90 FLORA HOM030PATHICA. 



of Opium in confirmed pain is therefore empirical, and deceptive 

 to the patient, leading him to attribute to other diseases the 

 mischievous consequences due to it alone. 



u Chronic diseases are the test of true practice, because they 

 never cure themselves. Slight and sudden affections cease, 

 with or without medicine, evidently through the vis medicatrix 

 natures ; but in acute disease, when medicines are given, to 

 make that cure evident, it must be effected more rapidly and 

 more perfectly than it could have been done by Nature. 



" If Opium appears sometimes to cure pain in acute diseases, 

 it is for the simple reason that, when the diseases are not 

 dangerous, they run their course in a few days, and carry off 

 with them the attendant pains. 



u The only instance in which Opium appears really to cure 

 pain, is the uncommon one in which, by its other primitive 

 effects, it agrees homoeopathically with the symptoms of the 

 disease, and thus destroys it. Hence, of course, the pain must 

 cease, but only by indirect means. Thus dysentery, being 

 caused by the retention of substances in the larger intestines, 

 some varieties of this disease, which are accompanied with heat 

 and stupor, may be cured by Opium, between the primitive 

 effects of which and their symptoms there is homoeopathic 

 concordance. 



" Thus again, Opium can only calm the pains of the lead- 

 colic, when it has cured homoeopathically, by its primitive con- 

 stipating property, the obstinate constipation occasioned by 

 lead. It cures indirectly, and not by its stupifying quality; 

 that is to say, in small doses, insufficient to produce stupor. But 

 it never can make a sudden cure, without inconvenience follow- 

 ing ; so far from it, it is one of the principal remedies in dis- 

 ease with stupor in which the patient does not feel pain. 



" Painful maladies, acute and chronic, can only be cured 

 effectively by medicines whose primitive effects are analo 

 to their peculiar symptoms, and which also possess the faculty of 

 exciting a kind of pain closely resembling those which ch 



go us 



arac- 



