“If two dissimilar maladies happen to be coexisting, possessed of an unequal force, or if the oldest disease is more energetic than the recent one, the latter will be expelled by the former. Thus, an individual labouring under a severe chronic disease will not be subject to the invasion of an autumnal dysentery, or any other slight epidemic. Larrey affirms that the districts of Egypt in which scurvy was prevalent were exempt from the plague. Jenner asserts that rachitis prevents the effect of vaccination; and Hildebrand assures us that phthysical patients never experience epidemic fevers unless of the most severe character.”[32]
“If a recent affection, dissimilar to a more ancient one be more powerful than the latter, then will the progress of the latter be suspended until the malady is either cured or has been expended in its career, and then the old one will reappear.”[33]
“But the result is totally different when two similar diseases meet in the organism; that is to say, when a pre-existing affection is complicated with one of the same nature, but possessed of more energy.”[34]
“Two maladies resembling each other in their manifestation and their effects, that is to say, in the symptoms which they determine, mutually destroy each other, the strongest conquering the weakest.”[35]
He further contends that the essential nature of every disease is unknown; that their existence is revealed by alterations and changes in the system perceptible to our senses, and constituting what are called symptoms, and it is the series of these symptoms which characterize the disease in its course and its development. According to his notions, the physician has only to follow and study the succession and the grouping of these symptoms; in short, the phases and the phenomena of diseases. Attack and destroy these symptoms, and you will have destroyed the malady.
All classification of diseases, and their various denominations, he therefore deemed absurd, as, according to his doctrines, no one disease resembles another; so various were their modifications, that, with few exceptions, it was idle to give them a particular name, since disease was simply a derangement in our organization manifested by peculiar symptoms.
We are also, according to Hahnemann, ignorant of the essential properties of medicines, and can only observe and record their effects by experimental observation. Like diseases, they also produce a derangement in our organism, manifested by peculiar symptoms, their sole action consisting in developing specific diseases.
In conformity with these notions, to cure disease we have only to produce a similar affection; the primitive one would then give way to the secondary affection artificially produced, and in time the artificial one would cease to exist when the means that produced it were no longer brought into action.
Homœopathic medicines, he maintained, have the property of acting in a direct manner upon the affected part of the system; and this is proved when the disease, and the medicine given to relieve it, produce similar morbid manifestations: and he further contended that our vital organism was less susceptible of the action of natural affections than of those which are artificially produced.
On this basis did the homœopathic doctrinarians ground their practice; but a still more singular theory was broached by their leader; he maintained that medicinal substances, to prove efficacious, should be administered in an attenuated and diluted state, carried to such an extent as to become infinite in their division; he further asserts that this infinite division, far from diminishing their medicinal power and properties, imparts greater energy and certainty of action when these particles encounter in our organization an affinity of disposition, or a homogeny in action; that is to say, that these atomic attenuations act with greater power in those affections which manifest symptoms similar to those which these very medicines are known to produce when experimentally tried upon a healthy subject.