A
Meeting with Samuel Hahnemann in a Dream.by Peter Morrell
My hand – 2005
– Peter Morrell
A Meeting with Samuel Hahnemann in a Dream
Peter Morrell
One night recently (7 December 2005]) I dreamt of
meeting Hahnemann and speaking with him at great length. A range of
topics became revealed in this dream, but the dream seemed to start with
me roaming through some streets at night looking for a certain house. I
think I had previously been sleeping in an unfamiliar house somewhere in
the countryside. Anyway, I knocked on a door at night and an old man
opened the door and beckoned me to enter. I could see it was Hahnemann
at the age of about seventy-five in the Köthen period. I asked if he
was Dr. Hahnemann and he said yes. I showed him some papers or maybe a
letter and he immediately took me on a guided tour of the house while
additionally showing me numerous rooms and cupboards, bookshelves,
tables and bureaus stacked with books, papers and manuscripts, many
covered in dust and obviously untouched for many years. He also showed
me various old scientific instruments, bottles of remedies and remedy
cases. Throughout our encounter he seemed to treat me with considerable
respect as if I were some long-awaited guest or official who he had been
expecting or waiting to arrive and somehow impress. He greeted me and
spoke to me throughout warmly and respectfully, as a close confidant and
trusted friend. He was a small man of very light frame with twinkling
eyes and a ready smile and a shock of silvery hair, bald on top. He
spoke softly in excellent English with only a slight German accent.
S. HahnemannThe house seemed to be like a complex Aladdin’s cave,
a ‘rabbit warren’ consisting of many rooms and stories, all dimly lit.
Much of the time we spoke we were in a sort of cluttered attic with
numerous manuscripts and old documents strewn about the place, some on
the floor, laid out on tables and some high up on shelves. There was
another person in the house, perhaps an old woman, who I assumed to be
his wife. Wherever we sat or stood, I could see almost nothing beyond
the pool of light around us, which travelled with us and which I assume
came from a burning candle Hahnemann carried with him on a small dish.
In time we sat in armchairs in a downstairs room and talked of many
things about homeopathy and Hahnemann’s life, during which, and while
smoking his long tobacco pipe, he revealed many details of his views I
had never heard of before. Mostly he spoke softly and calmly, but at
times he became very loud and animated when he expressed things he felt
very strongly or which he wished to emphasize most forcefully as true.
Vienna
“In Vienna medicine let me down for the first
time. I had taken up medicine as a serious lifelong commitment, but I
had not fully really realized what a very serious and sombre profession
it is in reality. I saw first-hand the incredible barbarity of bleeding
and purging and despaired at this repulsive medical system in which I
was being trained. It caused great harm and in many cases terrible
suffering was made even worse. My conscience was deeply troubled by my
studies as I squirmed uncomfortably at the career choice I had embarked
upon. I had plunged myself into something I was ill-prepared to deal
with on an emotional level. I was high-minded, principled and
enthusiastic but wished to be handed the best and most gentle healing
tools. Was I really cut out for medicine? Could I really apply these
disgusting methods to close friends and relatives, to my own children?
My conscience was deeply troubled by everything I saw.Medicine let me down for the first time in Vienna,
for I felt a great inner crisis, because I could not realistically see
myself in my life ahead applying these barbaric methods to human beings.
Who would dare to apply them even to animals, let alone human beings? I
was deeply revolted by the methods of allopathy at a very early stage.
My conscience was deeply troubled. Everything I saw made a very deep
emotional impression on my mind. Therefore, I had serious misgivings
about my choice of career and felt like throwing it all in and
concentrating on translation work instead, as an alternative life path.
I discussed this with Dr von Quarin, who was in so many ways my personal
tutor and confidante. He was very understanding and helpful towards
me.”
A Gift for Languages
“I was born with a gift for languages. Of that
there is no doubt. I excelled in Latin, Greek and French as a school
child and from there I found that I could easily pick up any language
you placed in front of me. I found that I could master the main elements
of any language in a morning or an afternoon and would easily have a
useable vocabulary within only a few days. English, Italian and French
came easily to me, and later Spanish, Chaldaic, Syriac and Hebrew. * I
even picked up some Arabic. I had no difficulty reading and speaking
languages. This wonderful gift was a blessing that never let me down
once in my entire life. That is why I call it a gift or facility I was
born with. This gift also meant that I had a choice; I always had two
paths before me in life which I could use, and I knew that languages was
a path I could always rely upon, one that would never fail me or cause
me to be sad, or to stop and think.”
