Hahnemann’s Mission in Relation to Modern Homeopathy.
by Peter Morrell
The Visitor. A poem by Tu Fu, 2 March 1982 – Peter
Morrell
Hahnemann’s Mission in
Relation to Modern Homeopathy
When we look at homeopathy growing in the world
today, this raises a number of important issues, some more recent and
some embedded in Hahnemann’s own times two centuries ago. This article
explores centrally relevant issues of today that also troubled Hahnemann
himself, which derived from his own scathing analysis of Old Physick,
and upon which homeopathy was largely constructed.
Finding Definite Proofs Against
Old Physick
Although Hahnemann spent over twenty years as a
translator of medical and scientific texts, he was nevertheless
simultaneously using this time to study the causes of the failure of the
medical system of his day – a puzzle his conscience refused to leave
unsolved. He never gave up searching for new medical truths. Therefore,
although superficially he appeared to have abandoned medicine
completely, yet in essence he was biding his time and actively searching
for medical enlightenment. During these “restless years of
wandering,” [Haehl, vol. 1, 13] Even during “this
restless inclination for travelling,” [Haehl, vol. 1, 47]
Hahnemann was quietly developing his ideas and publishing essays based
upon his studies.
Hahnemann’s searches of the medical literature were
not primarily conducted to obtain theoretical ideas and to back-up his
own evolving medical views, but as a crucial means by which he could
trawl the medical past and present for detailed case reports concerning
diseases and drugs and their various specific effects on the human
organism, as well as interactions between them, cases of poisoning and
cures of all types. Literary work thus provided him with a precious
window through which he could view not just medical ideas, but also the
practical clinical activities of hundreds of fellow physicians scattered
through time, the cumulative experiences of whom Hahnemann could draw on
to fertilise his growing views about drugs and diseases. Through cunning
use of this approach, he was soon able to distil down a huge mass of
material into a few basic principles governing the actions of diseases
and drugs, which methods work and which do not. In brief, this was his
‘big idea,’ and was his true mission in life.
Dresden.
He obtained various medical positions during 1780-83,
but soon after his marriage [1782] he became increasingly disenchanted
with the imperfections of medical practice, [Haehl, vol. 1, 29, 33;
Cook, 47, 52] and turned once again to translation work to enhance his
modest income and to feed his growing family. On moving to Dresden in
1784, and by this time hugely dissatisfied with the harmfulness and
inefficacy of medicine, he gave up medical practice entirely so as to
devote himself to translation work on a full-time basis. In Dresden,
“Hahnemann…practised his profession only to obtain definite
proofs against it.” [Gumpert, 49] He already knew it was
harmful and uncurative. Now he wanted to reform it, to wrest victory
from the jaws of defeat.
He then embarked on many travels. For example, in 12
years from 1792-1804, he lived in fourteen different towns. During this
important phase of “his restless wandering life,”
[Haehl, vol. 1, 23] he was a lonely figure, thoroughly disgusted with
medicine [Cook, 52; Haehl, vol. 1, 64] and completing many translations
for his sole income. Between 1777 and 1806 he translated 24 large
textbooks and numerous articles into German, usually accompanied with
extensive footnotes and detailed corrections of his own. What we might
term ‘Hahnemann’s mission,’ formulated mostly in the ‘wandering
years,’ [1783-1804] was to find out why the medicine of his day was
such a total failure and what useful things could be gleaned from a
sustained study of the medical past, so as to piece together, hopefully,
some salvaged scraps and build something that both ‘worked and made
sense;’ he craved a medical system that did both.
Torgau.
After finally settling down in Torgau in 1804 he
started to commit to paper those ideas that had been troubling him
during his wandering years and the results of his many experiments. In
1804, with “this restless inclination for travelling,”
[Haehl, vol. 1, 47] finally expended, he settled in Torgau, “for
seven whole years,” [Haehl, vol. 1, 72] – 1804-1811 – and began
to write a series of important essays: all “his chief works were
produced in the Torgau period,” [Haehl, vol. 1, 74] within
which every detail of his new system was taking shape. Into these essays
were instilled everything he had discovered in his restless wandering,
deriving from his provings, his thinking and his extended studies.
What he Roundly Condemned
It is quite obvious and beyond any reasonable doubt
that Hahnemann had thoroughly scoured all prior medical systems for
truth. Knowing this gives us a key to unlock many mysteries. This
especially occurred during the time when he was most fully absorbed in
translation work, roughly between 1783 and 1804. As a result, he
specifically rejected, and often roundly condemned, Galen, Paracelsus,
contraries, signatures, astrology, mixed drugs, strong doses, prayers,
spells, incantations, purging, bleeding, enemas [clysters], and the
prevalent notion of cleansing or purifying the blood or bowels of
alleged ‘toxic material.’ He “was a most passionate opponent
of mixed doses that contained a large number of ingredients.”
[Gumpert, 96] He sought to “do away with the blind chimney
sweeper’s methods of dulling symptoms,” [Gumpert, 99] then so
much in vogue.
