Was Hahnemann the Greatest Physician Who Ever Lived? – Peter Morrell

Was
Hahnemann the Greatest Physician Who Ever Lived?
by Peter Morrell

Landscape with spheres, 1982
– Peter Morrell

To say Hahnemann was the greatest ever physician sounds
rather grandiose, an exaggerated claim, but it derives solely from the
pivotal position he occupies, a sober appraisal of what he did, the size
of the problems he tackled and the magnitude of the solutions he arrived
at.

To view homeopathy
against the background of the whole panoply of medical history – is a
grand and thus compelling task. It has not yet been sufficiently
apprehended from the distance that history requires to integrate it
fully and successfully into a broader context of medical reform
commencing in the 17th century and enduring up to modern times. Such a
noble historical task is made more difficult by those allopathically
inclined ‘historians’ who exaggerate scientific developments and
thus distort the historical evidence for the natural healing modalities.
Until that changes, our fuller view of medical history will remain
incomplete:

“If only more
physicians would practise the history of medicine in a professional
manner, their approach to the evidence could be more fully
evaluated.” [Weiner, 146]

The origin of
homeopathy is a point of historical importance. It seems that Hahnemann
created it as a monument to the reforming impulse of the 1600s, but was
led down a completely different track from that which spawned modern
medicine. Stripping medieval medicine down to its rude undergarments,
and removing thick encrustations of Christian and mystical elements
[mostly superstitious beliefs?], and finding only an ineffective form of
Galenical medicine at its core, he then forged, on the anvil of reason,
and from its central doctrines, the opposing axioms of homeopathy,
further purified in the distillation of experimentation. Thus,
contraries became similars, large doses became small doses, mixed drugs
became single drugs; signatures and poisonings became provings. In the
briefest terms – that is its origin. Hahnemann had no time for medieval
obsessions like alchemy, astrology or signatures and expunged them all.

A range of hints and
clues, scattered throughout his many writings, leaves one in little
doubt that Hahnemann saw his work in the profoundly wider context of
medical history. His extensive translation work, undertaken over a
thirty-year period [1777-1805], meant he absorbed an incomprehensibly
vast and detailed knowledge of the history of medicine – probably
unequalled by any other clinician of his day. Many references to
Sydenham, Brown, Boerhaave, Hoffman, Cullen and Stahl, reveal the depth
of his knowledge of the various theories, practices and figures of
medical history. His training in Transylvania with von Brukenthal, must
also have deepened his awareness of the esoteric legacy of medieval
medicine and alchemy. He was appreciative of the grand and serious
nature of his task.

“Disease is 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.”
[Kale]

Before 1650, medicine
was imbued with much theology and metaphysics – thick encrustations
which had dominated medicine for about eight centuries. Although the
rationalising force of the Reformation and the French Enlightenment
combined to render medicine more mechanical, and scientific, such that
it began moving in a modern direction, nevertheless, by 1800 it was
severely hampered by the barbarity and general ineffectiveness of its
methods.

Then, due to a
pervasive lack of clinical certainty, a war of theories plagued medicine
in the period 1700-1870, even further impeding progress. Any new,
concocted theory that emerged could attract an easy audience of
disciples for a time and could transiently guarantee winning some
measure of support. These numerous, evanescent theories were either
material [mostly mechanical] or metaphysical, and sprang from
developments in other sciences and philosophy. Essentially, medicine
became split into vitalist and materialist camps, modern medicine
deriving solely from the materialist camp.

“…the old
school of medicine believed it might cure diseases in a direct
manner by the removal of the [imaginary] material cause of
disease…” [Organon, 4]

Hahnemann [1755-1843]
lived through most of this period of intense ferment, which seems to
have been a necessary reconstruction phase medicine passed through in
its transition from medieval theology onto a more scientific base.
Speculation was finally laid to rest by unrestrained experimentation,
laying the foundations for physiology, biochemistry and pharmacology.
Ironically, no matter how hard Hahnemann strove to remove theological
links, others would always find ways to put them back:

“You cannot
divorce medicine and theology. Man exists all the way down from his
innermost spiritual, to his outermost natural.” [Kent]

Hahnemann ‘ploughed
a lonely furrow’ through the ideas of the medical past with the sole
intention of confirming or denying whatever others had said, alluding to
others only as the source of an idea or technique, which he was studying
at the time. Having been so sorely disappointed with the medicine in
which he had been trained, he was looking for a new medical system with
ideas that worked. His underlying motivation was to make sense of
everything around him, to retain whatever was good and useful and to
reject everything that was useless.

