It is only through a misuse of the desire to reach the eternal, sown in the spirit of man for nobler purposes, that these impudent attempts have been made upon the realm of the impossible, those speculative broodings over the essential nature of the medicinal powers of drugs, over vitality, over the invisible working of the organism in health and over the changes of this hidden inner working which constitute disease—in other words, over the inner nature and essence of illness.... When the physician maintains that research into such things is necessary, then he shows a misconception of the capacities of men and a misunderstanding of the requisites for the work of healing. ... If only it had served the practice of medicine in the slightest degree,—if all this subtile investigation had revealed the true remedy for the least of diseases, it might yet pass for desirable! APHORISM 31.—The great homeopathic law of cure rests on this law of man’s nature, revealed by experience, that diseases are only destroyed and cured by similar diseases. The homeopathic law may be thus formulated: that a disease can only be destroyed and cured by a remedy which has the tendency to produce a similar disease, for the effects of drugs are in themselves no other than artificial diseases. The preceding more or less disconnected portions of the text of Hahnemann’s great work—“Organon of the Rational Art of Healing”—are quoted here, not with the idea that they will convey to the reader a very clear idea of the doctrine of homoeopathy and of the way in which it is to be applied in the practice of medicine, but rather for the purpose of showing the extraordinary manner in which Hahnemann utilized his reasoning powers in his efforts to create a new pathology and a new system of therapeutics that would harmonize with this new doctrine. A further inquiry into the manner in which the disciples of Hahnemann acted upon these principles of homoeopathy in the practice of their profession establishes the fact that they believed in the remedial efficiency of doses that contained as small a quantity as the billionth or the decillionth of a grain of the drug. In a report which he makes to the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Edinburgh, James J. Simpson, the distinguished professor of midwifery in the University of that city, comments (1851–1852) upon these infinitely small doses in the following terms:—