Hahnemann frequently condemned many aspects of
ancient medicine, such as speculative metaphysics: astrology and
theology, and their medieval supernatural garb, with which he had only
limited patience: “…metaphysical, mystical, and supernatural
speculations, which idle and self-sufficient visionaries have
devised;” [Dudgeon, The Lesser Writings of Samuel Hahnemann,
491] “…now the influence of the stars, now that of evil
spirits and witchcraft…” [Lesser Writings, 1805, 421]
In an especially contemptuous blast, Hahnemann even questions how “old
astrology was to explain what puzzled modern natural philosophy.”
[Lesser Writings, 490] And, “…we were fooled by the
natural philosophers….their whole conception – so unintelligible, so
hollow and unmeaning, that no clear sense could be drawn from it.”
[Lesser Writings, 1808, 494]
Medieval medicine regarded disease and cure as God’s
work and an aspect of His plan for each person. 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…” [Porter, 1987, 27] 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.” [see Lawrence]
Disease was therefore seen as “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, BMJ 1995]
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.”[Porter, 1987, 14] In terms of the nature of
pathology and the real causes of human sickness: “God heals and
the doctor takes the fee,” [Benjamin Franklin] or “God
heals and the physician hath the thanks.” [George Herbert] These
topics are just as alive today as they were in Hahnemann’s time.
Goethe “rejected mechanistic views of life in
favour of a philosophy of holism.”[Porter, 1998, 249]
Paracelsus “saw the essence of disease as spiritual;”[Porter,
1998, 203] 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.“[Porter, 1998, 202] He saw the causes of
disease in “poisonous emanations from the stars or minerals from
the earth, especially salts.”[Porter, 1998, 203] The medieval
physician had always felt that “he had dressed the wound but God
had healed the patient.”[Porter, 1998, 188] Ancient physicians
generally adhered to the view of medicine as one of “supporting
the patient and trusting the healing power of nature.“[Porter,
1998, 260]
Lest we forget, “Hahnemann took ten years to test
his general rule [similia] before he used potencies at all…the
infinitesimal dose…is not laid down on theoretical grounds…[he]
developed it…from experiment alone…[which was] Hahnemann’s
doctrine and practice throughout his life,” [Dr Charles
Wheeler, 1944, 169]. As late as “the 1650s, doctors still spoke
largely of the sick man’s humors rather than of any particular entity
from which he suffered.” [Shryock, 12] And even in Hahnemann’s
time, the continued domination of medicine by the Greek theory of
humours also gave some sanction to the strong purificatory measures
preferred by all physicians, even extending down to the 1870s.
Rather Sweeping Condemnations
He therefore rejected outright the tenets of medieval
Galenism and most of its underpinning theoretical support structures
[what we might term ‘medical theology’]. He specifically condemned
them not only as antiquated, outdated and useless therapeutic measures,
but also as unhelpful, inaccurate, ineffective, misleading and
endangering to patient health.
We need to ask how valid his condemnations actually
were. Some of these objections were theoretical and some were based in
his own dismal medical practice, his own first-hand clinical experience.
Added to these were also the combined experiences of many other
physicians he knew and those whose medical casenotes he had read about
in the vast medical literature to which his translation work had given
him such detailed access. As a result, he denounced the medicine of his
day as useless, uncurative, dangerous and at best only palliative.
Hahnemann did not believe in the entrenched and
unquestioned ‘impurity theory’ of disease, upon which medieval
medicine was very largely based, because medical practice had very
painfully taught him that its methods were useless and dangerous. Thus
he probably felt wholly justified in condemning, just as forcefully, the
theories upon which those methods rested. He could see that behind those
methods and theories there existed a subtle and mysterious internal ‘genotype’
of disease cause from which chronic disease still inevitably springs
even after the use of palliative drugs have improved symptoms or subdued
a condition. He could see that strong drugs never actually cure sickness
or remove this deeper, innate tendency to sickness. They may delay
things or modify them, but they do not stop disease from arising.
It is likely that 1782-85 he only conceived of
himself as a translator of medical texts and a disgruntled critic of
orthodox medicine – he unleashed “uncontrolled and abusive
attacks on contemporary medicine.” [Cook, 105] We need to
understand why. It is doubtful that he could at that stage see beyond
such a role. Apart from being an open critic of medicine, or that he was
soon to become a great pioneer of a new system and a medical prophet. He
saw drugs as at best only palliative because they could not stop disease
arising from its deeper hidden source, from which it seems to spring
relentlessly in each one of us sooner or later. He maintained a constant
dialogue between the theory and practice of medicine and saw them both
as fertile sources always interlocked and influencing each other.
Ideally for him, they had to reflect each other; he was an intensely
pragmatic man, rarely allured solely by a theory. In this respect, he
was genuinely quite scientific in believing that something worked
because it was the right theory, and that useless methods were useless
because the theory they rested on was wrong.
