Part 5 (2/2)
I am sorry to see, also, that a degree of ignorance as to the natural course of diseases is often shown in these published cases, which, although it may not be detected by the unprofessional reader, conveys an unpleasant impression to those who are acquainted with the subject. Thus a young woman affected with jaundice is mentioned in the German ”Annals of Clinical h.o.m.oeopathy” as having been cured in twenty-nine days by pulsatilla and nux vomica. Rummel, a well-known writer of the same school, speaks of curing a case of jaundice in thirty-four days by h.o.m.oeopathic doses of pulsatilla, aconite, and cinchona. I happened to have a case in my own household, a few weeks since, which lasted about ten days, and this was longer than I have repeatedly seen it in hospital practice, so that it was nothing to boast of.
Dr. Munneche of Lichtenburg in Saxony is called to a patient with sprained ankle who had been a fortnight under the common treatment. The patient gets well by the use of arnica in a little more than a month longer, and this extraordinary fact is published in the French ”Archives of h.o.m.oeopathic Medicine.”
In the same Journal is recorded the case of a patient who with nothing more, so far as any proof goes, than inluenza, gets down to her shop upon the sixth day.
And again, the cool way in which everything favorable in a case is set down by these people entirely to their treatment, may be seen in a case of croup reported in the ”h.o.m.oeopathic Gazette” of Leipsic, in which leeches, blistering, inhalation of hot vapor, and powerful internal medicine had been employed, and yet the merit was all attributed to one drop of some h.o.m.oeopathic fluid.
I need not multiply these quotations, which ill.u.s.trate the grounds of an opinion which the time does not allow me to justify more at length; other such cases are lying open before me; there is no end to them if more were wanted; for nothing is necessary but to look into any of the numerous broken-down Journals of h.o.m.oeopathy, the volumes of which may be found on the shelves of those curious in such matters.
A number of public trials of h.o.m.oeopathy have been made in different parts of the world. Six of these are mentioned in the Manifesto of the ”h.o.m.oeopathic Examiner.” Now to suppose that any trial can absolutely silence people, would be to forget the whole experience of the past.
Dr. Haygarth and Dr. Alderson could not stop the sale of the five-guinea Tractors, although they proved that they could work the same miracles with pieces of wood and tobacco-pipe. It takes time for truth to operate as well as h.o.m.oeopathic globules. Many persons thought the results of these trials were decisive enough of the nullity of the treatment; those who wish to see the kind of special pleading and evasion by which it is attempted to cover results which, stated by the ”h.o.m.oeopathic Examiner”
itself, look exceedingly like a miserable failure, may consult the opening flourish of that Journal. I had not the intention to speak of these public trials at all, having abundant other evidence on the point.
But I think it best, on the whole, to mention two of them in a few words,--that inst.i.tuted at Naples and that of Andral.
There have been few names in the medical profession, for the last half century, so widely known throughout the world of science as that of M.
Esquirol, whose life was devoted to the treatment of insanity, and who was without a rival in that department of practical medicine. It is from an a.n.a.lysis communicated by him to the ”Gazette Medicale de Paris” that I derive my acquaintance with the account of the trial at Naples by Dr.
Panvini, physician to the Hospital della Pace. This account seems to be entirely deserving of credit. Ten patients were set apart, and not allowed to take any medicine at all,--much against the wish of the h.o.m.oeopathic physician. All of them got well, and of course all of them would have been claimed as triumphs if they had been submitted to the treatment. Six other slight cases (each of which is specified) got well under the h.o.m.oeopathic treatment, none of its a.s.serted specific effects being manifested.
All the rest were cases of grave disease; and so far as the trial, which was interrupted about the fortieth day, extended, the patients grew worse, or received no benefit. A case is reported on the page before me of a soldier affected with acute inflammation in the chest, who took successively aconite, bryonia, nux vomica, and pulsatilla, and after thirty-eight days of treatment remained without any important change in his disease. The h.o.m.oeopathic physician who treated these patients was M. de Horatiis, who had the previous year been announcing his wonderful cures. And M. Esquirol a.s.serted to the Academy of Medicine in 1835, that this M. de Horatiis, who is one of the prominent personages in the ”Examiner's” Manifesto published in 1840, had subsequently renounced h.o.m.oeopathy. I may remark, by the way, that this same periodical, which is so very easy in explaining away the results of these trials, makes a mistake of only six years or a little more as to the time when this at Naples was inst.i.tuted.
