Physician and patient

by Worthington Hooker

“Antipathic treatment is merely palliative. When the action produced by the remedy employed, and which may seem to effect a neutralization of the symptoms, or even a cure, ceases, the reverse process immediately takes place—not only shall the primitive malady return, but come it will with aggravated symptoms, and in proportion to the doses administered.”

“The Homœopathic is the only one which experience proves to be always salutary. The pure and specific effects of the remedies employed being perfectly analogous to the natural symptoms, they go right to the parts affected; and as two similar diseases cannot exist at the same time in the same system, the natural symptoms give way, provided the artificial ones slightly surpass them in intensity.”

The allopathic mode, he claims, is the mode of treating disease in common vogue, and his followers call physicians generally by the name of allopaths. Now we have no objection to the name which they assume to themselves, but we do object to their giving inappropriate names to their neighbors. The title of Allopath, thus impudently bestowed upon us by Homœopathists, is not a correct title. The treatment of disease by physicians of the old school, as they are termed, is not characterized by any predominance of the allopathic principle. They do not ordinarily attempt to cure a disease by creating another. They do sometimes indeed make use of this principle. As good an example of it as can be given is to be found in the application of a blister to relieve internal inflammation. Here a new disease is produced, upon a part which is able to bear it without injury, in order to cure the disease in the internal organ. And no fact is better established, as my readers will all allow, than that disease is sometimes thus cured, although Hahneman says “Allopathic treatment cannot cure in any case.”

What Hahneman terms the antipathic mode is much used by physicians. I mention as an example the treatment of spasmodic colic by opium. This antipathic remedy in almost all cases cures this malady, though Hahneman says the “antipathic treatment is merely palliative” and never cures.

In regard to many of the remedies which cure disease, it may be said, that we know not in what manner they do it. As an example I will refer to cinchona, and quinine, the essential principle of cinchona, in curing intermittent fever. The fact that they will cure it in most cases is as well established as any fact in medicine, but how they do it no one knows. Many explanations have been ventured, but they are mere conjectures. Hahneman asserts, that cinchona and quinine cure intermittent fever on the homœopathic principle, because, as he declares, he has found, that these articles produce on persons in health symptoms similar to those of this disease. His experience, however, does not correspond with that of others, who are more competent to observe correctly, than one who looks at everything through the distorting medium of a favorite theory. Cinchona and quinine have been given to many persons in health, both in large and in small doses, in order to test the truth of Hahneman’s alleged experience, and no such results as he describes have followed. They seem to be singularly confined to Homœopathists.

We see occasionally, but only occasionally, effects from agents in the treatment of disease which seem to have their explanation in the principle, that one disease is cured by temporarily creating another similar to it. Hahneman fixed his eye upon these few facts, his mind became filled with the one idea which he there saw, and he was soon blind to everything else. Losing thus his mental equilibrium, he became an errorist precisely in the same way that thousands have done before him.

The second great principle of Homœopathy is, that a peculiar power, a ‘dynamic power,’[15] as Hahneman calls it, is communicated to medicinal substances by minute division, with agitation and trituration. This Hahneman considers as his grand discovery. This was wholly an original idea with him, and if it be a really discovered fact that a peculiar power is thus given to medicines, the credit belongs to him, and to him alone.

The minuteness of the subdivision prescribed by Hahneman is extreme. He does not talk of doses so large as the millionth part of a grain—this would be horribly disastrous. A hundred millionth of a grain is quite a formidable dose. A decillionth is the common dose, and this numeral is expressed, after the old method of enumeration, by an unit with a string of sixty cyphers. If we suppose the population of the earth to amount to a thousand millions, a grain, if taken in the dose of a decillionth of a grain, would supply every inhabitant of the earth with a septillion of doses. And if each one should take three decillionths of a grain a day, the present inhabitants of the earth would require very nearly a sextillion of years to use up the whole grain.

A Dr. Dufresne reports a case in the Bibliotheque Homœopathique, in which he unfortunately administered an over dose, the one hundred millionth of a grain of strychnine, a medicine which physicians ordinarily give in the dose of a fifteenth or tenth part of a grain. It was a case of neuralgia. He does not say at what time he gave this over dose of a hundred millionth of a grain. But after taking it he says, “the patient was seized with a paroxysm of the neuralgia in the night about an hour earlier than the regular period of its attack. The usual symptoms were experienced, but it was remarkable that they occurred in an inverse order, attacking those parts last that were attacked first before. The dose was much too strong. Madame B. was like a mad woman all night; the racking pains seized her whole head, and her face was swollen and burning hot.” But it seems that after all, this over dose cured Madame B., for “there was but one slight accession of the complaint afterwards: the lady has ever since been perfectly well.” Dr. Dufresne adds that he should never again be guilty of such over-dosing, but that had he to treat Madame B’s. malady over again, he should give a decillionth of a drop of the alcoholic tincture.

Hahneman and his followers do not talk of these exceedingly small doses in regard to powerful medicines only, but also in regard to medicines considered almost inert. Nothing is more common with Homœopathists than to give a decillionth or two of a grain of charcoal or oystershell, or common salt.