Organon of homœopathic medicine E-Book

Samuel Hahnemann

• Herausgeber: Aroha
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 376

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Organon of Homœopathic Medicine by Samuel Hahnemann A foundational text of homeopathy outlining its principles and methods. Hahnemann emphasizes the "like cures like" philosophy, individual treatment approaches, and minimal dosages, presenting a systematic framework for holistic healing based on balancing the body's vital forces.

Leseprobe

SAMUEL HAHNEMANN

ORGANON OF THE

MEDICINE

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD TO THE SIXTH EDITION (*)

The old medicine, or allopathy, speaking of it in general, always supposes in the treatment of diseases, sometimes a superabundance of blood (plethora) that never exists, and other times, morbific principles and acrimonies. Consequently, it takes away the blood necessary to life and tries to sweep away the supposed morbific matter, or to attract it to another point by means of vomitory, purgative, sudorific, sialagogues, diuretics, vejigatories, cauteries, etc. It attempts in this way to diminish the disease and destroy it materially; but it only increases the sufferings of the sick person, and deprives the organism of the strength and juices necessary for healing. It attacks the organism with considerable doses of heroic medicines, continued for a long time and frequently renewed, the lasting and often very fearful effects of which are unknown to it. He also seems to endeavor to disfigure their effect by accumulating many unknown substances in a single formula. And finally, after a continued use of these medicines, he adds to the already existing disease, new medicinal diseases, most often impossible to cure. So that he does not fall into disreputeA, he never fails to employ when it is within his reach, different means that by their contrary opposition contrarias curantur, suppress and palliate for some time the symptoms, but leaving behind them a greater disposition to reproduce themselves, thus exasperating the disease. He unfoundedly considers all affections that occupy the external parts of the body as purely local, isolated and independent, and believes he has cured them when he has made them disappear by means of topicals, which force the internal affection to move to another nobler and more important part. When he no longer knows what to do against the disease, or that it does not want to give way, or that it is always worsening, he tries to modify it blindly by means of alterants, particularly with calomelanes, corrosive sublimate and other mercurial preparations at high doses.

To render at least incurable, if not fatal, out of a hundred diseases affecting the chronic form, the ninety-nine, either by weakening and tormenting the sick incessantly, overwhelmed either with their own ills, or by producing new and more fearful affections, such seems to be the object of the dismal efforts of ancient medicine, an object easily attained, by becoming acquainted with accredited methods, and by becoming deaf to the voice of conscience.

The allopath never lacks arguments to defend the evil he does, but always relying on the concerns of "his teachers" or on the authority of "his books." There he finds with which to justify the actions most opposed and most contrary to the good

* In Hahnemann's manuscript there is a note in French which, translated, is as follows:

Medicine as practiced (allopathy) commonly has no treatment, except the pretended expulsion of the harmful agents supposed to be the causes of disease. The blood of the sick is cruelly drawn by bloodletting, leeching, cupping, scarification, to diminish a pretended plethora which never exists. A loss of blood accumulated in a healthy woman a few days before her menstruation produces no appreciable consequences, while a loss which only implies a plethora destroys life.

A For the same purpose, the experienced allopath takes pleasure in inventing a particular name, preferably Greek, for the disease, in order to make the patient believe that he has known it for a long time and is therefore in a position to cure it.

sense, however fatal they may be in their result. It is only when by long experience he has become convinced of the sad effects of his pretended art, that he confines himself to trifling drinks, that is to say, to do nothing, even in the most serious cases, and then it is that fewer of the sick get worse and die at his hands.

This fatal art, which for a long series of centuries has arbitrarily disposed of the life or death of the sick, which causes ten times more men to perish than the bloodiest wars, and which makes millions of others more afflicted than they were, I will examine in turn in some detail, before setting forth the principles of the new medicine, which is the only true one.

The opposite is true of homeopathy. It demonstrates to all those who reason, that diseases do not depend on any acrimony, on any material principle, but on the dynamic alteration of the force that virtually animates the body of man. It also teaches that healing can only be effected by means of the reaction of the vital force against an appropriate medicine, and that it is effected so much more surely and promptly, the more energy that force retains. For this reason he avoids everything that could weaken in the leastB (177), he keeps as much as possible from exciting the least pain, because pain exhausts the forces; he uses only those medicines whose effects he knows exactly, that is to say, the way to modify dynamically the state of man; He seeks among them that whose modifying faculty (the medicinal disease) is capable of causing the disease to cease by its analogy with it (similia similibus) and gives only, in rare and weak doses, that which, without causing pain or weakening, nevertheless excites a sufficient reaction. As a result, it extinguishes the natural disease without weakening, tormenting or disturbing the patient, who recovers strength as the improvement appears. This work, whose ultimate goal is to restore the health of the sick in a short time, without inconvenience and in a complete manner, seems easy, but it is painful and requires much meditation.

