Вебинар предназначен для широкого круга людей, интересующихся гомеопатией и альтернативными методами лечения, но также будет полезен практикующим гомеопатам.

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Mind
- Anxiety about conscience. Remorse.
- Indisposed to speak. Tearful moroseness.
- Sadness with sleeplessness from heart pains, due to unhappy love, grief.
- Weeping from music.
- Fear that heart will stop if they move (opposite of Gels.).
- Fear of death, about the future.

Generalities
- SLOW PULSE.
- COMBINATION OF HEART AND PROSTATE OR LIVER COMPLAINTS.
- agg. Lying on left side.
- agg. Exertion, coition.

Vertigo
- With heart or liver symptoms.

Eye
- Blue lids.
- Detachment of retina.
- Objects appear green and yellow. Colours of the rainbow before eyes. Changes in perception of shades
of green.

Face
- Face and lips bluish.
- Blue distented veins on lids, ears, lips and tongue.

Mouth
- Tongue and gums blue.

Stomach
- Nausea, agg. eating least food, smell or sight of food. Not relieved by vomiting.
- Faintness, great weakness in stomach. Sinking feeling at pit of stomach.

Abdomen
- Enlarged, sore, painful liver. Hepatitis.

Rectum
- Diarrhea during jaundice.

Stool
- White, chalk-like, pasty.

Bladder
- Constant urging agg. at night, with discharge of hot burning drops.
- Sharp cutting or throbbing pain at neck of bladder, as if straw were being thrust back and forth.
- Retention of urine.

Prostate
- Prostatitis. Prostate enlarged, esp. old people.

Urethra
- Urethritis. Constriction and burning as if urethra too small.

Male genitalia
- Hydrocele. Edema of prepuce. Dropsical swelling of genitals.
- Amorous desire with impotency.
- Phimosis.

Respiration
- Dyspnea associated with heart problems.
- Deep sighing.
- Irregular.

Expectoration
- Hemoptysis instead of menses or before menses.

Chest
- Pneumonia in old people. Chronic bronchitis.
- Passive congestion of lungs with hemoptysis due to weak heart (Queb).
- SLOW PULSE. Slower than heart.
- Least motion causes violent palpitation. Weak puls, quickened by least motion.
- WEAK HEART. FEELS AS IF IT WOULD STOP IF HE MOVED, must hold breath and keep still.
Sudden sensation as if heart stood still (Gels, Lob).
- Angina pectoris agg. raising arms, exertion, coition, excitement.
- Irregular heartbeat. Intermittent pulse.
- Hyperthrophy of heart. Dilatation. Cardiac dropsy.
- Heart failure. Rheumatic heart disease.
- PALPITATIONS, WITH DEPRESSION, FROM GRIEF (Ign, Ph-ac).

Extremities
- Pain and numbness in left arm.
- Dropsy. Shiny, white swelling joints. Swelling of fingers agg. night. Swelling of feet.
- Fingers go to sleep easily.
- One hand cold, the other hot.
- Blue nails.
- Weakness.

Sleep
- Starts from sleep from fear of suffocation.
- Starts from sleep, as if falling from height.

Skin
- Jaundice.
- Cyanosis.
- Dropsy.

Dd
Chim, Kalm, Lach, Lat-m, Spig, Spong, Staph.

Основные лекарственные формы. Гомеопатические гранулы D3, C3, C6 и выше. Капли D3, C3, C6 и выше.
Показания к применению. Действует на систему кровообращения, выделительные (секреторные) железы, фиброзную и апоневротическую ткань (связки и суставы), клетчатку, слизистые оболочки, нервную систему головного мозга, мышцы органов. Применяют при пороках сердца, плеврите, хроническом бронхите, гастрите, колите.

Характерные признаки, усиленная сердечная деятельность, сильное сердцебиение, боль в висках, в правой и левой половине головы, ослабление памяти, маниакальный бред, недержание мочи, расстройство пищеварения.

При использовании докторами старой школы это лекарство принесло вреда больше, чем какое-либо другое средство из арсенала Materia Medica. Digitalis назначался каждому пациенту с учащенной работой сердца или вообще с любыми проблемами с сердцем. К сожалению, такое необдуманное применение препарата повлекло за собой огромное количество смертей. Назначая его при ускоренном сердцебиении, мы лишь провоцируем специфический вид паралича сердечной мышцы; нарушается сбалансированность в его работе, возникает декомпенсация, больной заметно и быстро ослабевает, — подобное состояние может закончиться смертельным исходом.

К сожалению, большинству врачей неизвестно, что, всего лишь избавив больного от этого препарата, они могли бы помочь ему выжить при многих видах лихорадки, пневмониях или каких-либо других острых заболеваниях, тогда как на самом деле они, наоборот, назначали Digitalis в виде настоек, по нескольку капель на прием, до тех пор пока работа сердца не замедлялась. Это лекарство принято считать седативным; и оно поистине обладает седативным эффектом. Под его влиянием реакции больного становятся очень спокойными и замедленными.

Это напоминает то спокойствие, которое присуще человеку после того, как над его телом поработает владелец похоронного бюро, облекая его в лучшие и торжественные одежды. Сходное воздействие оказывает и настойка наперстянки. В руках аллопата она производит именно такое успокоительное действие. Гомеопат никогда не ставит себе целью сделать пульс у больного реже. Он назначает индивидуальное лекарство для пациента, а работа сердца регулируется уже сама по себе.

Digitalis — плохое средство при лихорадках. Вопреки общепринятому мнению, испытания показывают, что назначать его следует отнюдь не при ускорении пульса, а наоборот, при его замедлении.
Препарат вызывает расстройства в работе печени. «Конгестия и увеличение печени. Болезненность в области печени». Печень уязвима, ее функция ослаблена — это сопровождается замедлением пульса. Работа кишечника становится вялой, что, в свою очередь, вызывает снижение печеночной активности, в кале уменьшается содержание желчи, он светлоокрашен, становится кашицеобразным — пульс при этом замедляется.

Добавьте к вышесказанному желтуху, и перед вами окажется готовая и достаточно полная картина препарата Digitalis. Желтуха, с замедленным пульсом, с нарушениями работы печени, светлоокрашенным калом — увидев такого больного, вы наверняка вспомните о Digitalis, даже если раньше вам не приходилось сталкиваться с этим лекарством. К вышеописанной картине можно добавить огромное количество мелких симптомов, но сути дела это не изменит. Так или иначе это Digitalis.

Наряду с сердечными, печеночными и кишечными проблемами Digitalis существует и еще одна группа очень характерных симптомов. В первую очередь — ощущение дурноты, будто внутри все опускается. Пациенту кажется, что он умирает; от еды это ощущение не проходит. По сути, это нервная, сильнейшая слабость, которая возникает наряду с сердечными нарушениями. Неудивительно, что для Digitalis характерна нервная прострация. Беспокойство и выраженная нервная слабость. «Ощущение, как будто он разлетится на кусочки. Тревога. Ощущение, что что-то может произойти». Кажется, что все существо пациента наполнено тревожными ощущениями и беспокойством. Апатия, обмороки, истощение и выраженная прострация. Обмороки от малейшей причины. Слабость начинается в желудке; ощущение огромной слабости в желудке и кишечнике.

Сон пациента наполнен ужасными сновидениями, кошмарами, пугающими образами. Сны о падениях — этот симптом часто встречается при сердечных поражениях. Пульс значительно замедлен, он может быть нерегулярным, в результате во время сна мозг неравномерно снабжается кровью, чем и обусловлено это характерное беспокойство. Через все тело проходят разряды, напоминающие электрически» ток, как будто все внутренности сотрясаются и сокращаются. Возможны резкие мышечные подергивания с ощущением что, через тело проходят электрические импульсы. Это обычно сочетается с медленным пульсом, с предобморочным состоянием и выраженной слабостью. Синюшные и бледные.

Можно перечислить огромное число сердечных симптомов, но ни один из них не является столь значительным, как медленный пульс. Пульс замедляется уже в самом начале заболевания. В этот период он также может периодически, вспышками, становиться учащенным. Пациент тревожен, беспокоен, характерны ужасные сновидения и ощущение, что внутри все опускается — это можно назвать начальной стадией Digitalis, — но я всегда интересуюсь, наблюдалось ли в самом начале болезни замедление пульса. Сам пациент редко помнит об этом, но кто-нибудь из окружающих обязательно вспомнит, что в самом начале пульс был 48 ударов в минуту; тогда же я не сомневаюсь, что передо мной случай Digitalis.

Если в начале болезни пульс, наоборот, ускорялся, не думайте о Digitalis. он не поможет. Пульс Digitalis вначале всегда замедленный, это продолжается несколько дней, после чего может возникнуть трепетание в сердце, которое бьется нерегулярно, с перебоями, иногда возникает ощущение, что оно совсем остановилось, — все перечисленные признаки характерны для данного препарата. Слабость является очень характерной для пульса Digitalis чертой, все остальные симптомы следует рассматривать лишь в сочетании с ней. Вначале пульс иногда замедленный, иногда возрастает его наполнение. Медленный пульс хорошего наполнения, в случаях, когда сердечная мышца поражается ревматическим процессом. «Резкий, но не очень частый пульс. Внезапные, резкие сердечные толчки, с нарушением ритма». Малейшее движение усиливает тревогу и сердцебиение.

Сердцебиения, связанные с яростью, гневом. Внезапное ощущение, что сердце остановилось. Трепетание сердца. При ослаблении сердечной мышцы малейшее мышечное усилие изменяет работу сердца, делает ее непостоянной. У пациентов часто определяются увеличение печени, замедление пульса, желтуха и обесцвечивание кала. Иногда наряду с этим возникает сильный кашель. Digitalis редко назначается при кашле, исключение составляет сердечный кашель. Кашель в полночь. Кашель с мокротой, напоминающей «кипящий крахмал». Кашель с выделением кровянистой слизи в случаях гипостатической конгестии легких. Кашель, вызываемый разговором, ходьбой, употреблением холодных напитков, сгибанием тела. Подобные виды кашля всегда сочетаются с другими нарушениями жизнедеятельности организма.

То же самое можно сказать о дыхании. Нарушения дыхания всегда сочетаются с сердечными и печеночными симптомами. Дыхание нерегулярное, в значительной степени затруднено. Сохраняется постоянное желание сделать глубокий вдох. Когда больной засыпает, дыхание постепенно и медленно угасает, через некоторое время он просыпается от удушья. Подобные проявления наблюдаются у Lachesis, Phosphorus, Carbo Vegetabilis и некоторых других препаратов: у всех этих лекарств отмечается некоторое поражение мозжечка, в котором все они способны вызвать конгестию. Когда человек засыпает, головной мозг как бы отдает команду мозжечку: «Я утомлен, поэтому теперь тебе придется немного позаботиться о дыхании».

В описываемых случаях мозжечок не в состоянии справиться с такой задачей. Его ткани подвержены конгестии: как только мозг засыпает, то же самое происходит и с мозжечком, в результате чего у больного и возникают подобные нарушения дыхания: это сравнительное описание механизма возникновения удушья у Digitalis и у некоторых других препаратов. Мозжечок отвечает за функцию дыхания, когда человек спит, а полушария головного мозга — в состоянии бодрствования. Если бы этот факт был нам неизвестен, мы несомненно узнали бы о нем из испытании лекарств.

«Страх удушья по ночам». Этот симптом необходимо проанализировать. Больной знает из собственного опыта, что удушье возникает каждый раз, когда он засыпает, поэтому он боится засыпать из страха задохнуться. Страх задохнуться ночью имеет именно такое происхождение. То же самое возникает, если пациент засыпает днем, «Дышит с трудом, ловит воздух ртом». Digitalis может быть успешно применен в случаях, когда нижние части легких наполняются содержимым. Больной сидит в постели, при перкуссии в нижних частях обоих легких отмечается притупление с выраженным резонансом в верхних частях легочной ткани. В таких случаях пациенты испытывают удушье в положении лежа. Во всех других ситуациях пациент Digitalis предпочитает лежать ничком, без подушки. При наличии гипостатической конгестии он задыхается даже в таком положении. Digitalis наверняка окажет помощь в случаях, когда в начале заболевания пульс был замедленным, а затем ускорился.

Теперь несколько слов о симптомах, связанных с органами мочеполовой системы. В застарелых случаях увеличения предстательной железы Digitalis совершенно незаменим. Для таких пациентов типично наличие постоянных позывов на мочеиспускание. Digitalis также хорошо помогает при многих заболеваниях, когда моча не может отходить естественным путем, в связи с чем в течение многих месяцев или даже лет пациенту приходится прибегать к помощи катетера, либо при состояниях, связанных с наличием остаточной мочи у стариков или старых холостяков. Это лекарство способно уменьшить размер предстательной железы, в некоторых случаях удается достигнуть полного излечения. «Отечность с подавлением выделения мочи». При уремических состояниях, а также при различных вариантах болезни Брайта с поражением почек часто наблюдаются симптомы, требующие назначения Digitalis. Задержка мочи; моча вытекает по каплям. Сперматорея. Ночные поллюции. Пациенты, которые в течение многих лет предавались тайным порокам. Увеличение предстательной железы.

Препарат способен излечить хроническую гонорею, а также острые случаи этой болезни. Он эффективен при воспалительных поражениях тонкой, нежной оболочки, покрывающей головку полового члена. Отечное опухание гениталий.

«Потеря аппетита и сильная жажда». Большинство докторов назначают Sulphur, в случаях, когда пациент много пьет и мало ест. Тошнота Digitalis не похожа на таковую у Ipecacuanha или Bryonia. Это совершенно особое состояние. Запах пищи вызывает сильнейшую тошноту, слабость, упадок сил, истощение, что часто сочетается с сердечными нарушениями, желтухой и печеночными расстройствами. Тошнота сопровождается ощущением близкой смерти, у пациента ощущение, как будто он постепенно уходит в иной мир. Иногда тошнота уменьшается после еды, но упадок сил сохраняется и после приема пищи, что доказывает, что причиной такого состояния является не только голод. «Постоянная тошнота. Выраженная чувствительность в подложечной области. Обморочное состояние и ощущение, что «все внутри опустилось», так, будто пациент стоит на пороге смерти. Аппетита нет, но выражена жажда. Болезненность и уплотнение в области печени. Чувствительность к давлению в области печени». Запомните наиболее значимые симптомы Digitalis, это — сердечные и печеночные нарушения, желтуха, замедленный пульс, мучительное ощущение дурноты и «опускающегося желудка», увеличение предстательной железы, серый стул.

После всего вышесказанного вас вряд ли удивит то, что поведение пациента Digitalis отличается ужасающей тревогой, которая сохраняется практически постоянно. Он хочет быть один; тоска, меланхолия, отчаяние и беспокойство. Он не способен принять решение в каких-то обычных для него, ежедневных ситуациях; дрожание. Желудочные, кишечные и печеночные нарушения — это то, что часто возникает у алкоголиков после попыток бросить пить. Пациент находится в прострации; сердце не выдерживает нагрузок, работает нерегулярно, слабо, медленно; часто отмечаются тоска и меланхолия; не способен обслуживать себя сам. Digitalis поможет организму такого пациента справиться с ситуацией.

VERTIGO
Vertigo sitting while amel
Vertigo standing while agg

HEAD
Head hair affection of in general greasy
Head hair appearance lusterless
Head heaviness extending to eyes
Head itching scalp
Head numbness sensation of
Head sensitiveness of scalp or brain touch to

HEAD PAIN
Head pain dull
Head pain dull occiput
Head pain dull occiput extending to vertex
Head pain dull sides right
Head pain general afternoon one pm agg
Head pain general bathing after amel
Head pain general bending head backwards agg
Head pain general bending head forward agg
Head pain general evening agg
Head pain general from beer
Head pain general heat agg heated from becoming
Head pain general heat amel
Head pain general morning agg waking and on.
Head pain lancinating occiput bending backwards agg
Head pain lancinating occiput left
Head pain lancinating sides right
Head pain localization forehead extending face to
Head pain localization forehead eyes above
Head pain localization forehead eyes above motion during agg
Head pain localization forehead eyes above right
Head pain localization forehead eyes above stooping when
Head pain localization occiput extending neck to
Head pain localization occiput sides of left
Head pain localization sides touch agg
Head pain localization vertex right
Head pain neuralgic
Head pain neuralgic temples right
Head pain pressing band as if by
Head pain pressing bending head forward agg
Head pain pressing closing eyes amel
Head pain pressing forehead eyes above
Head pain pressing lying amel
Head pain pressing occiput
Head pain pressing occiput extending to vertex
Head pain pressing occiput lying down after
Head pain pressing occiput sides of left
Head pain pressing occiput weight or stone as from
Head pain pressing sides right
Head pain pressing vertex
Head pain pressing vertex extending eye to
Head pain pressing vertex extending forehead to
Head pain pressing vertex weight like
Head pain pressing weight as from
Head pain sore bruised sensitive to pressure sides touch agg

EYE
Eye ecchymosis
Eye heaviness
Eye irritation
Eye lachrymation
Eye lachrymation air in open
Eye lachrymation light from sun of
Eye lachrymation wind in
Eye pain general right extending to left
Eye pain pressing pressure
Eye pain pressing pressure eyes behind
Eye pain pressing pressure pressing inward
Eye pain pressing pressure rest amel
Eye pain pressure pressing ball in
Eye pain pressure pressing eyes around
Eye pain pressure pressing headache during
Eye twitching canthi outer left
Eye twitching left
Vision blurred

EAR
Ear itching in behind ear
Ear itching in left
Ear itching in left
Ear itching in night
Ear noises in reverberating, echoes and reechoes
Ear noises in reverberating, echoes and reechoes own voice
Ear pain general air cold in agg
Ear pain general extending right to left
Ear pain general extending to jaw socket right
Ear pain general pressure on agg
Ear pain general right
Ear pain general right left then
Ear pain general warmth wrapping up amel and
Ear pain lancinating
Ear pain lancinating intermittent
Ear pain pulsating throbbing
Ear pain soreness external ear
Ear pain tearing right extending to right teeth
Ear pains lancinating left
Ear pulsation
Ear pulsation right
Ear skin sensation as of stretched over right external ear
Ear swelling general below glands
Ear swelling general lobes

NOSE
Nose coryza general
Nose coryza general bending forward agg
Nose coryza general discharge with fluent
Nose coryza general discharge with fluent dripping
Nose coryza general intermittent
Nose coryza general violent attacks
Nose discharge clear
Nose obstruction general morning
Nose pain sore bruised inside
Nose peppery sensation
Nose sneezing general
Nose sneezing general constant
Nose sneezing general coryza with
Smell, acute

FACE
Face ulcers lips inside

MOUTH
Mouth dryness general
Mouth dryness general thirstlessness with
Mouth hemorrhage gums cleaning them when
Mouth pain sore lip inside lower
Mouth ulcers general
Mouth ulcers general flat
Mouth ulcers general painful
Mouth ulcers general right
Mouth ulcers general yellow

THROAT
Throat dryness general
Throat general mucus evening
Throat general mucus swallow must
Throat hawk disposition to tickling from
Throat irritation
Throat lump plug sensation of soreness with
Throat lump plug sensation of swallowing agg on
Throat mucus bitter
Throat mucus general
Throat mucus general clear
Throat mucus general morning
Throat mucus general tenacious
Throat mucus general yellow
Throat mucus general yellow morning
Throat mucus sensation of
Throat pain general drinking amel
Throat pain general left
Throat pain general sleep after
Throat pain general swallowing on liquids amel warm
Throat pain general warm drinks amel
Throat pain rawness swallowing when
Throat pain sore bruised left
Throat pain sore bruised lump as if from
Throat pain sore bruised swallowing empty on
Throat pain splinter as from
Throat pain splinter as from a extending to ear
Throat pain splinter as from a swallowing on agg

External throat pain general sides right
External throat pain tearing sides pressure amel
External throat swelling general cervical glands
External throat swelling general veins

STOMACH
Stomach appetite diminished
Stomach appetite diminished morning
Stomach appetite diminished noon
Stomach appetite increased hunger in general
Stomach appetite insatiable
Stomach fullness sensation of eating agg after
Stomach nausea
Stomach nausea eating agg after
Stomach nausea eating amel after
Stomach nausea eructations amel. during
Stomach nausea menses during
Stomach nausea menses during profuse
Stomach nausea morning
Stomach nausea morning rising on and after agg
Stomach nausea morning waking on
Stomach nausea pain during
Stomach nausea sleep agg, after
Stomach pain cramping griping constricting
Stomach pain cramping griping constricting
Stomach pain cramping griping constricting eating agg after
Stomach pain cramping griping constricting dysmenorrhoea like
Stomach pain general cold drinks after agg
Stomach pain general continuous
Stomach pain general heat amel
Stomach thirst
Stomach thirstlessness
Stomach, pain, neuraligic

Abdomen
Abdomen distention general
Abdomen distention general painful
Abdomen flatulence
Abdomen general pain sides right
Abdomen noises, rumbling eating agg after
Abdomen pain cramping griping intermittent
Abdomen pain cramping, griping extending to back
Abdomen pain cramping, griping, sides
Abdomen, pain, cramping, gripping, sides, extending to kidney
Abdomen pain general eating agg after
Abdomen pain general inguinal region left
Abdomen pain general inguinal region pressure amel
Abdomen pain general inguinal region urinate with urging to
Abdomen pain general rumbling with
Abdomen pain general urination amel
Abdomen pain stabbing
Abdomen pain stitching sticking etc. deep inwards
Abdomen pain stitching sticking etc. extending upwards

RECTUM
Rectum flatus general odorless
Rectum flatus general offensive
Rectum flatus general offensive spoiled eggs

STOOL
Stool forcible sudden gushing explosive
Stool odor offensive

FEMALE
Female sexual leucorrhea profuse
Female sexual menses bright red
Female sexual menses bright red clotted partly
Female sexual menses frequent too early too soon
Female sexual menses frequent too early too soon, five days too early
Female sexual menses frequent too early too soon, four days too early
Female sexual menses frequent too early too soon, scanty, and
Female sexual menses frequent too early too soon, six days too early
Female sexual menses general appear would appear, as if
Female sexual menses hot
Female sexual menses painful dysmenhorrhea extending down thighs
Female sexual menses painful dysmenhorrhea extending to inguinal region right
Female sexual menses painful dysmenhorrhea lying amel
Female sexual menses painful dysmenhorrhea walking agg
Female sexual menses painful dysmenhorrhea warmth amel
Female sexual menses profuse general
Female sexual menses protracted prolonged
Female sexual metrorrhagia general

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Lukewarm baths, of from 318 to 348C [888 to 938F], serve to awaken the slumbering irritability of the fibers in cases of apparent death (from freezing, drowning, asphyxiation) where the feeling of the fibers has been benumbed. While these baths are only palliative, they often prove themselves to be sufficiently effective, especially if at the same time, coffee is given and the patient is rubbed by hand.

