The association is not closed. The “WORLD” and his publications will continue the work for which John Henry Clarke both lived and died. There is a saying that none of us is indispensable, but in Clarkes case that does not hold. In the first place he had them knowledge, in the second the energy, enthusiasm and capacity for the meeting or opposition, and finally the gift of teaching by way of books. If he had not been a good practitioner even these great qualities might have lacked, but settling himself down in the most exclusive part of the West End of London he there reflected honour upon the profession, built up a fine practice and maintained it to his death, amidst a host of friends.
Of just such a man Cicero was thinking when he wrote: Mortales inimicitias, sempiternas amicitias-for of few is it more true than of the late John Henry Clarke: May our enemities be short- lived, our friendships eternal.
God rest his soul and make us mindful of a life well lived, well done.
SOME OBJECTIONS ANSWERED.
By the late DR. J.H. CLARKE.
(from his book, Homoeopathy Explained).
[ Some readers having suggested the re-publishing in this commemorative issue of some of the writing of Dr. Clarke, we have chosen this chapter from his book published in 1905].
IN the course of conversation at a public dinner the subject of homoeopathy cropped up, and my neighbour, a layman of intelligence, frankly stated the objections he had to the system, looked at from the outside. He owned that he had no personal acquaintance with homoeopathy, and had not studied it; but it seemed to him that a man who did not pin himself to a system was more free to use any and Further, he thought that medicines which were of such an innocent nature that they could be safely prescribed in domestic practice, must have very little power of doing any good at all. I will take these two objections and discuss them in their order.
I. HOMOEOPATHY TRAMMELS ITS ADHERENTS.
This is a very natural view for any one not acquainted with the system to take. Really the very opposite is the case. Homoeopathy does not fetter its adherents: it sets them free. It gives those who follow it a point of view from which they can discern clearly them at their proper worth. By its double-sided method of studying drugs it can estimate their power and use them with a precision unknown to allopathy. Further, it can take advantage and make good use of the mistakes and over-dosings of the allopaths, which invariably occur with drugs newly brought out. For example, when chloral was first lunched upon the medical world, it was declared to be perfectly harmless, and was given in large doses to numbers of patients.
In some instances severe attacks of nettle-rash followed its use. This at once showed to homoeopaths its power over skin disease, and it has been used by them in certain cases of nettle-rash ever since. Again , when salicylic acid and its salts were first given in cases of rheumatism, it produced in many patients who were over-dosed with it, deafness,s noises in the ear, and vertigo. The hint was at once taken by homoeopathists, and salicylate of soda in its homoeopathic form has cured many patients suffering from a disease which presents this distressing set of symptoms, and is called after the man who first described it, :Menieres disease.”
I may mention also the drug Thyroidin, lately brought forward )prepared from the thyroid gland of the sheep) has produced alarming symptom sin many patients, and in the hands of homoeopaths has been used successfully in cases presenting similar symptoms. Homoeopaths are free to use anything-just as free as allopaths; only they have this advantage: knowing the doublesidedness of drug action-that a drug can cure conditions like those it can produce in the healthy-they have a much more intimate knowledge of any drug that is brought forward than an allopath can have. The latter has to blunder on in the dark,m and learn from his mistakes as much as he can; but his mistakes can never teach him so much as they teach a homoeopath.
But, really, there is no comparison between the system of homoeopathy and the no-system of allopathy. There is reason, light, and orderly orderly progress in the one; there is nothing but chaotic fragments in the other. Homoeopathy no more trammels its adherents than the laws of Nature trammel the mechanician.
2. HOMOEOPATHY IS TOO HARMLESS TO BE OF ANY USE.
It is quite true that homoeopathy is of no use for poisoning vermin or for killing patients. If patients must die, it prefers that they shall die a natural death. It is also true that the homoeopathic preparations of deadly poisons may be used with perfect safety in household practice. But it does not follow that because a preparation cannot kill, therefore it cannot cure.
I may here mention incidentally another objection that has been raised: “If homoeopathy is true,” it is said, “a drug must cure in the which it is given.” But the objector in this case leaves out of account the difference in the sensitiveness of the human organism under the different conditions of health and disease. Homoeopathy simply demands that there shall be a correspondence between the disease symptoms and the drug symptoms.
The rest is a matter of experience, and experience shows that in a normal healthy state the organism requires a larger dose of a drug to disturb by disease. The difference in the sensitiveness of an organ in health and disease may be seen any time. Take an inflamed eye and compare that with a normal eye in its reaction to light. A normal eye can near a very strong light which to an inflamed eye would cause exquisite pain.
This fact supplied the answer to the objection to homoeopathic medicines, on the score of their harmlessness. Remarking, by were equally harmless, I may add that the sensitiveness of the diseased human organism to the homoeopathically indicated drug is intensified beyond conception. It is impossible to get the dose too small if attenuated in the graduate manner directed by Hahnemann. And even in certain individuals when not diseased there is a peculiar sensitiveness to certain drugs infinitely transcending the sensitiveness of Drosera to phosphate of ammonia, which gave Darwin such a fright.
Some persons cannot be in the attic of a house whilst a few grains of ipecacuanha are being powdered in the basement without being powerfully affected thereby. In THE HOMOEOPATHIC WORLD of July, 1885, I quoted the report of a case from the British Medical Journal of February 7th of the same year, in which a medical man tells how he nearly killed a patient by simply applying a linseed poultice, though the patient protested that every time such a poultice had been applied she had had an intense attack of asthma.
The doctor pooh- poohed her statement, insisted on the with the result that three hours later he was “summoned to see her, as he sister thought she was dying.” And he continues: “I found her livid, and struggling for breath, and certainly in as bad an attack of asthma as I ever saw.” To an allopath an observation of this kind is a curiosity and nothing more. To a homoeopath it is full of useful significance.
It is exceptional to find a patient as sensitive as this to a remedy not homoeopathically related to the case. But in disease, the patient becomes excessively sensitive to the remedy which has caused corresponding symptoms, that is to say, to the remedy which is homoeopathic to his condition. Experience taught Hahnemann that a very much smaller amount of the corresponding drug was needed to cure than that required to produce the symptoms. Experience has confirmed the fact in the practice of thousands of his followers; and it now remains established beyond the possibility of disproof.
I will now pass on to answer other objections we sometimes hear.
HOMOEOPATHY HAS NO TONICS.
On the contrary; every properly chosen homoeopathy remedy is a tonic to the case treated. Again and again I have been asked by patients, “Was not that a tonic you gave me? My appetite has been so much better since I took it,” when it was merely the appropriate homoeopathic remedy. By “tonic,” people generally understand something which increase the appetite and the feeling of strength. The appropriate remedy will do both; but this implies that the patient is in a state of debility. There are no such things as “tonic” in and absolute sense. Quinine is only “tonic” when given for debility; when taken in health it is one of the most debilitating drugs known.
The same may be said of Arsenic, Iron, Phosphorus, and Strychnine. They are only “tonic” to special kinds of debility, like those they are capable of creating. There is thus an inconceivable amount of harm done by indiscriminate indulgence in “tonic.” It is a relic of the old barbarous treatment of names of disease by names of drugs, against which Hahnemann protested. A patient is feeling “want of tone”; what could be simpler than to take a “tonic”? In nine cases out of ten the result is slow poisoning.