Homoeopathy is thus presented to us as a very simple medicine, always the same in its principles and procedures, forming a separate whole, perfectly independent and refusing any association with the pernicious routine of the old school, which is its antithesis, as night is to day, and never should such a routine 'boast the honorable name of Homoeopathy.

SAMUEL HAHNEMANN.

Coethen, March 28, 1833.

B Homoeopathy does not spill a drop of blood; it does not purge, and never causes vomiting or sweating; it does not affect any external evil by means of topicals or prescribe hot baths or unknown minerals, or medicinal lavatives; it does not apply vejigatories or sinapisms or silk or cauteries; it never excites salivation or burns the flesh with moxas or hot iron to the bones, etc., but gives directly his preparations of simple medicines, which he knows exactly; he never soothes pain with opium, etc.

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Ratified in Paris, 184...C(178).

INTRODUCTION.

Review of the so-called "allopathic" and "palliative treatment" therapies that have been used to date

have been practiced by the secular school of medicine

Ever since men have existed on the surface of the globe they have been exposed individually or en masse to the influence of morbid causes, physical or moral. As long as they remained in their first state, a small number of remedies were sufficient for them, because the simplicity of their kind of life gave them knowledge of very few diseases. But the causes of the alteration of health and the need for medicinal aid have grown in proportion to the progress of civilization. Since then, that is to say, since Hippocrates existed, or two thousand five hundred years ago, there have been men who have devoted themselves to the treatment of more and more numerous diseases, and whose vanity made them seek in their imagination means of alleviating them. So many diverse heads produced an infinity of doctrines about the nature of diseases and their remedies, establishing systems that were all in contradiction with each other and even with themselves. Each of these subtle theories, admired at first the whole world for its unintelligible profundity, and attracted to its author a multitude of enthusiastic proselytes, although no use could be made of them in practice, until a new system, often completely opposed to the preceding one, made the latter be forgotten, and in its turn captured for some time the general opinion. But none of these systems was in conformity with nature and experience. They were all a tissue of subtleties based on illusory consequences that could be of no use in the bed of the sick, and that were only suitable to feed vain disputes.

Alongside these theories, and without any dependence on them, a method was formed which consists in employing certain mixtures of unknown medicines against different kinds of diseases arbitrarily admitted, always in contradiction with nature and experience, and consequently without advantageous result. To this ancient medicine is given the name of allopathy.

Without disregarding the services that a great number of physicians have rendered to the sciences incidental to the art of healing, to physics, chemistry, natural history, in its different branches, and to that of man in particular, to anthropology, physiology, anatomy, etc., I am only concerned here with the practical side of medicine, to show how imperfectly diseases have been treated up to the present time. My views are far superior to those of this mechanical routine, which plays with the precious life of man, taking for its guide collections of prescriptions, the number of which is increasing every day, proves their inefficiency. I leave this scandal to the dregs of the medical people, and

C Hahnemann did not put the exact date on his manuscripts, probably leaving it until the book was to be printed, but Dr. Haehl. suggests February, 1842, as the probable date, in connection with a manuscript of Hahnemann's time.

--Note by Dr. W. B.

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I only deal with the reigning medicine, which imagines that its antiquity really gives it the character of science.

This ancient medicine boasts of being the only one that deserves the title of rational, because it is the only one that seeks and separates the cause of diseases, and the only one that follows the traces of nature in the treatment of them.