Warm baths

Warm baths can provide homeopathic assistance in cases where the irritability is very unevenly distributed and has accumulated far too much in some organs, as is the case with some hysterical cramps and infantile convulsions.

Cold baths

Cold baths have proven to be a homeopathic aid and also a restorative palliative in the convalescence of patients who have been medicinally restored from a chronic disease. Momentary immersion in cold baths, of 78 to 138C [458 to 558F], has been found to be a homeopathic aid for a patient’s lack of vital heat. Later in convalescence, momentary, frequently repeated immersions in cold baths have proven to be a restorative palliative for the tone of slack fibers. When the restoration of slack fibers is the intent, cold baths are to be taken for more than a moment, even for several minutes, and at increasingly cold temperatures. While this is a palliative, it only acts physically and therefore it is not connected with the disadvantage of an opposite reaction, which takes place (and is to be feared) with dynamic medicinal palliatives.

Mesmeric action is involved when a robust, good-natured person gives a massage to someone who was chronically ill and has been cured but is still in the process of slow recovery, and is still suffering from emaciation, weak digestion and lack of sleep. The massage therapist separately lays hold of the muscles of the limbs, chest and back, moderately pressing and, as it were, kneading the muscles, whereby the life principle is stimulated in its counter-action to restore the tone of the muscles and their blood and lymph vessels. Of course, the mesmeric impinging action is the main thing in this procedure, which should not be used to excess with patients who still suffer from emotional irritability.  

Negative mesmerism

Negative mesmerism deserves such a name because it has the opposite effect. The passes that are needed to waken people out of a somnabulistic sleep belong to this category, as well as all the manual executions covered under the names calming and ventilating. With undebilitated persons, this discharge of the life force which has excessively accumulated in a single part is most surely and simply produced, through negative mesmerism, by means of a very rapid movement of the flat out-stretched right hand, held parallel to and about an inch from the body, going from the top of the head down over the tips of the toes. 237 The more rapidly this pass is executed, the stronger the discharge it produces. For example, in one case of apparent death, a woman who was previously healthy, 238 received a violent emotional shock which suppressed her menstruation just prior to its onset. This probably resulted in an accumulation of energy in the precordial region. This was discharged and the entire organism was restored to homeostasis by a rapid negative pass, and she was revived. With such treatment, revival usually ensues immediately. 239 In cases of very irritable persons, a gentle, less rapid negative pass occasionally relieves the excessive restlessness and anxious insomnia that sometimes stems from an all-too-powerfully given positive pass, etc.

Comment

236 When I speak of the decided and sure curative power of positive mesmerists, I certainly do not mean that most deplorable exaggeration of it (called somnambulism or clairvoyance) in which repeated passes are made for half an hour or even a whole hour at a time, day after day, on patients with a weak nervous system in order to induce that monstrous alteration in the tunement of the entire human wesen. This is a highly unnatural and dangerous state in which the person is transported from the world of the senses and appears to belong more to the spirit world. It has been used in vain attempts to cure chronic diseases.

237 It is an already-known rule that a person that is to be mesmerized, either positively or negatively, must not wear silk on any part of the body. It is less well known, however, that the mesmerist can communicate his life force to the patient in fulle

238 Thus, a negative pass, especially a very rapid one, is extremely detrimental to a chronically weak person with low vitality.r measure if he stands on silk instead of standing on the bare floor.

239 A robust ten year-old country lad, due to a minor indisposition, was treated one morning by a so-called strokestress who repeatedly passed both tips of her thumbs very powerfully from the pit of his stomach out under his ribs, and he fell at once, deathly pale, into such an unconsciousness and immobility that, with all due exertion, one could not awaken him and he was almost taken for dead. I then had his older brother give him as rapid a negative pass as possible from the top of his head down over his feet, and he immediately regained consciousness and became lively and well.

I find it necessary to make mention here of so-called animal magnetism or mesmerism (so named in gratitude to Mesmer, its first founder) which differs in nature from all other medicines. This curative power (often foolishly denied or reviled for an entire century) is a wonderful, priceless gift of God, granted to humanity. The life force of a healthy mesmerist, gifted with this power, dynamically streams into another human being by means of touch or even without it-indeed even at some distance. It does so through the powerful will of a well-intentioned individual. The mesmerist’s life force dynamically streams into another human being just as one of the poles of a powerful magnet dynamically streams into a rod of raw steel. This curative power works in a different way in that in part, it replaces the life force lacking here and there in the patient’s organism and in part, it drains off, decreases and more equally distributes the life force that has accumulated all-too-much in other places, thereby arousing and maintaining unnamable nervous sufferings. In general, it extinguishes the morbid mistunement of the patient’s life principle, replacing it with the mesmerist’s normal tunement which is powerfully impinging upon the patient. It does so, for example, in cases of old ulcers, amaurosis, paralysis of individual limbs, etc.

Many a rapid apparent cure in all ages can be attributed to the animal magnetizers gifted with great nature-power. The action of communicated human power upon the whole organism by means of the most powerful, good-natured will of a man whose life force is in full bloom 235 has been most brilliantly shown in the revival of some persons who remained in apparent death for a long time-a kind of wakening from death of which history gives us several undeniable examples. If the mesmerizing person of either sex is capable at the same time of good-natured enthusiasm (or perhaps even a degenerated form of it, such as bigotry, fanaticism, mysticism or obsessive philanthropy) then he is all the more in a position, with this philanthropic, self-sacrificing action, not only to direct the power of his prevailing good nature exclusively upon the object requiring his help but also, as it were, to concentrate it there, thus occasionally working wonders.

Comment

235 Especially one of those men (of whom there are few in humanity) who, along with great good nature and full-blown bodily powers, possesses very little or even no sexual drive. Consequently, all the subtle life spirits that would otherwise be employed in the preparation of semen are available in quantity, ready to be communicated to others through touch and a powerful exertion of will. Some mesmerists with such curative power, whom I got to know, possessed all of these particular attributes.

One can more surely avail oneself of the curative powers of a powerful magnet. The positive actions of its north and south poles are presented in the Materia Medica Pura. Although both poles are equally powerful, they stand in opposition to one another in the manner of their action. Doses may be moderated by the amount of time one or the other pole is applied (according to whether more of the symptoms of the north or the south pole are indicated). A plate of polished zinc can be used as an antidote for an all-too-violent action. 

The dynamic powers of mineral magnets, electricity and galvanism act as powerfully and as homeopathically on our life principle as do actual so-called medicines that lift diseases by means of oral ingestion, through the skin, or by olfaction. They thereby enable the cure of diseases, especially those of sensibility and irritability, of abnormal feeling, and involuntary muscle movements. However, the sure manner of employing electricity and galvanism (as well as the use of the so-called electro-magnetic machine) still lies too much in the dark to make homeopathic use of them. So far, both electricity and galvanism have been used only for palliation, doing great damage to patients. Up until now, their positive pure actions on the healthy human body have been but little proven. 

Thus, the cure of very old diseases can be furthered by the physician rubbing (on the back, arms, upper and lower legs) the same medicine which is being taken internally and proves itself to be salutary to the patient when taken internally. Any parts subject to pain, cramps or skin eruption should be avoided [§194]. 234

Comment

234 The fact that medicines can be administered through the skin explains those rare miracle cures where chronically crippled patients (whose skin was nevertheless whole and unblemished) were rapidly and permanently cured after a few mineral baths. By chance, the medicinal constituents of the baths were homeopathically appropriate to the old malady. On the other hand, mineral baths have very often done great damage by expelling patients’ skin rashes. After a brief period of well-being, the life principle usually allows the inner uncured malady to erupt elsewhere, upon another body site that is far more important for life and well-being. For example, any of the following may arise: paralysis of the optic nerve and amaurosis, a clouding of the crystalline lens of the eye [cataracts], deafness, insanity, suffocating asthma, or a stroke that puts an end to the sufferings of the deceived patient. It is a cardinal principle of the homeopathic medical-art practitioner (which distingushes him from every so-called physician of all the older schools) that he never employ any medication whose morbid impingements upon the healthy human being have not been carefully proven and thus become known to him (§20-§21). To prescribe for a patient a means which is unknown as to its positive actions on the human condition, upon mere conjecture about its possible salutariness in some similar case or because someone says, «This means has helped in such and such a disease,» is an unscrupulous, dangerous venture which the homeopath who loves mankind will leave to the unfeeling allopath. For this reason, a genuine physician and practitioner of our art will never send his patients to any of the countless mineral baths because almost all of them are unknown as to their exact positive action on the healthy human condition. Misused mineral baths are to be counted among the most violent and dangerous of medicinal means. Out of a thousand patients blindly sent to the most famous of such baths by the ignorant physicians who have not been able to cure them with allopathic treatment, one or two come back accidentally cured (though often only apparently cured) and praise the miracle to the skies, while many hundreds quietly slink away more or less aggravated. Some of them stay behind, readying themselves for their eternal resting place, a fact attested to by the well-filled graveyards that surround the most famous baths.†

Besides the tongue, the mouth, 233 and the stomach (which are the places most commonly affected by the ingestion of medicine), medicines may be administered through the nose and respiratory organs which, by means of olfaction and inhalation through the mouth, are especially receptive to the impingement of medicines in liquid form. All the rest of the skin of our body (clothed with its epidermis) is also fit for the impinging action of medicinal solutions, especially when the medicinal solution is rubbed in at the same time that it is ingested.

Comment

233 The power of medicines passed on to the nursing infant through the milk of the mother or wet nurse is admirably helpful. Every childhood disease yields to the homeopathic medicine that is correctly chosen for the child and given in very moderate doses to the woman nursing him. In this manner, diseases are eradicated in these new earth citizens far more easily and surely than could ever happen at a later time. Psora is usually communicated through breast milk to most nursing infants, if they do not already possess it by inheritance from the mother. Therefore, nursing infants can be antipsorically protected in the same way-by means of medicinal milk.

In order to proceed entirely in accordance with nature, the true medical-art practitioner will prescribe his homeopathic medicine, best selected in all respects, in such a small dose that if, upon occasion, he should be misled through human weakness into employing a more unfitting medicine, the disadvantage of its make-up (unsuitable as it is to the disease) would be so small that it could be rapidly extinguished and made good by the life’s own power and by the immediate opposition (§249)-likewise in the smallest dose-of a now more fittingly selected remedy, selected according to similarity of action. 

If the first doses of a treatment, especially of a case of chronic disease, already bring forth a so-called homeopathic aggravation (i.e. , a noticeable heightening of the original disease symptoms that were investigated at first) despite each repeated dose being somewhat modified (more highly dynamized) by succussion prior to ingestion (§247), then it is a sure sign that these doses were all-too-large. 232

Comment

232 There is a notable exception to the rule of beginning the homeopathic treatment of chronic diseases with the smallest possible doses and only very gradually increasing them. This exception applies to the three great miasms while they are still blooming on the skin; that is, the recently erupted itch diathesis, the undisturbed residual chancre (on the genitalia, the labia, the lips of the mouth, etc.) and figwarts. These blooming miasms not only tolerate but they require immediately, at the beginning, large doses of their specific remedy. They require their specific remedy in higher and higher degrees of dynamization ingested daily, or perhaps even several times a day. In treating these diseases in this way, one need not fear (as one must with diseases that are hidden in the interior) that the all-too-large dose, while extinguishing the disease, could engender (due to its being too large) the beginning of a medicinal disease, and with continued use, a chronic medicinal disease. In these cases where the blossoms of the three miasms are lying there openly, one can visibly perceive, in the daily progress towards cure, how much of the feeling of these diseases has been daily withdrawn from the life principle by the large dose. None of these three miasmatic diseases can go over into cure without the disappearance of their primary symptom; therefore the disappearance of these symptoms indicates to the physician that no more medicine is needed.

Since, in general, diseases are only dynamic infringements upon the life principle, with nothing material lying at their base, no materia peccans (a fable under which the old school in its delusion has been operating for millennia, to the ruin of its patients), there is then, in these disease cases, nothing material to take away, rub away, burn away, cut away or tie off without making the patient endlessly sicker and more incurable for the rest of his life than he was with the untouched blossom of these three great miasms (see The Chronic Diseases, vol. I).

What is essential about these outer signs of the internal virulent miasms is the dynamic enmity perpetrated upon the life principle. It is only possible to extinguish these miasms by impinging on the life principle with a homeopathic medicine that affects it in a similar way but more strongly. The feeling of the inner and outer spirit-like disease enemy is thus withdrawn in such a manner that it exists no more for the life principle, for the organism. The patient is thereby freed from the malady; he is released, cured. Experience teaches that the itch diathesis, together with its eruption, and the inner venereal [syphilitic] miasm with its chancre, can and must be cured only by means of the specific medicine, taken internally. Figwarts, however, when they have remained untreated for a long time, must be treated with the external application of their specific medicine at the same time as it is used internally, in order to effect a complete cure [§285].

To be sure of this, leave the patient without medicine for eight, ten or fifteen days, giving only milk sugar [as a placebo] instead.

If the few last ailments were merely due to the medicine, which imitated the former original disease symptoms, then these ailments will pass away within a few days or hours and, if (with continued good living habits) nothing more of the original disease shows itself in these medicine-free days, then the disease is probably cured.

If, on the other hand, traces of the former disease symptoms still show themselves in the last days, then these are remnants of the original disease that are not entirely extinguished. These remnants should be treated anew, in the indicated way, with higher degrees of dynamization of the medicine.

Patient sensitivity affects the rate of advance to higher potencies.

Naturally, for the cure to ensue again, the first smallest doses must also be gradually heightened [increased in potency], however they should be heightened far less and more slowly with patients in whom one perceives a considerable excitability than with the more unreceptive patients, with whom one can raise the dose more rapidly. There are patients whose uncommon excitability is one thousand times greater than that of the most unreceptive ones.

One should continue giving gradually heightened [more highly potentized] doses of the persistently serviceable medicine that engenders no new troublesome symptoms until the patient with general improvement of condition begins to sense anew, in a moderate degree, one or more of his old, original ailments. This renewal of old ailments indicates that:

1. the patient is near cure due to the moderate doses that have, each time, been gradually heightened by means of succussion (§247),

2. namely, the life principle almost no longer needs to be affected by the similar medicinal disease in order to lose the feeling for the natural disease (§148),

3. the life principle, now freer from the natural disease, is beginning to suffer somewhat from the homeopathic medicinal disease, which is otherwise called a homeopathic aggravation.

This pure experience now shows universally that:

1. if considerable corruption of an important [vital] organ does not obviously lie at the base of the disease (even if the disease is chronic and complicated), and

2. if, during treatment, all other foreign medicinal impingements on the patient have been withheld, then the dose of a homeopathically chosen, highly potentized remedy for the beginning of treatment of an important (especially chronic) disease, as a rule, can never be prepared so small that it would not 1. be still stronger than the natural disease, 2. be able, at least in part, to over-tune the natural disease, and

3. even be able to extinguish a part of the natural disease in the feeling of the life principle, thus producing a beginning of the cure.

The question arises: what is the most appropriate degree of smallness for certain as well as gentle help? How small would the dose of each single, homeopathically selected medicine have to be for the best cure in each individual case of disease? It is easy to realize that no theoretical conjecture can solve the problem of determining, for each medicine in particular, what dose will suffice for homeopathic curative purposes, yet still be so minute that the gentlest and most rapid cure will be attained. Speculating intellect and subtle sophistry give no information about it. It is also impossible to record all conceivable cases in a table in advance. Only pure experiment, careful observation of the excitability of each patient, and correct experience can determine the best dose in each particular case.

It would be foolish to disregard what pure experience teaches us about the smallness of the dose necessary for homeopathic cures and to advance the large doses of inappropriate (allopathic) medicines of the old practice. These allopathic medicines do not homeopathically touch the sick side of the organism; they only attack the parts of the organism not assailed by the disease.

For the same reason [§275], since a well-dynamized medicine whose dose is properly small becomes all the more curative and helpful-almost to the point of wonder-the more homeopathically it was searched out, it follows that a medicine whose apt selection has been homeopathically hit upon must also be all-the-more curative the more its dose descends to the appropriate degree of smallness for gentle aid.  

For this reason, a medicine that is homeopathically appropriate to a given case of disease, but that is given in too large a dose, does much more damage than an equally large dose of a medicine that is allopathic to the disease. In strong doses, the more homeopathic the medicine is to the disease state, and the higher its potency, 230 the more damage it will do-much more than an equally large dose of medicine that is unhomeopathic, bearing no relation to the disease state (i.e. , that is allopathic to the disease state).

Frequently repeated, too-strong doses of a homeopathic medicine can endanger the patient’s life or make his disease almost incurable

As a rule, all-too-large doses of an apt, homeopathically selected medicine give rise to great misfortune, especially if these too-large doses are frequently repeated. Not seldom, they endanger the patient’s life or make his disease almost incurable. Too-large doses certainly do extinguish the natural disease for the feeling of the life principle-the patient suffers no more from the original disease from the moment the all-too-strong dose of the homeopathic medicine acts upon him-but the patient is then more strongly sick from the quite similar, only far more violent medicinal disease which is very difficult to expunge. 231

Comment

230 The recent praise by some homeopaths for the larger doses is due to one of the following reasons:

1. they continue to use low potentizations of the administered medicine, dynamized in the hitherto manner (as perhaps I myself did 25 years ago for want of better knowledge),

2. the medicines they used were imperfectly prepared by the manufacturer, or

3. the medicines they used were not homeopathically selected.**

In other words, homeopaths who have praised the larger doses do so for one of two reasons:

1. The potencies they are using are so low that they require larger doses to have an effect. This follows Hahnemann’s point in §276 that the higher the potency, the smaller the dose that is needed to alter health (and the more harm that is done by a too-large dose).

2. The medicines they are using are not homeopathic enough to the disease state to work in small doses.

This follows Hahnemann’s point in §276 that the more homeopathic a medicine is, the smaller the dose that is needed to alter health (and the more harm that is done by a too-large dose).A medicine that is poorly manufactured may fall into either of these two categories. For a brief history of Hahnemann’s progressive development and use of different doses and potencies, see «Lecture XIV: Homeopathic Posology» in R.E.  Dudgeon’s Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Homeopathy.

231 [Examples of damage done by homeopathic medicines used in large and frequent doses:]

1. In this way, almost incurable mercurial wasting sicknesses arise from the persistent use of aggressive allopathic mercurial means, prescribed in large doses against syphilis. Yet in a few days, one or several doses of a mild but effective mercurial means would certainly thoroughly cure the whole venereal disease, along with the chancre, provided the chancre had not been dispelled by external measures (as always happens with allopathy).

2. Likewise, allopaths have given large, daily doses of cinchona and quinine for intermittent fevers where cinchona was correctly homeopathically indicated and where one very small dose of highly potentized cinchona would have unfailingly helped (i.e. , in cases of intermittent swamp fever, with those patients who are not suffering from manifest psora [§242]). The allopath thereby engenders a chronic quinine wasting sickness, while psora is developed at the same time. If this does not gradually kill the patient (by corruption of internal organs important for life, especially the spleen and the liver) it at least makes him suffer in a sad state of health for years on end. It is hard to conceive of a homeopathic antidote against this sort of malady, engendered by the excessive use of large doses of homeopathic medicines.

The appropriateness of a medicine for a given case of disease does not rest on its apt homeopathic selection alone, but also on the necessary, correct size (or smallness) of its dose. A medicine given in an all-too-strong dose for a given case of disease, even if the medicine is completely homeopathic to the case and in itself of a beneficial nature, will still damage the patient as a result of its size and the too-strong impression it makes on the life force and (due to its similar homeopathic action) on precisely those parts of the organism that are already the most sensitive and the most attacked by the natural disease. 

The true medical-art practitioner already finds in quite simple medicines, employed singly and unmixed, all that he could wish for: artificial disease potences which are able to completely over-tune
natural diseases by homeopathic power, to extinguish them for the feeling of the life principle and to permanently cure them. Therefore, it will never occur to the true medical-art practitioner to administer more than one simple medicinal substance at one time as a remedy, in accordance with the wise saying that it is wrong to use complex means where simple ones will suffice. Reasons for giving only one simple medicine at a time are:

1. Simple single medicines have been fully proven with respect to their pure characteristic actions in the unclouded healthy human state, but it is still impossible to predict how two or more medicinal substances might hinder or alter each other’s actions upon the human body.

2. If it is homeopathically selected, a simple medicinal substance, whose symptom complex is exactly known, helps completely, and by itself alone, in diseases. But even in the worst case-where the medicinal substance could not be entirely and appropriately selected in accordance with symptom similarity, and therefore does not help-it is nevertheless useful in furthering our knowledge of remedies. As a result of the new ailments aroused by the medicinal substance in such a case, those symptoms are confirmed which this substance had already shown in provings on the healthy human body. No such knowledge can be gained when compound means are used. 229

Comment

229 When the rational physician has carefully considered a case and given internally the apt, homeopathically selected medicine, he will leave to the irrational allopathic routine the practice of giving an additional herbal infusion of other medicinal substances, applying a poultice or a fomentation made from various herbs, inserting a medicated clyster or rubbing in this or that ointment.

In no case of cure is it necessary to employ more than a single simple medicinal substance at one time with a patient. For this reason alone, it is inadmissible to do so. It is inconceivable that there could be the slightest doubt about whether it is more in accordance with nature and more reasonable to prescribe only a single, simple,273 well-known medicinal substance at one time in a disease or a mixture of several different ones. In homeopathy-the only true and simple, the only natural medical art-it is absolutely prohibited to administer to the patient, at one time, two different medicinal substances.  

One globule [of fifty-millesimal potency medicine, prepared as described in §270-§271], 228 when it is placed dry upon the tongue, is one of the smallest doses for a moderate case of recently arisen disease. Administered in this way, only a few nerves are touched by the medicine. On the other hand, a similar globule crushed in with some milk sugar, dissolved in a good amount of water (§247) and well succussed before each ingestion, furnishes a far stronger medicine for many days’ use. Every dose, no matter how small, contacts many nerves all at once.

