a. The exact opposite condition of health ( counteraction, secondary action ) to this effect ( primary action ), produced upon it, if there be such an opposite and that in as great a degree as was the effect ( primary action ) to the artificial morbific or medicinal agent on it, and proportionate to its own energy;

- or:-

b. If there is not in nature a state exactly the opposite of the primary action, it appears to endeavour to indifferentiate itself, that is, to make its superior power available in the extinction of the change wrought in it from without (by the medicine), in the place of which it substitutes its normal state ( secondary action, curative action ).

65 Philosophy

Examples of (A) are familiar to all. A hand bathed in hot water is at first much warmer than the other hand that has not been so treated (primary action); but when it is withdrawn from the hot water and again thoroughly dried, it becomes in a short time cold, and at length much colder than the other (secondary action). A person heated by violent exercise (primary action) is afterwards affected with chilliness and shivering (secondary action). To one who was yesterday heated by drinking much wine (primary action), to - day every breath of air feels too cold (counteraction of the organism, secondary action). An arm that has been kept long in very cold water is at first much paler and colder (primary action) than the other; but removed from the cold water and dried, it subsequently becomes not only warmer than the other, but even hot, red and inflamed (secondary action, reaction of the vital force), Excessive vivacity follows the use of strong coffee (primary action), but sluggishness and drowsiness remain for a long time afterwards (reaction, secondary action), if this be not always again removed for a short time by imbibing fresh supplies of coffee (palliative). After the profound stupefied sleep caused by opium (primary action), the following night will be all the more sleepless (reaction, secondary action). After the constipation produced by opium (primary action), diarrhoea ensues (secondary action); and after purgation with medicines that irritate the bowels, constipation of several days' duration ensues (secondary action). And in like manner it always happens, after the primary action of a medicine that produces in large doses a great change in the health of a healthy person, that its exact opposite, when, as has been observed, there is actually such a thing, is produced in the secondary action by our vital force.

66 Philosophy

An obvious antagonistic secondary action, however, is, as may readily be conceived, not to be noticed from the action of quite minute homeopathic doses of the deranging agents on the healthy body. A small dose of every one of them certainly produces a primary action that is perceptible to a sufficiently attentive; but the living organism employs against it only so much reaction (secondary action) as is necessary for the restoration of the normal condition.

67 Philosophy

These incontrovertible truths, which spontaneously offer themselves to our notice and experience, explain to us the beneficial action that takes place under homeopathic treatment; while, on the other hand, they demonstrate the perversity of the antipathic and palliative treatment of diseases with antagonistically acting medicines.1

1. Only in the most urgent cases where danger to life and imminent death allow no time for the action of a homoeopathic remedy - not hours, sometimes not even quater-hours and scarcely minutes - in sudden accidents occuring to previously healthy individuals -
eg , in asphyxia and suspended animation from lightning, from suffocation, freezing ,drowning, and the like,
--is it admissible and judicious, at all events as a preliminary measure, to stimulate the irritability and sensiblity(the physical life) with a palliative, as for instance, with gentle electrical shocks, with clysters of strong coffee, with a stimulating odour, gradual application of heat, etc.  When this stimulation is effected, the play of the vital organs again goes on in tets former healthy manner, for there is here no disease* to be removed, but merely an obstruction and suppression to the healthy vital force.  To this category belong various antidotes to sudden poisonings:- alkalies for mineral acids, hepar sulphuris for metallic poisons, coffee and camphor (and ipecacuanha )for poisoning by opium, etc.
It does not follow that a homoeopathic medicine has been ill selected for a case of disease because some of the medicinal symptoms are only antipathic to some of the less important and minor symptoms of the disease;if only the others, the stronger, well marked (characteristic), and peculiar symptoms of the disease are covered and matched by the same medicine with similarity of symptoms -- that is to say, overpowered, destroyed and extinguished;the few opposite symptoms also disappear of themselves after the expiry of the term of action of the medicament, without retarding the cure in the least.

* And yet the nwo sect that mixes the two systems appeals (though in vain) to this observation, in order that they may have an excuse for encountering everywhere such exceptions to the general rule in diseases, and to justify their convenient employment of allopathic palliatives, and of other injurious allopathic trash besides, soley for the sake of sparing themselves the trouble of seeking for the suitable homoeopathic remedy for each case of disease [and thus conviently appear as homoeopathic physicians without being such, in the Sixth Edition] I might also say for the sake of sparing themselves the trouble of bieng homoeopathic physicians, and yet wishing to appear as such. But their performances are on a par with the system they pursue; they are nothing to boast of [they are corrupting in the Sixth Edition ].

68 Philosophy

Inhomeopathiccures they show us that from the uncommonly small doses of medicine ( 275 - 287) required in this method of treatment, which are just sufficient, by the similarity of their symptoms, to overpower and remove the similar nature disease, ['and remove from the sensation of the life principle the similar natural disease' in the Sixth Edition] there certainly remains, after the destruction of the latter, at first a certain amount of medicinal disease alone in the organism, but, on account of the extraordinary minuteness of the dose, it is so transient, so slight, and disappears so rapidly of its own accord, that the vital force has no need to employ, against this small artificial derangement of its health, any more considerable reaction than will suffice to elevate its present state of health up to the healthy point - that is, than will suffice to effect complete recovery, for which after the extinction of the previous morbid derangement but little effort is required ( 64 B).

69 Philosophy

In the antipathic (palliative) mode of treatment, however precisely the reverse of this takes place. The medicinal symptom which the physician opposes to the disease symptom (for example, the insensibility and stupefaction caused by opium in its primary action to acute pain) is certainly not alien, not allopathic of the latter; there is a manifest relation of the medicinal symptom to the disease symptom, but it is the reverse of what should be. What is here intended, is that the annihilation of the disease symptom, shall be effected by an opposite medicinal symptom, which is nevertheless impossible.