Tolle causam, ("Eliminate the cause") he cries out incessantly; but he limits himself to this vain cry. He imagines that he can find the cause of the disease, although in reality he does not find it, because he cannot know it and therefore cannot find it. In fact, since most, the vast majority of diseases are of a dynamic origin and nature, their cause is unknown to us. Consequently, we are forced to look for an ideal cause. Comparing on the one hand the normal state of the internal parts of the human body after death (anatomy), with the visible alterations that these parts present in individuals dead of diseases (pathological anatomy), and on the other hand, the functions of the living body (physiology) with the infinite alterations that they undergo in the innumerable morbid states (pathology, semeiotics). And drawing from all this conclusions concerning the invisible way in which the changes are effected inside the sick man, a vain and fantastic image was formed, which the theoretical medicine looked at as the first cause of the disease1, then making of it the proximate cause and at the same time the intimate essence of this disease, the disease itself, even if good sense dictates that the cause of a thing can never be this very thing. Now, how could one, without wanting to deceive oneself, make of this chimerical cause an object of cure, prescribe against it medicines whose curative tendency was equally unknown, at least most of them, and above all accumulate many unknown substances in what are called formulas?

The sublime project of finding a priori the internal and invisible cause of the disease, was reduced, at least as far as the most rational doctors of the old school were concerned, to look for the generic character of the disease on the basis of the symptoms2. They wanted to know whether it was spasm, weakness or paralysis, fever or inflammation, induration or obstruction of this or that part, blood plethora, excess or defect of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen or azoe in the humors, exaltation or decrease in the vitality of the arterial, venous or capillary system; a defect in the relative proportions of the factors of sensibility, irritability or nutrition. These conjectures, designated by the school under the name of indications derived from cause

1 Their conduct would have been more in accordance with sound reason and the nature of things, if, in order to put themselves in a state to cure a disease, they had sought the occasional cause, and if, after having confirmed the efficacy of a plan of treatment in affections dependent on the same occasional cause, they had then been able to apply it also with good success to others of the same origin; as, for example, mercury, which is suitable in all venereal ulcers, is equally appropriate in ulcers of the glans determined by impure coitus, if they had discovered that all chronic diseases (not venereal) recognize for their occasional cause the recent or ancient infection of the psoric miasma, and had thereafter found a common curative method, modified only by therapeutic considerations relative to each particular case, which would enable them to cure them all. But after so many centuries, they have not been able to cure the innumerable chronic affections, because they were unaware that their origin is the psoric myasma, a discovery which belongs to homeopathy and which has put it in possession of an effective curative method. They flatter themselves, however, that they are the only ones who follow a rational treatment directed against the primary cause of chronic diseases, without having the slightest suspicion of this very useful truth, that they all come from a psoric origin and therefore cannot really be cured by their means of treatment.

2 Any physician who treats diseases according to such general characters, cannot call himself a homoeopath, since in reality he is nothing but a generalizing allopath; for it is impossible to conceive of homoeopathy without the most absolute individualization.

and regarded as the only possible rationality in medicine, were too hypothetical and fallacious to be of any practical use. Incapable, even if they had been well founded, to reveal the most suitable remedy for this or that given case, they flattered the self-esteem of those who laboriously gave birth to them, although in most cases they induced him to error when he tried to act according to them. Most of them were given to these conjectures rather for ostentation, than with a well-founded hope of taking advantage of them to arrive at the true curative indication.

How often did it not happen that the spasm or paralysis seemed to exist in one part of the organism, while the inflammation seemed to be in another?

What remedies, then, could be used against each of these supposed general characteristics? Such remedies could only have been specific ones, that is to say, medicines whose effects were analogous to the morbific irritation179; but the ancient school proscribed them as very dangerous4, because in fact, experience had shown that with the high doses consecrated by use, life was compromised in diseases, during which there is a very great susceptibility to homogeneous irritations. Thus it was neither necessary nor possible to cure by the direct and most natural way, which is with homogeneous and specific remedies, since most of the effects produced by the medicines were and remained unknown, and because even if they had been known, it would never have been possible, with such habits of generalization, to guess the substance to be used.

However, the ancient school, which knew very well how much more rational it is to follow the straight path than to get entangled in deviant paths, still believed that diseases could be cured directly by eliminating their supposed material cause. It was almost impossible to renounce these crude ideas by trying to form an image of the disease, or to discover curative indications, just as it was impossible to discover the spiritual and material nature of the organism in the alterations of its sensations and vital actions, which is what constitutes the diseases, resulting only from dynamic impressions, and not from any other cause.

