In Hahnemann’s “Organon,” he provides quite a long series of aphorisms in which the new doctrine is somewhat fully developed. I have transcribed, below, a few of these in order that my readers may be able to learn at first hand just what their author had in mind when he wrote them.[[5]]
Aphorism 5.—It may be granted that every disease must depend upon an alteration in the inner working of the human organism. This disease can only be mentally conceived through its outward signs and all that these signs reveal; in no way whatever can the disease itself be recognized.
Aphorism 6.—... A thing or a condition demands a first proximate cause only in order to come into existence; where the thing or condition actually exists it requires no further originating, no first and proximate cause, for its continued existence. Thus a disease, once established, endures independently of its proximate, exciting, primal cause: endures without further need of its cause: endures even if its cause no longer exists. How, then, can the removal of the cause be held to be the principal condition of the cure of the disease?
Aphorism 8.—The unprejudiced observer ... is unable, however acute he may be, to take note of anything, in any single case of disease, except the changes in the condition of the body and soul which are perceptible by the senses, the so-called disease phenomena, symptoms in fact; in other words, he can note only such fallings away from a former state of health as are recognizable by the patient himself, the friends in attendance, and the physician. All these perceptible signs make up together the picture of the disease.
Aphorism 9.—... And thus this symptom-complex ... is the only means whereby it is possible to discover a remedy for it (the disease), the only means which can indicate the most appropriate agent of cure.
Aphorism 13.—Now since, when cure is effected through the removal of the whole range of the perceptible signs and symptoms, the inward change which caused the symptoms is also removed (that is, the totality of the disease), it follows that the physician has only to clear away the entire symptom-complex in order also to get rid of the inward alteration—in other words, to remove the whole disease, the disease itself, a feat which must always be the only aim of the rational healer; for the essence of the art of medicine consists in compassing the restoration of health, not in searching for the change in the inward and hidden things; a quest which can tend to nothing but fruitless speculation.
And then follows, in the form of an “Author’s Note,” the subjoined commentary by Hahnemann:—
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.