Of course, he was right to condemn what he knew to be
bogus – mostly 18th century ideas and methods – but was he
right to condemn what he could not know for sure if he so obviously did
not fully appreciate the theories it was based upon? At times he seems
to have impatiently condemned some practices and theories automatically,
in broad brush terms, when a theory or method that applied well to one
case may not have applied quite so well to another. Such was the nature
of medieval Physick. Thus, at times he may have committed an unworthy
averaging process in some of his more sweeping condemnations. He
probably condemned such body-purifying measures as clysters, purging,
bleeding and emesis, more on principle rather than because he had
personally investigated each of them very thoroughly through first-hand
use and found them wanting.
It is unlikely that he had tried and tested them all.
He was perhaps too sweeping in this than he could have been and so some
things were probably wrongly condemned by him in haste as useless that
plainly aren’t. As he spoke so often in such absolute terms, we are
entitled to conclude that is how he predominantly thought. Hahnemann
reasoned that because crude drugs were mainly palliative, then that was
all they could ever achieve. His reasoning was that being used
habitually in complex mixtures and in strong doses, on the basis of the
invalid principle of contraries, meant that they were utterly doomed in
every respect. If the theories were wrong, then all methods based on
them were also wrong. This is flawed reasoning, however, as some methods
might have worked but for very different reasons. Furthermore, their
true healing properties were largely obscured or unknown by their
improper mode of use and thus any healing properties single drugs really
did possess should be ascertained beforehand by provings on healthy
volunteers. His view that they should only be used singly and in
moderate doses on the basis of similars also follows from the same line
of argument: Hahnemann had noticed that “a drug imposes its own
disease on the patient and wipes out the natural disease.”
[Charles Wheeler, 170]
However, in medieval medicine the composition of
mixtures of drugs were constantly rotated by physicians to fit each
individual case and not always fixed by rote as Hahnemann implied in his
harsh judgement.
Yet, in Hahnemann’s day the fine-tune technique of
ancient medicine had been abandoned in favour of more brutal methods and
a heavy-handed reliance on Greek-driven measures like purging, cupping,
leeches and opening a vein. Increasingly, these generalised and brutal
methods of treatment were used on an unquestioning, rote basis for every
case, in ignorance of individual symptom totality; fine-tuning was
abandoned. The idea of specifics came to dominate the concept of ‘disease’
and the idea of ‘matching drug’ such that the previous medieval
fine-tuning approach became eclipsed by crude application of the same
brutal techniques to every case and a medical practice dominated by
treatment of small symptom groups conceived of as ‘diseases’ using
any drug that could subdue them.
The upshot of all this was chaos – the dangerous
inefficacy of medical practice and a deplorable explosion of theoretical
nonsense. Speculation was allowed to dominate medical theory at the same
time as barbarity dominated its technique, and for the same reasons –
medicine meandered like a rudderless ship. It was this gradual meltdown
of all common sense and gentle methods that made raised Hahnemann’s
blood to boiling point.
Experiments of his own and direct clinical
experience, always his most reliable and enduring beacons, had led
Hahnemann to entirely validate his own approach and to condemn the
ancient methods: he ranted and raved like “a raging hurricane
against the old methods.” [Haehl, vol. 1, 98] Through further
experiment, he refined his views towards single drugs in minute dose,
used as per similars and based upon provings, these becoming in turn the
core axioms of the homeopathic system. Such is certainly how homeopathy
came into being. It was not dreamed up overnight or all in one piece; by
contrast, it emerged in pieces over a long period: Homeopathy,
therefore, had a somewhat protracted ‘birth,’ emerging in pieces:
between “1790 and 1805…homeopathy was slowly coming to
birth.” [Haehl, vol. 1, 48]
The maxim of “everything that can hurt is
something that can heal,” [Anon, Jan 1932, 135] though
Hahnemann was mindful of the nature of poisonings, [Examples of his
interest in poisons include his publications: On Poisoning by Arsenic,
1786, Directions for the Preparation of Soluble Mercury, 1790 and
What Are Poisons? What Are Medicines?, 1806] for the same reason
Shakespeare once observed: “in the infant rind of this small
flower, poison hath residence and medicine power,” [Shakespeare,
Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 3] and although it is
self-evident that “drugs, in crude form…[do] have the power to
make even well people sick,” [Close, 54]
Mere Palliation
Hahnemann’s denunciation of crude drugs in strong
doses and mixtures as only doomed palliative measures, needs greater
scrutiny. Drugs were palliative in the sense that the most they could
achieve was to subdue symptoms and shift them around the organism,
rather than eliciting true and gentle cure by their safe removal. Even
if they ‘cured’ in the short term or in the ordinary sense of
improving sickness, Hahnemann saw later sickness episodes, of
predictable types, to always make their subsequent appearance and thus
that such allopathic ‘cures’ often in truth meant only the temporary
suppression of symptoms, not the true cure he envisaged, which would
involve removal of the root cause. As ‘cures,’ they were inevitably
always somewhat temporary and illusory.
Hahnemann’s conception of true cure involved the
gentle removal of the most subtle, invisible and intangible causes of
sickness at the ultimate and most fundamental level of organism
functioning, not just the removal of the main symptoms, the gross
molecular and physiological dysfunctions that preoccupied most ordinary
medical practitioners. This at least was implicit to his line of
reasoning.