The school, therefore, considered the matter altered by the disease, whether it was only in the state of turgescence, or whether it was thrown outside, as the producing cause of the disease, or at least, by reason of its pretended reaction, as the one that sustains it; which last option it admits today. Here is why she believed in curing by addressing herself to the causes, making every kind of effort to expel from the body the material causes which she supposed to be the cause of the disease. Hence his great desire to make vomiting, in order to evacuate the bile in the various bilious fever, his method of prescribing vomit in the affections of the stomach(5).

179

3 Nowadays called homeopathic.

4 "In cases where experience had revealed "the curative virtue of drugs working in a homoeopathic way. whose action was inexplicable, they avoided embarrassment by declaring them "Specific" and this 'word, properly "speaking, empty of meaning, dispensed with reflection on the object in question. But these homogeneous stimulants, i.e., specific or homeopathic, have long since been proscribed on the ground that they exerted an "extremely dangerous" influence. (Rau, "Ueber" dar homceopath "Heilverf." (Heidelberg. 1824, p. 101. 102).

5 In a gastric affection which comes on in a prompt manner with continual belching of corrupted food, and in general with moral despondency, cold feet and hands, etc., ordinary medicine is concerned only with what is contained in the stomach.

6 his attempt to expel pituitary and worms in the pallor of the face, bulimia, cramps and the bulging of the belly in children7, his habit of bleeding in hemorrhages8. and mainly the importance he gives to blood emissions of all kinds9 (180), as a main indication to be fulfilled in inflammations. By acting in this way, he believes he obeys the indications truly deduced from the cause, and treats the diseases in a rational way.

Imagine also, that by ligating a polyp, removing a swollen gland, or having it destroyed by suppuration determined by means of local irritants, dissecting a steatomatous or meliceric cyst, operating on an aneurysm, a fistula, etc., the following can be done: a polyp, an aneurysm, a fistula, an aneurysm, an aneurysm, a fistula, a fistula....

According to her, a good vomitive must be administered to procure the expulsion of the altered matters. Most of the time, this indication is fulfilled by means of tartar stibnite mixed or not with ipecac. But does the patient recover his health after vomiting? Oh, no. These gastric affections of dynamic origin, ordinarily derive from some moral revolution (contrariness, disgust, fright) of a cooling, of a mental or corporal work, to which one has given oneself after having eaten. The emetic and ipecac are not suitable to make this dynamic disagreement cease, and much less with the revolutionary vomiting that they determine. Besides, the particular morbid symptoms, which they produce are a further offense to health; and the biliary secretion suffers from this disorder, so that, if the sick person is not of a very robust constitution, he must resent for many days this pretended treatment directed against the cause, no matter how violently the contents of the stomach have been expelled. But, if instead of these evacuants which cause so much harm, the patient is made to take only once a globule of sugar, the volume of a mustard seed, soaked in the very diluted juice of pulsatilla, which infallibly restores order and harmony in the whole economy and in the stomach in particular, he will be cured after two hours. If there is still some belching, it is only of gases without taste or smell, the contents of the stomach are no longer altered, and at the next meal the patient has recovered his usual appetite, and is in perfect health. This is what must be called a true cure which has destroyed the cause. The other has this title only by usurpation; it does nothing but fatigue and injure the sick person.

Vomiting medicines are never good for a stomach full of food, even if they are difficult to digest.

digestion. In such a case, the nature knows how to get rid completely by spontaneous vomiting that, itself excites and that at the most can be helped by mechanical titrations exerted on the veil of the palate and the throat; thus are avoided the accessory effects that would result from the action of the vomitory, and a short quantity of infusion of coffee is then enough to make pass to the intestine the matters that still remained in the stomach. But if after having filled the stomach a lot, it did not retain, or had lost the irritability necessary for the manifestation of spontaneous vomiting, and if the patient, tormented by sharp pains in the spigastrium, did not experience the slightest desire to vomit, in such paralysis of the gastric viscera, the effect of the vomitive would be to determine a dangerous or mortal inflammation of the digestive tract, while an infusion of coffee given in very short and repeated doses would dynamically reanimate the weakened excitability of the stomach, and would put it in a state to expel by itself from above or below, the materials contained in its interior, no matter how great the quantity. Ordinary physicians also err in this by wishing to direct the treatment against the cause of the disease.

6 When the gastric juice is very abundant and refluxes into the mouth, which is not uncommon, the accepted use to this day, even in chronic diseases, requires the administration of an emetic to disimpulse the stomach. But the next day or a few days later, the viscera contains as much, if not more, of the same materials that had been expelled shortly before. On the contrary, the acedias give up by themselves, when their dynamic cause is attacked with a very short dose of very diluted sulfuric acid, or better still of a homeopathic antipsoric remedy to the other symptoms.

