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As soon as a healthy man is proving, he gets sick,
and thus he belongs in so far to the sick. Why should we
not have a right to compare the one suffering, from a
drug, with another suffering from miasma or other
influences?
A third grand objection was made, a monstrous
one, - a real monster of an objection:
“Come out ye Homœopathic men” they said “and
make a true intermittent, make a scarlet fever, make a
real disease, and we will come with our diagnostic
instruments and examine”. They supposed, of course,
we did not understand their pathology, and were not
able to make a diagnostic investigation. Of course it
would be an easy thing to show, in each such case, if we
would offer them as such, that they were not real
intermittent, nor real scarlet fevers, etc. Strange
infatuation! We do not need their pathology, nor their
instruments to obtain exactly objective characteristic
diagnostics. We can do this ourselves, just as well as
they. Why should we not have been able to learn what
they have learned? But the greatest absurdity in their
objection lies herein: we have never pretended to make
such diseases, we never did pretend to make diseases.
Did we ever say we could make the Plague, as the
witches did in the middle ages? Did we ever say we
could make an epidemic Cholera Asiatica, as the stupid
peasants in Russia believed, and in Italy still believe?
All that we ever pretended to find out and get by our
provings was: a number of symptoms, resembling cases
of sickmen, not of diseases. Even HAHNEMANN in his
first experiment did not say Cinchona powder had
produced an intermittent fever. He very wisely said, it
made such symptoms as I had been subject to before,
when I suffered with the intermittent.
A fourth objection has been made and has been
repeated by a great number, has been echoed all over
the land, has been such a powerful and persuasive one,
that we hear it even in our midst, from our own friends
up to this day. Our Materia Medica contains a great
many symptoms, and a great many even very doubtful,
some decidedly false. Thus our Materia Medica is not
pure, and it must be purified.
This “uncertainty of symptoms”, so much
complained of, is not a thing we pretend to oppose; this
objection is not only allowed to them, but it is even
granted that every single symptoms of each prover may
not be from the drug, but from something else. We do
not think, do not dream of opposing it at all, we give up
to it altogether and entirely. It was considered not worth
while on our side to talk much about it, Why should we?
Are not all human undertakings liable to error? Why did
HAHNEMANN so often and emphatically recommend
the greatest care in proving? He knew as well as any
one of us, that observations are very often deceiving,
even a master-mind may be deceived, and may make an
erroneous observation. Did not HIPPOCRATES, 2300
years ago, state in the first of his famous aphorisms:
“Life is short, our art is long, the chances are transient;
trials very slippery, and judgment a difficult thing”.
Thus allowing all these objections, regarding the
uncertainty, as based on a self evident truth; they may
be raised by all our opponents and repeated in our
midst, but they all fall down to the ground, like the
above first objection of the old retired Hollander, for we
are a great many years ahead of them, as we have a way
to ascertain what is true. This very cry of uncertainty or
impurity was raised further and particularly against
symptoms quoted, taken out of old reports, books, etc.;
neither HAHNEMANN nor any one of us laid much
weight on any of them. We can do without them; let
them all be stricken out, we do not care. The opponents
in our midst dwell upon symptoms observed on the sick
and call them impure; they roll their eyes, like
hypocrites, saying, HAHNEMANN used the word
M.M. Pura, and he had no right to do it; a single
symptom taken from a sick man made all the rest
impure. He used this word as it has been used by all
philosophers and scientific men, meaning, free from
guessing, but they use it now as the washerwomen use
the word “clean”.
The more our Materia Medica became enlarged by
observations, and the greater the difficulty in studying
it, the more popular the cry became for purifying it; and
the more physicians were driven over to our side, the
more enemies we had in our own camp.
What is to be said about these objections?
Regarding the uncertainty the symptoms obtained by
provers, it is true; further, symptoms observed in sick
persons are very uncertain, that is also true; further,
symptoms taken out of old moldy books, are still more
doubtful, that is true; in fact, all the objections raised
against the collection called Materia Medica are true,
every one of them. But what possesses our opponents
and all their imitators within our own ranks, to imagine,
that they tell us something new by making such
objections? How self-conceited they must be, to come
out thus, like wiseacres, supposing we had not known
all this long ago. Of course we did. It is a self-evident
truth, that particularly in such experiments with drugs
on the healthy, and still more on the sick, the symptoms
may or may not be caused by the drug. Only the most
shocking impudence, and as is usually the case,
ignorance combined with it, could pretend to teach us,
as if we were school-boys. It is not at all in these
objections that we differ from them. All the conclusions
drawn by our opponents and by all their imitators within
our own ranks: all their conclusions are wrong,
essentially and entirely wrong, are against all sound
logic, against all principles of the strict method to build