It is a clear and peculiar fact that Hahnemann was
innately very disinclined to accept purely chemical or physiological
factors as root causes of sickness, as most physicians still do, and he
always tended to look beyond and behind them to a more rarefied, subtle,
spiritual and non-physical realm of disease causation resident not
within the tissues but within the vital force and the case totality.
This tendency cannot have come from Vienna, Erlangen or Leipzig, but
more likely from Brukenthal and Freemasonry. For example, it became
encapsulated in Aphorism 9 of Hahnemann’s Organon, where he
speaks of the material organism being governed by a “spiritual
principle…that rules with unbounded sway.” [Organon of
Medicine, 1922, Aph. 9]
The vital force literally ‘runs the show’ and
elicits every change in the case. Hahnemann’s central axiom in
homeopathy is that the organism is controlled by the vital force, which ‘rules
with unbounded sway and dominates the organism in sickness and in health’
[Organon of Medicine, Aph. 9]. Kent then elaborates this further:
“We do not take disease through our bodies but through the Vital
Force; likewise with a true cure;” and “the law of
similars is the law of similars, whether produced by drug or disease. It
is the law of Influx;” and “one who thinks from the
material, thinks disease is drawn in from without, but it is drawn out
from within.” [Kent, 1926] Hence, homeopathic treatment
always aims to strengthen the innate healing power or vital force.
[Haehl, 1922; I, 64, 284, 289]
Because the vital force ‘runs the whole show,’ so it is
also that which cures disease, not the homeopath and not the remedy –
it truly is the ‘innate healing power’. We should always “remember
that it is our duty to help nature as far as possible do her job.”
[Bodman, Sir John Weir Obituary, 1971, 225] Medicine involves an
attempt “to restore health…an attempt to restore
balance,” [Dr Charles Wheeler Obituary, 1947, 1] for
true “health is simply the balanced life.” [ibid; 4]
Such innate self-healing powers, “the
self-rectifying powers of the vis medicatrix;“[Simpson, 82] the
“natural sanative powers of the constitution,”[Simpson,
81] “the curative powers of nature,”[Simpson,
88] and “the vital dynamism,“[Simpson, 23]
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,”[Bodman, op cit, 225] Yet,
allopathy is saddled with a ‘quick fix’ mentality, what Maizes and
Caspi call “the fixing paradigm,” that blithely ignores
the innate healing powers.
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,”[Organon of Medicine,
Aph. 11] for it is “the morbidly affected vital force
alone that produces disease,”[ibid; Aph. 12] 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,”[ibid; Aph.
15] 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.”[ibid; Aph. 16]
There is thus a strange ambiguity in his mentality,
an inconsistency in his approach to medicine, that strongly condemn
signatures, astrology and life-meaning theology, incantations, etc on
one side [as did most of his contemporaries], but on the other side
resist the enchantment of the materialistic philosophy of chemical and
mechanistic ‘machine patter’ of the iatrochemists and the
pneumatists [unlike his contemporaries]. He therefore reveals an
ambivalence, giving homeopathy firm roots in both camps of medical
thought, but not wholly committed to either. He wished to render
homeopathy into a truly curative system that gently subdued disease, but
that also went straight to the root of disease causes and removed them.
Experience had robbed him of what little faith he once had that chemical
drugs could ever achieve such a noble aim.
The Subtle Realm of Disease
Cause
In his slow and quiet way, Hahnemann made some
startling discoveries, which are still perfectly valid today. Apart from
finally confirming the superiority of similars, single drugs, moderate
doses and provings, by the 1790s his single most important discovery
might well have been that all ordinary medical treatments could only
ever palliate, alleviate or suppress symptoms and never truly cure at
the deeper, fundamental level. This revelation suggested to him that no
previous medical system had ever gotten to the bottom of disease, or
reached the true, deeper, innate causes of disease, let alone ever
removed them. He saw that sickness just keeps coming back over and over
often in new mutated forms [the hydra-headed?]. The source from which it
springs had thus never been severed.
They have always regarded drug-induced changes in cases as
fundamentally uncurative acts: any “removal of the tangible
products of disease…does not cure the disease, but does the patient a
positive injury.” [Close, 73] As Close then adds, “the
suppressed case always goes bad,” [Close, 75] to which Kent adds:
“all prescriptions that change the image of a case cause
suppression.” [Kent, Lesser Writings, 661] For Van Helmont too, “every
disease had a vital principle of its own [archeus] which could be
treated by a specific medico-spiritual response.“[Porter, 1998,
208] He believed that “all objects, minerals included, were
alive…matter was charged with a specific disposition [archeus], which
created life.” [Porter, 1998, 208] He also “postulated
the existence of ‘blas’…the heart of the human body…[a]
life-force dominated all corporeal processes…a health-defending
property.“[Porter, 1998, 208] 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.