And of a similar nature are many of the so-called causal cures of the physicians of the secular school whose main endeavor is, by means of tedious operations, troublesome to themselves and harmful to the patient, to expel the material product of the dynamic disorder, whereas if they perceived the dynamic source of their affliction and eliminated it homeopathically, then they would effect a rational cure.

7 Symptoms that depend solely on a psoric miasma, and which yield easily to mild (dynamic) antipsorics, without vomitants or purgatives.

8 Although almost all morbid hemorrhages depend solely on a dynamic disagreement of the vital force, nevertheless, the ancient school assigned to them for their cause the superabundance of blood, and therefore could not fail to prescribe bloodletting to rid the body of this supposed fullness. The fatal consequences resulting therefrom, the lack of strength and the tendency or even the transition to typhus, he places in the disease itself, from which he cannot then triumph. In a word, even if the sick person does not get better, he believes that he has conducted himself in conformity with the adage "Causam tolle", and mainly the importance he gives to 1.u blood emasions of all kinds to have done, speaking in his language, all that could be done, without having to repent of the procedure.

9 Although there is perhaps not a drop of blood to spare in the living human body, the ancient school does not for this reason cease to consider the plethora and superabundance of blood as the material and principal cause of inflammations, which it must combat with phlebotomies, scarified cupping and leeches. This is what she calls acting rationally and directing the treatment against the cause. In general inflammatory fevers, and in acute pleurisy, she considers the coagulable lymph, which exists in the blood or what is called crust, as sinful matter, and makes the greatest efforts to expel it with the help of repeated bloodletting, even though sometimes this crust becomes thicker and denser with each new emission of blood. If the inflammatory fever does not want to give way, it spills blood to the point of killing the patient, in order to make the contra or the supposed plethora disappear, without even suspecting that the inflamed blood is nothing but a product of the acute fever, of the morbid inflammatory irritation, immaterial or dynamic, and that the latter is the only cause of the great squall that takes place in the vascular system, and that can be destroyed with a minimal dose of a homeopathic remedy, for example, with a globule of

lacrimal, or a fistula of the anus; amputating a cancerous breast or a limb whose bones are decayed, etc., has already cured diseases radically, destroying their causes.

He has the same belief when he uses the repercussions and dries the old ulcers of the legs with astringents, lead, copper and zinc oxides, associated with purgatives that in nothing diminish the fundamental evil, and do nothing more than weaken: when he cauterizes cancers, destroys locally the pimples and warts, and affects the scabies of the skin with ointments of sulfur, lead, mercury or zinc; finally, when he makes disappear an ophthalmia with lead and zinc solutions, and when he drives away the pains of the limbs by means of the balsam of Opodeldoc, ammoniacal ointments, or fumigations of cinnabar and amber. In all these cases, he believes to have overcome the disease and to have used a rational treatment directed against the cause. But what are the consequences? New diseases which infallibly manifest themselves sooner or later, which, when they appear, are taken for new, and which are always more serious than the primitive affection, which highly refutes the theories of the school. He should open his eyes, and he would find that evil is of a more deeply hidden immaterial nature, that its origin is dynamic, and that it can only be destroyed by a dynamic agent.

The hypothesis, which the school preferred even in modern times, was that of morbific principles and acrimonies, according to which it is necessary to disengage the blood and lymphatic vessels, by means of the urinary organs or the salivary glands; the chest, by means of the tracheal and bronchial glands; the stomach and intestinal canal by means of vomit and albino stools,

sugar soaked in the juice of aconite to the ten-thousandth degree of dissolution, avoiding vegetable acids, in such a way that the most violent pleuritic fever, with all the alarming symptoms that accompany it, is completely cured in the space of twenty-four hours at most, without any emission of blood, without any antiphlogistic; so that not even a little blood is taken from the vein to make a test. It is no longer covered with inflammatory crust, while another patient, in a similar case, who has been treated according to the supposedly rational method of the ancient school, if he escapes death after copious bleeding and cruel sufferings, very commonly suffers whole months emaciated and exhausted his strength, before being able to stand, and even in many cases succumbs as a result of a typhoid fever of a leukophlegmasia or an ulcerative phthisis, too frequent consequence of such a treatment.

