Darkness & Dawn


Homeopathy system of medicine – Dwan after darkness….


The Revolution in Medicine BY J.H.CLARKE.

I.- DARKNESS AND DAWN NIGHT

Ladies and Gentlemen,

One hundred years ago the Art of Medicine still lay wrapped in Cimmerian night. The power of the Dark Ages, which the Protestant revolution had rolled away two hundred years before from other pursuits and avocations of men, unfettering the intellect in science and the conscience in the moral world, still lingered like a trailing, inky cloud after a storm over all that concerned the treatment of sick humanity. No ray of reason pierced the impenetrable fog of theory and conjecture in which the ministers of Healing moved, blindly led by blind Tradition, and blindly worshipping the fetich, Authority. Now and again the bolder spirits has ventured, like Paracelsus, to rise in revolt against powers of darkness; but in their attempts to break the rusted and corroding chains of Authority-chains, which to the generality were a glory instead of shame-they had succeeded in breaking only themselves. Systems of treatment based on fanciful theories of disease had risen, had had their day, and had sunk into their native night. Discoveries in anatomy and physiology has been made-and left the practice of medicine no better than before. A century and a half had passed since Harvey wrote the treatise which contained his grand induction of the circulation of the blood -an induction, be it here remarked, honestly made from anatomical observations, and not, as is commonly alleged, from the observation of vivisected animals,-thus completing the work of Servetus, Realdus and Cesalpinus, who had been before him in the field and had paved his way.

But Harvey did not dream of saying a word against the prevalent custom of bleeding for almost every disease-or, indeed, of suggesting any improvement in the Healing Art. So absolutely without effect on practice had Harvey’s great discovery proved to be, that in the succeeding generation the physician in ordinary to the son of Harvey’s master, the second Charles, published a work Aurora Chymica, by Edward Bolnest. M.D., Physician in Ordinary to King Charles on “mummiall quintessence,” among which a quintessence to be distilled “in the mouth of June or July” out of a “great quantity of overgrown old toads” was one the least objectionable.

1786 In the year of our Lord, 1786, when the Old Regime in France wad rapidly approaching its tragic end, and when the man who was destined to master the wild forces of the impending revolution, and to lead them through the length and breadth of Europe, overturning thrones and dynasties and shaking to their foundation the social and political institutions of the western world, was a young lieutenant of Artillery in his nineteenth year,-in this year a man who was born to inaugurate a very different revolution-to put an end to the reign of Darkness in the world of Medicine,-already twelve years the great soldier’s senior, was a general medical practitioner in the town of Dresden, dreaming as little as the other of the great part in the world’s history he was to be called upon to play.

At this date Hahnemann was innocent of homoeopathy.

HAHNEMANN.

I must not trench to much on the ground so ably occupied by may predecessors in this place, who have spoken of Hahnemann, the Man and the Physician, Hahnemann as a Medical Philosopher, as the Founder of Scientific Therapeutics, and of Hahnemann and his Works; but it will not be possible for me to avoid it altogether. And though some of the ground may be old, the recent publication in English of the great work by the lamented Dr. Ameke, of Berlin, Homoeopathy; its Origin and its Conflicts, translated by Dr. Drysdale, of Cannes, and edited by Dr. Dudgeon, opens up much that is both valuable and new..

Who, it may be asked, was Hahnemann that he should set himself to revolutionise the most conservative of arts, the profession in which the worship of ancestors was observed with a piety more than Chinese?

Samuel Hahnemann was the eldest of a family of ten born to a painter on porcelain, of Meissen, in Saxony. his father, whose means were none too ample, destined the boy to follow the same trade as himself. But when God has special work for a man in this world He does not leave his upbringing entirely in the hands of his parents. As a child. Hahnemann showed an intense passion and a wonderful aptitude for learning.