Sibiu
“I was very fortunate when medicine let me down
in Vienna because von Quarin came to my aid immediately. He understood
my problems and arranged for me to spend some quiet time in Hermannstadt
[Sibiu] to recover from my upset and to study in the Brukenthal Library,
where I was employed to produce a new catalogue of the possessions,
especially the coin collection. This task enabled me to study many
subjects, to learn new languages, and to study prior medical systems
often from their original texts, such as the works of Galen, Avicenna
and Hippocrates, as well as many great philosophical writers contained
in the magnificent surroundings of the library. *
von Quarin and Brukenthal“I was also fortunate in that von Quarin and
Brukenthal both regarded me very highly as one of the most outstanding
pupils in the Vienna medical school. I do not wish to boast, but they
often told me that. I simply accepted their judgement. On reflection, I
do not think I had the makings of a good doctor quite so much as being a
good scholar who was energetic and willing to stay up all night as
required in order to master any subject. As with my gift for languages,
this was a gift I had been born with and which I had exercised as a
child – devotion to hard work and study. Either way, the consequence of
this was that Brukenthal and von Quarin had kindly provided me with an
opportunity to take time out of my medical studies for almost two years,
solely because they regarded me as an exceptional pupil. I was very
grateful for this. They did not make such provision for anyone else in
the Vienna medical school, and so I have to conclude that they regarded
me somehow as a special case.“My time in Sibiu was certainly envisaged as a
rest and recovery period and a time for me to reflect on my future.
However, during this period I also had the opportunity to study many
ancillary subjects and especially original medieval and Renaissance
texts on alchemy, kabbala and magic, subjects I was not especially
interested in per se, but which had been a very important thread in the
history of European culture. I felt obliged to study them in that
context. I always had a great desire to learn everything I could.
Whether these ideas were truly relevant to my later studies is a
debatable point. However, the immediate problem I had was to decide if
and when I was going to make my return to Vienna and complete my medical
education. I often felt the sensation of Dr von Quarin waiting for me to
give the signal about when I would return.“Increasingly, as time wore on, I became anxious
about this matter and had more or less decided that I could not go back
there and study under him. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, he
had taken such trouble to kindly provide for me the time in Sibiu and
for this I was very grateful, yet gnawing away at me were my doubts
about medical practice and the methods he regarded as the best and most
effective. These doubts made me even more worried about my indebtedness
to him. Secondly, I could not find in any of the texts in Sibiu a better
system of medicine and so my search there had in this respect been a
complete failure. I became burdened by a sense of failure and the sense
that I had let down both Brukenthal and von Quarin, who had so kindly
provided for me for almost two years. Thus, I left there somewhat like a
scolded cat, creeping out so as not to be noticed. The easiest option
for me was thus to spend a term of study at and submit a thesis to
Erlangen and graduate that summer with the least possible fuss, hoping
that nobody noticed. I felt that sense of guilt and failure towards
Brukenthal and von Quarin very acutely for some years. In truth, I could
not face seeing them ever again, for fear of them being very angry with
me for disappointing them so much and wasting their time after they had
taken so much trouble to help me as their valued student.”
Doctors are Passionate and Serious People
“Many people outside medicine do not realize
what an emotional and serious business medicine really is. When you
commit yourself to medicine, you are committing yourself to aiding sick
humanity. That is a very serious calling. Death stands close to a doctor
all the time and follows him wherever he goes. He has seen worse cases;
he knows the worst that can happen. In truth, he is a lonely and
isolated figure with only his conscience and inner voice to guide him.
This is a deeply emotional matter. There is no getting away from it.