He who has touched the calm pulse of the sick person an hour before the shivering that always precedes acute pleurisy, can not

cease to be surprised when, two hours later, having declared the heat, he is persuaded that the enormous plethora that exists calls for repeated bloodletting, and wonders by what miracle the pounds of blood, the emission of which is claimed, could have been introduced into the very vessels of the sick person whom two hours before he had seen beating with such slow movement. And perhaps, nevertheless, there is not a drop of blood in his veins more than there was two hours before when the patient was in perfect health.

Thus, when the advocate of allopathic medicine practices his blood emissions, it is not superfluous blood that he takes away from the patient suffering from an acute fever, since this liquid never exists in excess; he deprives him, however, of the normal quantity of blood indispensable for life and the restoration of health, an enormous loss that is no longer in his power to repair. However, he believes he has acted according to the axiom "causam tolle", to which he gives a false interpretation, while the only and true cause of the disease is not an overabundance of blood, which in reality never exists, but a dynamic inflammatory irritation of the blood system, as is proved by the cure obtained in such a case by the administration, at extremely low doses, of the juice of aconite, which is homeopathic to this irritation.

The ancient school does not miss either the partial blood emissions, and especially the copious applications of leeches in the treatment of local inflammations. The palliative relief which results from this in the first moments, does not produce a rapid and complete cure far from this, the weakness and valetudinary state to which the part thus treated, and sometimes also the whole rest of the body, is always exposed, show how badly local inflammation had been attributed to a local plethora, and how sad the results of blood emissions, whereas this inflammatory irritation, of local appearance, which is purely dynamic, can be destroyed in a prompt and lasting manner by a short dose of aconite, or, according to circumstances, of belladonna, by means of which the disease is cured without the necessity of resorting to bloodletting, which is of no use whatsoever.

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without which it cannot be said that the body is free from the material cause that excites the disease, and that a radical cure has been effected according to the tolle causam principle.

Practicing openings in the skin, that the habitual presence of a foreign body turned into chronic ulcers (cauteries, sedales), he believed to draw the sinful matter of the body, which is nothing more than an illness, in the way that one makes the dregs come out of a cask by drilling it with a jar.He also believed to attract to the outside the bad humors with the vejigatories perpetually maintained. But all these procedures, absurd and contrary to Nature, do nothing but weaken the sick and finally make them incurable.

I agree that in all the diseases presented for cure, it was all the more comfortable for human weakness to suppose a morbid principle whose materiality the understanding could conceive, when the sick lent themselves voluntarily to such a hypothesis. Indeed, once supposed, it was only a question of choosing a sufficient quantity of medicines to purify the blood and humors, to excite the sweat, to facilitate expectoration, and to cleanse the stomach and intestines. Here is why all the Materia Medica that have been written since Dioscorides are almost completely silent about the proper and special action of each medicine, and only after having enumerated its pretended virtues against this or that nominal disease of the pathology, they limit themselves to say that it promotes the secretion of urine, of sweat, expectoration or menstrual flow, and above all that it has the property of evacuating from above or below the contents of the alimentary canal, because at all times the efforts of practitioners have tended mainly to expel the material morbific principle and many acrimonies to which they attributed the cause of diseases.

All this was nothing but vain dreams, gratuitous suppositions, hypotheses devoid of basis, skilfully imagined for the comfort of therapeutics, which flattered itself that it had an easier mission to accomplish, when according to it it was a matter of combating material morbific principles (si modo essent).

But the essence of diseases and their cure are not subject to our tastes and the desires of our indolence. In order to adapt to our crazy hypotheses, diseases cannot but be dynamic aberrations that our spiritual life undergoes in its way of feeling and acting, that is, immaterial changes in our way of being.

The causes of our diseases cannot be material, since any foreign material substance10 introduced into the blood vessels, however innocent it may appear, is promptly rejected as a poison by the vital force, or, if it cannot be, causes death. Let the smallest foreign body be introduced into our sensitive parts, and the principle of life, which is scattered throughout our interior, does not rest until it has separated this body by the

10 Life was endangered by the injection of a little pure water into a vein (see MulIen, in Birch, History of royal society, vol. IV). Atmospheric air introduced into the veins, has caused death (see J. H. Voigt, Magazin Fur den neuesten Zuatand der Naturkunde", t, III p. 25). Liquids, even the mildest, introduced into the veins, have endangered life (see Autenreith, Physiology, II, par. 784).

