But before Hahnemann was ready to enter on the external conflict he must first feel the power of the Darkness in his own soul and conquer it there. In spite of his great powers and high intelligence,-nay, rather by very reason of them- the seemingly never-ending night of Medicine oppressed him to the dust. Where smaller and less sensitive natures could live and move without discomfort a Hahnemann could not breathe. At last he could bear it no longer; he had reached, he thought, the “Everlasting No” of Medicine, and he gave up the practice in despair. Removing from Dresden in 1789, he came again to Leipzig, and there supported himself and his family by working as a literary hack, enduring the hardships of extreme poverty rather than continue to kill his fellow-creatures-as he felt he was doing-in accordance with the rules of his art. But illness in his own family recalled him to himself. He felt, as he believed in the goodness of God, that there must be a real Healing Art, if only it could be found. DRAWN.
This was the darkest hour before the dawn. Just then Hahnemann was engaged in translating Cullen’s work on Materia Medica from English into German; and when he came to that part of the work which deals with Peruvian Bark, he was dissatisfied with the attempt Cullen made to explain the curative action of the drug in ague.
It occurred to Hahnemann that if he were to try the effect of the drug on himself in health, he might obtain some information as to its action in disease. He therefore took an ordinary dose of the powdered bark. Within a short time he was seized with an attack of chills and fever indistinguishable from a fit of ague. Thinking this might possibly be a genuine attack of ague and not the result of the dose, after a little delay, he repeated the experiment, and again the same result followed. He had now no no longer any doubt; and the exactness of his observation has since been confirmed by numberless similar experiences. Bark cured ague; and bark could also cause the very counterpart of ague in the healthy. This was the first ray of light which heralded the coming dawn. Further experiments on himself with bark and other drugs proved that this was no isolated experience, but an instance of a general rule that there was a definite relation between the action of a drug on the healthy and its action on the sick, and that by knowing the one the other might with certainty be predicted.
With the breaking in of light upon his own mind Hahnemann was restored to hope and life.
But unlike certain modern discoveries who are eager to rush before the public with every idea that comes into their minds lest another should come before them and claim the priority (which is really not worth the claiming), Hahnemann took care to make sure his ground before he made any definite announcement. His translation of Cullen was published in 1790. For six long years he worked at the subject before he published his famous Essay “On a new Principle for ascertaining the Curative Properties of Drugs.” in which the homoeopathic principle was first clearly made known to the world.
The essay was published in the leading medical periodical of the day, Hufeland’s Journal, and it bears to the practice of medicine much the same relation that Harvey’s essay on the Motion of the Heart bears to physiology. The essay excited much comment at the time of its appearance, as it was bound to do, but no one suspected it then of being heretical, whilst its great originality and power were acknowledged on all hands. It was not until he had laboured still three-and-twenty years in developing his system, had collected around him an enthusiastic band of disciples, and had won the confidence of a large circle of patients, that his medical brethren-and especially the apothecaries-became alive to the dangerous nature of his teachings and practice, and put in operation against him the favourite engine o the Dark Ages-persecution. The new light which had dawned in this way upon Hahnemann’s mind shed its rays before and after; illuminating and explaining much of the experience of the past, as well as indicating the path by which advance was to be made in the future. In numbers of the cases of cure recorded in ancient writings, as Hahnemann showed, the drugs which had been given had removed conditions the like of which they were capable of causing when administered to those in health.
In his Essay on a New Principle Hahnemann formulates his conclusion thus:-
“Every powerful medicinal substance produces in the human a peculiar kind of disease, the more powerful the medicine, the more peculiar, marked and violent the disease.”
“We should imitate nature which sometimes cures a chronic disease by superadding another, and employ in the (especially chronic) disease we wish to cure, that medicine which is able to produce another very similar artificial disease, and the former will be cured; similia similibus.”
This proposition has never been shaken. Denied it has frequently been; misrepresented it still is; disproved it cannot
be.
Hahnemann had now his foot upon the solid ground of fact. The weakness of all previous systems of treatment that had been proposed lay in their having been founded on the quicksands of theory.. If Hahnemann had first sought to find to build up system upon the explanation instead of upon the fact, his system would have fared no better than the others. Facts ar durable things; explanations are always changing.
On his own body Hahnemann “proved” a large number of drug; that is to say he took them in substantial doses when in health and observed the effects that followed. These he noted as they occurred and made no attempt to explain them, simply labelling them what they were, “positive effects.” Drugs, like human beings are apt to be at times a little inconsistent in their actions. For instance, belladonna will cause some persons to perspire profusely, and will make the skin of other persons dry. Like a sensible man, Hahnemann, instead of trying to reconcile these inconsistencies, or to find an ingenious explanation of them, preferring, as smaller men are wont to do, his own explanation to the facts, simply set down both as “positive effects.”
An observer of the old school seeing one of these effects would immediately dub the medicine a “sudorific,” and another seeing the opposite effect would be equally certain to dub it “anti- sudorific;” and each would go away satisfied that he possessed a scientific understanding of the drug’s action, and for ever after use it according to the name he had given it, ignoring as exceptional all contradictory experiences. So it has been; and so it is to this day among those who reject Hahnemann; and hence the confusion that prevails in the works of orthodox writers on Materia Medica, to the distraction of the unhappy student who is compelled to learn their contents- for examination. Hahnemann swept away all these delusive names, embodying at the best only partial experiences, and suffered the much abused drug to write out its own character in the symptoms and changes it produced in his healthy body; he performing the simple clerical duty of writing, so to speak, to the drug’s dictation.. By so doing. Hahnemann has made it possible for us to know the actual powers, the very characters in fact, of hundreds of substances now in daily use in homoeopathic-and allopathic!-practice.
At the time when his essay was published Hahnemann was a physician of the highest standing and repute (which no one then thought of questioning), and in the forty-second year of his age. A physician who knows nothing but drugs is, properly speaking, no physician at all; but a physician who does not know how to use drugs is a man without his right hand.
Hahnemann was no one-sided enthusiast-he was an accomplished physician in all other matters apart from his knowledge of drugs and his skill in the use of them; and he was thus in every way qualified to lead the reform in the most important of all the divisions of the Doctor’s Art-the treatment of the sick by drugs. For the question of drug-action barred the way of all progress; and so long as the practice of drug administration remained unreformed, so long as the absurd theories and the high-sounding, delusive terms in which they were embodied held dominion over the physicians’ minds, the inauguration of a better era was impossible. But now that the light had come to him, Hahnemann was fully equipped and ready to enter on his life’s great work, for which all before had been a preparation. He was not alone in bewailing the state of the practice of his time, nor was he alone in his discernment of he curative powers of drugs; others, like. Von Stoerk, had possessed an insight of a limited kind into the properties of drugs, and saw the necessity of giving them singly, before Hahnemann. But there was none who saw a way out of the darkness until he came; there was none who was able to gather up the good and show how it might be recognised and distinguished from the mass of the bad. He alone possessed the genius, the talent, the learning, the faith and the fortitude that were needed to withstand all the powers arrayed against him, to lead all those who would follow him into a region of light, and to compel all those who refused to follow, to cease at least to do evil, if they would not learn to do well.