Hahnemann describes the development of diseases in
the ongoing life of the person [or family, or race, or humanity]
mutating through time [“the hydra-headed miasm“] and
able periodically to throw to the surface very different ‘disease
events’ springing forth from the same hidden root cause in the invisible
and intangible realm of the non-molecular. This describes very clearly
his depiction of the true nature of the miasms: a hidden realm of
disease cause, and a genotype from which the expressed and visible
symptoms, the phenotype of disease, periodically erupt at the surface
and which we tend to see before us as separate ‘diseases’. From “frequent
observations, Hahnemann had discovered that chronic maladies…had some
connection with a previous outbreak of Psora.” [Haehl, vol. 1,
138] To Hahnemann, Psora was “a disease or disposition to
disease, hereditary from generation to generation for thousands of
years, and…the fostering soil for every possible diseased condition.”
[Haehl, vol. 1, 144]
It seems natural for homeopaths to be suspicious of
and unsatisfied with the solely molecular, mechanistic and tangible
explanation or technique of crude drugging for specifics [allopathy].
Being daily used to seeing into the realm of the subtle and intangible,
with their more subtle form of vision, it is only natural for them to
seek out deeper root causes in such a realm that lies behind and beyond
the solely molecular realm, which seems so satisfying to allopaths and
scientists. By employing intangible and non-molecular remedies and
seeing their often spectacular effects in the clinical sphere, it is not
so surprising that they have come to develop such deep respect for
non-molecular theories of life, disease causation and cure.
For “what we cannot see directly with the
corporeal eye, we may yet be able to perceive indirectly, by the eye of
reason,” [King, 1963; 23] It is similarly true in homeopathy
that “the distinction between observation and inference, between
empiricism and rationalism, is basically artificial, since neither can
exist without a substantial share of the other…in almost every
statement, some observation and some inference are involved…the
further we get from direct observation, the more we depend on inference
and reasoning,” [ibid; 22-23]
Hahnemann
basically agrees with van Helmont and Paracelsus that the root causes of
sickness do not reside in the outer, tangible and visible aspects of
disease manifestations, the phenotype, but rather in the deeper essence
or genotype. Symptoms are not seen by homeopaths as the disease, but as
the results, the end-products, of deeper dynamic disease processes: “tissue
changes…are but the results of disease;” [Kent, 1926, 672;
Pagel, 1972, 419-454; see also Pagel, 1944, 44 pages] “a cure is
not a cure unless it destroys the internal or dynamic cause of disease.”
[Kent, 1926, 673]
Homeopaths have generally, interpreted the phenomena
of life, disease and cure through essentialist eyes: “the
outer world is the world of results.” [Kent, 657; see also
Coulter, iii, 334 re essence; also Mayr, 1982, 38, 87, 304-5; Bullock
& Trombley, 1999, 282-3]
Close states that “the gross, tangible,
lesions and products in which disease ultimates are not the primary
object of the homeopathic prescription.” [Close, 38] Close goes
right to the heart of the matter in stating that it is not symptoms that
need correction, but function. “Function creates the organs…function
reveals the condition of the organs,” [Close, 38] and he
further reveals that “the totality of the functional symptoms of
the patient is the disease.” [Close, 38] This somewhat flies in
the face of the Hughes/Dudgeon claim that disease is a localised affair,
a material affair that must be treated with material doses – tinctures,
1x and 3x. But, seizing his quarry firmly, Close deepens the real focus
of homeopathy not upon the tissues, but into “the realm of pure
dynamics;” [Close, 39] what he calls the “sphere of
homeopathy is limited primarily to the functional changes from which the
phenomena of disease arise.” [Close, 40-41]
Symptoms have never been seen by homeopaths as the
disease, but as the results, the end-products, of deeper dynamic disease
processes: “tissue changes…are but the results of
disease;” [Kent, Lesser Writings, 672] “a cure
is not a cure unless it destroys the internal or dynamic cause of
disease.” [Kent, Lesser Writings, 673] When Close states
that the “real cure…takes place solely in the functional and
dynamical sphere,” [Close, 42] we can see that his emphasis has
shifted away from any visible pathology resident in the organs, tissues
and cells, to the underlying vital and dynamic processes that underpin
and derange the cells and tissues.
Close validates this view by tracing it back to its
true source: “Hahnemann introduces us into the realm of
dynamics, the science…of motion. In medicine dynamical commonly refers
to functional as opposed to organic disease.” [Close, 59] Power
does not reside in the body, in the tissues or the cells themselves, it “resides
at the centre;” [Close, 61] disease “is the suffering
of the dynamis.” [Close, 72] Close devotes considerable energy
to clearly defining disease; an effort which repays close study. For
example, he says that “homeopathy does not treat disease; it
treats patients.” [Close, 51] Disease, he claims, is “an
abnormal vital process;” [Close, 60] “a dynamic
aberration of our spirit-like life;” [Close, 67] “a
perverted vital action;” [Close, 70] it is “not a
thing, but only the condition of a thing;” [Close, 70] that in
the last analysis disease is “primarily only an altered state of
life and mind.” [Close, 71] This is akin to Kent’s likening of
cure to a qualitative re-tuning of a piano, [Kent, Lesser Writings,
664-5] and is all a very far cry from using remedies in material doses
[1x or 3x] for named conditions.