No doubt the antipathically chosen medicine touches precisely the same diseased point in the organism as the homeopathic medicine, chosen on account of the similar affection it produces; but the former covers the opposite symptom of the disease only as an opposite, and makes it unobservable to our life principle for a short time only, so that in the first period of the action of the antagonistic palliative, the vital force perceives nothing disagreeable from either of the two (neither from the disease symptom nor from the medicinal symptom), as they seem both to have mutually removed and dynamically neutralized one another as it were (for example, the stupefying power of opium does this to the pain). In the first minutes the vital force feels quite well, and perceives neither the stupefaction of the opium nor the pain of the disease.

But as the antagonistic medicinal symptom cannot (as in the homeopathic treatment) occupy the place of the morbid derangement present in the organism [ 'in the sensation of the life principle' in the Sixth Edition] as asimilar, stronger (artificial) disease, and cannot, therefore, like a homeopathic medicine, affect the vital force with a similar artificial disease, so as to be able to step into the place of the original natural morbid derangement, the palliative medicine must, as a thing totally differing from, and the opposite of the disease derangement, leave the latter uneradicated; it renders it, as before said, by a semblance of dynamic neutralization,¹ at first unfelt by the vital force, but, like every medicinal disease, it is soon spontaneously extinguished, and not only leaves the disease behind, just as it was, but compels the vital force (as it must, like all palliatives, be given in large doses in order to effect the apparent removal) to produce an opposite condition ( 63, 64) to this palliative medicine, the reverse of the medicinal action, consequently the analogue of the still present, undestroyed, natural morbid derangement, which is necessarily strengthened and increased ² by this addition (reaction against the palliative) produced by the vital force. The disease symptom(this single part of the disease) consequently becomes worse after the term of the action of the palliative has expired; worse in proportion to the magnitude of the dose of the palliative . Accordingly (to keep to the same example) the larger the dose of opium given to allay the pain, so much the more does the pain increase beyond its original intensity as soon as the opium has exhausted its action.³

1. In the living human being no permanent neutralization of contrary or antagonistic sensations can take place, as happens with substances of opposite qualities in the chemical laboratory, where, for instance, sulphuric acid and potash unite to form a perfectly different substance, a neutral salt, which is now no longer either acid or alkali, and is not decomposed even by heat. Such amalgamations and thorough combinations, which form something permanently neutral and indifferent do not, as has been said, ever take place, with respect to dynamic impressions of an antagonistic nature in our sensific apparatus. Only a semblance of neutralization and mutual removal occurs in such cases at first, but the antagonistic sensations do not permanently remove one another. The tears of the mourner will be dried for but a short time by a laughable play; the jokes are, however, soon forgotten, and his tears then flow still more abundantly than before.

2. Plain as this proposition is, it has been misunderstood, and in opposition to it some have asserted Òthat the palliative in its secondary action, would then be similar to the disease present, must be capable of curing just as well as a homoeopathic medicine does by its primary action. But they did not reflect that the secondary action is not a product of the medicine, but invariably of the antagonistically acting vital force of the organism; that therefore this secondary action resulting from the vital force on the employment of a palliative is a state similar to the symptoms of the disease which the palliative left uneradicated, and which the reaction of the vital force against the palliative consequently increased still more.

3. As when in a dark dungeon, where the prisoner could with difficulty recognize objects close to him, alcohol is suddenly lighted, everything is instantly illuminated in a most consolatory manner to the unhappy wretch; but when it is extinguished, the brighter the flame was previously the blacker is the night which now envelopes him, and renders everything about him much more difficult to be seen than before.

70 Philosophy  Totality of the symptoms

From what has been already adduced we cannot fail to draw the following inferences:

That everything of a really morbid character and which ought to be cured that the physician can discover in diseases consists solely of the sufferings of the patient, and the sensible alterations in his health, in a word, solely of the totality of the symptoms, by which means the disease demands the medicine required for its relief; while, on the other hand, every internal cause attributed to it, every occult quality or imaginary material morbific principle, is nothing but an idle dream;

That this derangement of the state of health, which we term disease, can only be converted into health by another revolution effected in the state of health by means of medicines, whose sole curative power,  consequently can, only consist in altering man's state of health - that is to say, in a peculiar excitation of morbid symptoms, as is learned with most distinctness and purity by testing them on the healthy body;

That, according to all experience, a natural disease can never be cured by medicines that possess the power of producing in the healthy individual an alien morbid state (dissimilar morbid symptoms) differing from that of the disease to be cured ( never, therefore, by an allopathic mode of treatment ), and that even in nature, no cure ever takes place, in which an inherent disease is removed, annihilated and cured by the addition of another disease dissimilar to it, be the new one ever so strong;

That, moreover, all experience proves that, by the use of medicines, which have a tendency to produce in the healthy individual an artificial morbid symptom, antagonistic to the single symptom of disease sought to be cured, the cure of a long - standing affection will never be effected, but merely a very transient alleviation, always followed by its aggravation; and that, in a word, this antipathic and merely palliative treatment in long standing diseases of a serious character is absolutely ineffective;

That, however, the third and only other possible mode of treatment (the homeopathic ), in which there is employed for the totality of the symptoms of a natural disease, a medicine capable of producing the most similar symptoms possible in the healthy individual, given in suitable dose, is the only efficacious remedial method whereby diseases, which are purely dynamic deranging irritations of the vital force, are overpowered, and being thus easily, perfectly and permanently extinguished, must necessarily cease to exist ['This is brought about by means of the stronger similar deranging irritation of the homeopathic medicine in the sensation of the life principle' in the Sixth Edition] - and for this mode of procedure we have the example of unfettered Nature herself, when to an old disease there is added a new one similar to the first, whereby the new one is rapidly and forever annihilated and cured.