Having acquired an
in-depth knowledge of the main tenets of all prior healing systems,
Hahnemann then tried them out and pondered deeply upon them all, only to
find in every case, the same dismal ineffectiveness of their methods and
the paucity of their ideas. He was searching for some underlying
principles for the practice and study of medicine. Principles that could
be regarded as reliable and become true beacons to success, which would
never sorely disappoint sincere and hardworking physicians like himself.

To locate such real
and reliable principles, that must underpin all medical knowledge, he
sketched out the main ideas and systematically worked his way through
them. Realising that a sizeable mass of material in the medical past was
mostly founded upon crude and unmethodical work, Hahnemann saw a
desperate need for testing things through experiments. This was
precisely the task he undertook with patient zeal, after abandoning
medical practice in 1784 in Dresden and part-way through a 30-year phase
of translations and research.

Consequently, he
narrowed down his search to a number of key areas. These concerned the
actions of drugs in health and disease – which formed his expanding
databank of information. Second, the reports of various writers
throughout history on the variable nature of diseases. Third, the data
on poisonings, which he soon came to regard as a part of the drugs
database. This later became greatly extended, forming the basis for his
‘provings’ of medicines on the healthy. Fourth, the minute changes
brought about by drugs and poisons in their primary and secondary
effects – an only partially investigated topic in medical history that
he was personally to greatly extend. Fifth, the way diseases can
displace each other. Sixth, the nature of cure or symptom removal, under
varying conditions and by different means and their generally woeful
consequences [suppression]. Seventh, the nature and actions of the life
force or dynamis. These unsolved problems, inherited from medieval
medicine, comprised Hahnemann’s ‘mission’.

He saw his task as one
of clearing rough ground, collecting and testing a reliable database on
drugs and diseases, and investigating through experiment whatever
reliable principles he could find in the medicine of the past. He used
medical history as a database of ideas and methods, to test for himself.
Ransacking every nook and cranny of the medical past to drag forth ideas
and observations, he tested them, both philosophically as ideas, against
each other in careful analysis, and also by experiments. His writings
are a monument to this gradual unfolding of ideas and techniques, packed
as they also are with myriad references to the work of his medical
predecessors.

“The organism
is indeed the material instrument of life, but it is not conceivable
without the animation imparted to it by the instinctively perceiving
and regulating vital force…” [Organon, para 15]

From an early stage,
he portrays as futile and dangerous the medieval Galenic methods of
using crude and mixed drugs, based on contraries and in strong doses –
these ruled themselves out as barbaric, unscientific and
unworthy. Such methods do not cure because they are not holistic, they
chase symptoms around the body like an elusive butterfly, dampening or
suppressing the natural action of the vital force. For a short time they
may supply the temporary illusion of cure [through suppression of
symptoms], but then new illnesses spring forth redoubled in their power.
Instinctively, from the dismal results of his own early medical
practice, he knew this was the case, and searching medical history
merely confirmed for him the same view.

Because diseases vary
so greatly in subtle terms from one individual to another, Hahnemann
resisted the then fashionable impulse to classify diseases in groups on
general terms. Likewise, poisons and drugs affect people in broadly
similar ways, but also with subtle variations of individuality. Although
diseases do appear as generalised entities [as Sydenham amongst others
had asserted], yet in reality they also affect each person in different
ways, and such subtle disease phenomena fascinated him much more than
they had anyone else in medical history. He could not accept that such
individuality in the reactions to disease might be construed
mechanically by regarding the organism as a machine. Rather, he felt,
these minute variations were due to the individuality in the reactions
of the life force, with which living beings are imbued, and which varies
subtly and minutely in its action from one person to another.

“In the
healthy condition of man, the spiritual vital force [autocracy], the
dynamis that animates the material body [organism], rules with
unbounded sway…” [Organon, para 9]

“The vital
force dominates, rules and coordinates the human body.” [Kent]

Hahnemann soon
realised that medicine had been moving along entirely the wrong tracks
for many centuries, using mixed, strong drugs employed along the lines
of contraries. Such crude methods do not work precisely because they do
not enhance the innate healing power of the life force, damaging health
to the same degree that they inhibit its natural healing action. This
‘Galenic medicine’ soon became the main focus of his attack and in
this, he came close to the attitude of Paracelsus [1493-1541].