Close lays bare its deeper nature when he says
disease is “primarily a morbid disturbance or disorderly action
of the vital powers and functions,” [Close, 74] or “purely
a dynamical disturbance of the vital principle.” [Close, 74]
Furthermore, he logically pronounces that because “disease is
always primarily a morbid dynamical or functional disturbance of the
vital principle,” [Close, 88] so in turn it is clear that “functional
or dynamic change always precedes tissue changes,” [Close, 71]
and that cure has been established only “when every perceptible
sign of suffering of the dynamis has been removed.” [Close, 73]
For Close, it is precisely upon such reasons and definitions that “the
entire edifice of therapeutic medication governed by the law of Similia,”
[Close, 88] has been conceived and constructed. All these insightful
statements elaborated by Close might be said to derive from Kent, but,
as he insists, they also flow naturally from Hahnemann’s own sentiments
in the Organon: [Hahnemann, Organon, Aphorisms 11 [9, 10],
15 and 16] “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,
Introduction, 10]
As Close says, disease cause therefore also exists
solely in “the realm of pure dynamics;” [Stuart Close, The
Genius of Homeopathy, Lectures and Essays on Homeopathic Philosophy,
New York, 1924; 39] what he calls the “sphere of homeopathy is
limited primarily to the functional changes from which the phenomena of
disease arise,” [ibid; 40-41] Therefore, the removal
[correction might be a better word] of the internal damage [miasm] is
the removal of the cause; which is not the same as removing the
symptoms: “In faithful treatment, it is sought to accomplish an
end far more subtle than the mechanical removal of bacilli.”
[Nichols, 1891, 233-234]
Why Modern Medicine Does not
Cure
These same observations Hahnemann made even apply
today. Modern drugs manifestly do not really cure, they only palliate
for a time. They create merely an illusion of cure. There is just as
much disease in the world today as ever there was, if not more. The
medicine of today has indeed “reduced the patient’s autonomy to
a therapeutic choice of drugs or surgery,“[Diamond, 2001; 11]
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.”[Kent, 1900, 160-1] 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,”[ibid, 79]
Medicine, in spite of the entire scientific advance
of two centuries, is still not curing disease, nor is it reaching behind
the molecular level to remove the innate tendency towards sickness. The
deeper causes of sickness that Hahnemann identified as non-molecular are
still not being tackled two centuries later. His theory of miasms was a
good attempt to explain where sickness originates. He satisfied himself
further that only potentised drugs could reach deeper into this
non-molecular realm of disease cause. Modern medicine is evidently just
as incapable of doing so as its 18th century predecessor.
When the bullets stop coming, you are entitled to
believe the guns have been silenced or even gone altogether. Thus, when
disease stops appearing, the causes can be assumed to have been removed.
This was his line of reasoning. Hahnemann’s observations of medical
practice, combined with his prolonged analytical studies, convinced him
of a range of new medical truths even before he embarked on a path of
continued original experimentation. What he clearly observed two hundred
years ago is still true today – people show an innate tendency towards
sickness, to sickness episodes that tend to recur, to conditions that
mutate through time, to chronic and serious disease and this tendency is
not in decline, but on the increase, or at least as active as it ever
was. This clearly observable aspect of modern disease is seemingly
unaffected by drug-based treatments and is not diminishing. Chemical
drugs today manifestly do not reach the heart of the matter; they do not
cure.
If medicine were truly working, then we would see a
very different picture. We would see these tendencies on the decline,
disease in retreat, with the mass of disease declining. We would see
sickness going into reverse, being pushed back by medical advance. This
is precisely what we do not see in the world today. Therefore, it seems
safe to conclude, that the innate, deeper, genotypic causes of disease
are just as alive today, just as active in the organism, as they were
two centuries ago. Although the nature of sickness has changed, and the
old infectious conditions have largely disappeared, yet the overall
burden of disease is the same if not even greater than it was. Who is to
say that the removal of the one has been obtained at the expense of the
other?
Yet, there is a contrast when we look at adults and
children who are treated with homeopathy for any length of time. This is
especially apparent when you look at whole families who use homeopathy.
They do not show the same general tendency towards sickness, to simple
recurrent diseases or to chronic or relapsing conditions that are so
evident in the main population who are treated allopathically. Nor do
they show the same tendency towards chronic and serious diseases. They
show less disease, less recurrent disease, less serious disorders,
greater resistance to infections, than their peers, and a general level
of good health and well-being that is considerably higher than the
average population. This is especially apparent in children and young
adults.
This is not simply my own observation. Such
observations are common to all families who use homeopathy regularly and
all homeopaths confirm this same pattern. This applies as much to mental
health as to physical. Therefore, one feels entitled to conclude from
this that, as in Hahnemann’s day, human beings today still react
positively to homeopathic treatment and that it does indeed successfully
subdue and progressively eliminate sickness and above all the hidden,
genotypic predisposition towards recurrent disease. It removes the
causes of sickness that lie buried deep within the organism: the gun is
silenced.
