Reflections on an Ongoing Involvement with Natural Medicine – Peter Morrell

Main

Reflections
on an Ongoing Involvement

with Natural Medicine

by Peter Morrell

Clouds – Peter Morrell

Reflections on an Ongoing
Involvement with Natural Medicine

Though
my interest in homeopathy started in 1978, I can trace back an
underlying theme of the interest much earlier than that. For example, my
‘union with nature’ and a love of flowering plants and animals go back
to my very early childhood: “there was a time when meadow, grove
and stream the earth and every common sight, to me did seem apparelled
in celestial light.”[1] Some of my earliest memories concern
crawling in a field of buttercups and daisies, where I could dig out and
eat pignuts [Conopodium majus], and of picking violets for my
grandmother every spring from under a hedge behind her house: “those
veiled nuns, meek violets,”[2] which are “April’s
loveliest coronets.”[3] I have therefore long felt a strong
connection – a resonance – with the natural world, and with birds,
beasts and flowers: “childhood, whose very happiness is love.”[4]
In truth, I was a child always brimming with great curiosity: “curiosity
is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.”[5] Curiosity is “in great and
generous minds, the first passion and the last.“[6]

Conopodium majus

I was often ill or
injured as a child. For example, I fell onto some glass aged 5 when
exploring in my uncle’s carpentry workshop, when trying to catch a
butterfly, cutting deep into my left shin. Aged three I cut my hand on a
bread knife. I cut my fingers deep on some bamboo stems aged 8. I broke
my left little finger smashing rocks with a friend aged 11. I crashed
into a lorry on my bicycle in fine drizzle aged about 12, which probably
fractured my skull. As I never sought medical attention, I shall never
know.

On another occasion, I
fell over the handlebars of my bicycle and grazed all one side of my
face aged 15. Similar things were often happening to me, as I was not
very careful and a rather adventurous and accident-prone child
always out exploring and in the thick of the action: “sweet
childish days, that were as long as twenty days are now.”[7] I was also
much addicted to tree climbing and accepted that injuries were part of
such a risky life. I was always cutting myself on barbed wire or knives
and falling on spikes of wood. I seemed to be pretty indestructible
and I fortunately healed quick. In my childhood, I enjoyed
great “joy in nature’s wide domain,”[8]
“and golden joys,”[9]
and such a “calm sunshine of the heart.”[10] For in truth we realise too late in life that “the
human soul requires no other Heaven.”[11]

Asthma

My interest in health
matters naturally drew upon numerous such experiences, but more
generally derived from developing asthma as a 12-year-old child around
the same time as having the TB immunisation. It is too hard to say
whether the jab or the asthma came first. Certainly, by 1962-3 I was
starting to get wheezing attacks after running at school, although I had
experienced something similar as a younger child when I developed an
allergy to grasses. I recall at that time going to the doctors and
having little x-shaped crosses scratched up and down both arms and
strange tinctures dabbed on them. Those that became red and swollen
after the scratch test were substances to which I was allergic. Only
grasses produced a positive reaction.

Asthma had quite a devastating physical and emotional
impact upon me. Above all, it stoked a big volcano of anger for having
to stay indoors so much, for “health is not valued till sickness

comes.”[12] Being forced to read books and listen to birds and aeroplanes
did not seem like a fair exchange for being outside with friends
exploring the woods and fields, under the blue sky, as I had done in an
unrestrained way for years. Yearning for the return of my natural
freedom and good health, I detested sickness and its enforced physical
inactivity: “a healthy body is the great chamber of the soul; a
sick, its prison.”[13] Nevertheless, I was saddled with
asthma and bronchitis every year for decades and even with homeopathy my
health has been very slow to recover. As I was to discover, homeopathic
remedies are not the only route to good health and freedom. I later
experimented [1987-89] with reflexology, osteopathy and nature cure with
great success, for “diet cures more than doctors.”[14] These techniques I still employ.

