Education, Medical -- Massachusetts -- 19th century; Homeopathy; Libraries, Medical -- Massachusetts -- 19th century; Medicine
I think that, from what I have shown of the character of Hahnemann's
experiments, it would be a satisfaction to any candid inquirer to
know whether other persons, to whose assertions he could look
with confidence, confirm these pretended facts. Now there are many
individuals, long and well known to the scientific world, who have tried
these experiments upon healthy subjects, and utterly deny that their
effects have at all corresponded to Hahnemann's assertions.
I will take, for instance, the statements of Andral (and I am not
referring to his well-known public experiments in his hospital) as to
the result of his own trials. This distinguished physician is Professor
of Medicine in the School of Paris, and one of the most widely known and
valued authors upon practical and theoretical subjects the profession
can claim in any country. He is a man of great kindness of character,
a most liberal eclectic by nature and habit, of unquestioned integrity,
and is called, in the leading article of the first number of the
“Homoepathic Examiner,” “an eminent and very enlightened allopathist.”
Assisted by a number of other persons in good health, he experimented
on the effects of cinchona, aconite, sulphur, arnica, and the other most
highly extolled remedies. His experiments lasted a year, and he stated
publicly to the Academy of Medicine that they never produced the
slightest appearance of the symptoms attributed to them. The results of
a man like this, so extensively known as one of the most philosophical
and candid, as well as brilliant of instructors, and whose admirable
abilities and signal liberality are generally conceded, ought to be of
great weight in deciding the question.
M. Double, a well-known medical writer and a physician of high standing
in Paris, had occasion so long ago as 1801, before he had heard of
Homoeopathy, to make experiments upon Cinchona, or Peruvian bark. He and
several others took the drug in every kind of dose for four months, and
the fever it is pretended by Hahnemann to excite never was produced.
M. Bonnet, President of the Royal Society of Medicine of Bordeaux, had
occasion to observe many soldiers during the Peninsular War, who made
use of Cinchona as a preservative against different diseases, but he
never found it to produce the pretended paroxysms.
If any objection were made to evidence of this kind, I would refer to
the express experiments on many of the Homoeopathic substances, which
were given to healthy persons with every precaution as to diet and
regimen, by M. Louis Fleury, without being followed by the slightest of
the pretended consequences. And let me mention as a curious fact, that
the same quantity of arsenic given to one animal in the common form of
the unprepared powder, and to another after having been rubbed up into
six hundred globules, offered no particular difference of activity in
the two cases.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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