Therefore, the idea that medicine can somehow be a strict science and
emotionally detached is nonsense. When you stand near a dying child or a
close friend who is in high fever or desperately ill, you know what can
happen, you know the worst thing that can happen. Death stands close by
you, it hovers close and yet you are expected to do something, to
perform a miracle, to cast death out, to see it off. We cannot perform
miracles every day, nor even regularly.“You are emotionally connected to every patient
and the eyes of their relatives are upon you. They expect you to do
good, to cure the sick, and that your intervention will help. In only a
slightly diluted form, you feel what they feel. You want to bring
benefit and relief, but this is also an enormous emotional burden to be
placed upon you; it weighs heavy. A doctor carries that inner burden all
his life and for many it carries them off to an early grave; they die
young, because you cannot escape your conscience. Every good and bad
thing we said or did is held within us and invisibly we take it with us
and are held to account. This is the problem with being a doctor: we
carry all these secrets about life, death and suffering, and on the deep
emotional level, we are accountable for our actions. It is a very
serious and emotional calling and not one to be taken lightly.“The doctor is thus a burdened man. He is
burdened by his duty to the sick and ultimately accountable for his
decisions and actions; his conscience keeps reminding him of any
failures he may have been guilty of, and the real sense of failure hangs
heavy on his heart. This is an inescapable fact. He blames himself for
every loss. Therefore, it is clear that a good doctor and a man of
conscience may not make very good bed-fellows. They make for much
trouble and strife and much inner wrestling with one’s conscience. It is
a great mistake to imagine you do not have a conscience, for we are all
built this way. It is inevitable that a good man will reflect on the bad
things he has seen and witnessed and have regrets over certain errors,
misjudgements, decisions or mistakes. This is a fact of life for every
doctor. We sometimes appear arrogant or cavalier in an attempt to make
light of it and think we can shrug it all off, but at night and late in
life many of these things come back to haunt you. It can at times be a
pretty miserable and lonely calling.”
Search for the Possible
“One thing I never fully grasped as a young man
is that we must try and find what is possible for us to achieve. We can
easily waste much precious time trying to do things we are not meant or
destined to succeed in. We may even see others achieving things easily
that we cannot achieve. We should not be distracted by such events, but
should find and focus on what our own life path offers for us. Do not
look at what others can do, but look within yourself and find your own
path. This can be a very hard lesson to learn. In my case, as I have
said, I wrestled long and hard with medicine and several times gave up
on it because it let me down. I struggled with it.“At any stage I could have had a good career in
writing and translating and almost embraced that path in the 1780s as a
permanent option. But medicine was never far from me and I knew that at
any time I could reach out and have that path too. It was only my
conscience that prevented me from using the allopathic tools I had been
trained in. But my conscience in the end was my saviour, because without
it I would never have kept trying to find a better method than the awful
‘bleed and purge’ approach of Galenism. Thus, we can say, keep looking
for your own path, which life has given to you as a gift, and follow
your path. This is such an important point for every person. We can save
ourselves a lot of grief and vexation by knowing this.”
Discovery of Homeopathy
“Yes, of course, people say my discovery of
homeopathy can be shown to rest on certain hints and ideas scattered
throughout the past in such places as Hippocrates, Paracelsus and
Arabian medicine. But let me assure you that is not how it was
discovered. No matter how many ideas I absorbed in the Library at Sibiu,
the fact is that I knew nothing about homeopathy for another twenty
years. In truth, it emerged of its own accord through detailed research
and experiments. There really was no hidden plan which I had followed
all my life. At every stage I had no idea where my studies were leading
me. Even after the provings in the 1790s, I still had no a priori idea
of where my studies were taking me. It is therefore completely untrue
that I carried inside me the germs or seeds of homeopathy from my youth
and that they simply got confirmed and that they were somehow
mysteriously aggregated together in my thinking from a very early stage.
That is simply untrue quasi-teleological nonsense. This applies as much
to the method of potentisation, and the Law of Similars as it does to
the proving and olfaction. They were all discovered and confirmed
separately through empirical work. People will believe what they like,
but that is all there is to it.”
No Magic in Medicine
When I asked him about Paracelsus, he became animated
but insisted that he had personally never found very much magic in
medicine and he had little patience with those who believe there is such
magic.“The problem with magic, you see, is that it is
all very well for a tiny minority of doctors who have that gift and who
can actually rely on it from time to time. Good luck to them! But what
about the rest of us who do not have this gift? We must base medicine on
something more reliable and predictable, something more rational, a
better, firmer basis. For the vast majority of doctors, magic has no
place; it is a very deceptive path and is a pretty useless basis for
reliable and effective medical practice. It lets you down too
often.”