And, in a skin disease dating back twenty years, this vital principle, whose activity is indefatigable, would suffer patiently for so many years in our humors a material exanthematous principle, a herpetic, scrofulous or gouty virus! What nosologist has ever seen these morbific principles, of which he speaks so confidently, and on which he pretends to build a plan of medical conduct? Who will ever bring a gouty principle, a scrofulous virus, to anyone's sight?

Even if the application of a material substance to the skin, or its introduction into an ulcer, has spread disease by infection, who could prove, as our pathologies so commonly assert, that the least material particle of this substance penetrates our humors or is absorbed?11. No matter how carefully and promptly the genital parts are washed, this precaution does not preserve from venereal ulcers. A weak breath escaping from a man affected by smallpox is enough to produce this terrible disease in a healthy child.

What quantity of this material principle must penetrate into the humors to produce, one disease (syphilis), which by defect of treatment will last until the last days perhaps only efface death, and in the second, an affection (smallpox) which so commonly terminates life in the midst of an almost general suppuration?12 Is it possible, that in both these and analogous circumstances we admit a material morbid principle which has passed into the blood? It has been very commonly seen that letters written in the room of a sick person communicated the same disease to the one who read them. Shall we then suppose some material thing that penetrates into the humors?

But of what use are all these proofs? How many times have we not seen insulting words occasion a bilious fever that put life in danger, or an indiscreet prophecy cause death at the time foretold, and a pleasant or unpleasant surprise suddenly suspend the course of life? Where then is the material morbid principle which has been introduced in substance into the body; which has produced the disease, which sustains it, and without whose material expulsion by means of medicines every radical cure would be attempted in vain?

The advocates of such a false hypothesis as that of morbific principles, should be ashamed to be so ignorant of the spiritual nature of our life, and of the dynamic power of the causes which occasion disease, and to humble themselves to such ignoble behavior, that in their vain efforts to sweep away morbific matters whose existence is a chimera, they kill the sick instead of curing them.

11 A girl of eight years of age having been bitten by a rabid dog, at Clasgow, a surgeon instantly excised the whole of the wounded part by the teeth, which did not prevent it thirty-six days afterwards from developing rabies, from which she died within two days." (Med. comment. of Edimb. d2c 11, 1793).

12 In order to explain the production of the often so considerable quantity of putrid fecal matter and of ichorous acrid matter observed in diseases, and to be able to present these substances as the cause which produces and sustains the morbid state, although at the time of the infection nothing of material has been seen to penetrate into the body, another hypothesis has been imagined, which consists in admitting that certain very subtle contagious principles work in the body as ferments, communicating their same degree of corruption to the humors, and thus converting them into a common ferment which sustains and nourishes the disease. But by what purifying herbal teas is it hoped to rid the body of a ferment which is incessantly reborn, and to separate it so completely from the mass of humors, that not the least particle remains, which, according to the hypothesis admitted, would still have to corrupt these humors, and reproduce, as before, new morbific principles? To what gross consequences do even the most subtle hypotheses lead, when they rest on an error. According to this school it would be impossible to cure these diseases. The most marked syphilis, after separating the psora which commonly complicates it, is cured by the mere influence of one or two very small doses of the thirtieth dissolution of mercury, and the general syphilitic alteration of the humors is annulled forever in a dynamic manner.

Are the sputum, then, often so unpleasant, which is observed in diseases, the matter which engenders and sustains them?13 Are they not always rather the products of the disease, that is to say, of the purely dynamic alteration which life has undergone?With these false material ideas about the origin and essence of diseases, it is not surprising that at all times the most distinguished practitioners as well as those of lesser note and even the inventors of the most sublime systems, have directed all their efforts to the expulsion of a supposed morbific matter, and that the most frequent indication has been to eliminate this matter, to make it movable, to procure its exit by saliva, sputum, sweat and urine; that of purifying the blood by the intelligent action of herbal teas; of thus ridding it of the acrimonies and impurities that never existed; of carrying away the imaginary principle of the disease by means of sedales, cauteries, permanent vejigatories and above all that of making the sinful matter come out through the intestinal canal for the benefit of laxatives and purgatives enhanced with the title of aperitifs, and of solvents in order to give them more importance and a more imposing exterior.