71 Therapeautics

As it is now no longer a matter of doubt that the diseases of mankind consist merely of groups of certain symptoms, and may be annihilated and transformed into health by medicinal substances, but only by such as are capable of artificially producing similar morbid symptoms (and such is the process in all genuine cures), hence the operation of curing (therapeautics) is comprised in the three following points:

I. How is the physician to ascertain what is necessary to be known in order to cure the disease?

II. How is he to gain a knowledge of the instruments adapted for the cure of the natural disease, the pathogenetic powers of the medicines?

III. What is the most suitable method of employing these artificial morbific agents (medicines) for the cure of natural disease?

72^(a)Therapeautics I :The Nature of Disease

With respect to the first point, the following will serve as a general preliminary view.

The diseases, to which man is liable, are either rapid morbid processes of the abnormally deranged vital force, which have a tendency to finish their course more or less quickly, but always in a moderate time. These are termed acute diseases. Or, they are diseases of such a character, that with small, often imperceptible beginnings, which dynamically derange the living organism, each in its own peculiar manner, causing it to gradually deviate from the healthy condition.  This in such a way, that the automatic life energy, called vital force, whose office it is to preserve health, only opposes to them, at the commencement and during their progress, imperfect, unsuitable, useless resistance, but is unable of itself to extinguish them, and must helplessly suffer them to spread and itself to be ever more and more abnormally deranged, until at length the organism is destroyed. These are termed chronic diseases and they are caused by infection with a chronic miasm.

73 Therapeautics I: The Nature of Disease, Acute

As regards acute diseases, they are either of such a kind as attack human beings individually, the exciting cause being injurious influences, to which they were particularly exposed. For example: - excesses in food, or an insufficient supply of it, severe physical impression, chills, over heatings, dissipation, strains, etc. ., or physical irritations, mental emotions, and the like, are all exciting causes of such acute febrile affections. In reality, however, they are generally only a transient explosion of latent psora, which spontaneously returns to its dormant state if the acute diseases were not of too violent a character and were soon quelled.

Or they are of such a kind as attack several persons at the same time, here and there ( sporadically), by means of meteoric or telluric influences and injurious agents. The susceptibility for being morbidly affected by these, is possessed by only a few persons at one time. 

Allied to these, are those diseases in which many persons are attacked, with very similar sufferings from the same cause (epidemically).  These diseases generally become infectious (contagious) when they prevail among thickly congregated masses of human beings.  Thence arise fevers,¹ in each instance of a peculiar nature. And because the cases of disease have an identical origin, they set up in all those they affect, an identical morbid process, which, when left to itself terminates in a moderate period of time in either death or recovery. The calamities of war, inundations and famine are not infrequently their exciting causes and producers.

Sometimes they are peculiar acute miasms, which recur in the same manner and are hence known by some traditional name. They either attack a person but once in a lifetime, such as the smallpox, measles, whooping-cough, the ancient, smooth, bright red scarlet fever ² of Sydenham, the mumps, etc., or are those which recur frequently in pretty much the same manner, such as the plague of the Levant, the yellow fever of the sea-coast, the Asiatic cholera, etc.

1. The homoeopathic physician, who does not entertain the forgone conclusions devised by the ordinary school (who have fixed upon a few names of such fevers, besides which mighty nature dare not produce any others, so as to admit of their treating these deseases according to some fixed method), does not acknowledge the names goal fever, bilious fever, typhus fever, putrid fever, nervous fever or mucous fever, but treats them each according to their several peculiarites.

2. Subsequently to the year 1801 a kind of purpura miliaris ( roodvonk ), which came from the West, was by physicians confounded with the scarlet fever, notwithstanding that they exhibited totally different symptoms, that the latter found its prophylactic an curative remedy in belladonna,the former in aconite, and the former was generally merely sporadic while the latter was invariably epidemic.Of late years it seems as if the two occasionally join to form an eruptive fever of a peculiar kind, for which neither the one nor yet the other remedy, alone, willl be found to be exactly homoeopathic.

74^(a)  Therapeautics I : The Nature of Disease, Chronic, Idiopathic.

Among chronic diseases we must still unfortunately include, are those so commonly met with, which are artificially produced in allopathic treatment by the prolonged use of violent heroic medicines in large and increasing doses. Such as abuse of calomel, corrosive sublimate, mercurial ointment, nitrate of silver, iodine and its ointments, opium, valerian, cinchona bark and quinine, foxglove, prussic acid, sulphur and sulphuric acid, perennial purgative,* venesections ['shedding streams of blood' in the Sixth Edition], leeches, issues, setons, etc.

By this treatment, the vital force ['vital energy' in the Sixth Edition ] is sometimes weakened to an unmerciful extent, and sometimes, if it does not succumb, gradually, is abnormally deranged (by each substance in a peculiar manner) in such a way that, in order to maintain life against these inimical and destructive attacks, the vital energy must produce a revolution in the organism, and either deprive some part of its irritability and sensibility, or exalt these to an excessive degree and causes dilatation or contraction, relaxation or induration or even total destruction of certain parts, leading to the development of faulty organic alterations here and there in the interior or the exterior (cripple the body internally or externally), in order to preserve the organism from complete destruction of the life by the ever - renewed, hostile assaults of such destructive forces.?

* A new foot note is added in the Sixth Edition, as follows:
 
[ 'The only possible case of plethora shows itself with the healthy woman, several days before monthly period, with a feeling of certain fulness of womb and preast, but with out inflammation']
1.If the patient succumbs, the practiser of such a treatment is in the habit of pointing out to the sorrowing relatives, at the post-mortem examination, these internal organic disfigurements, which are due to his pseudo-art, but which he artfully maintains to be the original incurable disease (see my book, Die Alloopathie, ein Wort deh Warnung an Kranke jeder Art, Leipzig, bei Baumgartner [translated in Lesser Writings]). Those deceitful records, the illustrated works on pathological anatomy, exhibit the products of such lamentable bungling.