Comment

228 These globules retain their medicinal value for many years if protected from sunlight and heat

1. Mix a couple of grains of the plant in a mortar with one third of 100 grains of milk sugar.

2. Bring the mixture to the one millionth trituration in three distinct steps (§270).

The substance can then be further potentized by means of succussion. This procedure is also to be observed with the remaining medicinal substances of either a dry or oily nature [fn267b].

Comment

227 Physicians should prepare their own medicines until that day when the government (having attained insight as to the indispensability of perfectly prepared homeopathic medicines) has them manufactured by a capable, impartial person so that they may be given, free of charge, to homeopathic physicians of the land who are versed in cure, who have been trained in homeopathic hospitals, proven in both theory and practice, and thus certified. In this way, the physician will not only be assured of the intrinsic superior quality of these divine curative implements, he will also be able to give them free to his patients, rich and poor.

In order to best produce this development of power, a small quantity of the substance to be dynamized (about one grain) is first raised to the one-millionth powder-attenuation by means of a three-hour trituration process. Three one-hour triturations are done, each using 100 grains of milk sugar as explained in the footnote below. 220

The medicinal substance is then further potentized by means of dilution and succussion. Preparation of medicine to the first degree of potency [LM1]:

1. Dissolve 1 grain of the triturated powder [i.e. , the substance triturated to the one-millionth attenuation] in 500 drops of a mixture that is 1 part brandywine [90° grain alcohol] and 4 parts distilled water. The reason for using this 500:1 dilution ratio is explained in the footnote [270f] below.

2. Place a single drop of this mixture in a vial.

3. Add 100 drops of good wine spirit [95° grain alcohol] to the vial. 221

4. Give the tightly corked vial 100 strong succussions with the hand against a hard but elastic body. 222 This is the first degree of dynamization.

5. Thoroughly moisten 223 fine sugar globules 224 with this liquid.

6. Rapidly spread the sugar globules on blotting paper to dry.

7. Store the globules in a tightly stoppered little vial with the sign of the first degree of potency (i).

8. Protect the bottle from heat and daylight.

Preparation of medicine to the second degree of potency [LM2]:

1. Take 1 globule of the medicine potentized to the first degree [LM1] and put it in a new vial (with a drop of water in order to dissolve it). 225

2. Follow steps 3-8 above, labeling the bottle with the sign of the second degree of potency (ii).

Preparation of medicine to the thirthieth degree of potency [LM30]:

Continue the above procedure until the dissolved globule of the 29th degree of potency has formed a spiritized medicinal fluid with 100 drops of wine spirit, by means of 100 succussions, whereby globules that are moistened with this and dried are labeled xxx, the 30th degree of dynamization.

Only when crude medicinal substances are processed in this way, does one obtain preparations that have attained their full capability to aptly touch the suffering parts in the sick organism. In this way, by means of a similar artificial disease-affection, the feeling of the natural disease is withdrawn from the life principle which is present in these suffering parts. By means of this mechanical processing (provided it is properly executed, as specified above) a given medicinal substance which, in its crude state, is only matter (in some cases, unmedicinal matter) is subtilized and transformed by these higher and higher dynamizations to become a spirit-like medicinal power. 226 This medicinal power in itself no longer falls within our senses. The medicated globule becomes the carrier of this invisible power and, in this capacity, it documents the salutariness of that power in the sick body. The medicated globule carries this invisible power even when it is used dry, but far more so when it is dissolved in water [§272].

Comment

220 Trituration to the one-hundredth powder-attenuation: 1. Obtain milk sugar of that especially pure kind that is crystallized on threads and comes to us in the form of round bars. 2. Put one third of 100 grains of powdered milk sugar in a glazed porcelain mortar, the bottom of which has been roughened by rubbing it with fine, moist sand. 3. Put 1 grain of the powdered medicinal substance to be triturated (or 1 drop of mercury, petroleum, etc.) on top of the powdered milk sugar. 4. Mix the medicine and the powder with a porcelain spatula for a moment. 5. Triturate the mixture rather strongly for 6 to 7 minutes, using a porcelain pestle that has been rubbed dull. 6. For 3 to 4 minutes, thoroughly scrape the mass from the bottom of the mortar and from the pestle, to make it homogeneous. 7. Continue the trituration (as described in step 5) for another 6 to 7 minutes. 8. Scrape the mass (as described in step 6) for another 3 to 4 minutes. 9. Add the second third of the milk sugar. 10. Repeat steps 4-8. 11. Add the last third of the milk sugar. 12. Repeat steps 4-8. 13. Put the powder in a well-corked vial that protects it from sunlight and daylight. 14. Label the vial with the name of the substance and the number 1/100 [to indicate the one hundredth attenuation, or first centesimal trituration, 1c]. Trituration to the one ten-thousandth powder-attenuation: 1. Mix 1 grain of the 1/100 powder with 1/3 of 100 grains of powdered milk sugar. 2. Follow steps 4-13 above. 3. Label the vial with the name of the substance and the number 1/10,000 [to indicate the one ten-thousandth attenuation, or second centesimal trituration, 2c].Trituration to the one millionth powder-attenuation: 1. Mix 1 grain of the 1/10,000 powder with one third of 100 grains of powdered milk sugar. 2. Follow steps 4-13 above. 3. Label it with the name of the substance and the number 1/1,000,000 [to indicate the one millionth attenuation, or third centesimal trituration, 3c]. Each grain of this powder contains one millionth of a grain of the original substance. Each of these three trituration procedures takes one hour (six times 6-7 minutes for trituration plus six times 3-4 minutes for scraping). After the first hour of trituration, each grain of the preparation contains 1/100 of the medicinal substance used; after the second hour, 1/10,000 and after the third hour, 1/1,000,000. These are the three degrees of dry powder trituration which, if well executed, make a good beginning towards developing the power (dynamization) of the medicinal substance.

The mortar, pestle and spatula must be thoroughly cleaned before being used to prepare another medicine. Clean them as follows:

1. Wash them thoroughly in warm water.

2. Dry them thoroughly.

3. Place them in boiling water for 1/2 hour.

4. As an extra precaution, these utensils may be placed on top of glowing coals.

221 The size of the vial used for potentizing should be such that it is two-thirds full with this liquid.

222 Such as a leather-bound book

223 To moisten the globules with the medicinal alcohol: 1. Place the globules in a small cylindrical vessel made of glass, porcelain or silver and shaped like a thimble, with a fine opening in the bottom. 2. Moisten them with some of the dynamized medicinal alcohol. 3. Stir the globules. 4. Invert the vessel and tap out the globules onto a sheet of blotting paper in order to rapidly dry them.

224 The sugar globules should be made from starch flour and cane sugar by a confectioner under one’s own supervision. First, the tiny globules are placed in a sieve to separate them from the fine dust-like particles. Then they are put through a strainer with holes through which only those weighing 1 grain per 100 can pass. This is the most useful size for the requirements of the homeopathic physician.

225 In earlier instructions, I specified that a whole drop of a liquid in a given potency be added to 100 drops of wine spirit for higher potentization. But meticulous experiments have convinced me that this proportion of the dilution medium to the medicine being dynamized (100:1) is much too narrowly limited to develop the powers of the medicinal substance properly and to a high degree, by means of a large number of succussions, unless one uses great force. Whereas if a single globule (100 of which weigh a grain) is used instead of a whole drop of liquid, and this is dynamized with 100 drops of wine spirit, then the ratio of dilutant to medicine becomes 50,000:1, indeed higher than that, because 500 of such globules cannot completely absorb 1 drop. In this much higher ratio of the dilution medium to the medicine, many succussions of the vial filled to two-thirds with wine spirit can bring about a far greater development of power. With a ratio of the dilution medium to the medicine as low as 100:1, very many impacts by means of a powerful machine, as it were, are forced in. As a result, medicines arise that, especially in the higher degrees of dynamization, almost instantaneously but with stormy-indeed dangerous-intensity, impinge on patients (especially delicate ones) without bringing about an enduring, gentle counter-action of the life-principle. On the other hand, my new method engenders a medicine of the highest development of power and the gentlest action which, if well chosen, curatively touches all sick points.

Using these far more perfect [i.e. , greatly perfected] dynamized medicinal preparations, one can, in acute fevers, repeat the small doses of the lowest degrees of dynamization even at short intervals and even with medicines of long-lasting action, such as belladonna.

In chronic diseases, one can best proceed by beginning treatment with the lowest degrees of dynamization and, when necessary, continuing to the higher degrees which, although they become ever more powerful, always act only gently.

226 This assertion will not appear improbable if one considers that with this method of dynamization [of fifty-millesimal potencies]-which I have found after many laborious tests and counter-tests to be the most powerful and, at the same time, the mildest in action (i.e. , the most perfected)-the material part of the medicine is attenuated about 50,000 times and yet it is incredibly increased in power. If we multiply by 50,000 at each progressive dynamization [following initial trituration which achieves a dilution ratio of 1,000,000 to 1] the material substance is already reduced to 125,000,000,000,000,000,000 at the third potency [1,000,000 x 50,000 x 50,000 x 50,000 = 125 x 1018]. This is the dilution after triturating the substance to the one-millionth attenuation and then dynamizing it to the third potency [LM3]. The thirtieth dynamization, prepared progressively in this way, gives a fraction of material substance almost impossible to express in numbers. It becomes exceedingly probable that the matter, by means of such dynamizations (developments of its true, inner medicinal wesen) finally dissolves entirely into its individual spirit-like wesen. Therefore, in its crude state, it could be considered as actually consisting only of this undeveloped spirit-like wesen.*

Comment

216 Long before I devised this procedure, it was known through experience, that several alterations in natural substances could be brought about by friction (e.g. , warmth, heat, fire, development of odor in odorless bodies, magnetization of steel, etc.). However, all of these properties engendered by friction relate only to what is physical and lifeless, whereas there is a natural law according to which the physiological and pathogenic powers that are in the raw material of the medications (indeed even in natural substances never yet proven to be medicinal)-powers that alter the living organism’s condition-are engendered by means of friction [in trituration] and succussion, under the condition that the natural substance is triturated and succussed with certain proportions of a non-medicinal (indifferent) intervening medium. This wonderful law, which is physical but more especially physiological and pathogenic, was not discovered before my time. No wonder then, that the natural scientists and physicians of our day (this law being unknown to them) did not, until now, believe in the magical curative power of medications prepared (dynamized) according to homeopathic theory and employed in such small doses!

217 For example, there is no mistaking that a trace of latent magnetic power slumbers in the interior of the iron bar and the steel rod. There is no mistaking this because both of them, if they are stood upright after their forging, repel with their lower end a magnetic needle’s north pole and attract its south pole, while the upper end of the iron bar or steel rod proves to be a south pole. But this is only a latent power; not even the finest iron filings can be magnetically attracted or held by either end of such a rod. Only when we dynamize this steel rod by strongly rubbing it in one direction with a blunt file does it become a true, active powerful magnet, capable of attracting iron and steel to itself and even of imparting magnetic power to another steel rod by mere contact (and even when the other steel rod is held at some distance). The more the steel rod has been rubbed, the greater its magnetic power. Likewise, rubbing a medicinal substance and succussing its solution (dynamization, potentization) develops the medicinal powers lying hidden in the medicinal substance and discloses these powers more and more. The dynamization spiritizes the material substance, if one may use that expression.

218 The only thing that is heightened and more strongly developed is the power of these natural bodies to bring forth alterations in the condition of animals and humans when the natural bodies, in this improved state, are brought quite near to the living, sensitive fibers or touch the same (upon ingestion or olfaction). This is just like the magnet that only engenders magnetic power in a steel needle (especially in one whose pole is near to it or touching it) without altering the steel itself, which remains unchanged in the rest of its chemical and physical properties [fn 11]. And just as magnets do not bring about alterations in other metals, such as brass, dynamized medicines do not exert any action upon lifeless things.

219 Daily we hear homeopathic medicinal potencies referred to as mere dilutions when they are, in fact, the opposite. There is a true opening up of the natural substances produced by trituration and succussion, bringing to the revelatory light of day the specific medicinal powers that lie hidden in their inner wesen. The non-medicinal dilution medium merely helps as a supervening accessory condition. For example, the simple dilution of a grain of salt in a large amount of water results in just plain water; the grain of salt disappears and never becomes the medicinal salt [natrum muriaticum] that our well-prepared dynamizations have heightened to such admirable strength.

Comment

215 Properly prepared dry powders can be kept forever in well-stoppered and sealed bottles, maintaining all their original medicinal power without spoiling and becoming moldy. However, one has to take a precaution that was hitherto almost unknown to pharmacists, who were unable to store powders without their spoiling, even when they were made from well-dried animal and plant substances and preserved in well-stoppered bottles. Whole, raw plant substances, even when they are thoroughly dried, still contain a certain amount of moisture as an indispensable condition of the cohesiveness of their fabric. This is not enough moisture to allow spoilage when the substance is in its whole state, but it is far too much for a finely powdered state. Therefore, animal and plant substances that are fully dried in their whole state yield a somewhat moist powder when fully pulverized. This powder cannot be preserved in stoppered bottles without quickly becoming spoiled and moldy unless it is freed from this superfluous moisture. Further drying of the fine powder is best done as follows:1. Spread the powder out on a flat, tin plate with a high rim. 2. Float the plate in a pot of boiling water. 3. Dry it, stirring the powder, until its particles no longer stick together in clumps but easily separate, like fine dry sand, and turn into dust. 4. Store powders in well-stoppered and sealed bottles that are airtight. 5. Keep the bottles away from sunlight and daylight (in covered cannisters, chests, boxes). All animal and plant substances gradually lose their medicinal power (even when they are whole and far more so when they are powdered) if they are not stored in airtight containers away from sunlight and daylight.

The most complete and certain way to secure the powers of indigenous [local] plants, and plants that can be obtained fresh, is as follows:

1. Press out the juice and mix it, without delay, with an equal amount of wine spirit [alcohol] strong enough for a sponge to burn in it.

2. Let this mixture stand for 24 hours in a stoppered glass bottle.

3. Decant the clear liquid from the fibrous and albuminous matter that has settled and store the liquid for medicinal use. 213

4. Keep the preparation in a well-stoppered bottle, sealed with wax to prevent evaporation.

5. Store it away from sunlight.

The alcohol immediately stops all fermentation of the plant juice and makes subsequent fermentation impossible. The whole medicinal power of the plant juice is thus conserved forever (complete and unspoiled) in well-stoppered and sealed bottles, stored away from sunlight. 214

Comment

213 Bucholz (Taschenb. f. Scheidek. u. Apoth. a. d. J., Weimar, 1815, vols. I, VI) assures his readers (and his reviewer in the Leipziger Literaturzeitung [Leipzig Literary Newspaper], 1816, no. 82, does not contradict him) that we have the Russian campaign of 1812 to thank for this excellent mode of preparing medicines, from whence it came to Germany in 1813. Following the noble custom of many Germans to deny the merits of their compatriots, he conceals the fact that this invention and the directions that he quotes, in my own words, are from the Organon of the Rational Medical Art, first edition (§230 and footnote) which was published in 1810, two years before the Russian campaign. Some people would rather pretend that an invention came from the wilds of Asia than give a German just credit for it. What times! What customs!Alcohol has certainly been mixed with plant juices before (for example, to preserve them for some time before making extracts of them) but never with the intent to administer them in this form.

214 Equal parts of alcohol and freshly pressed juice are usually the most appropriate proportion for depositing the fibrous and albuminous matter, however there are exceptions:1. A double proportion of wine spirit [i.e. , twice as much alcohol as plant juice] is needed for plants that contain a lot of tough mucilage (e.g. , symphytum officinale, viola tricolor, etc.) or a lot of albuminous matter (e.g. , aethusa cynapium, solanum nigrum, etc.). 2. Plants with very little juice (e.g. , oleander, buxus, taxus, sabina, ledum, etc.) must first be pounded up alone into a moist, fine pulp and then stirred together with a double portion of alcohol, so that the plant juice and alcohol combine. Then the juice can be extracted by being pressed out. These plants can also be dried and then brought to the one-millionth powder-trituration with milk sugar (if one applies proper force with the mortar and pestle). After dissolving a grain of this, one can make further liquid dynamizations (see §271).

212 All animal and plant substances have more or less medicinal power and can alter a person’s condition, each in its own manner. The plants and animals used for food by the most enlightened peoples have these advantages: They have a larger concentration of nutrients, and the medicinal power of their raw states (already not very violent) is decreased by culinary and domestic preparation. Processes that partly destroy and dissipate the medicinal part of substances include:

1. Pressing out the detrimental juice, as with the cassava root of South America.

2. Fermentation of the flour in dough for making bread, of sauerkraut prepared without vinegar, and of brine-cured pickles.

3. Smoking of foods.

4. Heating of foods by boiling, stewing, toasting, roasting, baking or, for potatoes, by steaming.

5. By the addition of salt (pickling) and vinegar (sauces, salads), the animal and plant substances indeed lose much of their malignity, but they receive other disadvantages from these additions. However, the most medicinally powerful plants do lose their medicinal power, in part or entirely, by such treatments.

6. By complete dessication, all roots of the iris-species, horseradish, arum and peony lose almost all of their medicinal power.

7. Through the heat used in ordinary extract preparation, the juice of plants with the most violent medicinal action becomes a pitch-like mass which is quite inert.

8. By long exposure to the air, the pressed out juice of the deadliest plants becomes quite powerless. At moderate air temperatures, it soon ferments by itself, like wine, and thereby loses much of its medicinal power. It proceeds directly to another stage of fermentation, like vinegar, and then putrefies, thereby losing all of its peculiar medicinal power. If the starchy sediment [the fecula] it deposits is collected and washed, it is then completely harmless, like any other starch.

9. Even by the transudation that takes place when a quantity of green plants are piled on top of one another, the largest part of their medicinal power is lost.

It is a matter of conscience for the medical-art practitioner to be certain that each patient takes the right medicine every time. Therefore, the practitioner should give the patient the correctly selected medicine from his own hands, and he should also prepare the medicine himself.  

The true medical-art practitioner must have the most genuine, full-strength medicines on hand in order to be able to rely on their curative power; he himself must know them according to their genuineness. 

2. In like manner, in acute diseases, the temperature of the room and the warmth or coolness of the bed coverings must be arranged entirely according to the wishes of the patient.

3. All mental exertion is to be kept distant from the patient.

4. All emotional shocks are also to be kept distant from the patient.

Comment

211 Such desires are, in fact, rare. For example, in cases of purely inflammatory diseases where aconite is so indispensable, but whose action would be lifted [cancelled] by partaking of vegetable acids, the patient almost always craves only pure cold water.

On the other hand, in febrile diseases (except in cases of mental confusion), since the subtle, unerring, internal sense of the here very lively, instinctual sustentive drive of life decides so distinctly and definitely, the physician simply needs to advise the patient’s relations and attendants to put no obstacle in the way of this voice of nature, be it by the denial of enjoyments that the patient urgently demands or by detrimental proposals and persuasions. 

While patients with chronic diseases are using medication, the most expedient regimen is based upon the removal of any of these obstacles to cure plus the addition of their necessary opposites here and there [i.e. , where appropriate]:

1. innocent mental and emotional diversion;

2. active movement in the fresh air in almost all kinds of weather (daily walks, light manual labor);

3. appropriate, nutritious, non-medicinal foods and drinks, etc.

For the chronically ill, it is all the more necessary to carefully seek out such obstacles to cure since the disease has usually been aggravated by such malignities and by other morbific actions. Often, these are errors in the patient’s regimen which have not been discerned. 210

Comment

210 Patients with chronic diseases should avoid the following: Coffee; fine Chinese tea and other herb teas; beers adulterated with medicinal vegetable substances not suitable for the state of the patient; so-called fine liqueurs prepared with medicinal spices; all kinds of punch; spiced chocolate; many kinds of colognes and perfumes; strongly scented flowers in the room; medicinally compounded tooth powders and tooth spirits [mouthwashes]; perfumed sachets; highly seasoned foods and sauces; spiced cakes and frozen goods [ices and ice creams] prepared with medicinal matters (e.g.  coffee, vanilla, etc.); raw medicinal herbs on soups; vegetable dishes with herbs, roots or sprouting stalks (such as asparagus with long green tips); hop sprouts and all vegetables possessing medicinal powers (celery, parsley, sorrel, tarragon, all kinds of onions, etc.); old cheeses and meats which are putrid; foods which have medicinal side effects (e.g. , the meat and fat of pigs, ducks and geese; all-too-young veal; sour foods; all kinds of salads). All of these are to be removed from chronically ill patients, who should also avoid: every excess, even that of sugar and salt; alcoholic drinks not diluted with water; heated rooms; woolen clothing next to the skin; a sedentary lifestyle in closed quarters or, more often, only passive movement (through riding, driving, swinging); excessive breast-feeding; long afternoon naps lying down (in bed); reading in a horizontal position; keeping late hours; uncleanliness; unnatural voluptuousness; enervation from reading lubricious material; onanism, incomplete coition or abstinence from coition (either from superstition or to prevent the engenderment of children [pregnancy] in marriage; objects of anger, grief or vexation; passionate play; mental or bodily overexertion, especially immediately after a meal; dwelling in marshy regions and stuffy rooms; penury, etc. All these things must be avoided as much as possible or removed if the cure is not to be hindered or even made impossible. Some of my imitators, by forbidding far more, rather indifferent things, seem to make the diet of the patient unnecessarily difficult, which is not to be sanctioned.

Due to the necessary, as well as expedient, minuteness of the dose used in the homeopathic procedure, it is easy to grasp why, during treatment, everything else that could in any way act medicinally must be removed from the diet and regimen, so that the subtle dose will not be over-tuned and extinguished, or even disturbed, by any foreign medicinal irritant. 209

Comment

209 The gentlest tones of a distant flute in the still of the night, which would raise a soft heart to over-earthly feelings and melt it away into religious rapture, become inaudible and futile amid the extraneous clamor and noise of the day.