Hering
With regard to the training of homeopaths, Hahnemann
said how much he admired Constantine Hering, even though he had been
criticized by many outside America for his strange views, such as using
nosodes and high potencies. “What people should remember about Dr.
Hering is that, for all his faults, he was the one who established the
first purely homeopathic medical colleges in the world. That is a most
important achievement as every homeopath has had to train as an allopath
first, and this appalling and unjust situation has cursed our pure and
sublime method of healing for years. Certainly, we should thank Dr.
Hering for paving the way ahead.”
Organon
“I still think that the Organon is the
finest book on medicine ever written. I do not say this boastfully. The
reasons are that although it reads like a rather dry philosophical work,
and has been incorrectly criticized as such, yet every word in it is
based upon empirical observations and experiments and has been
repeatedly confirmed through countless clinical observations. It is thus
the distillation of my life’s work in clinical practice and theoretical
cogitations compressed into one volume. It is therefore a well-balanced
blend of theory and practice. Homeopathy is not really a theory or a
medical system; it is a proven method on how drugs should be prepared
and employed. When closely followed, this healing method is the gentlest
and safest in the world. It is the most natural healing method that
renders no harm to the patient. That is my claim and I defy anyone to
disprove it.”
Melanie
“So many people have commented on this French
lady who breezed into my life and changed it forever. Why could they
never see the simple truth of what happened? My life, when she made her
appearance, was very ordinary; my wife had been dead a number of years,
and I was living a meagre kind of life in Köthen just like a recluse.
Suddenly this beautiful creature comes to my house and we talk and talk
all day and all night. It was never ending. It is so beautiful when you
meet a person who lights up your life with love and joy, just as if you
have been roaming in darkness all your life and then suddenly the light
comes. What a wonderful feeling! We fell in love instantly. There was no
doubt about it for both of us. It was incredible. It was really a
recognition of two souls in deep fellowship, who had found each other,
like two moths each attracted to the light of the other.“She completely turned my life upside down. And
people said, ‘Why are you leaving your family and going to Paris with
this young girl, Dr Hahnemann? It is quite scandalous.’ Well, I would
have followed her anywhere, even to the ends of the earth if necessary.
I did not turn my back on my family; I kept in touch with them, but she
awakened in me something totally new and unexpected … love. What can
we do but follow this sweet fragrance called love? It makes sense of our
life and gives us new meaning and purpose. I had grown dry and rigid and
my life, in so many ways, was over.There is no doubt that it was a stale and loveless
life. And then along comes Melanie! What a treat. What a breath of fresh
air in old lungs. What a miracle. She made my life really come alive for
the first time. Yes, I was blissfully happy with her in Paris, just like
I said in letters. It was wonderful. She lit up my life as nobody ever
had. Of course, Melanie and I were two souls who shared a deep
fellowship of love. In a sense I suppose I was waiting for her to arrive
so as to make my life complete. We resonated with each other at a deep
emotional level; and so it was the Law of Similars in action.”
Discussion
While I was astonished and amazed by this dream,
which made on me a very strong emotional impact, it is difficult to
evaluate its real significance. Hahnemann confirms many ordinary and
well-known things in this dream. It is not especially contentious.However, there are several rare and peculiar things
which he refers to, which cannot be easily confirmed, but which seem
quite plausible when taken at face value. For example, he admits for the
first time to reading kabbala, Hebrew and magical texts, which are known
to be in the Brukenthal Library, * but he qualifies this comment by
saying he was not very interested in these subjects per se. That sounds
just like the old Hahnemann, admitting one thing and then denying it on
another level, giving with one hand and taking back with the other! He
was a slippery customer and ‘held back’ many things he did not want
others to know. Freemasonry provides a good example of this tendency, a
subject he returned to while residing in Coethen. His documented views
about Paracelsus, provide another example. What he did or did not read
in Sibiu is yet another example.