M. Andral, the ”eminent and very enlightened allopathist” of the ”h.o.m.oeopathic Examiner,” made the following statement in March, 1835, to the Academy of Medicine: ”I have submitted this doctrine to experiment; I can reckon at this time from one hundred and thirty to one hundred and forty cases, recorded with perfect fairness, in a great hospital, under the eye of numerous witnesses; to avoid every objection--I obtained my remedies of M. Guibourt, who keeps a h.o.m.oeopathic pharmacy, and whose strict exactness is well known; the regimen has been scrupulously observed, and I obtained from the sisters attached to the hospital a special regimen, such as Hahnemann orders. I was told, however, some months since, that I had not been faithful to all the rules of the doctrine. I therefore took the trouble to begin again; I have studied the practice of the Parisian h.o.m.oeopathists, as I had studied their books, and I became convinced that they treated their patients as I had treated mine, and I affirm that I have been as rigorously exact in the treatment as any other person.”
And he expressly a.s.serts the entire nullity of the influence of all the h.o.m.oeopathic remedies tried by him in modifying, so far as he could observe, the progress or termination of diseases. It deserves notice that he experimented with the most boasted substances,--cinchona, aconite, mercury, bryonia, belladonna. Aconite, for instance, he says he administered in more than forty cases of that collection of feverish symptoms in which it exerts so much power, according to Hahnemann, and in not one of them did it have the slightest influence, the pulse and heat remaining as before.
These statements look pretty honest, and would seem hard to be explained away, but it is calmly said that he ”did not know enough of the method to select the remedies with any tolerable precision.” [”h.o.m.oeopathic Examiner, vol. i. p. 22.]
”Nothing is left to the caprice of the physician.” (In a word, instead of being dependent upon blind chance, that there is an infallible law, guided by which; the physician MUST select the proper remedies.') ['Ibid.,' in a notice of Menzel's paper.] Who are they that practice h.o.m.oeopathy, and say this of a man with the Materia Medica of Hahnemann lying before him? Who are they that send these same globules, on which he experimented, accompanied by a little book, into families, whose members are thought competent to employ them, when they deny any such capacity to a man whose life has been pa.s.sed at the bedside of patients, the most prominent teacher in the first Medical Faculty in the world, the consulting physician of the King of France, and one of the most renowned practical writers, not merely of his nation, but of his age?
I leave the quibbles by which such persons would try to creep out from under the crus.h.i.+ng weight of these conclusions to the unfortunates who suppose that a reply is equivalent to an answer.
Dr. Baillie, one of the physicians in the great Hotel Dieu of Paris, invited two h.o.m.oeopathic pract.i.tioners to experiment in his wards. One of these was Curie, now of London, whose works are on the counters of some of our bookstores, and probably in the hands of some of my audience. This gentleman, whom Dr. Baillie declares to be an enlightened man, and perfectly sincere in his convictions, brought his own medicines from the pharmacy which furnished Hahnemann himself, and employed them for four or five months upon patients in his ward, and with results equally unsatisfactory, as appears from Dr. Baillie's statement at a meeting of the Academy of Medicine. And a similar experiment was permitted by the Clinical Professor of the Hotel Dieu of Lyons, with the same complete failure.
But these are old and prejudiced pract.i.tioners. Very well, then take the statement of Dr. Fleury, a most intelligent young physician, who treated h.o.m.oeopathically more than fifty patients, suffering from diseases which it was not dangerous to treat in this way, taking every kind of precaution as to regimen, removal of disturbing influences, and the state of the atmosphere, insisted upon by the most vigorous partisans of the doctrine, and found not the slightest effect produced by the medicines. And more than this, read nine of these cases, which he has published, as I have just done, and observe the absolute nullity of aconite, belladonna, and bryonia, against the symptoms over which they are pretended to exert such palpable, such obvious, such astonis.h.i.+ng influences. In the view of these statements, it is impossible not to realize the entire futility of attempting to silence this a.s.serted science by the flattest and most peremptory results of experiment. Were all the hospital physicians of Europe and America to devote themselves, for the requisite period, to this sole pursuit, and were their results to be unanimous as to the total worthlessness of the whole system in practice, this slippery delusion would slide through their fingers without the slightest discomposure, when, as they supposed, they had crushed every joint in its tortuous and trailing body.