If, on the other hand, the patient mentions some newly arisen befallments and symptoms of consequence-features of a medicine that was not fittingly homeopathic in its selection-then we must regard the patient’s state as having taken a turn for the worse, as it will soon be perfectly apparent that it has. We should conclude that his condition is worse even if the patient good-naturedly assures us that his condition is improving. 208

Comment

208 Such inaccurate assurances from patients are not infrequent among consumptives with suppuration of the lungs [pulmonary tuberculosis].

Amelioration

If a. the patient complains of no new, unusual ailments, b. none of the old befallments has worsened, and c. one has already observed a mental and emotional improvement, then the medicine must also have brought forth an altogether essential decrease of the disease or, if little time has elapsed, it will do so soon. Assuming that the remedy is appropriate, if the visible improvement of the patient is delayed too long, this indicates either some error of conduct on the part of the patient or it indicates that some other circumstances [obstacles to cure] are hindering improvement.

Either the appearance of new, foreign befallments of the disease to be cured or the decrease of the original symptoms without the addition of any new ones will soon dispel any doubt, for the keenly observing and investigating practitioner, about aggravation or amelioration, even in those patients who, by nature, are incapable of giving an account of this amelioration or aggravation or are unwilling to admit it.  

In all diseases, especially the rapidly arising (acute) ones, the patient’s emotional state and entire behavior are the surest and most enlightening of the signs showing a small beginning (not visible to everyone) of amelioration or aggravation. When there is an ever-so-slight beginning of improvement, the patient will demonstrate a greater degree of comfort, increasing composure, freedom of spirit, increased courage-a kind of returning naturalness. When there is an ever-so-slight beginning of aggravation, the patient will demonstrate the opposite of this, exhibiting a more self-conscious, more helpless state of emotional mind, of the spirit, of the whole behavior and of all attitudes, positions and performances-a state which draws more pity to itself. This can be easily seen if one observes with exact attentiveness, but it cannot be easily described in words. 207

Comment

207 Signs of mental and emotional improvement can only be expected soon after ingestion of the medicine if the dose has been properly minute (i.e. , as small as possible). An unnecessarily larger dose of even the homeopathically most fitting medicine acts too violently. It initially disturbs the spirit and emotions too much and too persistently for one to soon become aware of the improvement in the patient; not to mention the other disadvantages (§276) from doses that are all-too-large. I remark here that this very necessary rule is sinned against mostly by conceited beginners in homeopathy and by physicians from the old school, who are passing over to the homeopathic medical art. Due to old prejudices, those who come from the old school avoid using the smallest doses of the higher dynamizations of medicines. Hence, they do not experience the great advantages and blessings of this procedure which has been found, in thousands of experiences, to be the most salutary. They are unable to achieve all that genuine homeopathy can do and thus unjustly pass themselves off as its students.

But if [apart from these cases involving medicines with reciprocal actions] one finds, in a case of chronic disease, that the best homeopathically selected medicine, given in the appropriate (smallest) dose, does not promote improvement, then this is a certain sign that the cause maintaining the disease still persists. Some circumstance is to be found in the regimen or the environment of the patient which must be gotten rid of if the cure is to permanently come to pass.  

There are some medicines whose power to alter the human condition consists, for the most part, of reciprocal actions. Examples of such medicines are ignatia, probably bryonia and rhus toxicodendron, and in part, belladonna. These medicines have initial-action symptoms that are, in part, opposed to one other. Should the medical-art practitioner find no improvement upon prescribing one of these medicines (according to strict homeopathic selection) he should give another, equally minute dose of the same medicine. He will thereby soon attain his purpose in most cases (and in cases of acute disease, after just a few hours). 206

Comment

206 I have explained this in greater detail in the preface to Ignatia in the Materia Medica Pura.

In urgent cases, after six, eight or twelve hours, it may already be revealed to the sharp-sighted medical-art practitioner who accurately investigates according to the disease state, that he has mis-selected the medicine last given. The patient’s state grows distinctly (even if only ever-so-slightly) worse from hour to hour, as new symptoms and ailments arise. In these cases, it is not only permitted but the physician is duty-bound to make good the mistake he has made by selecting and administering a homeopathic remedy which is not merely tolerably fitting, but which is the most appropriate possible for the present disease state [i.e. , the disease state as it now appears, with the old symptoms that remain and the new symptoms] (§167). 

Every medicine prescribed for a case of disease which, in the course of its action, brings forth new and troublesome symptoms that are not peculiar to the disease to be cured, is not capable of engendering true improvement. Such a medicine is not to be deemed as homeopathically selected. 204

1. If the aggravation is significant, it should be partly extinguished by an antidote, given as soon as possible. Then the next means should be given, which has been more precisely selected according to its similarity of action.

2. If the troublesome symptoms are not all-too-violently adverse, then the next means should be administered at once, to take the place of the incorrectly selected one. 205

Comment

204 According to all experience, almost no dose of a highly potentized, specifically fitting homeopathic medicine can be prepared so that it is too small to bring forth a distinct improvement in the disease for which it is suited (§161, §279). Therefore, one would be practicing inexpediently and detrimentally (as happens with the hitherto method of treatment) if one wanted to repeat or even increase the dose of the same medicine when there is no improvement or when there is a small aggravation, under the delusion that the medicine was not able to be of service on account of its small quantity (i.e. , its all-too-small dose). Every aggravation involving new symptoms (when nothing untoward has occurred in the mental or bodily regimen) always means that the previously taken medicine was inappropriate to this case of disease. It never indicates that the dose was too weak.

205 Antidotes will never be necessary in the practice of a well-trained and conscientiously careful physician if the physician begins treatment by giving his well-selected medicine in the smallest possible dose, as he should do. An equally minute dose of a better-selected medicine will put everything in order again.

Potentize the solution anew before each dose. 

1. Before each administration of the medicinal solution, 203 potentize the solution anew with about eight, ten or twelve succussions of the bottle. Then give the patient one or, ascendingly, several teaspoons of this.

The frequency of administration depends on the disease.

2. In protracted diseases, give the medicine daily or every second day. In acute diseases, give the medicine every six, four, three or two hours. In the most urgent cases, give the medicine every hour or even more frequently. In chronic diseases, every correctly chosen homeopathic medicine, even one whose action is of long duration, may be repeated daily for months with ever-increasing success [when fifty-millesimal potencies are used].

Use the same medicine, in increasing potencies, as long as the patient improves with no important new ailments.

3. When a solution is used up, in 7-8 or 14-15 days, it is necessary to add to the next solution one or (rarely) several globules of the same medicine of another (higher) potency, if the medicine is still indicated. One should continue in this way as long as the patient continues to sense more improvement without undergoing one or another important ailment that he never had in his life.

Select another, more homeopathic medicine if any important new ailments appear and the symptoms of the disease are altered.

4. If the patient undergoes one or another important ailment that he never had before in his life, and the rest of the disease appears in a group of altered symptoms, then another medicine, more homeopathically appropriate, must now be selected in place of the one that was used. The new medicine should be administered in just such repeated doses. Again, each dose of the solution should be modified with the proper vigorous succussions in order to somewhat alter and heighten its degree of potency.

If homeopathic aggravations appear towards the end of treatment of a chronic disease, diminish the dose and frequency of the medicine, or stop it for several days. 

5. If so-called homeopathic aggravations (§161) appear towards the end of treatment of a chronic disease, after almost daily repetition of the fully homeopathically fitting medicine (i.e. , so that the remaining disease symptoms seem to be somewhat heightened), then this is an indication that the medicinal disease, which is so similar to the original disease, is now audible almost all by itself. Therefore, the doses must be reduced still more and repeated at longer intervals, or even entirely suspended for several days in order to see whether or not any more medicine is needed for recovery. If no more medicine is needed, these apparent symptoms (stemming merely from the overflow of the homeopathic medicine) will soon disappear by themselves, leaving behind unclouded health.

Administration of fifty-millesimal potencies by olfaction.

If the medicine is administered by olfaction daily (or every two, three or four days) the medicine must also be vigorously succussed before each olfaction. Medicine to be administered by olfaction is prepared as follows:

1. One globule of the medicine is dissolved, by succussion, in one dram of dilute alcohol.

2. The medicine is thoroughly succussed eight to ten times prior to each olfaction.

Comment

203 Make up solutions with 40, 30, 20, 15 or 8 tablespoons of water. Add some alcohol or a piece of charcoal to keep the solution from spoiling. If charcoal is used, suspend it on a thread in the bottle and remove it when succussing the bottle. Instead of using large quantities of water, solutions can be made up with only 7-8 tablespoons of water, as follows:

1. Place one globule of the properly dynamized medicine in a bottle with 7-8 tablespoons of water. (It is rarely necessary to use more than one globule of a properly dynamized medicine.)

2. Vigorously succuss the bottle.

3. Pour one tablespoon of this into a glass containing 8-10 tablespoons of water.

4. Stir several times vigorously.

5. Administer the determined dose of this to the patient. If the patient is unusually excitable and sensitive, a teaspoonful of this solution may be put in a second glass of water, vigorously stirred again, and a teaspoon of this (or somewhat more) administered to the patient. There are patients of such high excitability that it is necessary to employ a third or fourth glass, prepared in a similar way, to properly thin the medicinal solution for them. Every day after ingestion, one should pour out the contents of the one (or several) prepared drinking glasses in order to prepare the solution anew each day. It is best to crush the globule of highly potentized medicine into a few grains of powdered milk sugar so that all the patient has to do is put it into a bottle that holds the determined amount of water.

It is an unexecutable project to repeat the same, unmodified dose of a medicine even once, let alone many times (and at short intervals in cases where treatment ought not be delayed). 202 The life principle does not accept such entirely identical doses without opposition, that is, without other symptoms of the medicine (i.e. , the ones not similar to those of the disease to be cured) becoming pronounced. The previous dose has already carried out the expected alteration of the life principle’s tunement, leaving a second unaltered dose of the same medicine of entirely equal dynamization with nothing more to carry out on the life principle. The patient can only become sick in a different way by such an unmodified dose-fundamentally sicker than he already was-because now the only symptoms of the medicine that remain in effect are those not homeopathic to the original disease. The result is an actual aggravation of the patient’s condition, rather than progress towards cure.

But as soon as one slightly modifies each new dose, by dynamizing it to a somewhat higher degree of potency (§269-§270), the sick life principle allows itself to be further unburdened by the same medicine without ill effect, allowing itself to be further altered in its tuning. Its feeling of the natural disease is further decreased and it is thereby brought closer to cure.

Comment

202 Therefore, one should not allow the patient to take a second or third dose of medicine in the same potency-even if it is the best homeopathically chosen medicine which was so well received the first time. For example, if one dry pellet was taken, another dry pellet in the same potency should not be taken a second or third time. If one takes, for a second or third time, an equal or smaller dose of the same medicine dissolved in water (where the water has remained standing undisturbed) then this same medicine will not be well received by the patient, even if the subsequent doses are taken after intervals of a couple of days. This is the case even if the original preparation was potentized with ten succussions (or only two succussions, as I later proposed [in fn 280 of the fifth edition of the Organon] in order to avoid this disadvantage and, to be sure, only for the above cited reasons). But by modifying each dose in its degree of dynamization, as I teach here, no shock takes place, even with more frequent repetition of the doses, no matter how highly potentized the medicine may be, with ever so many succussions. One might almost say that even the best chosen homeopathic medicine can best withdraw the morbid mistunement from the life principle and, in chronic diseases, extinguish the mistunement, only if the medicine is applied to the life principle in several different forms.

During treatment, every noticeably progressing and conspicuously increasing improvement is a state which, as long as it persists, generally excludes any repetition of the medicine being used because all the good being produced by the medicine is still hastening towards completion. This is not seldom the case in acute diseases.

Cures of chronic diseases can be achieved more rapidly, using gradually increased potencies of fifty-millesimal medicines.

On the other hand, with somewhat chronic diseases, there are, to be sure, some cases that have slow, continuous improvement based on one dose of an aptly selected homeopathic medicine (taking 40, 50, 60, 100 days to complete the cure, depending on the nature of the medicine) but this is very seldom the case. Also, it must be a matter of great importance, to the physician as well as to the patient, to foreshorten this period, if possible, by half, three-quarters, indeed even more, in order that a far more rapid cure might be attained. The most recent and frequently repeated experiences have taught me that such rapid cures can be favorably carried out under the following conditions:

1. Select with all circumspection, the aptly homeopathic medicine.

2. Use a highly potentized [fifty-millesimal] dose, dissolved in water.

3. Administer a properly small dose of this to the patient.

4. Give a dose of the solution at intervals that experience has shown to be the most distinctly appropriate for the best possible acceleration of the treatment.

5. Prior to each administration of a dose of the solution, alter the degree of potency of the dose. It is very important that the degree of potency of each dose deviate somewhat from the previous and subsequent ones. This is so that the life principle, whose tunement is to be altered to that of the similar medicinal disease, may never feel itself agitated to adverse counter-actions and enraged, as happens when repeated, unmodified doses are given, especially when such doses are rapidly repeated one after another. 246

Intermittent fevers endemic to marshy regions and places where flooding is frequent have given the old school physicians a lot of trouble. Yet, a healthy young person can accustom himself even to marshy regions, and remain healthy in such surroundings, provided his regimen is faultless and he is not oppressed from deprivation, fatigue or destructive passions. The intermittent fevers endemic to the place will, at most, only seize him when he is a newcomer. One or two of the smallest doses of highly potentized cinchona solution would, along with an orderly way of life, soon free him of the disease.

If people cannot be freed of intermittent marsh fever with one or two such small doses of cinchona, along with proper exercise and a healthy mental and bodily diet, then this always means that psora, striving to develop itself, lies at the base of their malady. The intermittent fever cannot be cured in the marshy region without antipsoric treatment. 201

It sometimes happens that such patients, if they are not yet deeply sunken in disease (i.e. , if the psora is not yet fully developed and can return to its latent state), can exchange the marshy region for a dry mountainous one without delay, and recovery apparently ensues (i.e. , the fever leaves them). But they can never become healthy without antipsoric help.

Comment

201 Larger, frequently repeated doses of cinchona (as well as concentrated cinchona preparations such as chininum sulphuricum [quinine]) can indeed free such patients from what is typical of intermittent marsh fevers [i.e.  the periodic attacks] but such people, deceived into believing they are cured, are not. They are left suffering in a different manner, as was already noted above [fn 235a], from a cinchona wasting sickness which is occasionally incurable (see footnote 276b). 246 What I said in a long footnote to this paragraph in the fifth edition of The Organon of the Medical Art was all that my experience allowed me to say at the time. It was written with the purpose of preventing these adverse reactions of the life principle. However, during the last four to five years, all such difficulties have been fully lifted through the modifications I have made since then, resulting in my new, perfected procedure [for fifty-millesimal potency medicines]. The same well-chosen medicine can now be given daily, even for months when necessary. In the treatment of chronic diseases, after the lowest degree of potency has been used up (in one or two weeks) one proceeds in the same way to higher degrees of potency (for in the new [fifty-millesimal] manner of dynamization, use begins with the lowest degrees, as is taught in the following paragraphs).

There are cases of intermittent fever that befall single individuals outside of marshy regions [where such fevers are endemic]. These are often very virulent. In these cases, treatment should be started by using, for several days, a general remedy from among the proven medicines, not an antipsoric. (This is how acute cases in general should be treated, which these fevers resemble with respect to their psoric origin.) If, after several days, recovery is nevertheless delayed, it means that this is a case of psora on the point of its development. Only antipsoric remedies can provide thorough [fundamental] help. 

If the first attacks of such an epidemic intermittent fever are left uncured, or if the patient is debilitated by allopathic mistreatment, then the indwelling, dormant psora (which unfortunately is already in so many human beings) develops and takes on the typus of the epidemic intermittent fever; that is, the psoric disease, to all appearances, plays out the role of the epidemic intermittent fever. In these cases, the medicine that would have been helpful for the initial paroxysms is no longer fitting and can help no more. We now have a case of psoric intermittent fever only. It is usually vanquished by the subtlest doses of sulphur or hepar sulphuris in high potency. 

Those epidemics of intermittent fever that occur outside areas where such fevers are endemic have the nature of chronic diseases composed of single, acute attacks. Each epidemic has its own self-same character which is common to all of the individuals who are taken ill. If the character of the epidemic disease is discovered according to the symptom complex common to all the patients [i.e. , the genus epidemicus], this will point to the homeopathically fitting (specific) remedy for the totality of the cases. This remedy almost always helps in those patients who enjoyed tolerably good health before the epidemic, that is, who were not chronically sick with developed psora. 

If during an epidemic of intermittent fever, one or another patient is not perfectly cured by the homeopathic remedy found to be specific to that epidemic, this is always due to the hindrance of the psoric miasm (assuming the cure has not been hindered by the patient’s living in a marshy region). Such a case must be treated with antipsoric medicines until complete aid has been afforded.   

Almost every medicine, in its pure action, arouses its own specific fever that deviates from all of the fevers generated by other medicines. This even includes a kind of intermittent fever with its reciprocal states. Therefore, homeopathic help for the numerous natural intermittent fevers is to be found in the great realm of medicines. For many such fevers, help is already available in the moderate number of medicines proven on healthy bodies up until now. 

Not infrequently, the appropriate medicine will expunge several attacks with only one small dose, probably restoring health all by itself, however, in most cases, one must administer a new dose after each attack. In the most favorable cases (i.e. those cases in which the nature of the symptoms has not been altered) doses of the same medicine are to be given. Due to the recent discovery of the best repetition of doses, repeated doses can be administered without ill effect (see footnote to §270). 200 The medicinal solution should be succussed 10-12 times before administering each successive dose.

Removal of the arousing cause of the intermittent fever may be necessary for a permanent restoration of health.

In rare cases, the intermittent fever returns after the patient has felt well for several days. This recurrence of the same fever after an interval of health is only possible when the malignity that first aroused the intermittent fever continues to impinge upon the convalescing patient, as it does in marshy regions. In such cases, a permanent restoration of health is only possible by removal of the arousing cause (for example, by staying in a mountainous region in the case of an intermittent marsh fever).

Comment

200 In fn 270f, Hahnemann discusses the advantages of fifty-millesimal (lm) potency medicines over centesimal (c) potencies. With fifty-millesimal potencies, one may repeat the dose even at short intervals and even with medicines of long-lasting action.

In this case, the medicinal dose is most expediently and most helpfully given immediately or, at least, very soon after completion of the attack, as soon as the patient has somewhat recovered from it. Then it has time to produce all its possible alterations of the organism towards health, without storm and without violent attack. On the other hand, if the medicine (no matter how specifically appropriate it may be) is administered just before a paroxysm, its action will coincide with the natural resumption of the disease and it will occasion such a counter-action in the organism, such a violent opposition that, at the very least, such an attack will rob much vitality, if it does not endanger life altogether. 199 If, however, one gives the medicine immediately after the completion of the attack (that is, at the time when the fever-free interim has come on, and far in advance of the preparation for the next paroxysm) then the organism’s life force is in the best possible shape to allow itself to be quietly altered by the remedy, and thus transposed into a state of health. 

Comment

199 This can be seen in those (by no means rare) fatal cases in which a moderate dose of opium, given in the midst of the chills of the fever, rapidly takes the patient’s life.

When it comes to reigning sporadic or epidemic intermittent fevers 197 (not those endemically dwelling in marshy regions) we often find every attack (paroxysm) likewise composed of two opposite reciprocal states [fn232] that alternate with one another (cold-heat, heat-cold). Even more often, each paroxysm is composed of three states (cold-heat-sweat). For this reason, the remedies selected for these intermittent fevers (chosen from the general class of proven medicines, not usually from the antipsorics) must be able to similarly arouse both or all three intermittent states in healthy provers (which is the surest); or as much as possible, they should homeopathically correspond in symptom similarity to the strongest and most peculiar reciprocal state (the cold, the heat or the sweat) along with the accessory symptoms of that state. But especially, the selection of the most apt homeopathic remedy must be guided by the symptoms of the patient’s condition in the fever-free time. 198

Comment

197 The hitherto pathology, still in its non-rational childhood, is only aware of a single intermittent fever, which it also calls cold fever [ague]. It makes no distinctions other than the intervals at which the attacks recur (e.g. , daily, every three days, every four days, etc.). There are, however, far more important distinctions among these fevers than their intervals of recurrence. There are countless variations of intermittent fevers, for example:

1. There are many intermittent fevers that cannot be called cold fever at all because their attacks consist only of heat.

2. Other intermittent fevers only have attacks of cold, with or without sweat afterwards.

3. There are others in which the patient is cold all over but feels hot internally, or the patient is hot to the touch but feels cold.

4. There are others in which one paroxysm consists only of shivering or simply feeling cold, followed by feeling well. This is followed by a paroxysm of heat, with or without subsequent sweat.

5. In other fevers, the heat comes first, followed by chill.

6. There are other fevers where the chill and the heat are followed by a period of no fever, and then (often many hours later) there is an attack of sweat only.

7. In some fevers, no sweat follows.

8. In still others, the attack consists only of sweat, without heat or chill.

9. In other fevers, there is sweat but only during the heat.

198 It was Baron von Boenninghausen who in the beginning best elucidated this subject (which requires so much circumspection) and facilitated the selection of the most effective remedy for the different epidemic fevers, through his writing of Versuch einer homцopathischen Therapie der Wechselfieber [Attempt at a Homeopathic Therapy for Intermittent Fevers], Mьnster at Regensberg, 1833.

196  Intermittent fevers occur in various forms, including: Sporadic-a few cases of the same disease, occurring at the same time in widely scattered localities. Epidemic-numerous cases of the same disease occurring at the same time and in the same area, outside of regions where such diseases are endemic. Endemic-cases of intermittent fever that occur in regions where such diseases are continuously present. Isolated-individual cases of intermittent fever that occur outside of regions where such fevers are endemic. Psoric-cases that develop from untreated or poorly treated cases of epidemic intermittent fever, in patients where psora is already present. These various forms of intermittent fever and their treatment are discussed in §235-§244.

The intermittent disease states that appear to be without fever typically affect isolated individuals, that is, they are not usually sporadic or epidemic. These apparently non-febrile diseases are always chronic and most of them are purely psoric. Only seldom are they complicated with syphilis. Consequently, they can be successfully treated with antipsorics. Sometimes, however, the intercurrent use of a very small dose of potentized cinchona solution is necessary in order to entirely extinguish their intermittent fever-like typus. 