?A long footnote in the Sixth Edition is added as follows;

[ Among all imaginable methods for the relief of sickness, no greater allopathic, irrational or inappropriate one can be thought of than this Brousseauic, debilitating treatment by means of venesection and hunger diet, which for many years has spread over a large part of the earth. No intelligent man can see in it anything medical, or medically helpful, whereas real medicines, even if chosen blindly and administered to a patient, may at times prove of benefit in a given case of sickness because they may accidentally have been homoeopathic to the case. But from venesection, healthy common sense can expect nothing more than certain lessening and shortening of life. It is a sorrowful and wholly groundless fallacy that most and indeed all diseases depend on local inflammation. Even for true local inflammation, the most certain and quickest cure is found in medicines capable of taking away dynamically the arterial irritation upon which the inflammation is based and this without the least loss of fluids and strength. Local venesections, even from the affected part, only tend to increase renewed inflammation of these parts. And precisely so it is generally inappropriate, aye, murderous to take away many pounds of blood from the veins in inflammatory fevers, when a few appropriate medicines would dispel this irritated arterial state, driving the hitherto quiet blood together with the disease in a few hours without the least loss of fluids and strength. Such great loss of blood is evidently irreplaceable for the remaining continuance of life, since the organs intended by the Creator for bloodmaking have thereby become so weakened that while they may manufacture blood in the same quantity but not again of the same good quality. And how impossible is it for this imagined plethora to have been produced in such remarkable rapidity and so to drain it off by frequent venesections when yet an hour before the pulse of this heated patient (before the fever and chill stage) was so quiet. No man, no sick person has ever too much blood or too much strength. On the contrary, every sick man lacks strength, otherwise his vital energy would have prevented the development of the disease. Thus it is irrational and cruel to add to this weakened patient, a greater, indeed the most serious source of debility that can be imagined. It is a murderous malpractice irrational and cruel based on a wholly groundless and absurd theory instead of taking away his disease which is ever dynamic and only to be removed by dynamic potencies.]

75 Therapeautics I : The Nature of Disease, Chronic, Idiopathic.

These inroads on human health effected by the allopathic non - healing art (more particularly in recent times) are of all the chronic diseases, most deplorable, They are the most incurable and I regret to add that it is apparently impossible to discover or to hit upon any remedies for their cure when they have reached any considerable height.

76 Therapeautics I : The Nature of Disease, Chronic, Idiopathic.

Only for natural diseases has the beneficent Deity granted us, in Homeopathy, the means of affording relief; but those devastations and maimings of the human organism, exteriorly and interiorly, effected by years, frequently, of the unsparing exercise of a false art*, with its hurtful drugs and treatment, must be remedied by the vital force itself (appropriate aid being given for the eradication of any chronic miasm that may happen to be lurking in the background), and if it has not already been too much weakened by such mischievous acts, can devote several years to this huge operation undisturbed. A human healing art, for the restoration to the normal state of those innumerable abnormal conditions so often produced by the allopathic non - healing art, there is not and cannot be.

* A new foot-note is added in the Sixth Edition, as follows:
 
[ 'If the patient succumbs, the practiser of such a treatment is in the habit of pointing out to the sorrowing relatives, at the post-mortem examination, these internal organic disfigurements, which are due to his pseudo-art, but which he artfully maintains to be the original incurable disease (see my book, Die Alloopathie, ein Wort deh Warnung an Kranke jeder Art, Leipzig, bei Baumgartner [translated in Lesser Writings]). Those deceitful records, the illustrated works on pathological anatomy, exhibit the products of such lamentable bungling. Deceased people from the country and those from the poor of cities who have died without such bungling with hurtful measures are not opened up through pathological anatomy as a rule. Such corruption and deformities would not be found in their corpses. From this fact can be judged the value of the evidence drawn from these beautiful illustrations as well as of the honesty of these authors and book makers.' ]

77 Therapeautics I: The Nature of Disease, Chronic, Mode of Living.

Those diseases are inappropriately named chronic, which persons incur who expose themselves continually to avoidable noxious influences, who are in the habit of indulging in injurious liquors or aliments, are addicted to dissipation of many kinds which undermine the health, who undergo prolonged abstinence from things that are necessary for the support of life, who reside in unhealthy localities, especially marshy districts, who are housed in cellars or other confined dwellings, who are deprived of exercise or of open air, who ruin their health by overexertion of body or mind, who live in a constant state of worry, etc. These states of ill - health, which persons bring upon themselves, disappear spontaneously, provided no chronic miasm lurks in the body, under an improved mode of living, and they cannot be called chronic diseases.

78 Therapeautics Point I : The Nature of Disease, Chronic, Miasmatic.

The true natural chronic diseases are those that arise from a chronic miasm, which when left to themselves, and unchecked by the employment of those remedies that are specific for them, always go on increasing and growing worse, notwithstanding the best mental and corporeal regimen, and torment the patient to the end of his life with ever aggravated sufferings. These ['excepting those produced by medical malpractice (Paragraph 74), ' in the Sixth Edition] are the most numerous and greatest scourges of the human race; for the most robust constitution, the best regulated mode of living and the most vigorous energy of the vital force are insufficient for their eradication.*

* A new foot-note is added in the Sixth Edition as follows:
[ 'During the flourishing years of youth and with the commencement of regular menstruation joined to a mode of life beneficial to soul, heart and body, they remain unrecognized for years.

Those afflicted appeal in perfect health to their relatives and acquaintances and the disease that was received by infection or inheritance seems to have wholly disappeared. But in later years, after adverse events and conditions of life, they are sure to appear anew and develop the more rapidly and assume a more serious character in proportion as the vital principle has become disturbed by debilitating passions, worry and care, but especially when disordered by inappropriate medicinal treatment.']

79 Therapeautics Point I : The Nature of Disease, Chronic, Sycosis.

Hitherto syphilis alone has been to some extent known as such a chronic miasmatic disease, which when uncured, ceases only with the termination of life. Sycosis (the condylomatous disease), equally ineradicable by the vital force without proper medicinal treatment, was not recognized as a chronic miasmatic disease of a peculiar character, which it nevertheless undoubtedly is, and physicians imagined they had cured it when they had destroyed the growths upon the skin, but the persisting dyscrasia occasioned by it escaped their observation.