Origins of Homeopathy
All this modern material ties in very neatly with the
main concerns that Hahnemann immersed himself in two centuries ago. What
Hahnemann was primarily appalled and disgusted by and which he most
vigorously and passionately opposed were strong doses of drugs,
bloodletting and compound drug mixtures conceived and employed along the
Galenic lines of contraries. These were the biggest objections he made
against the medicine of his day. He was implacably opposed to them
because he could see from first-hand daily experience that they were
dismally ineffective measures to be employed against sickness, and they
were also harmful and damaging to patients as well; they caused more
suffering. Thus, he stood alone in having the courage and intellectual
honesty to abandon in disgust such a medical practice, and to commit
himself instead to a search for more gentle, benign and effective
therapeutic measures. Who could possibly stand up and condemn him for
doing that?
His starting point obviously suggested that he use
single drugs in moderate doses and not contraries. We should not forget
that his search was rooted in the sombre and very despondent basis of
his deep dissatisfaction with his chosen profession. It commenced 1781-2
in a fairly lacklustre and haphazard manner, into the medical past for
any evidence of true cures attributable to using single drugs on the
basis of similars and in moderate doses. He found evidence for all these
principles and also some for the curative effects of one similar disease
upon another, but not for dissimilar diseases. Together with the records
of poisonings, he soon amassed considerable evidence not only for using
moderate doses of single drugs, but that they should be employed on the
basis of similars rather than contraries. He also accrued abundant
evidence of the health damaging effects of contraries and high doses.
This mass of evidence gradually convinced him to use
similar drugs in moderate doses and to commence provings [1790] to
ascertain more precisely [than signatures] the real therapeutic
properties of drugs. This was his attempt to cast aside and move beyond
the entrenched and centuries-old ‘doctrine of signatures,’ which
was, to his mind, a ridiculous, hit-and-miss method that was vague and
often thoroughly misleading.
He was also disparaging about the doctrine of
signatures. [Hobhouse, 137-8; Hahnemann’s Lesser Writings, 502-3,
670; Haehl, 1, 23; & 2, 10-11] In his Materia Medica Pura we
read under Chelidonium: ‘The ancients imagined that the yellow
colour of the juice of this plant was an indication (signature) of its
utility in bilious diseases…the importance of human health does not
admit of any such uncertain directions for the employment of medicines.
It would be criminal frivolity to rest contented with such guesswork at
the bedside of the sick.” [Hobhouse, 138] Hence we behold
his fundamental ambivalence.
Even when the Organon insists that “the…virtues
of medicines cannot be apprehended by…smell, taste, or appearance…or
from chemical analysis, or by treating disease with one or more of them
in a mixture…” [Organon; v.110].
The only sane and rational means to discover the
actual, pure and real [repeatable] i.e. scientific properties of drugs
was to initiate mild medical poisonings [provings] and to record in
detail their manifold effects on the organism – their ability to
derange health. By proving drugs on the healthy, he could more clearly
establish an area of compatibility between the health-deranging effects
of real diseases on the one side, and the health-deranging effects of
such artificial diseases [provings] caused by drugs, on the other side.
Detailed comparisons between these two datasets might then yield greater
therapeutic success than continued adherence to the old-fashioned,
haphazard and in his view doomed method of signatures – a battered and
rusty old lamp that seemed to obscure in shadows as many medical truths
as it illuminated. Likewise, he could compare contraries and similars,
strong doses versus small and mixed drugs versus single drugs. By
proceeding precisely in this systematic manner, Hahnemann uncovered the
core truths of his new system.
Hahnemann had actually embarked single-handed upon a
radical programme of medical reform: to clear away the dusty,
centuries-old methods, the outdated dead wood of useless practices that
were manifestly uncurative and harmful and which blocked progress, and
replace them with new methods that were simpler, more effective and thus
superior.
When Cooper declares that “all great improvements
in science are made by men who throw off the trammels of previous
teachings and begin by a complete and radical overhauling of the entire
subject,” [Cooper, 1894, 389], then he certainly
encapsulates Hahnemann’s bold, freethinking spirit of inquiry.
Hahnemann’s original and gargantuan task had been to “break
through the orthodoxy…[and] sweep away the painstaking edifices of
their honourable but limited predecessors who…tend to imprison thought
within their own tidy but fatally misconceived constructions.”
[Berlin, 1986; 72]
His research showed that the whole edifice of
official, Galenic medicine had been founded on entirely wrong premises
– upon contraries, strong doses of compound drug mixtures, instead of
similars, single drugs in moderate doses; upon the shifting sands of
signatures rather than the hard factual rocks of provings. All this
inevitably brought him into conflict with orthodoxy.
Protest against homeopathy
To some extent, the storm of protest that greeted the
birth of homeopathy and which was unleashed on Hahnemann personally, was
a storm of indignation by the mainstream against a single physician who
had the breathtaking audacity to step forward and challenge officialdom
and say its was entirely wrong. Such a damburst of protest can be seen
as the natural and instinctive reaction of orthodox and well-established
vested interest whenever official orthodoxy is prickled or challenged:
something of a David and Goliath situation?