The typical intermittent diseases [point 1, above] are those in which an unvarying disease state returns at fairly definite intervals and recedes again at equally definite intervals. In between these outbreaks, the patient appears to be in good health. This disease pattern, where symptoms come and go at regular intervals, is found both in the apparently non-febrile intermittent diseases as well as in the febrile one: the many intermittent fevers.

These latter intermittent diseases [point 2, above] are also very diverse 195 but they are all numbered among the chronic diseases. Most of them are the engenderment of effloresced psora only. Occasionally, although seldom, they are the engenderment of psora which is complicated with a syphilitic miasm. In the first case they are cured with antipsoric medicines, while in the latter case they are cured with antipsoric medicines alternated with antisyphilitic ones, as is taught in my book The Chronic Diseases. 

Comment

195 In these diseases, two or even three states may alternate with one another. The following are examples of two reciprocal states alternating with one another:

1. Certain unremitting pains in the feet, etc., can appear as soon as an eye inflammation subsides, which then comes up again as soon as the pain in the limb has temporarily passed.

2. Spasms and cramps can directly alternate with any other suffering of the body or one of its parts. The following is an example of three reciprocal states in a persistent infirmity: A patient’s customary moderate indisposition is suddenly replaced by a period of apparently heightened health with a tense heightening of the mental and bodily powers (an exaggerated hilarity, an all-too-active liveliness of the body, an excess of comfort, inordinate appetite, etc.) whereupon there then appears, just as unexpectedly, a somber, melancholic temper, an intolerable, hypochondriacal emotional mistunement with disturbance of several vital functions (digestion, sleep, etc.) which in turn, reverts just as suddenly to the customary moderate indisposition. In this manner, there can be several other manifold reciprocal states. Often there is no longer any noticeable trace of the previous state when the new one sets in. In other cases, there are only a few traces of the preceding reciprocal state that are still present; there is little left over from the symptoms of the first state upon emergence and continuation of the second. Occasionally, reciprocal disease states will be completely opposite to one other; for example, periods of melancholia will alternate with periods of jovial insanity or frenzy.

1. those diseases that recur at definite intervals (which include the large number of intermittent fevers, as well as the apparently non-febrile ailments that recur like intermittent fevers), and

2. those diseases in which certain reciprocal disease states alternate at indefinite intervals; that is, those diseases in which certain disease states alternate with states of a another kind.

In cases of mental or emotional disease (which are incredibly various), if the selected remedy for a particular case is entirely appropriate for the truly sketched image of the disease state, then the smallest possible doses are often sufficient to produce the most striking improvement, which is often quite rapid. This is never achieved by medicating the patient to death with huge, frequent doses of all other unsuitable (allopathic) medicines. The unflagging search for the most fitting homeopathic remedy is more easily achieved (if enough medicines of this kind, known according to their pure actions, are available for selection) because the mental and emotional state of such a patient, which is the main symptom, comes to light with unmistakable distinctness. I can assert from much experience that the sublime advantage of the homeopathic medical art over all other conceivable methods of treatment is nowhere displayed in a more triumphant light than in old mental and emotional diseases that originally arose from somatic sufferings or even arose simultaneously with them. 

On the other hand, the following behaviors are entirely out of place: contradiction, eager agreements, violent reprimands and vituperations, as well as weak, timid compliance. These are equally detrimental treatments for the spirit and the emotional mind of such patients. Above all, these patients are embittered, and their disease is worsened, through scorn, deceit and noticeable deceptions. The physician and attendants must always appear as if they credit such patients with reason.

All external disturbances to the senses and emotions should be removed.

On the contrary, one should seek to remove all kinds of external disturbances to their senses and emotions. There are no entertainments for their befogged spirit, no beneficent diversions, no advice, no soothing words, books or objects for their indignant soul languishing in the fetters of a sick body. There is no refreshment for them except cure. Only when the tunement of their bodily condition is altered towards improvement do quiet and comfort radiate back once more upon their spirit. 194

Comment

194 The treatment of insane, raging and melancholic patients can only be accomplished in a specifically arranged institute, not in the patient’s family circle.

Mental and emotional diseases that arise from somatic diseases can only be cured by homeopathic medicine that is directed against the internal miasm, in conjunction with carefully adapted living habits. It is also important that the patient’s physician and relations observe a psychically fitting approach towards the patient as an assisting diet for the soul. To raging insanity, they must oppose quiet fearlessness and cold-blooded [unemotional] firm will. To distressing, plaintive lamentation, they must oppose silent regret in their looks and gestures. To senseless chatter, they must oppose a silence not wholly inattentive. Disgusting and atrocious behavior and chatter should be opposed with complete inattentiveness. They must safeguard against property damage without reproaching the patient for this, arranging everything so that corporal punishments and torments are thoroughly abolished. 193 This is all the more easily effected since in the homeopathic administration of medicine (administration of medicine being the only case in which compulsion could be justified as an excuse) the small doses of helpful medicine are never conspicuous to the taste and can therefore be given in the patient’s drink without his being aware of it so that all compulsion becomes unnecessary. 

Comment

193 One must be astonished at the hard-heartedness and indiscretion of physicians in several mental institutions. These cruel physicians, without seeking the true medical mode for such diseases-the only helpful, homeopathic medicinal (antipsoric) way-content themselves with tormenting these most pitiable of all human beings by means of the most violent beatings and other excruciating martyrdoms. By these unconscionable and revolting procedures, they lower themselves far beneath the level of prison guards, for prison guards execute such punishments only because it is the duty of their official position and they do so upon criminals. These physicians, on the other hand (humiliated due to their medical ineptitude) seem to vent their spite against the presupposed incurability of mental and emotional diseases by being tough on the pitiable, innocent sufferers. These physicians are too ignorant to furnish aid and too indolent to adopt an expedient curative procedure.

These cases, as well, are based upon a psoric miasm which, however, is not yet entirely near its full unfoldment. To ensure against a relapse into a similar mental disease (which can easily happen) the convalescing patient should be given a thorough antipsoric (and probably also an antisyphilitic) treatment. 

It is only these emotional diseases, which were first spun and maintained by the soul, that allow themselves to be rapidly transformed into well-being of the soul by psychotherapeutic means (displays of trust, friendly exhortations, reasoning with the patient, and even well-camouflaged deception). With appropriate living habits, these diseases apparently also allow themselves to be transformed into well-being of the body. However, such approaches will be effective only if the emotional disease is new and has not yet deranged the somatic state all too much.  

By comparison, there are certainly a few emotional diseases that have not simply degenerated from somatic diseases. In these cases, the emotional disease develops in an inverse manner. With but little infirmity, it develops outward from the emotional mind due to persistent worry, mortification, vexation, abuse, or repeated exposure to great fear or fright. While initially there is but little infirmity, in time emotional diseases of this kind often ruin the somatic state of health to a high degree. 

If the mental disease is not yet fully developed and if there is still some doubt as to whether it arose from somatic suffering or whether it stemmed from faulty upbringing, bad habits, perverted morality, neglect of the spirit, superstitions or ignorance, the way to decide the point is as follows:

1. If it stems from the latter [faulty upbringing, bad habits, etc.], then the mental disease will subside and improve with understanding, well-intentioned exhortations, consolation, or with earnest and rational expostulations.

2. If it is a mental or emotional disease that is really based upon a somatic disease, it will rapidly worsen with such treatment. The melancholic patient will become still more downcast, plaintive, disconsolate and withdrawn; someone who is maliciously insane will become still more embittered; and senseless talk will become obviously more nonsensical. 192

Comment

192 In such cases where understanding and exhortations, etc. aggravate the mental or emotional disease, it appears as if the soul of the patient feels, with exasperation and sadness, the truth of these rational expostulations and acts directly upon the body as if it wanted to restore the harmony that has been lost; but it appears as if the body, by means of its disease, reacts too strongly back upon the mental and emotional organs, throwing them into an even greater uproar through a renewed transference of its sufferings upon them.

An insanity or frenzy that suddenly breaks out as an acute disease from the patient’s usually quiet state may be occasioned by fright, vexation, drinking alcohol, etc., but it almost without exception springs from internal psora that, as it were, flares up like a flame. Such a case cannot be treated straight away, in its acute onset, with antipsoric medicines. Rather, it must first be treated with medicines (such as aconite, belladonna, stramonium, hyoscyamus, mercury, etc.) selected from the other class of proven remedies [i.e. , the apsorics]. These should be given in highly potentized, subtle homeopathic doses in order to dispatch the acute flare-up to such an extent that the psora returns for the present to its previous, almost latent state, whereupon the patient appears to recover. 

4. By adding the patient’s mental and emotional state 190 (accurately observed by the patient’s relations and by the physician himself) to the patient’s somatic symptoms, a complete image of the disease is put together. In order to homeopathically cure the malady (if the mental disease has already lasted for some time) a medicine must be sought from among the (antipsoric, etc.) medications which is capable of arousing aptly similar symptoms and, especially, the similar mental derangement. 

3. The first depiction of these symptoms should include an exact description of all the befallments of the former so-called somatic disease before it degenerated into the one-sided heightening of the mental symptom, that is, before it degenerated into the mental and emotional disease. This will come to light in interviewing the patient’s relations.

How to treat chronic one-sided mental and emotional diseases:§217 

Get a picture of the whole disease, both the somatic and especially the mental and emotional state.

1. In these maladies, the investigation of the whole complex of signs must be undertaken with care. One must carefully investigate the somatic symptoms and, preeminently, one must exactly apprehend the definite individuality (i.e. the character) of the malady’s chief symptom: the special, always prevailing, mental and emotional state.

Select the remedy whose symptoms most resemble not only the somatic symptoms in the case, but especially the mental and emotional state. 

2. This should be done in order to find a homeopathic medicinal disease potence, among the remedies known according to their pure actions, that will extinguish the total disease-a remedy which, in its symptom content, offers not only the somatic symptoms that are present in this disease case but which also, preeminently, offers the greatest possible similarity of the mental and emotional state.

Almost all so-called mental and emotional diseases are nothing other than somatic diseases in which the symptom of mental and emotional mistunement that is peculiar to each disease heightens itself as the somatic symptoms diminish (more rapidly or more slowly) right up to the most striking one-sidedness until finally the disease transfers itself (almost like a local malady) to the invisibly subtle mental and emotional organs.  

Therefore, what I have to teach about the cure of the mental and emotional diseases can be confined to a very few remarks, since these diseases are to be cured in the same manner as all the other diseases (and not at all differently), that is, by means of a remedy that offers a disease potence as similar as possible to a given case of disease (with respect to the remedy’s symptoms that were brought to light in the body and soul of the healthy prover). 

For this reason, one will never cure in accordance with nature, that is, one will never cure homeopathically unless:

1. one attends to the symptom of the mental and emotional alterations, together with the other symptoms, in every case of disease, even acute ones, and

2. for aid, one selects, from among the remedies, a disease potence that, along with the similarity of its other symptoms with those of the disease, is of itself capable of engendering a mental or emotional state similar to that of the disease. 188

Comment

188 Thus aconite will seldom or never produce either a rapid or permanent cure if the patient’s emotional state is quiet and uniformly calm. Nux vomica will not cure if the patient has a mild and phlegmatic emotional state. Pulsatilla will not cure if the patient’s emotional state is glad, cheerful and stubborn. Ignatia will not cure if the patient’s emotional state is unchangeable and not inclined to fright or vexation.

The Creator of curative potences has also preeminently taken into consideration this chief ingredient of all diseases, the altered mental and emotional state, in that every efficacious medicinal substance in the world very noticeably alters the mental and emotional state of the healthy individual who proves it and, to be sure, each medicine does so in a different way.

This preeminent importance of the emotional state holds good to such an extent that the patient’s emotional state often tips the scales in the selection of the homeopathic remedy. This is a decidedly peculiar sign which, among all the signs of disease, can least remain hidden from the exactly observing physician. 

Almost all of the diseases that I have termed one-sided belong to psora. These diseases appear to be more difficult to cure because of this one-sidedness (where all the rest of the disease symptoms vanish, as it were, before a single, great, prominent symptom). The so-called mental and emotional diseases 186 are of this kind. They do not, however, constitute a class of diseases that is sharply separated from the rest of the diseases because, in all the so-called somatic diseases as well, the mental and emotional frame of mind is always altered. 187 In all cases of disease to be cured, the patient’s emotional state should be noted as one of the most preeminent symptoms, along with the symptom complex, if one wants to record a true image of the disease in order to be able to successfully cure it homeopathically. 

Comment

186 ‘Mental’ is translated from Geist (spirit) and ‘emotional’ is translated from Gemьt (the emotional mind). See mental and emotional in the Glossary.

187 For example, one often encounters patients with the most painful, protracted diseases who have a mild, gentle emotional mind such that the medical-art practitioner feels impelled to bestow attention and sympathy upon them. If the physician conquers the disease and restores the patient again (which is not a rare possibility with the homeopathic mode of treatment) the physician is often astonished and startled at the dreadful alteration of the patient’s emotional mind. The physician often meets with ingratitude, hard-heartedness, deliberate malice and the most degrading, the most revolting tempers of humanity-qualities that were precisely those possessed by the patient in former, healthy days. One often finds that people who were patient in healthy times become, in disease: stubborn, violent, hasty, and even insufferable, self-willed and in due succession, impatient and despairing [i.e. , impatient then despairing, etc.]. Those who were formerly chaste and modest often become lascivious and shameless. Not seldom, one finds that bright people become dull-witted, those who are usually feeble-minded become more clever (as it were, more sensible) and the slow-witted occasionally become full of presence of mind and rapid resolve, etc.

Based on these symptoms, the physician starts the treatment by selecting the (antipsoric, etc.) medication that has the utmost possible similarity of signs to those of the disease, and so forth.

4. Much more frequently, the physician will find cases in which psora is the only fundamental cause of all the remaining chronic sufferings (whatever they may be called) which, on top of it all, have often been bungled by allopathic artlessness, and have thereby been monstrously heightened and deformed.

185* In inquiries of this kind, one must not be misled by the frequent assertions of patients or their relations regarding the cause of protracted diseases (including the greatest and most protracted ones) attributing them to such things as a cold suffered many years ago (from getting soaked or drinking something cold while overheated), a former fright, a strain from lifting, a vexation, sometimes even a bewitchment, etc. These occasions are much too minor to engender a protracted disease in a healthy body, to maintain it for years, and to increase it from year to year, as is the tendency with all chronic diseases from developed psora. Much more important causes than these recollected noxious factors must lie at the base of the inception and continuation of any significant, obstinate, inveterate malady. Those alleged occasions can only serve as moments of enticement for a chronic miasm.

The homeopathic physician never uses local means (neither external, dynamically acting ones 183* nor mechanical ones) to treat these primary symptoms of chronic miasms, nor does he use local means to treat any of the secondary maladies that have germinated from the miasm’s further development. When either primary or secondary symptoms appear, he cures the great miasm lying at their base. In this way, the primary and secondary symptoms, together with the great miasm, vanish all by themselves (except in some inveterate cases of sycosis).

Unfortunately, however, the homeopathic physician mostly finds himself with cases in which the primary symptom 184* has already been outwardly annihilated by the old school physician who previously treated the case. Therefore, the homeopathic physician now generally has to deal with the secondary symptoms (i.e. , the maladies stemming from the eruption and development of these indwelling miasms). Mostly, he has to deal with the chronic diseases that have developed from internal psora. (I refer the reader to The Chronic Diseases, in which I have endeavored to present the internal cure of these miasms as far as any one physician could bring them to light, after many years of cogitation, observation and experience.)

Comments
183* Therefore I cannot recommend, for example, the local extirpation of the so-called lip or facial cancer (which is, perhaps, the fruit of highly developed psora, sometimes combined with syphilis) by means of Cosmo’s arsenical preparation. It is extremely painful and often fails; but more importantly, when the bodily site is locally freed of the malignant ulcer by this means, the fundamental malady has not been diminished in the least. The sustentive power of life is therefore required to transfer the focus for the great internal malady to a still nobler site (as it does with all metastases) allowing blindness, deafness, insanity, suffocative asthma, dropsy, apoplexy, etc. to follow. Moreover, this ambiguous local liberation of the site from the malignant ulcer by the topical arsenical means only succeeds when the ulcer is not yet large and not of venereal origin, and when the life force is still very energetic. But it is in precisely such cases that a complete internal cure of the whole original malady is still feasible. The result is the same when facial or breast cancers are removed surgically or when encysted tumors are enucleated without previously curing the indwelling miasm. Something worse ensues or, at the very least, death is hastened. This has been the result in times without number, but the old school still goes on blindly wreaking the same misfortune in each new case.

184* That is, the itch diathesis eruption, the chancre (or inguinal bubo), or figwarts.

2. those countless medicinal wasting sicknesses (see §74) that arise from imprudent, persistent, aggressive and ruinous treatments employed by physicians of the old school (often even for minor diseases), then the greatest part of the remaining chronic sufferings stems from the development of the three chronic miasms: internal syphilis, internal sycosis, but especially (in unequally greater proportion) internal psora. Each of these miasms was already in possession of the whole organism, having pervaded it in all of its parts, before the appearance of the primary, representative local symptom that prevented the outbreak of the internal disease (the itch diathesis eruption in psora, the chancre or inguinal bubo in syphilis, and the figwart in sycosis).

The entire organism is pervaded by the miasm before its primary symptom appears. The primary symptom serves to prevent the outbreak of the internal disease.

If, by external means, these miasms are robbed of their representative local symptoms (which allay the general suffering) sooner or later the characteristic diseases that the Originator of nature has appointed for each of the miasms must inevitably unfold and erupt, thus spreading all the nameless misery and the incredible quantity of chronic diseases which have tormented humankind for centuries and millennia. None of these diseases would have come so frequently into existence had physicians intelligently striven to thoroughly cure these three miasms solely by the internal homeopathic medicines proper for each of them, and to extinguish them in the organism without resorting to topical means for their external symptoms (see fn282).

When its representative local symptom is removed, the miasm expresses itself through the development of characteristic chronic diseases.

Comment

182 This is because the additional medicines that were administered internally served only to aggravate the malady since these means possessed no specific curative power for the totality of the disease. Rather, these medicines attacked the organism, weakened it and, in addition, inflicted other chronic medicinal diseases upon it.

If the local symptom is topically annihilated by external means (by a physician of the hitherto school who is of the opinion that he has thereby cured the whole disease), nature makes up for this by awakening the internal suffering and the rest of the symptoms that already existed and are lying dormant along with the local malady; that is, nature makes up for this by heightening the disease. In these cases, one tends to say, incorrectly, that by external means, the local malady has been driven back into the body or upon the nerves.

When the human life force is burdened with a chronic disease that it cannot overwhelm by its own powers, it obviously decides (in an instinctual way) to form a local malady on a given external part. It makes and sustains the local malady on an external part which is not indispensable to life merely with the intent to allay the internal malady that threatens to annihilate vital organs and rob the patient of life. It does so in order to transfer (so to speak) the internal malady to a representative local malady-to divert it there, as it were. In this way, the presence of the local malady reduces the internal disease to silence for the present, however, without being able to cure it or to essentially curtail it. 181 In the meantime, the local malady always remains nothing more than a part of the total disease, but a part exaggerated one-sidedly by the organic life force, shifted onto a more harmless (outer) location of the body in order to allay the internal suffering.

Local symptoms of chronic disease grow worse in order to continue to appease the worsening internal disease.

While the presence of this local symptom silences the internal disease for awhile, little is won on the side of the life force towards either diminishing the total malady or curing it. On the contrary, the internal suffering gradually increases and nature is compelled to enlarge and worsen the local symptom more and more in order that it may still suffice as a representative for the enlarged internal disease and for its appeasement. For example:

1. Old thigh ulcers get worse as long as internal psora is uncured.

2. The chancre enlarges as long as internal syphilis is uncured.

3. The figwarts multiply and grow as long as sycosis is uncured, whereby the sycosis becomes more and more difficult to cure.

The internal total disease also grows of itself with time.

Comment
181 The fontanels used by old-school physicians do something similar. As artificial ulcers on external parts, they allay some internal chronic sufferings, but only for a very short time (as long as they cause a painful irritation to which the sick organism is unaccustomed) and they cannot cure the sufferings. Rather, they debilitate and ruin the whole condition-state far more than the instinctual life force does through most of the metastases that it organizes.

Comment

180 This was the situation before I discovered the remedies for figwart disease (and the antipsoric medicines).

Comment

179 The local maladies which are the chief symptoms of the psoric, syphilitic and sycotic miasms are the recent itch diathesis eruption, the chancre and the figwart, respectively.

It might seem that the cure of such diseases would be accelerated by employing, both internally and externally, the medication that has been correctly discerned as homeopathic for the entire symptom complex since the action of a medicine, brought to bear on the site of the local malady, could bring forth a more rapid alteration.  

To achieve a thorough cure in such not-rare cases, an appropriate antipsoric treatment (as taught in my work, The Chronic Diseases) should be undertaken after the acute state has been dispatched to a tolerable extent. The antipsoric treatment should be directed against

1. the ailments that remain after the acute state has been dispatched, and

2. the diseased condition-states that were habitual for the patient prior to the acute disease.

In chronic local diseases that are not obviously venereal, the antipsoric internal cure is necessary anyway. 178

Comment

178 As I have stated in my book The Chronic Diseases.

It is not useful (either with rapidly arising, acute local sufferings or with long-standing local maladies) to rub in or apply external means on the site. This is the case even if the means would be homeopathically specific and salutary if it were used internally, even if it were to be used internally at the same time.

Acute topical maladies not cured by the most appropriate internal apsoric medicine are acute flare-ups of psora.

Acute topical maladies (e.g. , inflammations of single parts, erysipelas, etc.) which have not arisen from an external damage of a violence proportionate to the malady, but through dynamic or internal causes, yield most surely to an internal means from the general supply of proven medicines [i.e. , an apsoric medicine] that is homeopathically appropriate to the present, outwardly and inwardly perceptible condition-state. The malady will generally yield to this treatment without any other aid. If the malady does not completely yield in this way-if some residue of the disease remains at the site of suffering, and in the whole condition, which the life force is not in a position to lift again to normalcy (even though the patient is following a good regimen)-then the acute malady is a flare-up of psora which has hitherto remained dormant in the interior and which is on the verge of developing itself into an overt chronic disease. Such a case is not rare.