Asthma undoubtedly made me conscious of health
matters generally and the debilitating effect chronic illness can have
on people’s lives. There is a savage indignity inherent to medical
dependency. The medicine of today has indeed “reduced the
patient’s autonomy to a therapeutic choice of drugs or surgery,“[15]
which stands as a chilling indictment of its claim to cure disease,
which is nothing other than a sorry state of medical dependency
masquerading as true cure. This woeful situation obviously flies in the
face of Kent’s insistence that cure should: “leave the patient
in freedom always.”[16] Aphorism 1 of The Organon
states the mission of the physician to heal gently and safely, to place
the patient in greater freedom: “to establish freedom should be
the aim of the physician, and if a physician’s work does not result in
placing his patient in freedom he cannot heal the sick,”[17]

First Experiments with Natural
Therapies

A major turning point came for me in the early 1970s
while at university. On buying a 1920s book called Flowers of the
Field by the Reverend C A Johns, I started to collect wild flowers
and generally investigate the wild plants of hedgerow, waste places and
riverbanks. This also led me to Culpeper’s Herbal and to a book
by R C Wren called Potter’s New Cyclopaedia of Botanical Drugs and
Preparations, which had gone through many editions since about 1920
and was the standard work on the subject. I very much immersed myself in
these books, one of which I had bought cheap from a second-hand bookshop
and the other I had found while rummaging around in a derelict chemists
shop in Leeds. Consequently, I started to prepare herbal remedies myself
and make decoctions and ointments. I made Yarrow ointment for wounds and
a Comfrey ointment for healing. These preparations could also be
obtained in old herbal stores, which I occasionally visited in
Nottingham and Leeds.

Comfrey ointment

I also started to try proprietary brands of
herbal preparations for asthma and chestiness with only limited success.
I followed the textbooks and collected herbs like Coltsfoot, Red Poppy,
Red Clover, Melilot, Lungwort and Elecampane. However, I did not find
these herbs to do me much good at all, and was rather thrown into a pit
of despair by these setbacks and disappointments. Gradually, therefore,
throughout the 1970s, I began to draw the rather sombre conclusion that
herbs are not very effective at all, while those “as strong as Aconitum,”[18] are actually dangerous. Maybe I had
failed to fully grasp the complexity of using herbs properly? They did
not seem to comprise a viable alternative to the antibiotics and
expectorants I had been stuck with for fifteen years.

Nevertheless, these observations saddened me for it
seemed that apart from a few good herbs, the medical claims concerning
the vast bulk of herbal medical lore is just myth and fairytale: a
disheartening discovery, as it throws into question everything the
ancient writers had claimed about the healing virtues of simple plants
collected from wayside, pasture or woodland. Moreover, that seemed like
an infinitely depressing realisation to me; it darkened my bright little
world considerably. Instinctively, I wanted them to work. In
effect, I had initiated a quest to obtain release from the crippling
burden of medical dependency; this was my search for therapeutic
enlightenment, medical truth and personal liberation. Henceforth, I
would follow only those paths whereon hopeful beacons shone.

Homeopathy

On first discovering homeopathy in the autumn of
1978, I had a bad cold just starting and a friend said, ‘here try this:’
it was Arsenicum 6. This friend kept livestock and was in
frequent contact and on quite intimate terms with the famous
veterinarian, George McLeod. He often rang him up to talk about his
goats or pigs. My cold disappeared within the hour and I was duly
astonished. On avidly learning all the basics, I then started buying
remedies and books and went to London to buy remedies from Nelson’s in
Duke Street and books from a shop called ‘Books from India’ opposite
the British Museum. I suddenly became very immersed in the subject,
buying Boericke, Kent and anything I could lay my hands on. First
reading Kent’s Lectures on Homeopathic Philosophy was a
revelation, like the rolling back of a heavy curtain of ignorance and
certainly a moment of great illumination.

Homoeopathic
Nelson’s Pharmacy.

British
Museum.

Though I used a homeopathic doctor for a year or so,
I soon began to treat myself. In 1980, I was interviewed in London by
Robert Davidson and offered a place on the College of Homeopathy course.
However, I was unable to take up the offer as I was teaching full-time
and was generally quite poverty-stricken. Reluctantly, I gave up the
idea. Nevertheless, I kept on buying books, remedies, treating friends,
and neighbours with remedies. Also in 1980, I undertook personal
provings of Euphorbia helioscopia and of Tuberculinum bovinum,
both of which had a profound enough impact to convince me of the truth
of Hahnemann’s original experiments.