80 Therapeautics Point I : The Nature of Disease, Chronic, Psora.

Incalculably greater and more important than the two chronic miasms just named, however, is the chronic miasm of psora.

While the other two reveal their specific chronic internal dyscrasia, by the venereal chancre, and cauliflower-like excresances, respectively, the inner monstrous internal chronic miasm of psora, anounces itself after the completion of the internal infection of the entire organism, by a peculiar cutaneous eruption, sometimes consisting only of a few vesicles accompanied by intolerable, voluptuous ticking, itching and a peculiar odour.

This psora, is the only real fundamental cause and producer of all the other numerous and may I say innumerable, forms of disease,¹ which, under the names of nervous debility, hysteria, hypochondriasis, mania, melancholia, imbecility, madness, epilepsy and convulsions of all sorts, softening of the bones ( rachitis² ), scoliosis and cyphosis, caries, cancer, fungus nematodes, neoplasms, gout, hemorrhoids, jaundice, cyanosis, dropsy, amenorrhea, haemorrhage from the stomach, nose, lungs, bladder and womb, of asthma and ulceration of the lungs, of impotence and barrenness, of megrim, deafness, cataract, amaurosis, urinary calculus, paralysis, defects of the senses and pains of thousands of kinds, etc., figure in systematic works on pathology as peculiar, independent diseases.

1. I spent twelve years in investigating the source of this incredibly large number of chronic affections, in ascertaining and collecting certain proofs of this great truth, which had remained unknown to all former or contemporary observers, and in discovering at the same time the principal (antipsoric) remedies, which collectively are nearly a match for this thousand-headed monster of disease in all its different developments and forms.

I have published my observations on this subject in the book entitled The Chronic Diseases (4 vols., Dresden, Arnold. [2nd edit., Dusseldorf, Schaub.]) before I had obtained this knowledge I could only treat the whole number of chronic diseases as isolated, individual maladies, with those medicinal substances whose pure effects had been tested on healthy persons up to that period, so that every case of chronic disease was treated by my disciples according to the group of symptoms it presented, just like an idiopathic disease, and it was often so far cured that sick mankind rejoiced at the extensive remedial treasures already amassed by the new healing art.

How much greater cause is there now for rejoicing that the desired goal has been so much more nearly attained, in as much as the recently discovered and far more specific homoeopathic remedies for chronic affections arising from psora (properly termed antipsoric remedies) and the special instructions for their preparation and employment have been published; and from among them the true physician can now select for his curative agents those whose medicinal symptoms correspond in the most similar (homoeopathic) manner to the chronic disease he has to cure; and thus, by the employment of (antipsoric) medicines more suitable for this miasm, he is enabled to render more essential service and almost invariably to effect a perfect cure.

2. The old term for Rickets. (ed.)

81 Therapeautics Point I : I The Nature of Disease, Chronic, Psora, innumeralble forms.

The fact that this extremely ancient infecting agent has gradually passed, in some hundreds of generations, through many millions of human organisms and has thus attained an incredible development, may render it in some measure conceivable, how it can now display such innumerable morbid forms in the great family of mankind, particularly when we consider what number of circumstances ¹ contribute to the production of these great varieties of chronic diseases (secondary symptoms of psora), besides the indescribable diversity of men in respect of their congenital corporeal constitutions, so that it is no wonder that such a variety of injurious agencies, acting from within and from without and sometimes continually, on such a variety of organisms permeated with the psoric miasm, should produce an innumerable variety of defects, injuries, derangement's and sufferings, which have hitherto been mentioned in the old pathological works,² under a number of special names, as diseases of an independent character.

1. Some of these causes that exercise a modifying influence on the transformation of psora into chronic diseases, manifestly depend sometimes on the climate and the peculiar physical character of the place of abode, sometimes on the very great varieties in the physical and mental training of youth, both of which may have been neglected, delayed or carried to excess, or on their abuse in the business or conditions of life, in the matter of diet and regimen, passions, manners, habits and customs of various kinds.

2. How many improper ambiguous names do not these works contain, under each of which are included excessively different morbid conditions, which often resemble each other in one single symptom only, as ague, jaundice, dropsy, consumption, leucorrhoea, haemorrhoids, rheumatism, apoplexy, convulsions, hysteria, hypochondriasis, melancholia, mania, quinsy, palsy, etc., which are represented as diseases of a fixed and unvarying character, and are treated, on account of their name, according to a determinate plan!  How can the bestowal of such a name justify an identical medical treatment?  And if the treatment is not always to be the same, why make use of an identical name which postulates an identity of treatment?  Nihil sane in artem medicam pestiferum magis unquam irrepsit malum, quam generalia quaedam medicinam, says Huxham, a man as clear-sighted as he was estimable on account of his conscientiousness (Op. phys. med., tom. I.).

And in like manner Frittze laments (Annalen, I, p.80) that essentially different diseases are designated by the same name. Even those epidemic diseases, which undoubtedly may be propagated in every separate epidemic by a peculiar contagious principle which remains unknown to us, are designated, in the old school of medicine by particular names, just as if they were well-known fixed diseases that invariably recurred under the same form, as hospital fever, goal fever, camp fever, putrid fever, bilious fever, nervous fever, mucous fever, although each epidemic of such roving fevers exhibits itself at every occurrence as another, a new disease, such as it has never before appeared in exactly the same form, differing very much, in every instance, in its course, as well as in many of its most striking symptoms and its whole appearance.

Each is so for dissimilar to all previous epidemics, whatever names they may bear, that it would be dereliction of all logical accuracy in our ideas of things were we to give to these maladies, that differ so much among themselves, one of those names we meet with in pathological writings, and treat them all medicinally in conformity with this misused name.