“These
[allopathically conceived disease entities]…were all idle dreams,
unfounded assumptions and hypotheses, cunningly devised for the
convenience of therapeutics…the easiest way of performing a cure
would be to remove the material, morbific matters…” [Organon,
7]

Being forced to look
mostly at moderate doses of single drugs to find any sense at all, this
inevitably raised the question of how they were to be employed – based
on contraries or similars? The careful physician who gently imitates
nature [Sydenham] and imitates the actions of drugs and the actions of
diseases, especially in their minutest subtle variations, is able to
gain control of the vital force and increase its power, rather than to
impede it.

“Man cannot
be made sick or be cured except by a substance as ethereal in
quality as the vital force.” [Kent]

Experiment endorsed
only similars, moderate doses and single drugs. He was led down that
alley entirely by experiment, and from which, as a system, homeopathy
almost entirely springs. His observations also confirmed that
suppression of disease harmfully multiplies and deepens symptoms,
whereas the life-defending actions of the life force constitute the
firmest and most reliable guide to good therapeutic action, to any sound
interpretation of what the organism wants, or the direction it is moving
in. Crude, strong drugs are harmful because they flood the vital force
with excess stimulation, act in the opposite direction to its natural,
curative efforts and suppress its innate and dynamic impulse to cure
from within outwards [centripetally].

Ranting like a
Biblical prophet of old, Hahnemann repeatedly repudiates the old school
of medicine, their use of mixed drugs in strong dose and their assertion
that disease is caused by chemical or material factors in the organism,
such as morbific matter or impurities. He always asserts that such
methods can at best give only temporary relief, but they always
aggravate and intensify the malady in the longer run, which thereafter
rebounds with renewed vigour.

“Let it be
granted now…that no disease…is caused by any material substance,
but that every one is only and always a peculiar, virtual, dynamic
derangement of the health…” [Organon, 10]

He denounces the
employment of medicines based on contraries, giving numerous examples of
the folly of this approach and the superior employment of similars for
every type of condition. He denounces old school physicians as lacking
subtlety, deluding patients with a quick fix, and being ‘champions of
a clumsy doctrine’. By contrast, he gives numerous examples of
superior, permanent cures obtained through employing similars, both by
natural similar diseases displacing each other and through the use of
similar single drugs.

“The
champions of this clumsy doctrine of morbific matters ought to be
ashamed that they have so inconsiderately overlooked and failed to
appreciate the spiritual nature of life, and the spiritual dynamic
power of the exciting causes of diseases.” [Organon, 9]

Like Sydenham a
century earlier, he denounces theoretical medicine and speculative
tendencies, laying greater stress upon careful observation of the
patient, of drugs, of diseases and the action of the life force; that
direct hands-on clinical experience is vastly superior to the often
flowery excesses of book learning. He repeatedly denounces materialistic
doctrines, portraying them as illusory and, though superficially
attractive, they merely delude physicians into seeing diseases as
externally invading entities that can be treated and removed on a
localised basis with chemical drugs. He asserts that it is precisely
this approach that intensifies disease of a chronic character,
driving it deeper and causing it to multiply into diverse types and
sprout into new forms.

“The microbe
is not the cause of disease. We should not be carried away by these
idle Allopathic dreams and vain imaginations but should correct the
Vital Force..” [Kent]

“The
Bacterium is an innocent feller, and if he carries disease be
carries the Simple Substance which causes disease, just as an
elephant would.” [Kent]

Disease, he claims, is
not, and must never be seen, as an external, invading entity,
separate from the patient, nor a localised affair in space or in time,
but a derangement of the totality of the whole organism – body and mind
– arranged longitudinally in time and always and entirely part and
parcel of the patient himself – a derangement of the life force.

“…Hahnemann
invariably uses the term, vital principle instead of vital force,
even speaking in one place of ‘the force of the vital principle’,
thus making it clear that he holds…that life is a substantial,
objective entity, a primary originating power or principle and not a
mere condition or mode of motion. From this conception arises the
dynamical theory of disease…that disease is always primarily a
morbid dynamical or functional disturbance of the vital principle;
and upon which is reared the entire edifice of therapeutic
medication, governed by the Similia principle…” [Close, 88]

Treatment of parts and
separate diseases are therefore illusions that should never be indulged.
Disease of the whole organism should be treated solely with those
remedies that impact upon the whole organism, which enhance the natural
efforts of the life force itself and which act best in attenuated dose,
employed through simile and as single drugs.

