While this was going on, perhaps to the lasting benefit of our art, our institutions were gradually “fading away.” I mean really fading away. As you know, the external cause of this was pharmacal and medical monopoly in collision with bureaucratic prerogatives. But ten times more ominous were the internal causes, that is, lack of understanding, fear of disapprobation, appeasement on the part of some, and the serenity and content of the purists.
It was almost fatal. Many went over to the conventional caste and the ones tied to hospitals, asylums, clinics and colleges were too few to cope with the external pressure and infiltration. But the loss shocked the remnant into renewed efforts to improve their own therapy and homoeopathic standing, so that now we have proportionately more real homoeopathic practice with a minimal contingent than we had fifty years ago with a large one.
Of the residue of our teaching institutions, the smallest is the best yet, viz., the Post Graduate School of the American Foundation for Homoeopathy. This school teaches the principles of philosophy, materia medica and uses of the repertories. It is now sponsored by the American Institute of Homoeopathy. It is to be hoped that there may be some means to lessen the economic and professional burden on its teachers and students. Their sacrifices deserve earnest consideration.
The use of homoeopathy so as to care efficiently for chronic conditions, severe crises and desperate conditions requires no great store of knowledge, as I have said in other words. But it does require understanding. That is the first and most essential requirement. No amount of detailed knowledge of materia medica and hardly be a substitute for it.
Also, it requires a certain amount of foresight and consistency that gives one fortitude to gamble for the long pull instead of playing the game of apparent expediency. For instance, one may excise a fibroid or destroy a pair of tonsils and get a fee that looks alright on the surface. But one will gain as much and more by clearing them medicinally, although more time will be spent at it. Not only that, the first is a passing affair but the second blinds patients to the practice. Extirpation is the common thing, anyone may do it; but curing with medicines spread the reputation far, if not wide. There are other advantages.
Other things beings equal, the medicinal method builds a young practice e faster and keeps it active longer if one wants to work. The reputation of curing is something no one else can destroy and competition of curing is something no one else can destroy and competition is practically nil; an active demand is kept up. Moreover, independence is worth something. One is not subjected to unfair strictures of the hospital nor obliged to be under the scrutiny of a “chief”– conditions which are certain to grow worse instead of better.
The future of homoeopathy, if it can survive the threat of government monopoly, will be much more favorable than it has ever been. People are abandoning old time modern medicine as never before, more in other regions than here in the East, apparently. An acquaintance of mine questions this, however. He thinks that what seems expansion is a few writers making a lot of noise.
But we notice that old time medicine seems forced to adopt more and more methods from the cults, of course without credit as to the sources. Nevertheless, this is all to the good. It will lessen prejudice against sugar pills and make conditions easier to adopt them. Also, it tends toward the appreciation of the patterns and modes of individual life; which is an incentive to fit remedies to them. Medicine as a curative art will never die entirely.
In 1936 I read by request an article before this Society on “How Shall We Renew Interest in Homoeopathy.” We had a pretty fair attendance and some guest contributions to the program took considerable time to entertain us with a lot of material which a homoeopathic specialist could hardly use. Your present speaker came on the program when coats and hats were walking out so that he had the splendid attendance of four members as a sounding board for his subject. I have made this paper purposely long this time, in revenge.
In fact, I threatened to myself to read the other paper at this session. Anyhow, Dr. Roberts commented by saying, “Boy, you said it !” It was one of the rare times that I ever heard him use an exclamation point. But I will spare you and read only two or three synthesized excerpts. They deal with the economic aspects, not politics, as you will perceive if you listen closely. Politics in our economy is only interference with our livelihood, with production and exchange, both individual, domestic and global:.
What then of medicine and the opportunity to spread knowledge of homoeopathy? I see no opportunity to make any more impression on conventional medicine than we are making now. But there may be opportunity in the future, as I shall try to show.
Further economic distortion will come and grave changes arise in the relations of physicians to each other, to the government and to the public. With future depressions medical institutions, as organized, must break. The profession is in for a drastic moral and economic deflation. Whether future forms of government be fascist, socialistic, communistic or be that mongrel we have now does not alter this necessity, for the cause is more fundamental than politics alone.
It is economic forces that shapes policies and governments as well as general living. The primal urge behind mans activities is economic. The way in which society permits the holding of land, source of everything we have, determines the esprit and forms of institutions.
Homoeopathy cannot spread again very much except in a free economy, that is, in true democracy. And we shall never attain that until government impositions on labor and produce are abolished, so that labor can retain all of its earnings; and the impost put on land values instead, so as to provide revenue for public purposes and access to unused resources besides.
If we do not come to this, our sad prophecy of some years ago will come to pass. As economic and government pressure increases, the bait or backing in its several forms will be taken by more and more doctors. Certification, regimentation and control will march over private rights. There will be ruthless restriction of individual activities as such.
But there is a gleam of hope for the ones who do not capitulate. The prestige of the more informal doctor will increase relatively among the people. For the official doctor is neither trusted nor valued like the one sought by the patient. Confidence by way of results and mutual interest is the keynote of individual success in the face of official medicine, if we are allowed to preserve these privileges.
Despite their frothy strictures as to other therapy, homoeopaths have always been the most fraternal group in the profession. Enthusiasm for an ideal makes him sincere in the desire to give of what he knows is a priceless treasure. This may count in the emergency. What he is willing to give will more likely be received.
WATERBURY, CONNECTICUT.
Born in Torrington, Litchfield, Connecticut, USA on 20 Oct 1871 to Royal Edmund Hayes and Harriet E Merriman. He had at least 4 sons and 1 daughter with Miriam Martha Phillips. He lived in Torrington, Litchfield, Connecticut, United States in 1880. He died on 20 July 1952, in Waterbury, New Haven, Connecticut, United States, at the age of 80, and was buried in Waterbury, New Haven, Connecticut, United States.