F. J. W. Broussais (1772-1838), a physician of the vitalist school, was a devoted follower of Bichat, who made it his chief aim to find an anatomical basis for all diseases. He is particularly known for his theory that all fevers arise from irritation or inflammation of the intestinal canal. His long-exploded theory led to an enormous misuse of bleeding. He christened his system “Physiological Medicine,” which by directing attention to the morbid changes in the organs, led to the rise of the pathological school of Corvisart, Laënnec, and Bayle. The systems of Brown and Broussais must have destroyed, says Dr. De Noé Walker, more human beings than the whole revolutionary wars from 1793 to 1815.
Samuel C. F. Hahnemann (1755-1843), the founder of Homœopathy, was born at Meissen, near Dresden. He studied medicine at Leipsic, and afterwards at Vienna, graduating at Erlangen in 1779. In his first medical treatise he takes a despondent view of medical practice in general, and of his own in particular, as he is candid enough to own that most of his patients would have done better had they been let alone.
In a letter to Hufeland upon the necessity of a regeneration in medicine (1808), he declares that after eight years’ practice he had so learned the delusive nature of the ordinary methods of treatment as to be compelled to relinquish practice. He devoted much attention to the science of chemistry.
Berzelius said of him, “That man would have been a great chemist had he not been a great quack.” He translated Cullen’s Materia Medica in 1790, and the necessary study of medicinal agents which this involved set him thinking of a new theory of disease and cure which should replace that which he had found so unsatisfactory; he came to the conclusion, as the result of his researches, that “medicines must only have the power of curing diseases similar to those which they produce in the healthy body, and only manifest such morbid actions as they are capable of curing in diseases.”[1024]
He thus proceeded to lay down the homœopathic law that the power of medicines to alter the health must be proved on the healthy body. He endeavoured to discover a rule by which the effect of remedies might be ascertained, and which should supersede the old method of working in the dark.
Considering the endless powers which medicines possess, and feeling sure that the Creator intended them to have some purpose, and that to lighten the afflictions of the race, he felt that there must be a better way of employing them than that which he considered had so grievously failed in the past He was therefore henceforth the enemy of all empiricism. Antipathy, or the method by which contraries are cured by contraries, so that the diseased part is acted upon by something that opposes it, he considered a fatal error in medical practice. Contrary medicine he held could at best be palliative and temporary, not curative. He designated as Allopathy the method by which it is attempted to remove natural disease from one part by exciting artificial disease in another, or the principle of counter irritation.
The sciences of anatomy and physiology are quite superfluous to the homœopathist; the remedies being merely addressed to symptoms, the knowledge of their causes can have little or no concern to those who follow Hahnemann’s doctrines. The application of a remedy for facial neuralgia, as Dr. Mapother points out,[1025] has been applied over the motor nerve of the face, the inventor being ignorant that it has no connection with sensibility.
Hahnemann taught that all chronic maladies proceed from the itch.
Amongst other remedies for the itch, or psora, the swallowing of lice or a decoction of them was seriously recommended, because these parasites tickle the skin, and on the like-cures-like principle, would be beneficial for itch![1026]