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THURSDAY, JANUARY 26, 1888. 



ODIUM MEDICUM. 



NO one will deny the truth of the saying, " All men are 

 mortal," but very few have any definite feeling that 

 it applies to them personally so long as they are in the 

 possession of health and^strength. Almost everyone, how- 

 ever, Jias either suffered at a former time, is suffering 

 now, or is afraid of suffering at some future time, from 

 ailments of some sort ; and therefore the treatifient of 

 disease has a personal interest for everyone. On this 

 account the discussions which have been going on for 

 about a month in the Times regarding homoeopathy have 

 attracted a good deal of attention ; but it is difficult for 

 lay readers to understand the merits of the discussion 

 thoroughly unless they know something about the 

 " pathies " generally. The fundamental idea of the 

 " pathies " is that the body does not readily tolerate more 

 than one diseased process at the same time, and therefore 

 one morbid condition may be driven out by inducing 

 another. 



The nucleus of our present medicine may be said to 

 consist of the accumulated experience in the observation 

 and treatment of disease possessed by the priests of Cos, 

 and recorded by Hippocrates, who is justly regarded as 

 the father of medicine. His treatment was based upon 

 empiricism, and was not governed by any absolute rule, for, 

 although he stated that in general diseases are cured by 

 their contraries, he also allowed that disease might some- 

 times be relieved by medicines which produced similar 

 symptoms, and mentioned that under certain circum- 

 stances purgatives will bind the bowels, astringents will 

 loosen them, and substances which cause cough and 

 strangury will also cure them. 



The principle that contraries are cured by contraries, 

 e.g. that constipation is cured by purgatives, attained so 

 much importance under Galen and his followers, that the 

 other principle of like being cured by like was nearly lost 

 sight of, and so the antipathic school had for a long time 

 the preponderance. But the use of evacuants, which 

 formed a large portion of the practice of Hippocrates and 

 of medical practice down to the present day, could not 

 always be brought under the head of antipathy, and so it 

 came to be admitted that one abnormal condition in the 

 body might be relieved by inducing another, which was 

 neither of the same kind as itself, nor of an opposite kind, 

 but was simply of a different nature, and this is the allo- 

 pathic form of treatment. As an example of this we may 

 take the fact that a pain in the head may be cured by a 

 medicine which does not act on the head at all, but upon 

 the bowels. 



The antipathic and the allopathic systems of medicine 

 were in vogue in the time of Hahnemann, and their im- 

 perfections were very evident to a man of his mental 

 power and acuteness. He saw clearly that the enormous 

 doses which were given in his time were often productive 

 of great harm, and in experimenting with smaller doses 

 he found that his results were better. He also found, 

 what had been noted before by Hippocrates, that he 

 obtained curative effects from small doses of remedies 

 which in large doses produced symptoms similar to those 

 Vol. XXXVII. — No. 952. 



of the disease. In the recognition of this fact Hahne- 

 mann agreed with Hippocrates ; but, while the father of 

 medicine, testing everything by experiment and relying 

 simply on the result of experience, regarded the rule 

 " simtlta similibus curantur" as only of partial applica- 

 tion, Hahnemann converted it into a universal rule. He 

 began at first by relying on experiment, and spoke of pure 

 experience as the " only infallible oracle of medicine," 

 but he afterwards quitted this sure ground, and committed 

 himself unreservedly to a belief in his theoretical opinions, 

 whether supported by facts or not, and said in regard to 

 his doses that the maxim as to the very smallest being the 

 best is " not to be refuted by any experience in the world.' 

 The essence of his system of homoeopathy consisted in 

 the universal application of the rule regarding the similar 

 action of the drug to that of the disease, and in the small- 

 ness of the dose. 



Some modern homoeopathists are inclined to regard the 

 minute dose as not essential to homoeopathy, but Hahne- 

 mann says : "The appropriation of the medicine to any 

 given case of disease does not depend solely upon the 

 circumstance of its being perfectly homoeopathic, but 

 also upon the minute quantity of the dose in which it is 

 administered." The extent to which he carried the dilu- 

 tion of his medicines was extraordinary, and he imagined 

 that the more they were diluted the more potent did they 

 become. Thus he says in his " Materia Medica Pura " 

 (Dr. Dudgeon's translation) that the curative power of 

 aconite is marvellous when it is given "in the dose of a 

 thousandth part of a drop of the decillionth development 

 of power." But even this astoundingly minute dose was un- 

 necessarily strong in some cases, in which he thought " a 

 single momentary olfaction at a phial containing a globule 

 the size of a mustard-seed, moistened with the decillionth 

 potency of aconite, is quite sufficient." But it is difiicult for 

 those who have not studied the action of potent drugs like 

 aconite to form any definite judgment regarding their effect 

 in large and small doses ; so that it may be worth while to 

 give his views regarding vegetable charcoal, a substance 

 about which everyone can form an opinion. Most people 

 will be surprised to hear that Hahnemann gives no fewer 

 than 720 symptoms as being caused by a few grains of 

 vegetable charcoal diluted a million-fold with milk sugar. 

 These symptoms are of the most varying nature, from, 

 aching of the corns to headache, palpitation, and rheu- 

 matism, with sometimes a peevish temper, and at other 

 times an excessively cheerful one. The variety and 

 severity of these symptoms clearly show that they were 

 not due to the vegetable charcoal at all, but would have 

 occurred whether the charcoal had been taken or not. 

 But the most remarkable instance of a fallacy in Hahne- 

 mann's conclusions appears in his famous experiment on 

 the action of cinchona bark in producing ague, which has 

 been regarded by homoeopathists as one of the most 

 important proofs of the truth of the system. Hahnemann, 

 at one time of his life, had suffered from ague, as we 

 learn from Ameke's " History of Homoeopathy," but he 

 had probably been free from it for some time before he 

 made his experiment with cinchona. It is well known 

 that persons who have once suffered from ague are apt to 

 have it return when their digestion is disturbed, or when 

 they are subject to depressing influences. The dose of 

 powdered cinchona bark which Hahnemann took was 



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