His comment about the origin of homeopathy is also
interesting for the same reasons, for he at least admits for the first
time that there were ideas in scattered fragments in prior medicine
which he knew about and which he could perhaps have adapted into use
later in his career. Maybe he was consciously aware of them, or maybe
they were just subliminally working in his discovery of homeopathy. We
shall probably never know for sure. In this dream, this point remains
unclarified.His comments about Sibiu and Vienna are quite
revealing and seem to signal a very plausible line of argument that does
not offend the known facts and in some ways makes greater sense of them.
Likewise, his astonishing remarks about the passionate nature of a
medical calling. For me that section is the most remarkable and
unexpected section of the entire dream. It is very revealing and
convincing, because every doctor in the world would understand what he
says; they would resonate with it all. Furthermore, it is stated with a
very typical brand of Hahnemann passion; that is, with great emotional
emphasis. Taken together with his comments about Vienna, then we do have
a very plausible explanation both for his deep disenchantment with the
methods of allopathic medicine from an early stage, and also why he
never returned to complete his studies at the Vienna medical school. On
this basis, the dream solves an historical riddle.It is also clear that his failure to return to Vienna
and complete his studies under his affectionate patron, Professor von
Quarin, physician to the Empress of Austria, is a true historical puzzle
which this dream sheds some possible light upon. Maybe he did go to
Sibiu to take ‘time out’ for the reasons given here, and maybe he did
not go back to Vienna for the reasons stated here. But we shall never
really know for sure unless/until some written documents of that period
of his life come to light; that is, if they exist.His comments about the Organon seem quite
sound and justified, even though he really is boasting in a sense. What
he clarifies superbly is that he regards the Organon as a
wonderful blend of theory and practice, that it comprises really a body
of theoretical aphorisms, that comprise a guide to what homeopathy is
and how it should be practiced, but he also declares that all of them
have been won through endless experimentation with drugs on healthy
volunteers and in clinical practice. This was precisely the empirical
stance Hahnemann repeatedly used in life to defend homeopathy against
its detractors.Those who regard the dream as a form of psychic
channelling, which I was inadvertently subject to, are entitled to see
it that way. I am open-minded about that but have zero experience in
that field. As far as I am concerned, the dream represents a vivid
dramatization of many issues about Hahnemann that have been troubling me
for at least the last six months. I have made some progress with all of
them, but in essence much mystery surrounds all these topics. I have
been especially interested recently in why he left Vienna and went to
Sibiu and why he never returned to Vienna to complete his medical
studies. I have been thinking long and hard about that for months. This
dream is clearly one attempt to answer the problem. However, I have
never heard or thought of the views he states in this dream about
doctors being passionate people. That was completely new information to
me, even though I can see the absolute sense of what he said. What he
said about Melanie seems completely self-explanatory and valid.Finally, I regard this dream as a pure unconscious
dramatization, which in itself represents an ‘excursion of the
historical imagination’ in an attempt to solve some real and unsolved
historical puzzles. To what extent this can be regarded as a valid
‘historical method’ and to what extent the results are valid remain
questions for others to judge. Even this method has an origin in some
thoughts I had a few months back that when you think of a place you knew
as a child, then you can imagine that town as it was then with all the
people who lived in it then going about their lives. One can recreate it
in the imagination. Just as we do now when we think of any town or place
we know. The other compelling thought I had that is explored in this
dream is that we can only truly know a person by actually meeting them.
Or can we meet them in various other novel ways and thus come to know
them intimately? Such as in this dream. As was once said: “The past
is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” [L P
Hartley, The Go Between, prologue, 1953]* I wish to acknowledge my sizeable debt to Dr
Gheorghe Jurj MD, a homeopath in Timisoara, Romania, who has recently
been visiting the Brukenthal Museum in Sibiu, to ascertain the contents
of the Hahnemann Catalogue of the Library, much of it written in
Hahnemann’s own handwriting. He has kept me briefed in some detail of
the library’s contents. It includes the key works of the following:
Agrippa Cornelius von Nettesheim, Georgius Agricola, Francis Bacon,
David Hume, Theophrastus, Pico de la Mirandola, Marsilius Ficino,
Montesquieu, Descartes, Voltaire, Boerhaave, Stahl, Celsus, Hippocrates,
Galen, Erasmus, van Helmont, and Helmbold. Is it really credible that a
man of such subtle and inquisitive genius as Hahnemann read none of
these inspiring texts?