Euphorbia helioscopia

Taking Rhus tox 200 one day induced terrible
nosebleeds every time I stooped down and at night before sleep. Tuberculinum
gave me deep headaches and very powerful heart palpitations, for several
days, especially lying in bed at night. Euphorbia gave me itching
of the face and forehead and desire to drink milk, very like Rhus tox.
Then in 1981 I got the break I had been looking for – an opportunity to
work part-time as a homeopath in Stoke-on-Trent at an alternative
therapy centre. It was great and I achieved a great deal of good work as
well as being plunged into the best learning situation one could find.

Historical Research

After ten years of part-time practice, I started to
itch for something new. Yearning for deeper study and with a young and
growing family, placed certain constraints on my free time. I let the
practice dwindle down consequently and cast around for a higher degree.
At first, I thought of doing an MA in Buddhist Studies at Manchester.
Then I heard about someone at Staffordshire University who was
studying the history of homeopathy. This was Phil Nicholls. I went to
see him and started studying for a research thesis. It was to be a study
of the history of British lay homeopathy, those non-doctors who had
practised it since the start.

Staffordshire University

This research took me many years to complete as it
was done in my spare time while still having a full-time teaching post
and the dwindling remnants of a part-time homeopathic practice. I also
started writing and publishing articles on the history of homeopathy
from 1994. My work was completed in 1998 and I submitted my thesis,
which, after a viva with an external professor, then had to be revised
for resubmission the following year. It was finally accepted and bound
in July 1999. I had presented papers to conferences in Stuttgart, Keele,
London and Linkopping, Sweden.

Keele Hall and
University College, London

Since completing my thesis and publishing articles, I
then placed much of my work on the Internet through a Swiss homeopath
who offered me this facility free of charge. This website was then
transferred to Homeopathy International in Montpellier in 1999. Since
completing my thesis, I have become increasingly interested in
sociology, the sociology of medicine and the sociology of alternative
medicine in particular. I do a lot of reading on these subjects and
about patient perspectives, spiritual views of disease and cure and the
possible efficacy of ancient medical systems: “clothe warm, eat
little, drink well, so shalt thou

live.”[19]
I suspect more has been lost than we realise and that some ancient
healing practices were probably much more effective than is generally
believed: “nature, time and patience are the three great physicians.”[20] I have done a lot of reading about
the history of medicine in general, trying to fill some of the gaps in
my knowledge.

These days, I am very interested in the core
philosophy of medicine, the nature of pathology and the real causes of
human sickness: “God heals and the doctor takes the

fee,”[21] or “God
heals and the physician hath the thanks.”[22]
These seem to me to be topics
just as alive as they were in Hahnemann’s day. I read a lot about
magical views, an essentially spiritual universe, mythology,
essences, narratives and postmodernism. With time, I feel these are all
going to become centrally important matters in medicine as a whole, just
as they were in ancient times.

The Innate Self-Healing Powers

Perhaps because of these interests, I think
anti-science and non-rational beliefs are gaining in prominence in every
field. They are also part of a natural backlash against a century of
unquestioned dominance by science and secularity. The artistic,
post-modern and sociological critique of pure science and of
scientific medicine is growing – a slow train coming. These are key
areas of academic study and intellectual advance at this time. It is
clear that medicine took some wrong turns in the past to give birth to
the modern allopathic mode of conception. It stands at variance with
natural healing in a number of key ways, especially regarding the
mistaken concept of ‘disease entity’ that has spawned mass trials,
mass treatments and the reduction of the individual to a mere statistic,
whereas natural therapies respect and treat each case as unique. Then
there is the very thorny issue of chemistry vs. the innate self-healing
powers. Understanding the self-healing powers is a crucial issue within
medicine.

Such innate self-healing powers, “the
self-rectifying powers of the vis

medicatrix;“[23] the “natural sanative powers
of the constitution,”[24] “the curative powers of nature,”[25] and “the vital dynamism,“[26]
are valid forces at work in every one of us and the enhancement of
those powers is the primary task of all natural healing. Homeopathic
remedies do not heal directly, but, like other natural healing
modalities, act indirectly by stimulating these innate healing powers of
the organism: “remember that it is our duty to help nature as
far as possible do her job,”[27] Yet, allopathy is saddled with a ‘quick fix’
mentality, what Maizes and Caspi call “the fixing

paradigm,”[28] that blithely ignores the innate healing powers.