The candid Sydenham alone perceived this, when he (Obs. med., cap. ii, De morb, epid.) insists upon the necessity of not considering any epidemic disease as having occurred before and treating it in the same way as another, since all that occur successively, be they ever so numerous, differ from one another: "Nihil quicquam (opinor,) animum universae qua patet medicinae pomoeria perlustrantem, tanta admiratione percellet, quam discolor illa et sui plane dissimilis morborum Epidemicorum facies; non tam qua varias ejusdem anni tempestates, quam qua discrepantes divewrsorum ab invicem annorum constitutiones referunt, ab iisque dependent.
Quae tam aperta praedictorum morborum diversitas tum propriis ac sibi peculiaribus symptomatis, tum etiam medendi ratione, quam hi ab illis disparem prorsus sibi vendicant, satis illucescit. Ex quibus constat morbus hosce, ut ut externa quadantenus specie, er symptomatis aliquot utrisque pariter super venientibus, convenire paulo incautioribus videantur, re tamen ipsa (si bene adverteris animum), alienae admondum esse indolis, et distare ut aera lupinis".(a)
From all this it is clear that these useless and misused names of diseases ought to have no influence on the practice of the true physician, who knows that he has to judge of and to cure diseases, not according to the similarity of the name of a single one of their symptoms, but according to the totality of the signs of the individual state of each particular patient, whose affection it is his duty carefully to investigate, but never to give a hypothetical guess at it.
If, however, it is deemed necessary sometimes to make use of names of diseases, in order, when talking about a patient to ordinary persons, to render ourselves intelligible in few words, we ought only to employ them as collective names, and tell them, eg., the patient has a kind of St. Vitus dance, a kind of dropsy, a kind of typhus, a kind of ague; but (in order to do away once and for all with the mistaken notions, which these names give rise to) we should never say he has the St. Vitus dance, the typhus, the dropsy, the ague, as there are certainly no disease of these and similar names of fixed unvarying character.

82 Therapeautics: Point II Individualisation (Case Taking)

Although, by the discovery of that great source of chronic diseases, as also by the discovery of the specific homeopathic remedies for the psora, medicine has advanced some steps nearer to a knowledge of the nature of the majority of diseases it has to cure, yet, for settling the indication in each case of chronic (psoric) disease he is called on to cure, the duty of a careful apprehension of its ascertainable symptoms and characteristics, is as indispensable for the homeopathic physician as it was before that discovery, as no real cure of this or of other diseases can take place without a strict particular treatment ( individualization ) of each case of disease.

In this investigation some difference is to be made when the affection is an acute and rapidly developed disease, and when it is a chronic one; seeing that, in acute disease, the chief symptoms strike us and become evident to the senses more quickly, much less time is required for tracing the picture of the disease and far fewer questions need to be asked,¹ as almost everything is self-evident.

Conversly, in a chronic disease, which has been gradually progressing for several years, the symptoms are much more difficult to ascertain.g

1. Hence the following directions for investigating the symptoms are only partially applicable for acute diseases.

83^(a) Therapeautics: Point II: Individualisation (Case Taking)

This individualizing examination of a case of disease , for which I shall only give in this place general directions, for which the practitioner will bear in mind only what is applicable for each individual case, demands of the physician nothing but freedom from prejudice and sound senses, attention in observing and fidelity in tracing the picture of the disease.

84 Therapeautics: Point II: Individualisation (Case Taking)

The patient details the history of his sufferings; those about him tell what they heard him complain of, how he has behaved and what they have noticed in him; the physician sees, hears, and remarks by his other senses what there is of an altered or unusual character about him. He writes down accurately all that the patient and his friends have told him in the very expressions used by them. Keeping silence himself he allows them to say all they have to say, and refrains from interrupting them ¹ unless they wander off to other matters. The physician advises them at the beginning of the examination to speak slowly, in order that he may take down in writing the important parts of what the speakers say.

1. Every interruption breaks the train of thought of the narrators, and all they would have said at first does not again occur to them in precisely the same manner after that.

85  Therapeautics: Point II: Individualisation (Case Taking)

He begins a fresh line with every new circumstance mentioned by the patient or his friends, so that the symptoms shall be all ranged separately one below the other. He can thus add to any one, what may at first have been related in too vague a manner, but subsequently more explicitly explained.

86 Therapeautics: Point II: Individualisation (Case Taking)

When the narrators have finished what they would say of their own accord, the physician then reverts to each particular symptom and elicits more precise information respecting it in the following manner; he reads over the symptoms as they were related to him one by one, and about each of them he inquires for further particulars, e.g.,

At what period did this symptom occur? 
Was it previous to taking the medicine he had hitherto been using? 
While taking the medicine?  Or only some days after leaving off the medicine?
What kind of pain, what sensation exactly, was it that occurred on this spot? 
Where was the precise spot? 
Did the pain occur in fits and by itself, at various times?  Or was it continued, without intermission? How long did it last? 
At what time of the day or night, and in what position of the body was it worst, or ceased entirely? What was the exact nature of this or that event or circumstance mentioned - described in plain words?

87  Therapeautics: Point II: Individualisation (Case Taking)

And thus the physician obtains more precise information respecting each particular detail, but without ever framing his questions so as to suggest the answer to the patient,¹ or so that he shall only have to answer yes or no;else he will be misled to answer in the affirmative or negative something untrue, half true, or not strictly correct, either from indolence or in order to please his interrogator, from which a false picture of the disease and an unsuitable mode of treatment must result.

1. For instance the physician should not ask, Was not this or that circumstance present? He should never be guilty of making such suggestions, which tend to seduce the patient into giving a false answer and a false account of his symptoms.

88  Therapeautics: Point II: Individualisation (Case Taking)

If in these voluntary details, nothing has been mentioned respecting several parts or functions of the body or his metal state, the physician asks what more can be told in regard to these parts and these functions, or the state of his disposition or mind,¹ but in doing this he only makes use of general expressions, in order that his informants may be obliged to enter into special details concerning them.