It needs to be made clear that in no sense whatsoever
did such a reaction stem from anything approaching a calm and rational
appraisal of the true merits of homeopathy, or from people who were
remotely intent on conducting a sober and sympathetic investigation of
it, giving it a try and then filing a balanced and neutral report. Quite
the contrary, it signalled a mass emotional response of a slightly
paranoid, defensive profession with a mass closing of ranks against an
obvious enemy, a traitor, which had to be both publicly repulsed and
publicly defeated. The chief method employed to achieve this objective
was a sustained and vigorous campaign of ridicule and condemnation
against homeopathy: attacks upon him and upon homeopathy became
increasingly coordinated, amounting to a “vicious campaign of
persecution,” [Cook, 124].
Such has been the official attitude towards
homeopathy ever since those early days and it must be viewed exactly for
what it is. It never has been and is still not a carefully researched
and reasoned response to the claims of homeopathy, nor an impartial
assessment of Hahnemann’s case, his clinical track record or the mass
of detailed evidence he had accrued over many years against the methods
and theories of Old Physick.
Summary
To really understand Hahnemann, we must look in the
first phase at that which he condemned in allopathy and why. For in
those condemnations hides his anger and his passion against the betrayal
he felt at being trained in a medicine that was so useless. It was an
embarrassment. The anger he felt simmered like a volcano until it
exploded in rage at what nonsense his colleagues believed in and the
dangerous and injurious medical treatments they dished out to the poor
patient every day. Hahnemann refused to be part of such a blind, corrupt
and murderous form of medicine. Study what he condemned and what he
attacked and you can begin to see the puzzle unfold as it did for him
haphazardly over twenty years. By examining what he condemned and asking
why, we gain great insights into his approach and the situation he found
himself in.
The core principles of homeopathy, each is a shadow
of something in Old Physick or allopathy.
Similars
is the shadow of contraries, a dominant
concept in allopathy since the time of Galen [2nd century]
Using single drugs is the shadow of the mixed
drugs used in allopathy.
Using small doses forms the shadow of the
large doses of allopathy.
Provings
are the shadow of poisonings accumulated
over many centuries; a proving is a mild form of poisoning. Provings
also displace signatures as a source of reliable drug information.
Case totality
is a product of close observation
of cases and also derives from provings; it is the shadow of specific
named diseases, a concept Hahnemann rejected. Case totality is also a
monument to Hahnemann’s superior observational skills.
The drug picture is a result of case totality
and the proving but is also a distant shadow of the doctrine of
signatures.
Hahnemann had great interest in poisons: because of
their very great power to derange health; in the first phase of his
research he sought to find ways of taming these prodigious weapons and
so convert them into gentle healing tools. In this was the maxim that
what causes can also cure.
The contents of the old materia medica were entirely
the products of folk medicine, old wives tales and the doctrine of
signatures. These had been authorised and validated only by a succession
of eminent doctors down the ages, who tended to repeat what their
forebears had said. Hahnemann rebelled both against the drugs selected
on such a ridiculous basis as well as the authorities who had validated
them. He held such authorities in contempt and he blamed them alone for
the appalling state of medicine in his day.
He condemned whatever was ineffective and uncurative;
he condemned whatever was harmful; yet he had in the beginning no
alternatives and simply had to give up medical practice. Most things he
saw as both harmful and uncurative like emesis, purgation, bleeding and
sweating. These core practices of allopathy he regarded as having no
value whatever because they did not achieve cures and they harmed
patients. Or in some cases, they only palliated symptoms without curing
them.
His opposition was instinctive; he had no reasons and
no alternatives but he simply felt in his heart that medicine was too
dangerous for him to give his patients. He knew that it was damaging and
uncurative on instinct and this describes his mentality very well. It is
an insight that only comes to us now through prolonged reflection on the
details of his life and conduct; it cannot be seen directly in the
evidence. It is normally hidden. It is a good example of how history can
enrich our understanding of homeopathy.
There are in homeopathy no specific named diseases
that affect whole populations; there is just each case that must be
assessed on its own peculiar merits.
There are no mass treatments that can be given to
everyone or to a disease label; each case must be treated individually.
There are no single disease entities, just the whole
person, body and mind in which diseases and remedies enter and perform
like actors on a stage.
The law of similars began innocently enough with
examples like Mercury and Syphilis or Belladonna and Scarlet fever.
Hahnemann soon realised that very close similarity and case totality
were required for it to work best. Each case must be carefully
individualised to the single drug for success. Similars alone was not
enough.
Homeopathy was created by Hahnemann in the light of
its predecessor, allopathy, and the main elements of homeopathy are like
ghosts or shadows of the main elements in allopathy.
As we have seen, these shadows or ghosts are in every
case the opposite of the corresponding idea or method in allopathy.
Hahnemann deliberately chose the opposite of things in the useless
allopathic system in order to obtain something better than it.
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