By means of this medicine, taken only internally, the general disease state of the body is lifted simultaneously with the local malady (often with the first dose if the malady has arisen only recently). The general disease state and the local suffering are cured at the same time, proving that the local suffering depended simply and solely on a disease of the rest of the body and was only to be regarded as an inseparable part of the whole, as one of the biggest and most striking symptoms of the total disease. 

All genuine medical treatment of a malady that has arisen on external parts of the body (and that involves little or no damage from the outside) must therefore be directed towards the whole, towards the annihilation and cure of the general suffering by means of internal remedies. Only in this way will the treatment be expedient, sure, helpful, and thorough. 

Comment

177 This is one of the many, ruinous chief follies of the old school.

Those alterations and ailments appearing on external parts that have not been caused by an external damage, or that have only been occasioned from small external injuries, arise in quite another manner; these have their source in an internal suffering. To pass them off as only local maladies and to treat them only or almost only with local applications or other similar means (surgically, as it were) as the hitherto medicine has done throughout the centuries, is as absurd as it is detrimental in its consequences.  

The so-called local maladies that have arisen quite recently from an external damage [e.g. , an injury] seem foremostly to merit the name local malady, however, only in cases where the damage is very negligible and therefore without particular significance. This is because maladies of any import whatsoever, which have been inflicted on the body from without, draw the entire living organism into sympathy. Fevers arise, etc. Surgery occupies itself with such things. This is only appropriate when a mechanical aid is to be brought to bear on the suffering parts in order to eradicate external obstacles to cure. For example, it is appropriate to mechanically restore dislocations, suture or bandage wounds, mechanically restrain and stanch arterial bleeding, remove foreign bodies that have penetrated living parts, open a body cavity to extract a bothersome substance, drain collected fluids, set broken bones, etc.

 Significant injuries require dynamic aid in addition to mechanical removal of obstacles to cure.

However, while these interventions can mechanically remove external obstacles to cure, the cure itself can only be expected by means of the life force. When the entire living organism demands (as it always does) active dynamic help with such damages in order to be placed in a position to accomplish the work of healing (e.g. , when the stormy fever from extensive contusions or torn flesh, tendons or vessels is to be dispatched through internal medicine or when the external pain of burned or corroded parts is to be taken away homeopathically) then this is the business of a dynamic physician and his homeopathic aid.  

Therefore, as soon as the first dose of the medicine produces nothing further that is beneficial, new findings of the disease must again be gathered, the status morbi [disease state] must be recorded as it is now, and a second homeopathic means must be selected that exactly fits the present, the current state. This second means should be all the more appropriate since the group of symptoms has become more numerous and complete.

One should wait until the first medication produces nothing further that is beneficial unless the newly arisen ailments are serious and, on account of their intensity, demand more prompt aid [§249]. This, however, is almost never the case in very protracted diseases due to the smallness of the doses of homeopathic medicines. 176

Comment

176 There are cases where the patient feels very ill, but experiences only scant symptoms. This state can be ascribed to a dulling of the nerves which does not allow the patient’s pains and ailments to be distinctly perceived. (This occurs very rarely in chronic diseases, while it is less rare in acute diseases.) In these cases, opium expunges this stupor of the inner feeling sense, and the symptoms of the disease come distinctly to light in the after-action.

Let it not be interjected that the accessory ailments that now appear and the new symptoms of this disease are due only to the medication that was just used. The ailments do come from the medicine, 175 but they are only those symptoms whose appearance this disease was itself capable of engendering in this body. The medicine, as a self-engenderer of similar symptoms, merely prompted the symptoms to appear. In a word, one has to accept the entire symptom complex that has now become visible as belonging to the disease itself, as the present true state, and to further manage it accordingly.  

Comment

175 That is, the symptoms and ailments come from the medicine unless they are caused by an important error in living habits, a violent passion or a stormy development in the organism (e.g. , the onset or cessation of menses, conception, childbirth, etc.).

In this case, a medicine has been selected as well as possible but, due to the one-sided nature of the disease, it is only imperfectly homeopathic, that is, it is only partially analogous to the disease. Consequently, the medicine will arouse accessory ailments, just as in the above-mentioned case (§162) where the dearth of homeopathic remedies left the selection incomplete. The medicine will mix several befallments from its own set of symptoms into the condition of the patient. These befallments are, however, at the same time, ailments of the disease itself, although they have rarely or never been felt by the patient up until now. Befallments that the patient had not perceived at all before will disclose themselves, or befallments that the patient had perceived only indistinctly will develop themselves to a higher degree.

True cases of one-sided disease are very rare. To meet with success in these cases, one should, at first, select the medicine that has been homeopathically singled out according to one’s best estimation, guided by these few symptoms.  

Nevertheless, there are a few maladies of this kind which, after all initial investigation (§84-§98), outside of a couple of strong, intense befallments, only allow one to indistinctly observe the rest of the befallments.  

Diseases with an internal main symptom that appear to be one-sided are, in fact, often not one-sided. Rather, the medical observer, due to inattentiveness, has not completely tracked down the befallments that are at hand for the completion of the outline of the disease-gestalt.

The main symptom may be either:

1. an internal suffering (e.g. , a headache of many years’ duration, diarrhea of many years’ duration, an old cardialgia, etc.), or

2. a more external one. The more external sufferings are usually called local diseases.

Diseases that appear to have only a few symptoms are termed one-sided because only one or two main symptoms stand out, almost obscuring the rest of the befallments. Because of this, these diseases, which belong chiefly to the class of chronic diseases, are more difficult to cure.  

In chronic diseases that are not venereal (therefore those most usually arising from psora) one often needs to employ several antipsoric remedies in succession to bring about a cure, each to be homeopathically selected in accordance with the result of an examination of the group of symptoms that remain after the previous means has completed its action. 

If, on the first examination of a disease and the first selection of a medicine for it, no one medicine’s disease elements sufficiently cover the symptom complex of the disease (owing to an insufficient number of known medicines) but two medicines contend for preference in terms of suitability-one medicine homeopathically fitting one portion of the disease signs and the other medicine fitting another portion-it is not advisable, after using the superior of the two medicines, to automatically give the other without examining the case. 174 The medicine that before proclaimed itself second best may, under the altered circumstances, no longer fit the remaining symptoms. In this case, a more fitting homeopathic medication must be selected in place of the second medicine for the newly recorded stock of symptoms.

Comment

74 And it is still far less advisable to give the two medicines together (§273).

In cases of acute disease, if accessory ailments of some moment arise with the use of this first-employed, imperfectly homeopathic medicine, one should not let this first dose fully finish its work, abandoning the patient to the medicine’s full duration of action. Rather, one should examine anew the now altered disease state and bring the original symptoms that remain into connection with the newly arisen ones in order to record a new disease image.

But if:

1. there is nothing among the symptoms of the selected medicine that is in exact similarity to the distinguishing (characteristic), exceptional, uncommon symptoms of the disease case,

2. the medicine corresponds to the disease in question only in general, indeterminate states (e.g. , nausea, lassitude, headache, etc.) and not in more closely designated ones, and

3. among the known medicines, there is no more homeopathically fitting one to be found, then the medical-art practitioner has no directly advantageous result to promise himself from the employment of this unhomeopathic medicine.

A small number of homeopathic symptoms, met with in the best selected medicine, does no damage to the cure in those cases where these few medicinal symptoms are of an uncommon kind (characteristic) that especially distinguish the disease. The cure then ensues without particular ailments.

In such cases, a complete, untroublesome cure cannot be expected because when the imperfect medicine is used, some befallments will then emerge which were not to be found earlier in the disease. These are accessory symptoms of the not-completely-fitting medicine. To be sure, this will not hamper a considerable part of the malady (i.e. , the disease symptoms that are similar to the medicinal symptoms) from being expunged by this medicine, and a fair beginning of the cure arising by this means, although not without accessory ailments. With properly small medicinal doses, these accessory ailments will be moderate.  

Because there are still only a moderate number of medicines which are exactly known as to their true, pure action, it sometimes happens that only a portion of the symptoms of the disease to be cured are met within the set of symptoms of the still best-fitting medicine. Consequently, this imperfect medicinal disease potence must be employed for lack of a more perfect one.  

When I place the so-called homeopathic aggravation (i.e. , the initial action of the homeopathic medicine which appears to somewhat heighten the symptoms of the original disease) within the first hour or the first few hours, this is thus certainly the case with the more acute, recently arisen maladies. However, when medicines of longer duration of action have to combat an old or very old wasting sickness, no such apparent heightenings of the original disease should show themselves during the course of treatment; and they will not show themselves if the aptly selected medicine is administered in properly small, only gradually heightened doses which become somewhat modified every time by new dynamization (§247). Such heightenings of the original symptoms of the chronic disease can then only come to light at the end of such treatments when the cure is almost or entirely completed. 172173 The second half of §161 (beginning with «no such apparent heightenings…») along with fn 161, were written by Hahnemann for the sixth edition of the Organon, giving instructions for the use of fifty-millesimal (LM) potencies in these cases. 173 

Comment

172 If the doses of the best-dynamized medicine (§270) are small enough, and the dose is modified each time by succussion, then even medicines of long duration of action can be repeated after short intervals, even in cases of chronic disease.

Comment

171 This heightening of the medicinal symptoms over the disease symptoms analogous to them, which is similar to an aggravation, has also been observed by other physicians when a homeopathic remedy played into their hands by chance. When the itch diathesis patient complains about increased eruption after the ingestion of sulphur, his physician (not aware of the cause of this) consoles him with the assurance that the itch diathesis must come out more than ever before it can heal up. He is not aware that this is a sulphur eruption that only assumes the appearance of an increase in the itch diathesis. «The facial eruption that was cured by Viola tricolor was, at first, aggravated by it,» assures Leroy (Heilkunde fьr Mьtter [Medical Art for Mothers], p. 406). Leroy was not aware that the apparent aggravation stemmed from a too-large dose of the pansy which was to some extent homeopathic here. Lysons states, «Elm bark most certainly cures those cutaneous eruptions which it increases at the beginning of its use.» (Medical Transactions, London, 1772, vol. II). If he had not administered the bark in enormous doses (as is usual in the allopathic medicinal art) but in quite small doses as must be done when it is used homeopathically (i.e. , by symptom-similarity of the medicine) he would have cured without, or almost without, seeing this apparent disease heightening (the homeopathic aggravation).

The smaller the dose of the homeopathic means in the treatment of acute diseases, the more minor and shorter is the apparent exacerbation [heightening] of the disease in the first hours. 

This small homeopathic aggravation in the first hours is a very good portent that the acute disease will be mostly finished by the first dose. Such an aggravation is not infrequent, since the medicinal disease must naturally be somewhat stronger than the malady in order to over-tune and extinguish it, just as a natural disease can only lift and annihilate another similar natural disease if it is stronger than the other one (§43-§48).

While it is certain that a homeopathically selected remedy, on account of its appropriateness and the smallness of its dose, quietly lifts and annihilates an acute disease that is analogous to it without amplification of its non-homeopathic symptoms (that is, without the arousal of newer, more significant ailments), it is nevertheless usual (but likewise only with a dose not properly diminished) for it to produce some kind of small aggravation in the first hour or few hours immediately following its ingestion. (The aggravation will last for several hours if the dose is somewhat too large.) This aggravation is so similar to the original disease that it appears to the patient to be an aggravation of his own malady. In fact, it is nothing other than a highly similar medicinal disease that is somewhat stronger than the original malady. 

Meanwhile, especially when the dose is not sufficiently diminished, there is seldom a medication (even one that is apparently fittingly selected homeopathically) that does not bring to pass, in irritable and fine-feeling patients, at least one small ailment which is not habitual for the patient-a small new symptom-during the duration of its action. This is because it is almost impossible for the symptoms of the medicine and those of the disease to cover one another as exactly as two triangles with equal sides and angles. In a good case, however, this insignificant deviation is easily wiped away by the living organism’s own energy activity (autocracy). It does so without even being noticed by patients, except those of immoderate delicacy. In any case, the restoration proceeds on to the goal of recovery as long as it is not hindered by foreign medicinal influences on the patient, by errors in regimen or through passions. 

The disease is lifted and extinguished without significant ailment because, in the use of this fitting homeopathic medicine, only the medicinal symptoms of the remedy that correspond to the disease symptoms are in operation. The medicinal symptoms take up the place of the (weaker) disease symptoms in the organism, that is, in the feeling of the life principle, and annihilate the disease symptoms by means of over-tunement. Finding no employment in the existing case of disease, the other symptoms of the homeopathic medicine (which are often numerous) remain entirely silent. Almost nothing of the medicinal symptoms is to be noticed in the patient’s condition, which improves by the hour, because the medicinal dose necessary for homeopathic use is so deeply diminished [minute] that it is much too weak to express its remaining, non-homeopathic symptoms in the disease-free parts of the body. Consequently, it can only permit the homeopathic symptoms to act in the parts of the organism already most irritated and excited by the similar disease symptoms, thus allowing the sick life principle to feel only the similar, but stronger medicinal disease, whereby the original disease expires. 

If the counter-image that is put together from the set of symptoms of the most apt medicine contains the characteristic signs (i.e. , those that are special, uncommon, odd, and distinguishing) of the disease to be cured, in the greatest number and in the greatest similarity, then this medicine is the most fitting, homeopathic, specific remedy for this disease state. If the disease is of not-too-long duration, it will be lifted and extinguished without significant ailment, usually by the first dose.  

In the search for a homeopathically specific remedy, that is, in the comparison of the complex of the natural disease’s signs with the symptom sets of the available medicines (in order to find among them an artificial disease potence that corresponds in similarity to the malady to be cured) the more striking, exceptional, unusual, and odd (characteristic) signs and symptoms 170 of the disease case are to be especially and almost solely kept in view. These, above all, must correspond to very similar ones in the symptom set of the medicine sought if it is to be the most fitting one for cure. The more common and indeterminate symptoms (lack of appetite, headache, lassitude, restless sleep, discomfort, etc.) are to be seen with almost every disease and medicine and thus deserve little attention unless they are more closely characterized. 

Comment

170 In arranging the characteristic symptoms of homeopathic medicines in his Repertory, Baron von Boenninghausen has earned our esteem, as has Dr. G.H. G. Jahr with his Handbook of Chief Indications, now in its third printing under the title Grand Manuel.

The worse an acute disease is and the more numerous and striking the symptoms making it up usually are, then the more certainly a fitting remedy may be found for it if a sufficient number of medicines, known for their positive action, are available for selection. Among the symptom sets of the many medicines, it will not be difficult to find one out of whose component disease elements an artificial curative disease image may be put together that is very similar to the symptom complex of the natural disease. This is the desirable remedy. 

If, however, the patient complains of a couple of severe ailments the investigating physician will usually find several collateral, although more minor, befallments that give a complete image of the disease. 

If the patient complains to the physician of one or two trivial befallments which have only been noticed recently, the physician is not to regard this as a complete disease needing serious medicinal aid. A small modification in diet or regimen usually suffices to wipe away this indisposition. 

The old (and especially the complicated) wasting sicknesses require relatively more time for cure-especially those chronic medicinal wasting sicknesses so often engendered by allopathic artlessness, along with the natural disease that has been left uncured by such artlessness. These require a far longer time for recovery. Often, indeed, these cases are incurable due to a. the insolent robbery of the patient’s vitality and bodily fluids by venesection, purgatives, etc., b. the often long-continued application of large doses of violently acting means, administered according to empty, false suppositions about their alleged use in similarly appearing disease cases, and c. the prescription of unsuitable mineral baths, etc.-that is, all the usual heroic deeds of allopaths in their so-called treatments.

A natural disease is never to be regarded as some noxious matter situated somewhere inside or outside the person (§11-§13). Rather, natural disease is engendered by a spirit-like inimical potence that disturbs, as if by a kind of contagion (fn11), the spirit-like life principle that reigns, with its instinctual governance, in the entire organism. Like an evil spirit, it torments the life principle, forcing it to engender certain sufferings and disorders in the course of its life. These are known as symptoms or diseases.

If the feeling of the impinging action of the inimical agent that strove to produce and continue this mistunement is again withdrawn from the life principle, that is, if the physician lets an artificial disease potence impinge on the patient against the inimical agent-an artificial disease potence which is able to morbidly mistune the life principle most similarly and which continually exceeds the natural disease in energy (§33, §279) even in the smallest dose-then the life principle loses the sensibility of the original disease agent during the impinging action of this stronger, similar, artificial disease. From then on, the malady exists no more for the life principle. It is annihilated.

Recent natural diseases pass away quickly with homeopathic treatment. Somewhat older natural diseases require longer treatment.

If, as was said, the fittingly selected homeopathic medicine is properly employed, then the acute natural disease that is to be over-tuned passes away unnoticed; if it arose shortly beforehand, it often passes away in a few hours. A somewhat older natural disease (likewise along with all traces of indisposition) passes away somewhat later, after application of a few more doses of the same, more highly potentized medicine, or after the careful selection 169 of one or another still more similar homeopathic medicine. Health, recovery (and nothing else) then ensues in unnoticeable, often rapid, transitions. The life principle feels free again and able to continue the life of the organism in health; and vitality is there again.

Comment

169 The search for the remedy that is homeopathically the most suitable, in all regards, for a given disease state is a laborious, occasionally a very laborious, pursuit. While there are praiseworthy books for facilitating this process [i.e. , repertories and materia medica] it is still necessary to study the sources themselves [i.e. , reports of provings]. Many-sided circumspection and serious consideration is also required. The best reward for this is the awareness of a duty truly fulfilled. How could this laborious, painstaking work (which alone produces the best possible cure of diseases) suit those gentlemen of the new mongrel sect who vaunt the honorable title of homeopath and who, for show, give out medicines that are homeopathic in form and appearance but which they only lay hold of in a perfunctory way (quidquid in buccam venit [whatever comes into the mouth]*)? When the inexact means does not immediately help, they lay the blame for it on homeopathy, instead of on their inexcusable indolence and fecklessness in dealing with the most important and most critical of human affairs. They accuse homeopathy of being very imperfect when, in fact, the problem is that the most appropriate homeopathic remedy for each disease state does not spontaneously fly into their mouths like roasted pigeons, without any effort on their part! Being the adroit people that they are, they know how to quickly console themselves about the inefficacy of their scarcely half-homeopathic means by bringing to bear the allopathic toadies which are more familiar to them (including one or more dozens of leeches placed at the site of suffering, small innocent venesections of eight ounces or so, etc.). These cut a right stately figure. If the patient pulls through in spite of all this, these gentlemen then praise their venesections, leeches etc. «without which the patient would not have been able to be preserved.» They give one to understand, in no uncertain terms, that these operations (transmitted, without much brain-racking, from the ruinous routine of the old school) were fundamentally the best element in the treatment. But if the patient dies (as is not seldom the case) they seek to appease the disconsolate relations by saying that «they themselves were witnesses that, after all, everything possible had been done for the dearly departed.» Who would do this feckless and harmful brood the honor of calling them, after the very laborious but curative art, homeopathic physicians? May their just reward await them of being treated in the same manner once they fall ill!

Of course, only a very considerable supply of medicines, exactly known according to this, their pure mode of action in altering the human condition, can enable us to find a homeopathic remedy-a fitting analogue of an artificial (curative) disease potence-for each of the infinitely many disease states in nature, for each wasting sickness in the world. 167 Meanwhile (thanks to the truth of the symptoms and the abundance of disease elements that each one of the efficacious medicinal substances has shown in its impinging action on healthy bodies) there are only a few cases of disease left for which a fairly fitting homeopathic remedy is not to be met with, among the ones now already proven as to their pure action, 168 a remedy that brings health again gently, surely, and permanently without any particular ailments. These homeopathic medicines do so infinitely more certainly and surely than all the general and special therapies of the hitherto allopathic medicinal art, with its unknown compound means that merely alter and aggravate but cannot cure chronic diseases, that protract rather than promote the cure of acute diseases, and that often even bring about endangerment to life. 

Comment

167 Initially, some forty years ago, I was the only one who made the proving of pure medicinal powers his most important pursuit. Since then I have been supported by some young men who have done provings on themselves and whose observations I have gone through diligently. A few others have since done some genuine testing of this kind. But what will we be able (only then) to curatively achieve within the entire sphere of the infinite domain of disease, when several accurate and reliable observers have distinguished themselves through careful self-provings for the enrichment of this one genuine materia medica! Then the medical pursuit will approach the mathematical sciences in reliability.

168 See footnote 109a.

It is only by proving a considerable number of simple medicines on healthy individuals, and carefully and faithfully recording all the disease elements and symptoms that each medicine (as an artificial disease potence) is capable of engendering, that we can have a true materia medica. A true materia medica is a collection of the genuine, pure, unmistakable 166 modes of action of simple medicinal substances. It is a codex of nature:

1. in which stands recorded, from each efficacious medicine thus investigated, a considerable set of particular condition-alterations and symptoms as they came to the notice of the observer, and

2. in which are present in similitude, the disease elements which are homeopathic to the several natural diseases to be cured by them one day. These disease elements contain artificial disease states that offer, for similar natural disease states, the only true homeopathic (i.e. , specific) curative implements for certain and permanent recovery.

Comment

166 Lately, provings of medicines have been commissioned and published, using distant, unknown provers who were paid for their work. But in this way the most important pursuit, ordained to be the only basis of the true medical art, and demanding the greatest moral certainty and reliability, seems unfortunately to become ambiguous and unsure in its results and loses all worth. The false statements to be expected therefrom, which at some future time are accepted as true by homeopathic physicians, must prove in their application to the patient to be of the greatest disadvantage.

It is difficult to investigate the pure actions of medicines in diseases 164 [i.e.  with sick people, §107]. Distinguishing between the symptoms of the simple medicine used for cure and the ailments of the original disease (even in diseases that are mostly invariable, especially the chronic ones) 165 is the object of the art of higher judgement and should be left only to masters of observation. 

Comment

164 To clarify the meaning of this paragraph, Hahnemann’s synopsis (p. 271) has been included here as the first sentence of the paragraph.

165 It is extremely difficult to distinguish between symptoms of the entire disease (including those from a long time ago) from symptoms never noticed before which are, consequently, new symptoms belonging to the medicine.

