dr. Percy Hall-Smith, his successor as President of the British Homoeopathic Society, stated in his address a few months ago: There is an ever-increasing tendency for our large provincial towns to be left without homoeopathic practitioners because no trained men are available to replaced those who have fallen out owing to death or retirement.
Even in the London area the tendency is for homoeopathic practitioners to take up consulting practice so that there is a considerable dearth of general practitioners. One of the normal sources of supply has naturally been from the resident medical officers of this Hospital, but as the figures I quoted last year show, the proportion of our residents who in the last ten years have taken up homoeopathic practice has been less than during any other similar period during the last thirty or forty years, if not longer.
Further, as regards our hospitals, it is a fact that it is being found increasingly difficult to find trained homoeopaths to man their medical staffs, with the result that in the provinces at all events, allopathic influence is becoming increasingly predominant.
Consequently, the object for which such institutions were originally formed and for which their funds were subscribed is not being fulfiled as it should be. A recent example is that of Birmingham. Not only so, but the tendency of recent years towards the co-ordination of the hospitals in provincial towns under municipal control is making it increasingly difficult to retain those special characteristics so necessary to a homoeopathic hospital An outstanding example of this process is provided by Plymouth, where the once flourishing Divan and Cornwall Homoeopathic Hospital has been merged into a municipal scheme, and has been forced to give up its distinctive name, although, I understand, certain wards are retained for homoeopathic treatment. There are thus in these days only too many signs that, under modern medical and civic organisation, homoeopathic hospitals will be in danger of losing their distinctive character.
Not only the homoeopathic dispensaries and smaller hospitals have disappeared, or are disappearing, but the great London Homoeopathic Hospital is in the gravest danger through the lack of homoeopathic practitioners. Homoeopathic doctors cannot be appointed if none are available. The position is becoming desperate. “Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep.” One of the leading men at the hospital expressed the other day with callous indifference the opinion that within ten years that wonderful institution also would be engulfed. It is up to the readers of this journal to prevent this calamity.
Homoeopathy, which has been created by the vision and generosity of laymen, has been ruined by the restrictive and secretive policy of the doctors, and the most urgent task consists in eliminating those leaders who have shown such fatal incompetence. The laymen must resume control. Dr. Hall Smith, after giving a totally inadequate description of the crisis of homoeopathy, closed his observations with the advice:.
Here is no place for lay propaganda! Time enough for that when existing vacancies can be filled and men are available to open up new fields.
With incredible fatuousness the help of laymen, who introduced homoeopathy to this country, who financed and established homoeopathic doctors, training schools, dispensaries, hospitals, etc., had once more been repulsed. Yet the whole future of homoeopathy depends upon making it known to laymen by popular propaganda. Not only the homoeopathic doctors, the homoeopathic chemists, and the homoeopathic institutions are dying out, but the homoeopathic clientele of the doctors is disappearing owing to the incredible foolishness of the homoeopathic doctors. If homoeopathy is to be saved, the people at large and orthodox medical men must be made to understand that homoeopathy is vastly more efficient for curing the patient then orthodox medicine. That fact must be proclaimed from the housetops.
Thirty years ago far-seeing and enthusiastic laymen, founded the British Homoeopathic of Homoeopathy” and for “provings a central fund to act as an encouragement and aid to local bodies in Great Britain in the maintenance of homoeopathic institutions.” Unfortunately the association has fallen under the influence of doctors who form the majority of the Council. This institution, which was created for the purpose of popularising homoeopathy, follows the policy of secretiveness and restriction which is the distinctive feature of the British Homoeopathic Society, the professional trade union formed by the homoeopathic doctors.
In fact the Association has become a tool of the British Homoeopathic Society for both organisations are managed, or mismanaged, by the same people. I have received complaints from all over the country that requests for lecturers, advice and monetary assistance have been refused. The British Homoeopathic Association has existed for thirty years. What has it done during these thirty years to make homoeopathy known? There is not a single lay society in this country, while there are hundreds of flourishing lay societies in Germany, Holland, Switzerland, France, and many other countries.
How many lectures have been delivered in the provinces on behalf of the British Homoeopathic Association? Its utter uselessness in its present form is clearly recognised by homoeopathic laymen. Its funds are meager, probably because enthusiastic and opulent homoeopaths are aware that money given to it would be wasted. In the course of thirty years the Association has secured only about one hundred lay subscribers at one guinea a year.
James Ellis Barker wrote a very large number of books, both under the name James Ellis Barker and under his real German name Otto Julius Eltzbacher, The Truth about Homœopathy; Rough Notes on Remedies with William Murray; Chronic Constipation; The Story of My Eyes; Miracles Of Healing and How They are Done; Good Health and Happiness; New Lives for Old: How to Cure the Incurable; My Testament of Healing; Cancer, the Surgeon and the Researcher; Cancer, how it is Caused, how it Can be Prevented with a foreward by William Arbuthnot Lane; Cancer and the Black Man etc.