Cathartics used to be utterly discarded by Thompsonians, but now they are quite extensively used. Indeed they have widened their range of remedies generally. Once lobelia and steam and red pepper were nearly all in all. But now they are making out a very considerable materia medica. At the same time they are dropping the names Thompsonian Physician and Thompsonian Practice, and adopting instead of them Botanic Physician and Botanic Practice.
Once no Thompsonian doctor would practice vaccination, because as he contended, it was better to have even small pox, under the guidance of Thompsonian treatment, than it was to run the risk of getting ‘humors’ from the vaccine virus. But finding that their employers would have their children vaccinated, even though they were obliged to get the ‘mineral doctors’ to do it, some of them have gone into the business themselves.
Such are some of the changes which have come over Thompsonism, giving it a very different character from that which it exhibited when it first came in its stern simplicity from the rude hand of its founder. Its popularity is already declining, and it will probably soon pass away, to give place to some other kindred delusion.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] Guy, in his Forensic Medicine, states that common salt taken in a large quantity has destroyed life, with symptoms of irritant poisoning.
CHAPTER VI.
HOMŒOPATHY.[14]
Samuel Hahneman, the founder of the system of practice called by this name, was born at Messein in Saxony in the year 1755. At the age of twenty he went to Leipsic, to obtain his education, with but twenty ducats in his pocket. While he was going through with his course of education, he supported himself chiefly by translating English works on medicine. He professed to be dissatisfied with the common modes of medical practice, and after he took his degree, instead of becoming at once a practitioner of medicine, he preferred to gain his livelihood by translating books, and by contributing to various scientific journals in Germany.
It was in the year 1790 that he first broached the idea, which is the great principle of the Homœopathic system, and which he soon dreamed was to overturn and dispossess all other medical practice. He viewed himself as a great reformer, as the founder of a system, and he was soon ready to proclaim to the world, that his was the ‘great gift of God to man.’ Discarding all the past experience of ages as useless, with his mind filled with bright visions of his future greatness, he was ready to say with Paracelsus, ‘the monarchy of physic is mine.’ In 1796 he published his first paper on the subject of Homœopathy, in 1805 his first work, in 1810 his famous Organon, and the next year his Materia Medica. He died in Paris at an advanced age, only a few years since, having lived to see his system adopted very extensively all over Europe.
It will not be necessary to spread before the reader the principles of his system in his own language. There is in his statement of them considerable verbiage, which has quite a learned air, but which would be unintelligible to the common reader. The essential principles of his system are but two in number, when the mass of words comes to be sifted by a little plain common sense.
The great principle, which lies at the foundation of this system, and which has given it its name, is found in the Latin aphorism, Similia similibus curantur. This is in homely English, Like things are cured by like. In other words, a disease is cured by remedies which produce upon a healthy person symptoms similar to those presented by that disease. Thus vomiting is to be cured by a nauseant, diarrhœa by a laxative, &c. Hahneman does not pretend that this is a newly-discovered principle, but says that it has been acted upon from time immemorial. Of this fact the following examples are given. Senna has been used for colic; rhubarb for diarrhœa; thorn apple for insanity; the sweating sickness has been treated by sudorifics, frozen limbs by rubbing in snow, and burns by putting them to the fire and by stimulating ointments. So Shakspeare alludes to the same fact;