Sir John Weir [1879-1970]
said in an address that homeopathic “remedies do not act
directly on disease; they merely stimulate the vital reactions of the
patient, and this causes him to cure himself.“[29] The remedy acts and “the
reaction it sets up in the organism is a reaction which goes on working
to the ultimate dispersion of the infirmity.”[30] Natural medicine therefore involves an attempt
“to restore health…an attempt to restore balance,”[31] for true “health is simply the balanced life.“[32]
The homeopath is always looking deeper, being “always interested
in the whole man, body, mind and spirit.“[33] Afterall “the patient is the
only one who can really tell what is the matter.“[34]
Homeopaths are therefore naturally more patient-oriented, more
sympathetic, less domineering of their patients and genuinely more
interested in narrative – how sickness uniquely affects each person in
their life and mentality: “homeopathy considers the single
patient as indivisible and unique,”[35] recognising “health as a dynamic equilibrium,“[36]
of invisible forces ultimately under the control of the vital force.

The innate self-healing powers are discussed at
length in The Organon: “it is only this spiritual,
self acting (automatic) vital force, everywhere present in his organism,
that is primarily deranged by the dynamic influence upon it of a
morbific agent inimical to

life,”[37] for it is “the morbidly affected vital
force alone that produces disease,”[38]
and cure must remove,
“all such morbid derangements (diseases)…by the spirit-like
(dynamic, virtual) alterative powers of the serviceable medicines acting
upon our spirit-like vital force,”[39] for, “it is only by their dynamic
action on the vital force that remedies are able to re-establish and do
actually re-establish health and vital harmony.”[40]

Osler
Stuart M. Close

All disease can therefore be construed as a “dynamic
aberration of our spiritlike

life,”[41]
“a perverted vital action,”[42] “the suffering of the dynamis;[43] and “primarily a morbid
disturbance or disorderly action of the vital force.”[44] Close is most emphatic in insisting that disease is “not
a thing, but only the condition of a thing.”[45] This difference was soundly depicted by Osler
when he said that “it is much more important to know what sort
of patient has a disease than what sort of disease a patient has.”[46] This fast reviving view regards
disease as a natural, though temporary, derangement of the organism, a
complex and “dynamic derangement of the life force.”[47] Thus, the causes and cure of sickness cannot be translated into
purely molecular terms, or into the spiritless, dead-end patter of
Newton’s mechanical model.

Marketplace
Linkopping

The Realm of the Molecular

The shrewd and original observations and painstaking
experiments of Hahnemann, and upon which homeopathy is very largely
constructed, are as valid today as ever. This approach is still a very
fertile area of research for anyone in the health field. Watching what
the body does and how it actually responds to sickness and treatments,
should never be left in the backseat by a hasty medicine, driven chiefly
by theories. A truly curative medicine must anchor itself firmly to what
is a crucial conceptual point no patient should ignore. Homeopathy is a
true empirical science rooted entirely in observation and the method of
Bacon. Yet, by contrast, modern medicine still tends to view the
organism solely “through the spectacles of its own hypothetical

conceits,”[48] having largely traded how the organism observably functions as
a whole unit in natural health and disease for the ‘spectacles’ of
reductionist physiology.

Looking back at things today, I can see that my
interest in homeopathy also flows from a more generalised intellectual
challenge asthma precipitated at the age of 12, to find and win some
sound principles about health and disease. While I was always easily
enchanted by certain metaphysical views about life and the organism,
perhaps I was predisposed towards them from birth. Though they were
battered by ‘rough seas’ in the 1960s and 1970s, yet with the
discovery of homeopathy, they inched back to the fore again. My dormant
interest in such matters has been greatly enhanced by the use of
homeopathy and by uncovering for myself its hidden core of metaphysics.
This is not a new thing, but for me today, it has become a central
aspect of my study and writing.

Even homeopathy can be located within a wider
paradigm. In ancient times, sickness was viewed as suffering inflicted
by God as punishment for human sin. Cure would come through
purification, abstinence, repentance and doing good works, as well as
the deployment of herbal simples: “…above all, sickness was
regarded as the finger of Providence. God used illness for a multitude
of higher purposes…as a

punishment…”[49]
Although medieval medicine
portrayed itself as ‘Christian healing’, yet it still retained, even
towards 1700, many of its more ancient magical ideas and practices: “…in
the world in which the ancestors of modern medicine practised…religion
and medicine can scarcely be teased apart.”[50]

