EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MEDICINE 



his doctrine open to ridicule by the unreasonable 

 teachings of his dotage. 



Hahnemann rejected all the teachings of morbid 

 anatomy and pathology as useless in practice, and 

 propounded his famous "similia similibuscurantur" 

 that all diseases were to be cured by medicine which in 

 health produced symptoms dynamically similar to the 

 disease under treatment. If a certain medicine pro- 

 duced a headache when given to a healthy person, then 

 this medicine was indicated in case of headaches, etc. 

 At the present time such a theory seems crude enough, 

 but in the latter part of the eighteenth century almost 

 any theory was as good as the ones propounded by 

 Animists, Vitalists, and other such schools. It certain- 

 ly had the very commendable feature of introducing 

 simplicity in the use of drugs in place of the compli- 

 cated prescriptions then in vogue. Had Hahnemann 

 stopped at this point he could not have been held up 

 to the indefensible ridicule that was brought upon him, 

 with considerable justice, by his later theories. But he 

 lived on to propound his extraordinary theory of "poten- 

 tiality " that medicines gained strength by being di- 

 luted and his even more extraordinary theory that all 

 chronic diseases are caused either by the itch, syphilis, 

 or fig-wart disease, or are brought on by medicines. 



At the time that his theory of potentialities was 

 promulgated, the medical world had gone mad in its 

 administration of huge doses of compound mixtures of 

 drugs, and any reaction against this was surely an im- 

 provement. In short, no medicine at all was much 

 better than the heaping doses used in common practice ; 

 and hence one advantage, at least, of Hahnemann' s 



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