Of all the provings of the pure actions of simple medicines in altering the human condition, and of the artificial disease states and symptoms that they engender in the healthy person, the most excellent provings remain those that the healthy, unprejudiced, conscientious and fine-feeling physician employs upon himself, with all the care and caution taught here. He knows [is aware] with the greatest certainty that which he has perceived in himself. 163

Comment

163 These self-provings have other irreplaceable advantages for the physician.

1. First of all, the great truth becomes an undeniable fact for him, that what is medicinal about all medicines (wherein their curative power rests) lies in the condition-alterations undergone by means of the self-proven medicines and in the disease states self-experienced by means of these medicines.

2. By means of such remarkable observations, he will develop an understanding appreciation of his own sensibilities, of his mode of thinking and emotions which is the basis [basic wesen] of all true wisdom, gnwqi seaton [know thyself].

3. By observing himself so closely, he will develop into a good observer, [a skill in which] no physician dare be lacking. None of the observations we make on others are nearly as appealing as those we make on ourselves.

4. The observer of others must always worry lest the prover of a medicine has not felt distinctly just what he says, nor stated and characterized his feelings with the exactly fitting expression. There is always a lingering doubt as to whether the physician is not being at least partly deceived. This insurmountable obstacle to the discernment of truth in the inquiry into the artificial disease symptoms of medicines in others falls entirely by the wayside in self-provings. The self-prover is aware, with certainty, of what he has felt.

5. Each self-proving is a new impetus for the physician in the investigation of the powers of several medicines. Thus, by continuing to observe himself (the one person who will not deceive him and upon whom he can most rely) the physician becomes more and more practiced in the art of observing, which is of such importance to him. He will do these self-provings all the more eagerly since they promise the knowledge of the mostly still missing implements for cure [i.e. , proven medicines], according to their true worth and meaning, and without deceiving him.

Let him not imagine that such small illnesses from taking proving medicines are generally detrimental to his health. On the contrary, experience teaches that, through the various attacks on the healthy condition, the prover’s organism only becomes the more practiced in warding off everything from the external world that is inimical to his body, along with all the artificial and natural disease malignities. By means of such moderate self-provings with medicines, the prover’s organism also becomes more seasoned [hardened] against everything that is detrimental. His health becomes more invariable; he becomes more robust, as all experience teaches.

If the physician is conducting a proving with someone other than himself as the prover, then the following instructions should be followed:

1. The prover should write down distinctly each of his sensibilities, ailments, befallments and condition-alterations at that point in time when each one takes place. 2. The prover should indicate the time elapsed from the ingestion of the medicine to the arising of each symptom.

3. The prover should note the duration of the symptom, if it lasts a long time. The physician should look over the essay, in the presence of the prover, immediately after the completion of the proving, or daily if the proving lasts for several days.

Provers should be interviewed daily by the supervising physician.

The physician should do this in order to question the prover about the exact nature of each incident while everything is still fresh in his memory. The physician should write alongside any more detailed circumstances about these incidents, and he should modify the record as necessary, according to the prover’s testimony. 162

Comment

162 The person who makes known to the medical world the results of such experiments is responsible for the reliability of the prover and his statements, and rightly so since the welfare of suffering humanity is at stake.

For the duration of a medicine’s action, all ailments, befallments and alterations in the prover’s condition stem solely from this medicine, provided the above conditions for a pure experiment are complied with (§124-§127). All of these must be regarded as belonging peculiarly to this medicine as its symptoms, and recorded as such [in one's proving journal]. This is the case even if the prover perceived similar befallments in himself a considerable time previously. Their reappearance during the proving only indicates that this person, by virtue of his particular bodily constitution, is especially disposed to being aroused to such befallments. In our case, it has been done by the medicine. The symptoms come now (while the ingested efficacious medicine masters the prover’s entire condition) not of themselves, rather they stem from the medicine.

For such experiments, up to a certain degree, the more moderate the medicinal dose used, the more distinctly the initial actions emerge, and only those that are the most worth knowing [being aware of] without any after-actions or counter-actions of the life principle. This is the case provided one endeavors to facilitate the observation by the selection of a fine-feeling person who loves the truth, is moderate in every regard, and who directs the most intense attention to himself. On the contrary, with excessively large doses, not only are there several after-actions to be met with among the symptoms, but also the initial actions crop up in such confused haste and violence that nothing may be exactly observed, not to mention the danger of excessively large doses [for the prover]. This cannot be a matter of indifference to anyone who has regard for humankind and who prizes the least of the people as his brother.

A medicine, during its proving in the healthy state, cannot bring forth all of its condition-alterations in one person, but only in many different, diverging body- and soul-constitutions. Nonetheless, the tendency thus lies in it (§117) to arouse all of these symptoms in each person according to an eternal, immutable natural law by virtue of which all of a medicine’s actions, even those seldom brought forth in healthy people, are brought to bear in each person to whom it is administered who is in a disease state of similar ailments. Homeopathically chosen, the medicine then silently arouses, even in the least dosage, an artificial disease state in the patient that approximates the natural disease state. This artificial disease state rapidly and permanently (homeopathically) frees and cures the patient of his original malady. 

The complex of all disease elements which a medicine is capable of engendering is only brought near to completeness by means of multiple observations employed upon many differing qualified persons, both male and female. One can only be assured of having thoroughly proven a medicine for the disease states which it can arouse (i.e. , for its pure powers in altering the human condition) when subsequent provers can notice little about the medicine that is new and they almost always perceive in themselves the same symptoms that have already been observed by others. 

All external potences, preeminently medicines, bring forth a particular kind of alteration in the condition of the living organism, each in its own peculiar way. However, all the symptoms belonging to a given medicine do not appear in one person, nor all at once, nor in the same experiment. When one person takes the substance in three different experiments, some symptoms may appear in the first experiment and others in the second or third. Other people may experience different sets of symptoms, however, in such a manner that some or several of the befallments that take place with the fourth, eighth or tenth person may already have appeared with the second, sixth or ninth person, etc. Also, symptoms do not appear at the same hour every time.  

Upon becoming sensible [i.e. , upon feeling and becoming conscious] of this or that medicinal ailment, it is serviceable, indeed requisite for the exact determination of the symptom, to place oneself in different situations and to observe whether the befallment increases, lessens or passes away and whether, perhaps, the befallment returns when one is once again in the initial situation.

1. Does the befallment increase, lessen or pass away: -by movement of the part in question? -by walking in a room or in the fresh air? -by standing, sitting or lying?

2. Does the symptom alter itself: -by eating? -by drinking? -under some other condition? -by speaking, coughing, sneezing, or during another bodily function?

3. What time of the day or night is the symptom especially wont to come? In this way, what is peculiar and characteristic about each symptom becomes evident.

If however, in order to experience anything at all, one must give, as a test, the same medicine in ever-heightened doses [i.e. , an increased amount of globules] to the same person several days in a row, then to be sure, one experiences the various disease states which this medicine can in general bring to pass, but not their sequence. Also, the subsequent dose often curatively takes away one or another symptom aroused by the previous dose; or it takes away symptoms in bringing forth the opposite state. These symptoms must be bracketed as ambiguous until subsequent purer tests show whether they are counter- and after-actions of the organism or reciprocal actions of the medicine.

If, right at the outset, a properly strong medicinal dose has been administered, then one has the advantage of being able to record the exact sequence of symptoms that the prover experiences, and the times when each appears. This is very instructive for knowledge of the medicine’s character because the order of the initial actions, and also the reciprocal actions, comes to light most unambiguously. Even a very moderate dose is often sufficient for the proving if the prover is fine-feeling enough and very attentive (as much as is possible) to his condition. The duration of a medicine’s action only becomes known through the comparison of several tests [in which only one dose is taken].  

When only weak actions of such a dose come to light, one can increase the dosage with a few more globules daily until the actions become more distinct and stronger, until the condition-alterations become more perceptible. Few persons are immediately strongly attacked by a medicine. In fact, there is great diversity in this respect. Occasionally, an apparently weak person is hardly aroused by a medicine known to be very powerful while the same person is strongly enough aroused by several other, far weaker medicines. On the other hand, there are very robust persons who sense very appreciable disease symptoms from an apparently mild medicine while from stronger medicines, they sense less, etc. Since this is not known beforehand, it is very advisable to begin, at first, with a small medicinal dose [for everybody] and when it is appropriate and necessary, to increase it to a higher and higher dose from day to day. 

Both the recent and the most recent experiences have taught that, in provings done with medicinal substances in their raw state, the substances do not manifest nearly the full wealth of their hidden powers as they do in provings using substances in potentized form (i.e. , highly attenuated through proper trituration and succussion). By means of this simple processing, the powers that lie hidden and, as it were, dormant in the medicinal substance’s raw state are developed and awakened into activity to an incredible degree. Therefore, even substances deemed weak with regard to their medicinal powers are best investigated by having the prover take, daily on an empty stomach, four to six of the finest globules of the 30th potency [30C] of such a substance, moistened with a little water, or rather dissolved in a larger or smaller amount of water and well succussed. This should be continued for several days. 

Testing on males and females is necessary in order to bring to light gender-related condition-alterations.

The selected prover must above all things be known as credible and conscientious. During the course of the proving, a prover must:

1. guard against mental and bodily exertion,

2. guard against all excesses and disturbing passions,

3. have no urgent business to deter one from proper observation and, with good will, direct exact attention to oneself without being disturbed,

4. be bodily healthy, after one’s fashion [i.e. , what is good health for the prover],

5. possess the necessary intellect to be able to name and describe one’s sensibilities in distinct expressions.

During the proving, the diet must also be arranged quite moderately:

1. It must be simple, nutritious, and as much as possible without spices.

2. Side dishes of green vegetables and roots, 160 all salads, and soup herbs should be avoided because they always retain some disturbing medicinal power, no matter how they are prepared.

3. Beverages should be those usually taken, and they should be as little stimulating as possible. 161

Comment

160 Young green peas in the pod, green beans, steamed potatoes and, if need be, carrots are permissible since these are the least medicinal vegetables.

161 Provers must not have the habit of drinking wine, brandy, coffee or tea. If they did have the habit, they must have completely broken it long before the proving. Partly, these beverages are stimulating; partly, they are medicinally detrimental.

Each medicinal substance must be employed entirely alone and pure, without mixing in any foreign substance or otherwise taking any foreign medicinals on the same day or on subsequent days, as long as one intends to observe the actions of the medicine. 

Each of these medicines must be taken in a quite simple, unadulterated form.

1. Medicines made from indigenous [local] plants should be taken as freshly expressed juice mixed with some alcohol to prevent spoilage.

2. Exotic [non-local] plants should be made into a powder or they should be extracted fresh and made into a tincture prepared with alcohol. When administered, they should be mixed with several parts of water.

3. Salts and gums should be dissolved in water immediately before being taken.

4. If the plant is only to be had in its dry form and if, according to its nature, its powers are naturally weak, an infusion should be made from it by pouring boiling water over the crushed herb. It should be drunk immediately after being prepared, while still warm. This is because all expressed plant juices and all infusions of plants using water, without alcohol added, rapidly begin to ferment and spoil, losing their medicinal power.

The substances used in provings should be perfectly well-known, and their purity, genuineness and full vigor should be thoroughly assured. This is because the certainty of the entire medical art and the welfare of all future human generations depends on these experiments. 

In medicinal provings, with respect to their actions in the healthy body, one must bear in mind the following:

1. Even in small doses, the strong, so-called heroic substances tend to arouse condition-alterations, even in robust persons.

2. In these experiments, substances of milder power must be administered in more considerable doses.

3. For the action of the weakest medicines to be perceived, they can only be tested upon persons who are free of disease and who are delicate, excitable and sensitive.

Therefore the medicines upon which the life and death, the disease and health of human beings depend must be exactly, painstakingly distinguished from one another. For this reason, through careful, pure experiments, they must be tested as to their powers and true actions in the healthy body so that we may become exactly acquainted with them and avoid every mistake in their use with diseases, since only an apt selection of medicine can quickly and permanently restore the greatest of earthly blessings, the well-being of body and soul.  

Comment

158 Anyone who knows precisely and understands the value of the so singularly different actions of each single substance upon the human condition from the actions of every other single substance also easily realizes that among them, from a medical point of view, there can be absolutely no equivalent means, no surrogates. Only those who do not know the pure, positive effects of different medicines can be so foolish as to try to persuade us that one medicine can, in the same disease, be just as serviceable as another. This is the way in which ignorant children confuse things which are essentially different, because they barely know them on the outside, much less by their worth, their true meaning, their inner, highly divergent properties.

159 If this is pure truth (which it is) then no physician who does not want to be regarded as devoid of intellect, and who does not want to violate his good conscience (the sole testimony of genuine human worth) could possibly treat a disease with any medicinal substance unless he exactly and completely knows it in its true meaning, unless he has sufficiently tested its virtual action on the condition of healthy people in order to be exactly aware of its ability to engender a disease state very similar to the one to be cured, more similar than that of any other medicine that has become known to him. As has been shown above, neither man nor great nature can completely, rapidly and permanently cure except with a homeopathic means. Henceforth no genuine physician can exclude himself from such tests, especially on himself, in order to attain this knowledge which most necessarily belongs to the curative purpose and which has hitherto been so disdainfully neglected by the doctors of all centuries. In all past centuries (future generations will hardly believe this) physicians contented themselves with blindly prescribing for diseases, unproven medicines whose importance was unknown as to their highly divergent, pure dynamic action on human conditions. Indeed, physicians generally mixed several of these unknown, so very different powers into one formula, leaving it to chance how the patient would fare afterwards. This is like a madman getting into an artist’s studio and grabbing handfuls of very different tools which are unknown to him in order (he imagines) to work on the art objects standing about. Needless to say, these works of art would be ruined-probably quite irreparably ruined-by his senseless work.

Every medicine exhibits particular actions in the human body which do not come about in exactly the same way from any other medicinal substance of a different kind. 157

Comment

157 This fact was also perceived by Albrecht von Haller who wrote (in the preface to his Hist. stirp. helv.):  Latet immensa virium diversitas in iis ipsis plantis, quarum facies externas dudum novimus, animas quasi et quodcunque caelestius habent, nondum perspeximus. [A great diversity of strength lies hidden in these plants themselves, whose external features we have long known but whose souls, as it were, and whatever divine element they have, we have not yet perceived.]

1. the indwelling power of the impinging substance, and

2. the ability of the spirit-like dynamis that enlivens the organism to be aroused by this impinging substance.

Therefore, the conspicuous illnesses in the so-called idiosyncrasies cannot be attributed solely to these particular bodily constitutions but must, at the same time, be derived from these occasioning things in which must lie the power to make the same impression on all human bodies. It is just that few among the healthy bodily constitutions are inclined to let themselves be displaced by these things into a so conspicuous disease state. That these potences really make this impression on each body can be seen from the fact that they afford aid as homeopathic remedies to all sick persons for disease symptoms similar to the ones which they themselves can arouse, although apparently only in so-called idiosyncratic persons. 156

Comment

155 A few persons can faint from the smell of roses, or get into various other morbid, occasionally dangerous states from partaking of mussels, crab or barbel roe, by touching the foliage of some kinds of sumach, etc.

156 In this way, Princess Maria Porphyrogeneta helped her brother, Emperor Alexius, who suffered from faintings, by sprinkling him with rosewater-to twn rodwn stalagma [the liquid drop of roses]-in the presence of his aunt Eudoxia (Hist. byz. Alexius, lib. XV, p. 503, ed. PoЯer). Also, Horstius considered rose vinegar to be helpful in cases of faintings (Opera, III, p. 59).

In provings, some symptoms are brought to pass more frequently and others more rarely; that is, some symptoms appear in many healthy bodies while others appear in only a very few.  

Some medicines have not-a-few symptoms which are partially, or under certain attendant circumstances, opposite to other symptoms that have previously or subsequently appeared, but which are not therefore to be regarded as an actual after-action or simple counter-action of the life force, but which only form the reciprocal state to the various initial-action paroxysms. These are called reciprocal actions. 

The narcotic medicines appear to be the only exception in this regard. During the initial action, partly they take away the sensitivity and sensibility, and partly they take away the irritability. Then, even with moderate test doses in healthy bodies, a heightened sensitivity (and greater irritability) is frequently noticeable in the after-action.  

In those older descriptions of the often life-endangering actions of medicines ingested in excessive doses, one also perceives states which showed themselves not at the beginning but at the end of such sad events and which were of an entirely opposite nature to those at the beginning. These symptoms that oppose the initial action (which is actually the impinging-action upon the life force, §63) are the counter-action of the organism’s life principle. Therefore, they are its after-action (§62-§67). In provings with moderate doses upon healthy bodies, this after-action is seldom or almost never in the least to be sensed; with small doses, nothing at all is to be sensed. In the homeopathic curative pursuit, the living organism produces only as much counter-action against these small doses as is necessary to again raise the condition up to the natural healthy state [§68].  

The agreement of my observations of the pure actions of medicines [in provings] with these older reports [of poisonings] written irrespective of curative purposes, and even the accord of these reports [of poisonings] with others of this kind from different writers, easily persuades us that medicinal substances act in their morbid alteration of the healthy human body according to definite, eternal natural laws and, by virtue of these, are able to engender certain, reliable disease symptoms, each substance engendering particular ones, according to its peculiarity. 

In the medical literature, there are reports of poisonings where healthy individuals (accidentally, for the purposes of suicide or murder, or under other circumstances) ingested large amounts of a medicinal substance. I have seen that the actions of the morbid malignities described in these reports agreed with my observations upon testing the same substances on myself and other healthy individuals. The writers of these toxicological reports recorded these previous cases as proof of the disadvantage of these violent things, usually only to warn against them; partly also to extol their art when, while using their means against these dangerous befallments, recovery gradually set in; and partly, when people thus afflicted died during treatment, to exonerate themselves by proclaiming the danger of these substances which they then called poisons. None of these observers suspected:

1. that these symptoms, recounted by them only as proofs of the harmfulness and toxicity of these substances, contained sure reference to the power of these drugs to be able to curatively extinguish similar ailments in natural diseases,

2. that these disease arousals were indications of their homeopathic curative action, and

3. that the only possible investigation of their medicinal powers rests upon the observation of the condition-alterations brought forth by the medicines in healthy organisms.

The pure, peculiar powers of medicines for curative purposes are not to be discerned through a. specious a priori sophistry, b. the smell, taste or appearance of the medicines, c. chemical processing of the medicines, or d. the use in diseases of one or several medicines in a mixture (prescription). One did not suspect that these histories of medicinal diseases would some day supply the first rudiments of the true, pure materia medica which, from the outset up until now, consisted only in false conjectures and fabrications, and which was as good as non-existent. 154

Comment

154 See what I have said on this subject in «Examination of the Sources of the Common Materia Medica,» prefixed to the third part of my Materia Medica Pura. [This appears in Volume II of the English translation.]

Comment

152 It is impossible that there can be another true, best method of curing dynamic (i.e. , non-surgical) diseases besides pure homeopathy, just as it is impossible to draw more than one straight line between two points. A person who imagines that there are other modes of curing diseases could not have gotten to the bottom of homeopathy [i.e. , fundamentally understood it] or practiced it with sufficient care, nor could he have seen or read cases of correctly motivated homeopathic cures. Such a person could not have pondered the baselessness of all allopathic modes of treating diseases or inquired about their bad, often frightful, results if with such lax indifference, he places the only true medical art on an equal footing with these detrimental modes of treatment or even passes them off as sisters of homeopathy, which homeopathy could not do without! May my conscientious successors, the genuine, pure homeopaths, with their almost never failing felicitous cures, set them straight.

153 The first fruits of this labor (as ripe as it could be then) were published in the Fragmenta de viribus medicamentorum positivis, sive in sano corpore humano observatis [Fragments on the positive forces of medicines; that is, observed in the healthy human body] (Lipsiae, 1805, pts. I, II, vol. 8, ap. J.A.  Barth). The riper fruits were presented in Reine Arzneimittellehre [Materia Medica Pura] (vol. I, 3rd ed.; vol. II, 3rd ed., 1833; vol. III, 2nd ed., 1825; vol. IV, 2nd ed., 1825; vol. V, 2nd ed., 1826; vol. VI, 2nd ed., 1827). [The English translation of Hahnemann's Materia Medica Pura is published in two volumes.] These riper fruits were also presented in the second, third and fourth parts of Die chronischen Krankheiten [The Chronic Diseases] Dresden: Arnold, 1828, 1830 (2nd ed., with a fifth part, Dьsseldorf: Schaub, 1835-1839). [These appear in Part II of the English translation.]

Therefore there is no other possible way to unerringly experience the peculiar actions of medicines upon the human condition-there is no single, surer, more natural arrangement for this intent than to administer each single medicine experimentally, in a moderate amount, to healthy persons in order to learn what alterations, symptoms and signs of its impinging action each medicine particularly brings forth in the condition of body and soul, that is, what disease elements each medicine is able to and tends to arouse. 151 As has been shown (§24-§27), all of a medicine’s curative power lies in its power to alter the human condition; this is illuminated from observation of the human condition.  

Comment

151 As far as I am aware, not one single physician in the past 2500 years came upon this so natural, so absolutely necessary, sole genuine test of the pure, peculiar tunement-altering actions of medicines upon the human conditon in order to learn what disease states each medicine is capable of curing, except the great and immortal Albrecht von Haller. In the preface to his Pharmacopeia (Basel, 1771, p. 12 fol.), he states:  Nempe primum in corpore sano medela tentanda est, sine peregrina ulla miscela; odoreque et sapore ejus exploratis, exigua illius dosis ingerenda et ad omnes, quae inde contingunt, affectiones, quis pulsus, qui calor, quae respiratio, quaenam excretiones, attendendum. Inde ad ductum phaenomenorum, in sano obviorum, transeas ad experimenta in corpore aegroto, etc. [In truth a remedy must first be tried on a healthy body without any foreign admixture. Once one has tested its odor and taste, one should take a small portion of the dose and pay attention to any effects which ensue: what are the pulse rate, the temperature, the respiration rate, the excretions. After observation of the succession of clear effects in a healthy body, one may proceed to trials on a sick one, etc.] Though not a practicing physician, he alone besides me saw the necessity of doing this, but nobody, not one single physician, paid attention or followed these, his inestimable hints.

If, in order to perform this investigation, medicines are only given to sick persons (even when only one simple and singly prescribed medicine is given) one sees little or nothing definite of their pure actions since the particular condition-alterations expected from the medicines are mingled with the symptoms of the present natural disease, and are therefore seldom distinctly perceptible. 