1. For example:-
What was the character of his stools?
How does he pass his water?
How is it with his day and night sleep?
What is the state of his disposition, his humor, his memory?
How about the thirst? What sort of taste has he in his mouth?
What kinds of food and drink are most relished?
What are most repugnant to him?
Has each its full natural taste, or some other unusual taste?
How does he feel after eating or drinking?
Has he anything to tell about the head, the limbs or the abdomen?

89  Point II: Individualisation (Case Taking)

When the patient (for it is on him we have chiefly to rely for a description of his sensations, except in the case of feigned diseases) has by these details, given of his own accord and in answer to inquiries, furnished the requisite information and traced a tolerably perfect picture of the disease, the physician is at liberty and obliged (if he feels he has not yet gained all the information he needs) to ask more precise, more special questions. ¹

1.  For example:-
How often are his bowels moved?
What is the exact character of the stools?
Did the whitish evacuation consist of mucus or faeces?
Had he or had he not pains during the evacuation?
What was their exact character, and where were they seated?
What did the patient vomit?
Is the bad taste in the mouth putrid, or bitter, or sour, or what? before or after eating, or during the repast?
At what period of the day was it worst?
What is the taste of what is eructated?
Does the urine only become turbid on standing, or is it turbid when first discharged? What is its color when first emitted? Of what color is the sediment?
How does he behave during sleep?
Does he whine, moan, talk or cry out in his sleep?
Does he start during sleep?
Does he snore during inspiration, or during expiration?
Does he lie only on his back, or on which side?
Does he cover himself well up, or can he not bear the clothes on him?
Does he easily awake, or does he sleep too soundly?
How often does this or that symptom occur?
What is the cause that produces it each time it occurs?
Does it come on whilst sitting, lying, standing, or when in motion, only when fasting, or in the morning, or only in the evening, or only after a meal, or when does it usually appear?
When did the rigor come on?
Was it merely a chilly sensation, or was he actually cold at the same time?
If so, in what parts? or while feeling chilly, was he actually warm to the touch?
Was it merely a sensation of cold, without shivering?
Was he hot without redness of the face?
What parts of him were hot to the touch? or did he complain of heat without being hot to the touch?
How long did the chilliness last?
How long the hot stage?
When did the thirst come on - during the cold stage? during the heat? or previous to it? or subsequent to it?
How great was the thirst, and what was the beverage desired?
When did the sweat come on - at the beginning or the end of the heat?
- or how many hours after the heat?
    - when asleep or when awake?
How great was the sweat? Was it warm or cold?
- On what parts?
    - How did it smell?
What does he complain of before or during the cold stage?
What during the hot stage? what after it? what during or after the sweating stage? &c.*

* This foot-note is extended in the Sixth Edition, as follows:
[' In women, note the character of menstruation and other discharges, etc.']

90  Therapeautics: Part II: Individualisation (Case Taking)

When the physician has finished writing down these particulars, he then makes a note of what he himself observes in the patient,¹ and ascertains how much of that was peculiar to the patient in his healthy state.

1. For example:-
How the patient behaved during the visit - whether he was morose, quarrelsome, hasty, lachrymose, anxious, despairing or sad, or hopeful, calm etc.
Whether he was in a drowsy state or in any way dull of comprehension;
Whether he spoke hoarsely, or in a low tone, or incoherently, or how other wise did he talk? What was the color of his face and eyes, and of his skin generally?
What degree of liveliness and power was there in his expression and eyes? what was the state of his tongue, his breathing, the smell from his mouth, and his hearing?
Were his pupils dilated or contracted?
How rapidly and to what extent did they alter in the dark and in the light?
What was the character of the pulse?
What was the condition of the abdomen?
How moist or hot, how cold or dry to the touch, was the skin of this or that part or generally? Whether he lay with head thrown back, with mouth half or wholly open, with the arms placed above the head, on his back, or in what other position?
What effort did he make to raise himself? and anything else in him that may strike the physician as being remarkable.

91  Therapeautics: Part II: Individualisation (Case Taking)

The symptoms and feelings of the patient during a previous course of medicine do not furnish the pure picture of the disease; but on the other hand, those symptoms and ailments which he suffered from before the use of the medicines, or after they had been discontinued for several days, give the true fundamental idea of the original form of the disease, and these especially the physician must take note of. When the disease is of a chronic character, and the patient has been taking medicine up to the time he is seen, the physician may with advantage leave him some days quite without medicine, or in the meantime administer something of an unmedicinal nature and defer to a subsequent period, the more precise scrutiny of the morbid symptoms, in order to be able to grasp in their purity the permanent uncontaminated symptoms of the old affection and to form a faithful picture of the disease.

Individualisation (rapid and serious)

92  Individualisation (rapid and serious) (Case Taking)

But if it be a disease of a rapid course, and if its serious character admits of no delay, the physician must content himself with observing the morbid condition, altered though it may be by medicines, if he cannot ascertain what symptoms were present before the employment of the medicines, - in order that he may at least form a just apprehension of the complete picture of the disease in its actual condition, that is to say, of the conjoint malady, formed by the medicinal and original diseases, which from the use of inappropriate drugs, is generally more serious and dangerous than was the original disease and hence demands prompt and efficient aid; and by thus tracing out the complete picture of the disease he will be enabled to combat it with a suitable homeopathic remedy, so that the patient shall not fall a sacrifice to the injurious drugs he has swallowed.

93  Individualisation (obvious cause) (Case Taking)

If the disease has been brought on a short time or, in the case of a chronic affection, a considerable time previously, by some obvious cause, then the patient - or his friends when questioned privately - will mention it either spontaneously or when carefully interrogated.¹

1. Any cause of a digraceful character, which the patient of his friends do not like to confess, at least not vountarily, the physician must evdeavor to elicit by skilfully framing his questions, or by private information.  To these belong poisoning of attemted suicide, onanism, indulgence in ordinary of unnatural debauchery, excesses in wine, corddials, punch and other ardent beverages of coffee, -over-indulgence in eating generally, of some particular food, which is of a hurtful character, -infection with venereal disease of itch, unfortunate love, jealousy, domestic infelicity, worry, grief on account of some family misfortune, ill-usage, baulked reveged, injured pride, embarrassment of a pecuniary nature, superstitious fear, -hunger, - or an imperfection in the private parts, a rupture, a prolapsus, and so forth.