“Disease,
then, is primarily a morbid disturbance or disorderly action of the
vital force, represented by the totality of symptoms.” [Close,
74]

Hahnemann successfully
tackled all the unsolved medical problems inherited from the medieval
period, yet a timeless reference lies behind his work. The same thorny
problems about disease, vitality, drugs, dosage and holism are as alive
today as ever. The philosophical challenge that holism and vitalism
represent to modern medicine is as valid today as in Hahnemann’s day –
possibly even more valid, as the uncurative edifice of allopathy is
disintegrating – it is that which patients are fleeing, like rats
deserting a sinking ship.

“…in the
seventeenth century…the accent of therapeutics lay on expelling
toxic substances from the body – by purging, sweating, vomiting, and
the much favoured surgical technique of bloodletting…”
[Porter, 1987, 14]

Desperate in their
attempts to urgently stop the patient’s pain, the fever, the bleeding,
the diarrhoea, the constipation, the discharge, etc, and failing to see
that crude drugs only ever suppress symptoms and never lead to true
cure, doctors generally down the centuries have repeatedly resorted to strong
measures. Such strong measures [such as use of Opiates, emetics,
purging, antimony, mercurials, senna, bloodletting, silver nitrate
injections, and more recently, antibiotics, vaccines, hormones], do not
cure, but bring only the illusion of swift relief, and, though better
for a short time, sometime later comes the terrible physiological
backlash, with more illness, more internal illness, more serious, more
insidious and more frequent illness, a deepening dependency upon drugs
and devices and permanently ruined health. This is the pattern Hahnemann
observed and it has been repeated by most homeopaths, acupuncturists,
herbalists, etc since. We see the same pattern today in all the most
medicalised countries on earth. The adoption of ‘strong measures’
also means that physicians have abandoned any principles at all and so
they come to believe that there are none.

“Metallic
compounds began to be introduced into medicine on account of their
violent effects on the body…” [Bernal, 398]

The body system ‘runs
rapidly down hill’ through the deployment of non-curative crude doses,
and chemical drugs never really cure. The reality of this ‘path of
palliation’ endorses the vitalistic view of the body, because
chemicals should logically be able to correct all errors in a purely
chemical machine, and the curative value of all ‘nebulous therapies’
and even placebo would be impossible. That ‘nebulous therapies’ do
work and that chemical drugs don’t, collectively endorses vitalism and
holism, and suggests that the vital force represents a deeper and
superior realm of disease causation [and cure] that lies behind the
chemical machinery of the body. This simple fact infuriates those
hardened materialists among doctors, who hate homeopathy and acupuncture
and who set greatest store by the scientific belief that the body is a
machine. Keenly aware of the underlying and damaging implications
holistic and vitalistic therapies have for their pet theories, they
refuse to believe otherwise.

“…no
disease, in a word, is caused by any material substance, but every
one is only and always a peculiar, virtual, dynamic derangement of
the health…” [Organon, intro p.10]

Though gentler and
less barbaric in its methods than its heroic predecessor, medicine today
has changed little in its essential views. Less dramatically and more
gently, perhaps, but it achieves similar results to the crude doses of
the 1800s; it is still only palliating and managing illness symptoms –
chasing illness around the body – keeping patients on extended
programmes of dependency. It keeps illness going, creates new illness,
and ‘side-effects’, and merely juggles symptoms, chasing the
fictitious butterfly of ‘disease’ around the body, suppressing
symptoms and moving along the mutating ‘play’ of disease from one body
‘theatre’ to another.

“…homeopathy…can
easily convince…that the diseases of man are not caused by any
substance, any acridity…any disease matter, but that they are
solely spirit-like [dynamic] derangements of the spirit-like power
[the vital principle] that animates the human body.” [Organon,
xxix]

Hahnemann wished to
clearly elucidate the possible chain of errors that have led medicine to
where it finds itself. In his day, it could not even control or palliate
disease very efficiently. By contrast, modern medicine is impressively
able to control, manipulate, manage and palliate symptoms, but still
unable to cure disease, to eradicate a tendency to it or to elevate
health above that at birth – which the holistic therapies do on a daily
basis. Modern medicine acts just as uncuratively and as damagingly as
crude and heroic ‘old physic’.