The entire disease-arousing efficacy of the the individual medicines must be known; that is, all the disease symptoms and condition-alterations that each medicine is especially able to engender in healthy people must first have been observed before one can hope to be able to find and select from among the proven medicines, the apt homeopathic remedy for most of the natural diseases.  

Comment

150 In their treatments, the physicians of the old school made it extremely easy for themselves in this regard. They made no exact inquiry about all of the patient’s circumstances. Indeed, the physician often interrupted patients in the account of their individual ailments in order not be disturbed in the rapid writing up of the prescription, which was compounded of several ingredients that were unknown to the physician as to their true action. No allopathic physician, as said, insisted upon learning all the exact circumstances of a case, and still fewer of these circumstances did he ever write down. When he saw the patient again after several days, he was aware of little or nothing about the few circumstances he had heard at first since he had seen so many other, different patients since then. He had let it all go in one ear and out the other. At subsequent visits, he only asked a few general questions, made as if he felt the pulse and looked at the tongue before writing another prescription (likewise without reason) or continuing the first, in more handsome portions several times a day, then he hurried off with elegant gestures to thoughtlessly visit the fiftieth or sixtieth patient of the morning. This is how the most cogitative of all pursuits-the conscientious, careful investigation of the state of each single patient, and the special cure to be grounded thereon-was practiced by people who called themselves physicians and rational medical-art practitioners. The result was almost invariably bad, as is natural. Patients had to go to such people partly because there was nothing better and partly for the sake of etiquette and established convention.

Just like the mostly acute epidemics [§102] the chronic wasting sicknesses remain the same as to their wesen. Just as I did with the epidemics, I had to investigate the chronic wasting sicknesses (namely and principally psora) much more exactly than ever before. I had to do this because of the extent of the symptoms in these chronic diseases and also because one patient carries only a part of the symptoms in himself, while a second or third patient, etc. suffers from some other befallments which likewise, as it were, are only a part torn off from the totality of the symptoms that make up the entire extent of the one and the same disease. Therefore, the complex of all the symptoms belonging to such a miasmatic wasting sickness (in particular, psora) can only be ascertained from very many such individual chronic patients. Without such a complete overview and total image, the medicines that are homeopathically curative for the whole wasting sickness (namely the antipsorics) cannot be searched out. These medicines are, at the same time, the true remedies for the individual patients that are suffering from these chronic maladies. 

To be sure, all those afflicted by the epidemic at that time have the same disease, flowing from one and the same source. However, the entire extent of such an epidemic disease and the totality of its symptoms (knowledge of which belongs to the overview of the complete disease-image, so one can choose the most fitting homeopathic remedy for this symptom-complex) cannot be perceived in a single patient, but can only be completely abstracted and gathered [inferred] from the sufferings of several patients of different bodily constitutions.

Comment

149 For the physician who has already, in the first cases, been able to choose a remedy that approximates the specifically homeopathic one, subsequent cases will either confirm the suitability of the chosen medicine or direct the physician to an even more fitting, the most fitting homeopathic remedy.

It may well be that the physician does not get a perception of the complete image of the epidemic disease with the first case he encounters since each such collective disease only brings the complex of its symptoms to the light of day with the closer observation of several cases. Meanwhile, the carefully investigating physician can often come so close to the true state, even with the first or second patient, that he becomes alive to the characteristic image of the disease, and then finds a fitting, homeopathically commensurate remedy for it. 

In the investigation of the symptom complex of epidemic or sporadic diseases, it makes no difference if something similar has ever appeared before under the same or any other name. The novelty or peculiarity of such a contagion makes no difference, either in its examination or its cure, since the physician presupposes that the pure image of each and every presently reigning disease is new and unknown. He must explore it for himself from the ground up if he wants to be a genuine, thorough medical-art practitioner who never puts conjecture in the place of perception and never assumes (without carefully spying out all of the disease manifestations) that the treatment for a case of disease entrusted to him is either entirely or partially known. This is all the more the case here since each reigning epidemic is in many regards a phenomenon of a particular kind that is found, by exact investigation, to deviate greatly from all former epidemics (which have been falsely labeled with certain names). This is true of all contagious diseases except those that stem from an invariable infectious tinder, such as smallpox, measles, etc.  

It is certain that, on hearing about a patient’s ailments and sensibilities, one has to ascribe belief principally to the patient himself, especially to his own expressions with which he can render an account of his sufferings. (These are wont to be altered and falsified in the mouths of relations and attendants.) However, it is just as certain that the investigation of the true complete image of the disease and its details requires (with all diseases, but principally with the protracted ones) special circumspection, scrupulousness, knowledge of human nature, cautious inquiry and patience-all to a high degree.   

This individualizing examination of a disease case, for which I am giving only general instructions here (and from which the disease examiner should retain only what is applicable to each single case) demands nothing of the medical-art practitioner except freedom from bias and healthy senses, attention while observing and fidelity in recording the image of the disease.

148 A pure fabrication of befallments and ailments will never indeed be met with in hypochondriacs, even the most insufferable ones. This is demonstrated by a comparison of the ailments they complain of at different times while the physician gives them nothing at all or something unmedicinal [i.e. , a placebo]. However, something must be deducted from their exaggerations, or at least the strength of their expressions should be attributed to their excessive feeling. The high pitch of their expressions about their sufferings becomes, in itself, a significant symptom in the remaining set of symptoms from which the image of the disease is to be composed. It is a different matter with the insane and the willful fabricators of disease.

In cases of chronic disease, the investigation of the above mentioned and all remaining signs of disease must be conducted as carefully and minutely as possible, and one must go into the smallest details. This is because:

1. In chronic diseases, these details are the most peculiar and least resemble the signs of rapidly passing [acute] diseases. These cannot be taken too exactly if a cure is to be achieved.

2. Chronically ill patients become so accustomed to their long sufferings that they pay little or no attention to the smaller, often very characteristic accompanying befallments which are so decisive in singling out the remedy. They view them as almost a part of their natural state, nearly mistaking them for health, whose true feeling they have fairly well forgotten during the course of their fifteen to twenty year long suffering. It hardly occurs to them to believe that these accompanying symptoms, these remaining smaller or greater deviations from the healthy state, could have a connection with their main malady.

While inquiring into the state of a chronic disease, carefully ponder and scrutinize the particular affairs of the patient (ordinary occupations, usual living habits and diet, situation at home, etc.) to find out what there is in them that may arouse or maintain disease, and whose removal may further recovery. 147

Comment

147 In chronic diseases of women, one should pay special attention to such things as pregnancy, infertility, sexual desires, deliveries, miscarriages, breast-feeding, vaginal discharges and the state of the menses. With particular regard for the menses, the following should be ascertained:

1. Does the menstrual period recur at intervals that are too short or too long?

2. How many days does it last?

3. Is the flow continuous or interrupted at intervals?

4. How heavy is it?

5. How dark is its color?

6. Is there leukorrhea? If so, is it before or after the menstrual flow? How is it constituted? What sensations attend its flow? What is the quantity? Under what conditions does it occur? What brings it on?

7. Especially, what ailments of body and soul, and what sensations and pains does the patient have before, during and after a menstrual period?

If nothing has been mentioned in these voluntary statements about several parts or functions of the body, or about the patient’s emotional mood, the physician should then ask what is still to be recalled with respect to these parts and functions and the mental and emotional state. 143 The physician should do this in general expressions only, so that the commentator is obliged to respond with specifics. 

Comment

143 For example:

1. How are the bowel movements?

2. How does the urine pass?

3. How is sleep, both during the day and at night?

4. How are the emotions, temper, mental power constituted?

5. How is the appetite, the thirst?

6. How is the taste in the mouth, all by itself?

7. What foods and drinks taste the best? Which ones are the most repugnant to the patient?

8. Does each food have its full natural taste or some other strange taste?

9. How is the patient after eating or drinking?

10. Is there anything to recall about the head, the limbs, the abdomen?

If the disease has been caused by a remarkable event-either recently or, in the case of a protracted malady, some time ago-the patient (or at least his relations, when questioned privately) will then readily declare it, either of his (or their) own accord or upon cautious inquiry. 146

Comment

146 Through astutely phrased questions or other private inquiries, the physician must seek to trace the possible dishonoring occasions of diseases which the patient or his relations do not readily confess, at least not of their own free will. To these belong: poisoning or attempted suicide; onanism; debaucheries of common or unnatural lust; overindulgence in wine, liquor, punch or other heating drinks, tea, or coffee; gluttony in general or with particular detrimental foods; infection with a venereal disease or with the itch diathesis; unhappy love; jealousy; domestic discord; vexation; grief over family misfortune; abuses; dogged revenge; offended pride; financial problems; superstitious fear; hunger; or perhaps bodily infirmity in the private parts (e.g. , a hernia, a prolapse), etc.

The befallments and condition of a patient during some previous course of medication do not give the pure image of the disease. On the other hand, symptoms and ailments suffered before the use of the medicine or several days after discontinuing its use give the genuine, fundamental concept of the original gestalt of the disease, and the physician must record these in particular.

When the patient has a protracted disease and has been taking medicine up until the time of the visit, the physician could also leave him several days entirely without medicine or give him something non-medicinal [i.e. , a placebo], postponing for several days the more exact scrutiny of the disease signs in order to apprehend the enduring, unmixed symptoms of the old malady in their purity, and then be able to sketch an unmistakable image of the disease.

When the physician has finished writing down these statements, he then notes what he himself perceives about the patient, 145 and he inquires as to what [of all these indications] was proper to the patient in his healthy days. 

Comment

145 For example:

1. How does the patient gesticulate during the visit?

2. Is he vexed, quarrelsome, hasty, inclined to weep, anxious, despairing or sad; or is he comforted, calm, etc.?

3. Is he drowsy or generally dull-witted?

4. Does he speak in a demanding manner, very faintly, inappropriately, or in any other way?

5. How is the color of his face and eyes, and the color of his skin in general?

6. How is the vivacity and energy of his expression and eyes?

7. How is the tongue?

8. How is the smell of the mouth?

9. How is the respiration?

10. How is the hearing?

11. How much are the pupils dilated or constricted? How rapidly do they alter in the dark or light?

12. How is the pulse?

13. How is the abdomen?

14. How damp or dry, cold or hot to the touch is the skin in general, or this or that part of it?

15. Does the patient lie with his head bent back? With his mouth half or wide open? With his arms placed over his head? Does he lie on his back or in another position?

16. With what exertion does the patient straighten himself up?

17. Anything else the physician can perceive about him that is strikingly noticeable.

Only after the patient has finished freely relating the pertinent information upon simply being invited to do so, and upon being prompted [with general questions], thereby providing a fairly complete image of the disease, is it allowable and indeed necessary for the physician to ask more precise and specific questions if he feels he has not yet been fully informed. 144

The patient’s own account of his sensibilities is usually the most reliable. 

Of the accounts received from the patient and from others, most belief is to be attributed to the patient’s own account with respect to his sensibilities (except in feigned diseases).

Comment

144 For example: 1. How frequent are his bowel movements? What is the exact quality of the stools? Was the whitish bowel

In this way, the physician makes a closer determination of each single statement, without ever asking a question that would put words into the patient’s mouth or that would be answerable with a simple yes or no. Otherwise, the patient would be misled into affirming something untrue or half-true or denying something that really exists, out of convenience or to please the interviewer, whereby a false image of the disease and an unsuitable mode of treatment must arise. 142

Comment

142 For example, the physician should not ask, «Wasn’t this or that circumstance also present, perhaps?» The physician should never be guilty of seducing the patient into giving false answers and making false statements with any leading questions or suggestions.

When the narrator has finished what he wanted to say of his own accord, the physician enters a closer determination of each particular symptom in the following way: He reads through the single symptoms reported to him and asks for further particulars about this or that one. For example:

1. At what time did this befallment take place?

2. Did the befallment occur before the medicine was used, while taking the medicine, or only some days after setting it aside?

3. What kind of pain, what sensation (described exactly) took place at this spot?

4. What exact spot was it?

5. Did the pain ensue in fits and starts at different times, or was it persistent, incessant?

6. How long did the pain last?

7. At what time of day or night, and in what position, was the pain the worst? At what time, and in what position, did it stop entirely?

8. Described in clear, plain words, how was the befallment or circumstance exactly constituted?

The physician begins a fresh line with every new symptom or circumstance mentioned by the patient or relation so the symptoms are all ranged separately, one below the other. The physician can add to any one that is initially stated all-too-indefinitely, but afterwards more clearly. 

Obtain information from the patient’s relations.

Observe the patient.

Write the case accurately.

Do not interrupt.

The patient complains of the process of his ailments. The patient’s relations tell what he has complained of, his behavior and what they have perceived about him. The physician sees, hears and notices through the remaining senses what is altered or unusual about the patient. He writes everything down with the very same expressions used by the patient and his relations. The physician keeps silent, allowing them to say all they have to say without interruption, unless they stray off to side issues. 141 Only let the physician admonish them to speak slowly right at the outset so that, in writing down what is necessary, he can follow the speaker.

Comment

141 Every interruption disturbs the narrator’s train of thought. All he would have said at first does not occur to him again in precisely the same way after the interruption.

With the discovery of psora, that great source of chronic diseases, and with the finding of more specific homeopathic remedies for psora, the medical art has come some steps closer to the nature of the majority of diseases to be cured. Even so, the homeopathic physician’s duty to carefully apprehend the investigable symptoms and peculiarities of these diseases remains just as indispensable as before, for the formation of the indicator for each chronic (psoric) disease to be cured. No genuine cure of the psoric diseases, or any of the remaining diseases, can take place without the strict individualized treatment of each case of disease.

Differences in taking an acute and a chronic case.

In this investigation, some distinction is to be made between sufferings that are acute, rapidly arising diseases and those that are chronic. In acute diseases, the principal symptoms become more rapidly conspicuous and discernible to the senses so that a much shorter time is needed to note down the disease image. Since most of the acute disease presents itself spontaneously, there is much less that needs to be asked. 140 Gradually advanced, chronic diseases of several years duration are discovered far more laboriously.  

Comment

140 Therefore, the following schema for investigating symptoms only partly concerns cases of acute disease.

It is, to some extent, understandable how psora could now unfold itself in so many countless disease forms in all the human race since this age-old infectious tinder has gone, little by little, through many millions of human organisms over the course of hundreds of generations, thus attaining an incredible proliferation. This is all the more understandable when we consider the multitude of circumstances 138 that have tended to contribute to the formation of this great diversity of chronic diseases (secondary symptoms of psora), as well as the indescribable variety of human congenital bodily constitutions, which already, in and of themselves, deviate so greatly from one another.

It is also no wonder that so many different malignities, impinging from within and without (often lastingly) upon such a variety of organisms permeated with the psoric miasm, would produce untold different deficiencies, deteriorations, mistunements and sufferings. These have been falsely listed in the pathology books, under a multitude of names, as diseases existing in and of themselves. 139

Comment

138 Some of these causes that modified the formation of psora into chronic maladies include:1. climate and the particular natural quality of the location in which one lives,2. very irregular upbringing of youth- the neglected, distorted or over-refined development of body or spirit,3. misuse of body or spirit in one’s vocation or in life relationships,4. dietary regimen,5. human passions,6. customs, practices and habits of many kinds, etc.

139 These books contain so many improper, ambiguous names, under each of which are included highly different disease states that often only resemble one another in a single symptom, for example: ague, jaundice, dropsy, consumption, leukorrhea, hemorrhoids, rheumatism, stroke, convulsions, hysteria, hypochondria, melancholia, mania, quinsy, palsy, etc. These are declared to be unvarying, fixed diseases in and of themselves and are dealt with according to the name, following ordinary established practice! How could the bestowal of such a name justify uniform medicinal management? And if the treatment is not always to be the same, then why use the identical name, which is misleading and presupposes the same treatment?»Nihil sane in artem medicam pestiferum magis unquam irrepsit malum, quam generalia quaedam nomina morbis imponere iisque aptare velle gen-eralem quandam medicinam» [Indeed, no more deadly evil has ever stolen into the art of medicine than the imposition of certain general names on diseases as well as the wish to adapt a certain general medicine to them], says Huxham (Op. phys. med., tome I), whose insight and sensitive conscience command respect. Likewise, Fritze (Annalen [Annals], vol I, p. 80) complains that essentially different diseases are called by one name. Even those common acute diseases that are indeed able to propagate themselves within each single epidemic (by an infectious matter of their own which remains unknown to us) are documented by the old school of medicine as if they were already known, fixed diseases that always recur in the same form. [These are designated with names] such as typhus fever, hospital fever, dungeon fever, camp fever, putrid fever, typhoid nerve fever, mucous fever etc., even though every epidemic of such circulating fevers distinguishes itself each time as a different new disease, never before entirely extant, and diverging greatly as to its course, several of its most striking symptoms, and its entire conduct. Each epidemic differs so greatly from all preceding ones that one would have to disavow all logical conceptual precision to give them the same name and treat them the same, in accordance with this faulty label. Only the sincere Sydenham (Opera., chap. 2, «De Morb. Epid.,» p. 43) saw this, for he insists that no epidemic disease should be taken for any previous one and treated in the same way, since they are all indeed different from one another, howsoever many of them gradually appear:  Animum admiratione percellit, quam discolor et sui plane dissimilis morborum epidemicorum facies; quae tam aperta horum morborum diversitas tum propriis ac sibi perculiaribus symptomatis tum etiam medendi ratione, quam hi ab illis disparem sibi vindicant, satis illucescit. Ex quibus constat, morbos epidemicos, utut externa quatantenus specie et symptomatis aliquot utrisque pariter convenire paullo incautioribus videantur, re tamen ipsa, si bene adverteris animum, alienae esse admodum indolis et distare ut aera lupinis. [It strikes the mind with wonder how varied and clearly dissimilar are the presentations of epidemic diseases. The obvious diversity of these diseases is made sufficiently clear, both by their own characteristic and peculiar symptoms and by the methods of curing them, which in their difference from one another demonstrate the disparity. From which it follows that, however much some epidemic diseases may seem to the slightly incautious to agree in their outward forms and symptoms, in reality-if you pay careful attention- they are quite different in nature and stand apart from each other as real money does from play money.]From all this it becomes clear that these useless and wrongful disease names may not have any influence on the treatment mode of a genuine medical-art practitioner who is aware that he is to judge and to cure not according to the nominal similarity of a single symptom, but according to the entire complex of all the signs of the individual state of each single patient whose sufferings he has the duty to exactly spy out, never permitting himself to merely hypothetically presuppose them. However, if one still believes that occasionally it is necessary to use certain disease names in order to be succinctly understood by ordinary people, then one should use these disease names only collectively and say, for example, that the patient has a kind of St. Vitus’ dance, a kind of dropsy, a kind of nerve fever, a kind of ague; never however (so that the delusion in these names may finally cease once and for all) that he has the St. Vitus’ dance, the nerve fever, the dropsy, the ague, since there certainly are not any fixed, unvarying diseases by these or any similar names.

The internal monstrous chronic miasm of psora is immeasurably more widespread, and consequently more significant, than the two chronic miasms just named. While syphilis marks its specific internal wasting sickness with the venereal chancre and sycosis does so with cauliflower-like growths, psora documents itself (only after the complete internal infection of the whole organism) by means of a peculiar skin eruption, sometimes consisting of only a few vesicles, accompanied by an unbearably tickling voluptuous itch and a specific odor. Psora is the true fundamental cause and engenderer of almost all the other remaining forms of disease which are numerous, indeed countless. 137

In pathology books, these countless forms of disease are considered to be self-contained diseases with names such as: nervous debility, hysteria, hypochondria, mania, melancholia, imbecility, frenzy, epilepsy and convulsions of all kinds, bone-softening (rachitis), scrofula, scoliosis and kyphosis, bone caries, cancer, fungus hematodes, neoplasms, gout, hemorrhoids, jaundice and cyanosis, dropsy, amenorrhea and hemorrhage from the stomach, nose, lungs, from the bladder and the uterus, asthma and suppuration of the lungs, impotence and infertility, migraine, deafness, cataracts and blindness, kidney stones, paralyses, defects of the senses, and pains of a thousand kinds, etc.

Comment

137 It took me twelve years of research to find the source of that incredible myriad of protracted sufferings, to investigate and to ascertain this great truth (which remained unknown to the former as well as the contemporary world) and at the same time, to discover the most excellent (antipsoric) remedies which were, for the most part, equal to this thousand-headed monster of a disease in its so very different manifestations and forms. I have set forth my experiences about this in The Chronic Diseases (4 vols., Dresden: Arnold, 1828-1830; and 2nd ed. in 5 vols., [Dьsseldorf]: Schaub). Before I was in the clear with this knowledge, I could only teach about the collected chronic diseases as isolated individual diseases to be treated with medicinal substances whose pure action had been proven in healthy people up until then. Therefore, each case of protracted disease was treated by my students in the same way as a peculiar disease (i.e. , according to the symptom group that was met with in the case) and was often cured to such an extent that sick humanity could rejoice at the extensive remedial riches already amassed by the new medical art. How much more satisfying it can be, now that sick humanity has come so much closer to the desired goal, since the additionally found, far more specific homeopathic remedies for the chronic sufferings germinating forth from psora [the antipsoric remedies] have been published [in The Chronic Diseases], along with special instructions for their preparation and employment. From among these antipsoric remedies, the genuine physician can now select those whose medicinal symptoms correspond the most homeopathically to the chronic disease to be cured, thereby almost universally producing complete cures.

Until now, only syphilis has been known, to some extent, as a chronic miasmatic disease which, left uncured, only expires with the end of life.

Sycosis 

Uncured sycosis (figwart disease) likewise cannot be eradicated by the life force. Sycosis was not recognized as an internal chronic miasm of its own kind, as it indisputably is. Rather, people believed that the disease was cured with the destruction of the outgrowths on the skin. They did not heed the continuing residual wasting sickness.

The true, natural, chronic diseases are those that arise from a chronic miasm. When left to themselves (without the use of remedies that are specific against them) these diseases go on increasing. Even with the best mental and bodily dietetic conduct, they mount until the end of life, tormenting the person with greater and greater sufferings. Besides those diseases that are engendered by medical malpractice (§74), these are the most numerous and greatest tormentors of human race, in that the most robust bodily anlage, the best regulated lifestyle, and the most vigorous energy of the life force are not in a position to eradicate them. 136