Physician and patient

by Worthington Hooker

“Tut, man! one fire burns out another’s burning,

One pain is lessened by another’s anguish;

Turn giddy and be holp by backward turning;

One desperate grief cures with another’s languish;

Take thou some new infection to thine eye,

And the rank poison of the old will die.”

So also the common proverb ‘cure your bite with the hair of the same dog’ has reference to the same principle.

All that Hahneman claims is, that he has taken this principle, thus occasionally recognized, and demonstrated its applicability to the whole range of disease, and made it the basis of a system of practice.

Hahneman says that there can be but three relations of remedies to diseases—heterogeneity, opposition, and resemblance; hence severally, the Allopathic, Antipathic, and Homœopathic systems of practice.

The Allopathic mode—that which treats diseases by creating another disease—he says, “cannot cure in any case; having no analogy, or opposing force to the symptoms of the disease, it can never reach the parts affected: it may suspend the symptoms for a time by heterogeneous suffering, but it cannot destroy them.”