Education, Medical -- Massachusetts -- 19th century; Homeopathy; Libraries, Medical -- Massachusetts -- 19th century; Medicine
This is a strange contradiction to the doctrine of the development of
what they call dynamic power, by means of friction and subdivision.
In 1835 a public challenge was offered to the best known Homoeopathic
physician in Paris to select any ten substances asserted to produce the
most striking effects; to prepare them himself; to choose one by lot
without knowing which of them he had taken, and try it upon himself or
any intelligent and devoted Homoeopathist, and, waiting his own time,
to come forward and tell what substance had been employed. The challenge
was at first accepted, but the acceptance retracted before the time of
trial arrived.
From all this I think it fair to conclude that the catalogues of
symptoms attributed in Homoeopathic works to the influence of various
drugs upon healthy persons are not entitled to any confidence.
2. It is necessary to show, in the next place, that medicinal substances
are always capable of curing diseases most like their own symptoms.
For facts relating to this question we must look to two sources; the
recorded experience of the medical profession in general, and the
results of trials made according to Homoeopathic principles, and capable
of testing the truth of the doctrine.
No person, that I am aware of, has ever denied that in some cases there
exists a resemblance between the effects of a remedy and the symptoms
of diseases in which it is beneficial. This has been recognized, as
Hahnemann himself has shown, from the time of Hippocrates. But according
to the records of the medical profession, as they have been hitherto
interpreted, this is true of only a very small proportion of useful
remedies. Nor has it ever been considered as an established truth that
the efficacy of even these few remedies was in any definite ratio to
their power of producing symptoms more or less like those they cured.
Such was the state of opinion when Hahnemann came forward with the
proposition that all the cases of successful treatment found in the
works of all preceding medical writers were to be ascribed solely to the
operation of the Homoeopathic principle, which had effected the cure,
although without the physician's knowledge that this was the real
secret. And strange as it may seem, he was enabled to give such a
degree of plausibility to this assertion, that any person not acquainted
somewhat with medical literature, not quite familiar, I should rather
say, with the relative value of medical evidence, according to the
sources whence it is derived, would be almost frightened into the
belief, at seeing the pages upon pages of Latin names he has summoned as
his witnesses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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