Disease was therefore “a supernatural
phenomenon governed by a hierarchy of vital powers…disharmony in these
vital powers can cause illness. Thus, ancestral spirits can make a
person ill. Ingredients obtained from animals, plants, and other objects
can restore the decreased power in a sick person and therefore have
medicinal

properties.”[51] There is no doubt that “throughout the Middle Ages
and into the 16th and 17th centuries…disease [was] associated with the
work of Satan and with demonic possession. Plagues and pestilences were
believed to be visitations from God, to punish or try sinful people.
Protestants long continued to see disease as the finger of Providence.”[52]

Harvey
[1578-1657]
Hoffmann [1660-1742]

“A like fancy still lingers in some parts of
Europe. On the Cantabrian coast they think that persons who die of
chronic or acute disease expire at the moment when the tide begins to

recede.”[53] Yet, because “the thinkers
of the 18^th century had been too deeply infatuated by Newton’s
mechanical model,”[54] so this impulse soon spilled over
into medicine too. Such work was ably taken up by Boyle [1627-1691],
Sydenham [1624-1689], Hoffmann [1660-1742] and Boerhaave [1668-1738],
and much encouraged by Locke [1632-1704] and Harvey [1578-1657]. Thomas
Hobbes [1588-1679] then extended even further the mechanical philosophy
left by Descartes [1596-1650], by proposing “the universe as a
material continuum, devoid of spirit,“[55] which has since become enshrined as
the official creed of scientists. It is an unmitigated materialism that
makes them the avowed enemies of all religion and metaphysics, and gives
them a mission to work with tireless energy to purge the world of both.

Locke
[1632-1704]
Boerhaave [1668-1738]

Sydenham, Harvey & Newton

It
was Sydenham who first committed the chief conceptual error that
infected all subsequent medical practice, both in the impulse to
classify and name diseases and in then proposing that they are caused in
broad populations by invading disease entities of a generalised
nature. He also conceived the materialist doctrine that morbific
particles are the cause of infection. These errors lie at the root of
allopathy, while homeopathy treats each case uniquely on the symptom
totality of each individual patient, rather than attempting to expel
from each patient the same broad disease entity having the same name.

Oxford.

However, the transition from supernatural/magical to
mechanistic views took longer than we think. For example, “medical
teaching at Oxford was still essentially scholastic in character as late
as

1770.“[56]
The transition from “mere superstition and mysticism,”[57] to the “general repudiation of astrology and the
rejection of quasi-supernatural elements in medicine,”[58] took much longer than we imagine.
Indeed, it has never reached final completion. Although there has been a
move in the direction of “the rejection of superstition and theology,”[59] an impulse that “eliminated alchemy from chemistry and
astrology from medicine;”[60]
yet, in another important
sense it is increasingly apparent that within the superficial success of
this process lies a hidden failure. The “long struggle of the
medieval sciences to divest themselves of the clinging traditions of
medieval rationalism,”[61] also meant that “by this
time the ‘sick man’ as a whole had been pretty well lost to sight.”[62] Today, natural medicine very uncomfortably revives this thorny
old issue.

Francis Bacon proposed “that the pursuit of
knowledge depended on “the fresh examination of particulars,”
advice that underlaid the systematic observation of nature that
complemented the active experimentation advocated by his contemporary
William

Harvey,”[63] As most doctors know, “in 1628 Harvey had published
his discovery of the circulation of the blood,”[64] which unfortunately led to “a vigorous
exaggeration of the new point of view: every function was regarded as
mechanical; and thus arose the ‘iatro-mechanical school’…”[65] This in turn led physicians to “conceive of disease as
an embarrassment of the machine in some portion of its working parts;“[66]
“the spirit of the age…was crudely mechanistic.”[67] But the vitalists still hewed to their own line: “the
animists denied that machines were accurate models of the living
organism…the conflict between animism and mechanism is a major aspect
in the development of eighteenth century medical thought.”[68]

It is perhaps surprising to find that Harvey was also
a vitalist, who maintained that the blood was alive and moving in the
embryo, before the heart was even formed! His religious views found
nothing but confirmation in his embryological studies: “the
blood that circulates or semen that fertilizes…in this…lies the
astral pre-eminence of vital heat. In Neoplatonic terms, Harvey
envisages the blood as life and

soul.“[69] For Harvey, the blood “is
formed, moved and endowed with vital spirit before any blood-forming or
blood-moving organs are in existence…motion is intrinsic to the
substance of the blood and not communicated to it from outside by any
other part or organ.“[70]