3. I have said, that to show the truth of the h.o.m.oeopathic doctrine, as announced by Hahnemann, it would be necessary to show, in the third place, that remedies never cure diseases when they are not capable of producing similar symptoms! The burden of this somewhat comprehensive demonstration lying entirely upon the advocates of this doctrine, it may be left to their mature reflections.
It entered into my original plan to treat of the doctrine relating to Psora, or itch,--an almost insane conception, which I am glad to get rid of, for this is a subject one does not care to handle without gloves. I am saved this trouble, however, by finding that many of the disciples of Hahnemann, those disciples the very gospel of whose faith stands upon his word, make very light of his authority on this point, although he himself says, ”It has cost me twelve years of study and research to trace out the source of this incredible number of chronic affections, to discover this great truth, which remained concealed from all my predecessors and contemporaries, to establish the basis of its demonstration, and find out, at the same time, the curative medicines that were fit to combat this hydra in all its different forms.”
But, in the face of all this, the following remarks are made by Wolff, of Dresden, whose essays, according to the editor of the ”h.o.m.oeopathic Examiner,” ”represent the opinions of a large majority of h.o.m.oeopathists in Europe.”
”It cannot be unknown to any one at all familiar with h.o.m.oeopathic literature, that Hahnemann's idea of tracing the large majority of chronic diseases to actual itch has met with the greatest opposition from h.o.m.oeopathic physicians themselves.” And again, ”If the Psoric theory has led to no proper schism, the reason is to be found in the fact that it is almost without any influence in practice.”
We are told by Jahr, that Dr. Griesselich, ”Surgeon to the Grand Duke of Baden,” and a ”distinguished” h.o.m.oeopathist, actually asked Hahnemann for the proof that chronic diseases, such as dropsy, for instance, never arise from any other cause than itch; and that, according to common report, the venerable sage was highly incensed (fort courrouce) with Dr. Hartmann, of Leipsic, another ”distinguished” h.o.m.oeopathist, for maintaining that they certainly did arise from other causes.
And Dr. Fielitz, in the ”h.o.m.oeopathic Gazette” of Leipsic, after saying, in a good-natured way, that Psora is the Devil in medicine, and that physicians are divided on this point into diabolists and exorcists, declares that, according to a remark of Hahnemann, the whole civilized world is affected with Psora. I must therefore disappoint any advocate of Hahnemann who may honor me with his presence, by not attacking a doctrine on which some of the disciples of his creed would be very happy to have its adversaries waste their time and strength. I will not meddle with this excrescence, which, though often used in time of peace, would be dropped, like the limb of a sh.e.l.l-fish, the moment it was a.s.sailed; time is too precious, and the harvest of living extravagances nods too heavily to my sickle, that I should blunt it upon straw and stubble.
I will close the subject with a brief examination of some of the statements made in h.o.m.oeopathic works, and more particularly in the brilliant Manifesto of the ”Examiner,” before referred to. And first, it is there stated under the head of ”h.o.m.oeopathic Literature,” that ”SEVEN HUNDRED volumes have been issued from the press developing the peculiarities of the system, and many of them possessed of a scientific character that savans know well how to respect.” If my a.s.sertion were proper evidence in the case, I should declare, that, having seen a good many of these publications, from the year 1834, when I bought the work of the Rev. Thomas Everest, [Dr. Curie speaks of this silly pamphlet as having been published in 1835.] to within a few weeks, when I received my last importation of Homaeopathic literature, I have found that all, with a very few exceptions, were st.i.tched pamphlets varying from twenty or thirty pages to somewhat less than a hundred, and generally resembling each other as much as so many spelling-books.
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