When his father removed him from school (as he did for long periods together), with the aid of a clay lamp of his own construction the child continued his studies in his chamber at night after the less congenial labours of the day. But his teachers would not part with such a scholar without making great efforts to retain him. At last they prevailed on the father to allow the boy-whose health had given way under the combined effects of hard manual labour and chagrin-to follow his bent, they offering to forego all fees for his instruction, Such was the confidence he inspired that when only in his twelfth year Herr Miller, the principal of the Meissen School-of whom Hahnemann always speaks with the greatest veneration and affection,-commissioned him to teach to others the elements of Greek. At the age of twenty he removed to Leipzig to begin the study of medicine his last school essay being entitled “The Wonderful Construction of the Human Hand.” As showing his appreciation of his father’s treatment of him, much as he had been thwarted and opposed, a note of Hahnemann’s, written years afterwards, may be quoted here:-

“In Easter, 1775, my father sent me to Leipzig, with the sum of twenty thalers-the last money that I ever received from him He had to bring up several children on his limited income, and this sufficiently excuses the best of fathers.” Ameke, p. 151.

Thus the struggle with adverse circumstances began in hahnemann’s and there can be no doubt that this early lesson in enduring hardness formed one of the most important elements in the training for his after life.

At Leipzig the struggle continued. Hahnemann supported himself by teaching and by translating or publishers whilst he diligently attended the medical classes of the University. Here his fees were remitted by virtue of a kind of Government foundation instituted for the benefit of poor and deserving students. After two years spent at Leipzig he removed to Vienna in order to study medicine practically, since Leipzig possessed no hospital. At Vienna he attended the Hospital of the Brothers of Charity, in the Leopoldstadt, under Quarin, the physician in Ordinary to the Emperor. like most of his preceptors, Quarin conceived a great liking for the young Hahnemann, for whom he showed his partiality by taking him with him on his visits to private patients. “He singled me out,” says Hahnemann, “loved and taught me as if I were his sole pupil in Vienna, and even more than that, and all without expecting any remuneration from me.” Ameke, p. 152. To the genuine teacher a pupil of Hahnemann’s kind is himself a sufficient reward. It is to Quarin’s lasting honour that he discovered Hahnemann’s worth; and the love and the care he bestowed on his pupil were seeds sown in a fertile soil. A post of resident physician and library custodian too the Governor of Transylvania, obtained at Quarin’s recommendation, enabled Hahnemann to replenish his scanty resources, and at the same time to pursue his practice and his studies. In 1779 he took his M. D. Degree at Erlangen, where the graduation fee was lower than at Leipzig; thence he returned to his home, and after a short residence at Dessau removed to Gommern in 1781.

Two years later he married Henrietta Kuchler who shared with him for nearly fifty years the storms, the labours and the trials of his life. He now removed to Dresden, where we have already seen him, and where he remained for about six years practising his profession as best he might, and making good use of the electoral library.

A REFORMER NOT A DESTROYER.

If a man would inaugurate a new and better era in any department of human affairs, it is first of all necessary that he should master what there is of good in the old. He comes not to destroy but to fulfil. So Hahnemann, long before he commenced the work by which he is now almost exclusively known, had made himself in all the branches of his Art. and even in those which are now regarded as subsidiary branches, not merely proficient, but one of the first authorities o his time. Chemistry at this day owes to Hahnemann’s genius, among other things, the discovery of the best test for metals in solution; and the apothecaries, who were destined to be the first to cast the legal stone at him, possessed in his pharmaceutical Dictionary-a work of immense labour, learning and research, which took him years to complete, -their most valuable and most indispensable friend. His early writings prove him to have been far in advance of the men of his day. The practices of “fashionable physicians” he freely criticised; and in place of their violent measures he praised the virtues of cold water and fresh air in a way that would surprise modern sanitarians who imagine that hygiene is a discovery of the latter half of the nineteenth century. His, learning in all that concerned his Art was unrivalled. No writer of eminence, living or dead, escaped his wide reading and scholarship, whilst his wonderful memory retained for his use almost everything that he read.

John Henry Clarke
John Henry Clarke MD (1853 – November 24, 1931 was a prominent English classical homeopath. Dr. Clarke was a busy practitioner. As a physician he not only had his own clinic in Piccadilly, London, but he also was a consultant at the London Homeopathic Hospital and researched into new remedies — nosodes. For many years, he was the editor of The Homeopathic World. He wrote many books, his best known were Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica and Repertory of Materia Medica