Like many other great creators of science – Newton,
Descartes, Boyle and Sydenham, Harvey was basically a religious man who
saw the pursuit of science as they did – “for economic utility
and the glorification of God.”[71]
Nor was Sydenham the materialist modern people suppose, for he “stubbornly
saw no value in the microscope for revealing his morbific particles,”[72] believing it would contribute “very little towards the
discovery of the cause and cure of diseases.“[73] Nor is it therefore true that
science arose to expressly defeat religion, as modern scientists often
contend. On the contrary, it had essentially clear religious origins.
Indeed, for example “the ‘new science’ of post-Restoration
England, culminating in the natural philosophy of Isaac Newton and his
devotees, was consciously religious in inspiration and implication…the
discovery through experiment of certain immutable laws governing the
physical world was…proof positive of a divine omniscience and will…a
striking revelation of the order and harmony which God had ordained.“[74]

And again, “scientifically-demonstrated
natural laws…explaining the divine creation and revealing divine

providence,“[75]
could hardly be the ideas of anti-religious materialists. Such a view
was indeed a “natural religion, founded on the rock of human reason.”[76] Even the celebrated Boyle Lectures had been “endowed
under the will of Robert Boyle for the purpose of proving the Christian
religion against notorious Infidels, viz. Atheists, Theists, Pagans,
Jews and Mahometans.”[77] Therefore, the naïve and crudely modern interpretation of
mechanism as being opposed to religious metaphysics amounts to little
more than “a bogus prospectus, the child of an overactive
imagination, like designs for a perpetual motion machine.”[78] Thus,
we have shown that three major figures of early science – Harvey,
Newton and Sydenham – were not very much like modern scientists as
they demonstrably had not abandoned religion or metaphysical views of
life phenomena for the emergent materialistic paradigm.

Goethe

A Vitalism Reborn

Goethe
“rejected mechanistic views of life in favour of a philosophy of
holism.”[79] Paracelsus “saw the essence
of disease as spiritual;”[80]
according to him, “living
processes…depended upon what he called ‘archei’, the internal
living properties controlling processes like digestion…and ‘semina’,
or seeds deriving from God…who orchestrated nature.”[81] He saw the causes of disease in “poisonous
emanations from the stars or minerals from the earth, especially salts.”[82] The medieval physician had always felt that “he had
dressed the wound but God had healed the patient.”[83] Ancient physicians generally
adhered to the view of medicine as one of “supporting the
patient and trusting the healing power of nature.”[84]

For Van Helmont too, “every
disease had a vital principle of its own [archeus] which could be
treated by a specific medico-spiritual

response.“[85]
He believed that “all objects, minerals included, were alive…matter
was charged with a specific disposition [archeus], which created life.“[86]
He also “postulated the existence of ‘blas’…the heart of
the human body…[a] life-force dominated all corporeal processes…a
health-defending property.“[87] All these views can be seen as the
conceptual precursors to homeopathy, ground already laid out for the
foundation of another building – vital force and miasms.

In many ways, I feel I have arrived at a similar
place to William Blake, who believed the Gospels to be literal truth,
and the entire world to be God’s divine creation. He especially
revered London as a holy city: “to the visionary wisdom of

London,”[88] and he calls the British people the sons and “daughters
of Albion.”[89] He saw London as truly “the
wonder of God.”[90] He even regarded the gates,
districts and buildings of London as part of the physical fabric of a
divine city, a place of revelation: “the stones are pity and the
bricks are well wrought affections.”[91]
It is no exaggeration to say
he hated science and especially Isaac Newton.

Today, I can see when looking back, that I carry
within a noumenal reason for an interest in homeopathy, at once
both deeply internal and personal: a desire to retrieve a lost golden
age that flowered before I ever got sick and thus to walk again in
Albion, such that “joy rises in me like a summer’s

morn.“[92]
There would I “walk abroad in a shower of all my days,”[93] and be re-united with my loved ones
to dwell again in that happy state of joy and wonderment that I once
knew so well: “for childhood shows the man, as morning shows the
day.”[94] Such a life-affirming position validates the spiritual in man
and confirms elements of our potential immortality when purified of all
sickness. Such would indeed be the fulfilment of a little dream and the
catching at last of some precious butterfly:

Joy is the sweet voice, joy the luminous cloud

We in ourselves rejoice!