“When a
person falls ill, 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…” [Organon, para. 11]

Manifestly, modern
medicine, just like its 18th and 19th century predecessors, cures
nothing, and surgery is merely a supplement to admission of the failure
to cure – if an organ doesn’t work, then whip it out. Extremely subtle
perception of cases over long periods is required to confirm the views
and observations that Hahnemann made and it is therefore little wonder
that his system has remained as a minority in medicine, being far too
subtle, gentle and patient for the average materialistic and hasty
medical mind to apprehend.

Homeopathy,
acupuncture, reflexology, and nature cure, can and regularly do achieve
such permanent cures and elevations in well-being. They do so by the
same means as commended by Hahnemann – they subtly direct all their
efforts not at the chemical level, but reach ‘behind the curtain’ to
a deeper level, at the life force itself, which is the controlling
principle behind the chemical machinery. They probe and eradicate the
subtle causes of illness that lie in the life force itself. A realm
invisible to, and firmly denied by, the conventional doctor who is not
trained to look at cases so subtly and longitudinally. Not only is there
a nebulous realm of cause in the organism, but also in the causes of
disease and in the mode of cure [remedy]. It is this topic that
especially fascinated metaphysically inclined homeopaths like Kent.

“There are
two worlds; the world of thought or immaterial substance and the
world of matter or material substance.” [Kent]

“It is not
the Smallpox crust that is so dangerous, it is the Aura which
emanates from it.” [Kent]

“Everything
that is a thing, has its aura or atmosphere…each individual has
his aura, or atmosphere.” [Kent, 1920]

Hahnemann is the only
physician in the whole of medical history who stands out as a really
pivotal and revolutionary figure, who analysed and demolished every
axiom of medieval medicine. He denounced strong measures to remove ‘impurities’;
he denounced contraries and mixed drugs in strong dose. He repudiated
the doctrine of signatures, astrology and alchemy, which were the very
foundation of medieval medical theory. He denounced virtually every
extant practice – including antimony and bloodletting, endless
speculation about the nature of disease and disease conceived as an
externally invading entity of a generalised type. He then formulated a
completely new system based upon experiments and sound reasoning – a
system that works in accordance with reliable principles and predictable
methods.

Furthermore, Hahnemann
is the only physician to have done this by basing his work upon a very
thorough analysis of past systems. He also shifted the course of
medicine away from generalised disease entities and back to
contemplation of the individual patient – homeopathy treats patients,
not fictional disease entities of a generalised type that have become
‘the norm’ in allopathy just as they are in science.

In Hahnemann were
combined a brilliant modern experimenter, a first-rate thinking mind of
great erudition and incomprehensibly vast knowledge, a superb observer
and cataloguer of details, a brilliant linguist and the most meticulous
historian medicine has ever known. Combine all that with his personal
qualities of strong independence of mind, love of arguing and
overpowering adoration of truth, and you can see why homeopathy is a
philosophical marvel, an historian’s dream, and a brilliant system of
curative medicine that is totally grounded in experiment and clinical
practice – it not only works, but it works according to predictable and
reliable principles, forged through experiment, from the discarded
carcass of medieval medicine – which had been picked clean and left for
dead by the vultures of so-called science.

And when he is
eventually appraised on the unique facts of his achievements, and the
magnitude of the puzzles he solved, then yes, Hahnemann probably will be
seen as the greatest physician who ever lived.

Sources

Bernal, J D, 1969,
Science in History, 3 vols, Penguin, London

Close, Stuart, 1924,
The Genius of Homeopathy – Lectures and Essays on Homeopathic
Philosophy, New York

Hahnemann, Samuel,
1841, Organon of Medicine, combined 5th/6th edition of Dudgeon and
Boericke, 1923

Kale, Rajendra,
Education and Debate, South African Health: Traditional healers in South
Africa: a parallel health care system, BMJ 1995; 310: 1182-85 (6 May)

Kent, James T, 1920,
New Remedies, Lesser Writings, Aphorisms and Precepts, Jain

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

Weiner, Dora B,
Medicine in the Enlightenment by Roy Porter, Book Review, Soc. Hist.
Med., 11.1, April 1998, 145-6

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