done.
I think the shadow of that is on our land today. May be the external proletariat are the Communists but the internal proletariat is the public to whom we homoeopaths should minister and we are failing in numbers. They believe in us more than we believe in ourselves, and it may be that if the homoeopaths would enthusiastically accept and spread and apply Dr. Grimmers very fine paper, we could postpone this inevitable denoucement of the crumbling of our civilization. but not forever.
DR. HARVEY FARRINGTON [Chicago, Illinois]: Mr. Chairman, as usual, Dr. Grimmer has given us a very thoughtful and instructive paper. I have only one point to comment on and that is his statement-if I quote it correctly-that the vibrations of the homoeopathic remedy are sublet and diffusive. I think it can be proven that the action of the remedy is through the nerves of the tongue. From thence, it is diffused through the nervous system. Whether nerve energy is actual electricity or not make little difference. It is akin to it and it is undoubtedly a fact that the electro-magnetism in the body and in the cells is the same as electro magnetism anywhere else.
Many years ago, Nash said that no remedy ever cured a case of disease. I must correct that. The primary action of any remedy never cured a case of a disease but the reaction in the body instituted by it. He uses this as an argument for out tenet that when a remedy begins to act. it should not be interfered with until the reaction begins to wane. Then another dose may be given.
DR. A.H. GRIMMER [Closing]: I would like to thank the discussants for bringing up and enlarging on the subject.
As Dr. Rood has suggested, I think that we do need to get some of our benevolent propaganda at work. I think there will be something in the line of an editorial in the July issue. I wrote a short editorial on that very thing-on the power of propaganda and showed where we are, to a degree.
There are two types of propaganda-evil and good-and evil brings on wars and dissolution and destruction, while the good propaganda brings on progress and good results.
And homoeopathy is one of the things that lends itself especially to the good propaganda. It is so apt to the time and place that if we will get some of our papers and thoughts together and put that in pamphlet form or in some way give it out to the great public to educate them, we will go places. That is one of the things we have to do. I want to thank the discussants for their reaction to my paper.
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.