And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,

All melodies the echoes of that voice

All colours a suffusion from that light.[95]

Blake
Yeats

Like Blake, life experience impels me to distrust the
overwhelming dominance of Newton’s mechanical model. I feel we live
embedded in a spiritual universe, just as much as a physical one. A
wider paradigm must be considered, which connects everyone and
everything. A genuine resonance connects forms and events in the visible
and tangible world, which flows from a deeper source: a hidden
intangible world must lie behind the visible; this seems like the only
way to make sense of life experience. Blake, like Milton, Paracelsus,
Van Helmont, Yeats, Berkeley, and many more [yes, even Newton in his
garb as alchemist] believed the world to be spiritual, not physical in
essence. It is this belief that makes possible a pervasive resonance
between similar forms and events. Maybe this is the ultimate ‘law of
similars,’ that underpins all others. Crude interpretation of Newton
and Descartes, and others, by their irreligious followers, spawned the
fallacy of science – the sickening dogma that the world is a godless
machine, devoid of spirit. No wonder such science zealots hate
homeopathy, just as bats flee the sunbeams of the day’s breaking
light, being drawn back into their preferred realm of darkness.

Torako Yui, Head of Homeopathy in Japan
photographed with Peter in Regent’s Park
London, October 2003.

Notes :

1 William Wordsworth, [1770-1850] Intimations
of Immortality, 1807, Stanza 1

2 Thomas Hood, [1799-1845] The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies,
1827, line 318

3 Letitia E Landon, [1802-1838] The Violet

4 Letitia E Landon, Erinna

5 Samuel Johnson, [1709-1784] The Rambler, No. 103, 1751

6 Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 150

7 William Wordsworth, To a Butterfly

8 Johann Schiller, [1759-1805] Hymn to Joy

9 William Shakespeare, [1564-1616] Henry IV part 2, 1597,
Act V, Scene 3, line 102

10 John Constable, [1776-1837] Lecture 2 to Royal Institution,
2 June 1836, Chapter 18

11 Percy B Shelley, [1792-1822] Queen Mab, 1813, Canto iii,
line 11

12 Thomas Fuller, [1608-1661] Gnomologia, 1732, p.2478

13 Francis Bacon, [1561-1626] Augmentis Scientarum: Valetudo,
1623

14 Rev. Alan B. Cheales, Proverbial Folk-Lore, 1874,
reprinted Folcroft Library Editions, 1976, 82

15 W John Diamond, The Clinical Practice of Complementary,
Alternative and Western Medicine, Washington: CRC Press,
2001; p.11

16 James T Kent, Lectures on Homeopathic Philosophy,
California: N Atlantic Books, 1980, 160-1 [originally published,
Chicago: Ehrhart & Karl, 1900]

17 ibid, 79

18 William Shakespeare, King Henry the Fourth part 2, Act IV,
Scene IV

19 John Florio [1553-1625], First Fruites, Folio 34, 1591

20 H G Bohn, [1796-1884], Handbook of Proverbs, 457

21 Benjamin Franklin, [1706-1790] Poor Richard’s Almanac,
1744

22 George Herbert, [1593-1633] Jacula Prudentum, 1620

<sup>23 James Y Simpson, Homoeopathy, Its Tenets and
Tendencies, Theoretical, Theological and Therapeutical, Edinburgh:
Sutherland & Knox, 1853, 82

24 Simpson, 81

25 Simpson, 88

26 Simpson, 23

27 Frank Bodman, Sir John Weir Obituary,
Brit. Homeo. Jnl 60.1, 1971, 224-228; 225

28 V Maizes and O Caspi, The principles and
challenges of integrative medicine, West J Med 1999 171: 148-149, http://www.ewjm.com/cgi/reprint/171/3/148

29 Sir John Weir, The Hahnemann
Convalescent Home, Bournemouth, Brit. Homeo. Jnl 1931, 200-201

30 Robert T Cooper, Calcarea carbonica – a
Warning, Homeopathic World, 2 Jan 1893, 11-15; 14

31 Dr Charles Wheeler Obituary, Brit.
Homeo. Jnl 37.1, April 1947, 1-11; 1

32 ibid; 4

33 Stuart McAusland, Dr Douglas Borland Obituary, Brit.
Homeo. Jnl 50, 1961, 133-135; 133

34 A Taylor-Smith, letter re Dr Borland’s Obituary, Brit.
Homeo. Jnl 50.2, July 1961; 288

35 Otto E Guttentag, Trends Towards Homeopathy, Bull.
Hist. Med, 8.8, 1940, 1177

36 Guttentag, 1186

37 Samuel Hahnemann, Organon of Medicine, combined 5th</sup>/6^th
edition, translated and edited by Boericke and Dudgeon, 1841 and 1923;
Aph. 11