These efforts to expel a morbid matter capable of engendering and sustaining disease should be considered ridiculous, the living organism being dependent on an immaterial vital principle, and disease being nothing more than a dynamic disagreement of this power in relation to its acts and sensations.

Now then; if we admit, which we cannot doubt, that with the exception of diseases produced by the introduction of wholly indigestible or injurious substances into the digestive organs or other hollow viscera, by the penetration of foreign bodies through the skin, etc., there is none which recognizes for its cause a material principle, but on the contrary, all of them are always and only the special result of a virtual and dynamic alteration of health, there is none which recognizes for its cause a material principle, but on the contrary, all of them are always and only the special result of a virtual and dynamic alteration of the health, how fatal must not appear to the sensible man the methods of treatment which have for their basis the expulsion14 of this imaginary principle, since no good result can have

13 If this were so, it would be enough to blow one's nose well to cure infallibly and quickly any coryza, even the most inveterate.

14 The expulsion of worms has some semblance of necessity in verminous diseases. Worms are found in some children and pinworms in many of them; but these parasites depend on a general affection linked to an unhealthy life. Improve the diet and cure homeopathically the psora, always easier at this age than at any other time of life, and there will no longer be worms, and the children will have complete health, while they reappear in great numbers after the use of purgatives alone or associated with semen-contra.

It will be said, perhaps, that it is necessary to forget nothing in order to expel from the body the solitary worm, this monster created for the torment of the human race. It is true that the tapeworm is sometimes expelled, but at the cost of how many consecutive sufferings and how many dangers to life. I would not like to have on my conscience the death of all those who have succumbed to the violence of the purgatives directed against this worm, and the years of languor suffered by those who have escaped death. And how often does it happen that after having repeated for many consecutive years these purgatives, destroyers of health and life, the animal does not come out or reproduces. What would it be, then, if there were not the least need to expel it and kill it by violent and cruel means, which so often compromise the life of the sick person?

Are the various species of tapeworms only found in psoric subjects, and do they disappear whenever the psora is cured? Until the

At the time of healing, they live without much discomfort to man. not immediately in the intestines, but in the residue of food, immersed as in a world of their own, and they remain quiet, and find what is necessary for their nutrition. During these circumstances, they do not. touch the walls of the intestine, nor do they cause any injury to the subject containing them. But if some acute disease takes possession of the subject, the contents of the intestines become unbearable to the animal, which becomes agitated and irritates the sensitive walls of the alimentary tube, and excites a kind of spasmodic colic, which contributes not a little to increase the sufferings of the sick person. In the same way, the fetus does not stir or move in the womb, except when the mother is sick, and remains calm in the water in which it swims, while the mother is well.

It is worth noting that the symptoms observed in the aforementioned circumstances in those who have solitary worms, are of such a nature, that the tincture of male fern, at the smallest doses, extinguishes them quickly in a homeopathic way, because it makes the disease cease what caused the agitation of the parasite. On the other hand, the animal being at ease, it continues to live peacefully in the intestinal matter, without noticeably disturbing the patient, until the antipsoric treatment is sufficiently advanced, so that the worm no longer finds in the contents of the intestinal canal the substances that can serve as food, and disappears forever, without the need of any purgative.

in the main diseases of man and less in the chronic ones, always harming them enormously?

The degenerated matter and impurities that become visible in diseases are nothing else, without contradiction, but products of the disease, which the organism knows how to get rid of, sometimes too violently without the help of the evacuating medicine, and which are reborn during the duration of the disease. These matters often present themselves to the true physician as morbid symptoms, and help him to draw the picture of the disease, which then helps him to find a homeopathic medicinal agent for its cure.

But the present adherents of the ancient school do not wish to pretend that their principal object is the expulsion of material morbific principles. They call the numerous and varied evacuations they employ a derivative method, and pretend that in this they imitate the nature of the sick organism, which in its efforts to restore health extinguishes fever, by sweat and urine; pleurisy, by epistaxis, sweating and mucous sputum; other diseases by vomiting, diarrhea and the flow of blood; joint pains by ulcerations in the legs; angina by salivation or by metastases and abscesses which they produce in other parts distant from the site of the malady.

According to this, they believe that the best thing to do is to imitate nature, and they follow misguided paths in the treatment of most diseases. Wanting to imitate the diseased vital force left to itself, they proceed in an indirect way15