THE STRENGTH OF DRUGS AND THE DOSE. 35 



^^ potencies " has so far been adopted, it is far too closely allied in 

 meaning to the word ' ' strength ' ' to which we have already taken 

 exception, to be further used; our object has been to gradually 

 bring the student round to understand the application of the term 

 "ATTENUATION," upon which we shall hereafter rely in describ- 

 ing the fractional minuteness and the infinitesimal quantity of the 

 various drug preparations — and it is certainly not used here in the 

 sense applied to it in the British Homoeopathic Pharmacopoeia as 

 indicating that the specific attenuation contains more or less of the 

 crude material, but rather that it indicates the extent to which 

 the drug has been attenuated, pulverized, dynamized and diffused, 

 by which means its power has been developed: the prevailing 

 idea that the stronger the drug is in the possession of its natural 

 qualifications for producing specific effects on the healthy organ- 

 ism, the better and more reliable it is for administration to the 

 sick, has long been exploded, even among allopathists, if we are 

 to accept their prescriptions as illustrative of their simple faith: 

 but homoeopathists, especially those who possess faith enough to 

 follow strictly all the tenets of their master, Hahnemann, have 

 discovered that drugs in their crude, and therefore physiologically 

 strongest condition, do not best serve the purposes of the healing 

 art; indeed, those who are most skeptical on this point will 

 admit the illustration which common Sulphur furnishes in support 

 of this statement, for it is a well-known fact that this agent will 

 pass through the system practically unaltered in its crude state, 

 but after it has been submitted to the various processes of attenu- 

 ation up to the thirtieth centesimal, and much higher still, the 

 effects it will produce upon the system is simply marvellous; if 

 with Sulphur why not any other drug you can name ? Some one 

 may say that its inertness in the crude form accounts for this, but 

 that argument does not seem to meet the case, as any one who 

 will think for a moment will readih' decide. Before offering our 

 reasons for the greater utility of the attenuations which we claim 

 to exist, we must hark back to a description of the processes the 

 drugs should undergo that the student ma}- the better appreciate 

 the importance of obtaining the exact attenuation prescribed. 

 For the sake of brevity and conciseness let it be understood that 

 the drugs used in pharmaceutical preparations exist in two forms, 

 the fluid represented by tinctures and the solid represented by 