38 ibid; Aph. 12

39 ibid; Aph. 15

40 ibid; Aph. 16

41 Stuart Close, The Genius of Homoeopathy, Lectures & Essays
on Homoeopathic Philosophy, Delhi: Jain reprint, 1924, 67

42 Close, 70

43 Close, 72

44 Close, 74

45 Close, 70

46 V Maizes and O Caspi, The principles and challenges of
integrative medicine, West J Med 1999 171: 148-149, http://www.ewjm.com/cgi/reprint/171/3/148

47 Close; 37-8, 74

48 Hahnemann, Aesculapius In the Balance, 1805, in Lesser
Writings, p.423

49 Roy Porter, 1987, Disease, Medicine and Society in England
1550-1860, London: Macmillan, 27

50 Christopher Lawrence, Medicine in the English Middle Ages by
Faye Getz, book review, BMJ 1999; 318: 880, (27 March 1999) http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/318/7187/880

51 Rajendra Kale, Education and Debate, South African Health:
Traditional healers in South Africa: a parallel health care system,
BMJ 1995; 310: 1182-85 (6 May 1995) http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/310/6991/1397

52 Porter, 1987, 14

53 Sir James Frazer, 1922, The Golden Bough, a Study in Magic and
Religion, London, 35

54 Sir Isaiah Berlin, A Sense of Reality – Studies in Ideas and
their History, London: Pimlico, 1997, 8

55 Roy Porter, For the Benefit of Mankind – a Medical History
of Humanity, New York: Norton, 1998, 219

56 Richard H Shryock, The Development of Modern Medicine,
Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 1936; 53

57 Shryock, 59

58 Shryock; 60

59 Shryock; 140

60 Shryock; 140

61 Shryock; 111

62 Shryock; 296

63 John Grimley Evans, Education and debate, Geriatric medicine: a
brief history, BMJ 1997;315:1075-1077 (25 October), http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/315/7115/1075

64 Walter Pagel, Harvey and Glisson on Irritability, with a
Note on van Helmont, Bull. Hist. Med., XLI, Nov-Dec. 1967,
497

65 Iago Galdston, The Concept of the Specific in Medicine, Trans.
Coll. Phys. of Philadelphia, IX, 1941-2, 28-29

66 ibid

67 ibid

68 Lester Snow King, Some Problems of Causality in 18th Century
Medicine, Bull. Hist. Med., 1963, XXXVII, 18

69 Pagel, 504-5

70 ibid

71 Robert K Merton, Sociology of Science, Chicago: Univ
Chicago Press, 1973, 268

72 K D Keele, The Sydenham-Boyle Theory of Morbific Particles.
Medical History 1974;18:240–8, at 247

73 ibid

74 G Holmes, Science Reason and Religion in the Age of Newton,
Book Review of The Newtonians and The English Revolution
1679-1720, by Margaret C Jacob, Harvester Press, 1976, Brit Jnl
History of Science, 11, 1978, 164-71, 164

75 Holmes, 165

76 Holmes, 166

77 Holmes, 166

78 Sir Isaiah Berlin, Concepts and Categories – Philosophical
Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, 110

79 Porter, 1998, 249

80 Porter, 1998, 203

81 Porter, 1998, 202

82 Porter, 1998, 203

83 Porter, 1998, 188

84 Porter, 1998, 260

85 Porter, 1998, 208

86 Porter, 1998, 208

87 Porter, 1998, 208

88 Peter Ackroyd, Blake, London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995,
315

89 Ackroyd, 315

90 Ackroyd, 315

91 Ackroyd, 317

92 Samuel T Coleridge, [1772-1834], Christmas Carol

93 Dylan Thomas, Poem in October, 1950, Stanza 2

94 John Milton, Paradise Regained, book iv, 1671, line 220

95 Samuel T Coleridge, Ode to Dejection, 1802, stanza 5

Main