94 Therapeautics: Part II: Individualisation (Case Taking)

While inquiring into the state of chronic disease, the particular circumstances of the patient with regard to his ordinary occupations, his usual mode of living and diet, his domestic situation, and so forth, must be well considered and scrutinized, to ascertain what there is in them that may tend to produce or to maintain disease, in order that by their removal the recovery may by prompted. ¹

1. In chronic diseases of females it is especially necessary to pay attention to pregnancy, sterility, sexual desire, accouchements, miscarriages, suckling, and the state of the menstural discharge. With respect to the last-named more particularly, we should not neglect to ascertain if it recurs as to short entervals, or is delayed beyond the proper time, how many days it lasts, weather its flow is continuous or interupted, what is its general quantity, how dark is its colour, whether there is leucorrhoea (whites) before its appearance of after its termination, but especially by what bodily of mental ailments, what sensations and pains, it is preceded, accompanied or followed; if there is leucorrhoea, what is its nature, what sensations attend its flow, in what quantity it is , and what are the conditions andoccasions under which it occurs?

95 Therapeautics: Part II: Individualisation (minute peculiarities) (Case Taking)

In chronic disease the investigation of the signs of disease above mentioned, and of all others, must be pursued as carefully and circumstantially as possible, and the most minute peculiarities must be attended to, partly because in these diseases they are the most characteristic and least resemble those of acute diseases, and if a cure is to be affected they cannot be too accurately noted; partly because the patients become so used to their long sufferings that they pay little or no heed to the lesser accessory symptoms, which are often very pregnant with meaning (characteristic) - often very useful in determining the choice of the remedy - and regard them almost as a necessary part of their condition, almost as health, the real feeling of which they have well - nigh forgotten in the sometimes fifteen or twenty years of suffering, and they can scarcely bring themselves to believe that these accessory symptoms, these greater or less deviations from the healthy state, can have any connection with their principal malady.

96  Therapeautics: Part II: Individualisation (Case Taking)

Besides this, patients themselves differ so much in their dispositions, that some, especially the so - called hypochondriacs and other persons of great sensitiveness and impatient of suffering, portray their symptoms in too vivid colours and, in order to induce the physician to give them relief, describe their ailments in exaggerated expression.¹

1. A pure fabrication of symptons and suffering will never be met with in hypochondriacs, even in the most impatient of them - a comparison of the sufferings they compalin of at various times when the physician gives them nothing at all, or something quite unmedicinal, proves this plainly:- but we must deduct something form their exaggeration, at all events ascribe the strong character of their expressions to there excessive sensibility, in which case this very exaggeration of therei expressions, when taking of their ailments, becomes of itself an important symptom in the list of features, from which the portrait of the disease is composed.  The case is different with insane persons and rascally feigners of disease.

97 Therapeautics: Part II: Individualisation (Case Taking)

Other individuals of an opposite character, however, partly from indolence, partly from false modesty, partly from a kind of mildness of disposition or weakness of mind, refrain from mentioning a number of their symptoms, describe them in vague terms, or allege some of them to be of no consequence.

98 Therapeautics: Part II: Individualisation

Now, as certainly as we should listen particularly to the patient's description of his sufferings and sensations, and attach credence especially to his own expressions wherewith he endeavours to make us understand his ailments -- because in the mouths of his friends and attendants they are usually altered and erroneously stated, -- so certainly, on the other hand, in all diseases, but especially in the chronic ones, the investigation of the true, complete picture and its peculiarities demands especial circumspection, tact, knowledge of human nature, caution in conducting the inquiry and patience in an eminent degree.

99 Therapeautics: Part II: Individualisation (acute) (Case Taking)

On the whole, the investigation of acute diseases, or of such as have existed but a short time, is much the easiest for the physician, because all the phenomena and deviations from the health that has been but recently lost, are still fresh in the memory of the patient and his friends, still continue to be novel and striking. The physician certainly requires to know everything in such cases also; but he has much less to inquire into ; they are for the most part spontaneously detailed to him.

100 Therapeautics: Part II: Individualisation (epidemics) (Case Taking)

In investigating the totality of the symptoms of epidemic and sporadic diseases it is quite immaterial whether or not something similar has ever appeared in the world before under the same or any other name. The novelty or peculiarity of a disease of that kind makes no difference either in the mode of examining or of treating it, as the physician must any way regard to pure picture of every prevailing disease as if it were something new and unknown, and investigate it thoroughly for itself, if he desires to practice medicine in a real and radical manner, never substituting conjecture for actual observation, never taking for granted that the case of disease before him is already wholly or partially known, but always carefully examining it in all its phases; and this mode of procedure is all the more requisite in such cases, as a careful examination will show, that every prevailing disease is in many respects a phenomenon of a unique character, differing vastly from all previous epidemics, to which certain names have been falsely applied -- with the exception of those epidemics resulting from a contagious principle that always remains the same, such as smallpox, measles, etc.

101 Therapeautics: Part II: Individualisation (epidemics) (Case Taking)

It may easily happen that in the first case of an epidemic disease, which presents itself to the physician's notice, he does not at once obtain a knowledge of its complete picture, as it is only by a close observation of several cases of every such collective disease that he can become conversant with the totality of its signs and symptoms. The carefully observing physician can, however, from the examination of even the first and second patients, often arrive so nearly at a knowledge of the true state as to have in his mind a characteristic portrait of it, and even to succeed in finding a suitable, homeopathically adapted remedy for it.

102 Therapeautics: Part II: Individualisation (epidemics) as in Dugeon (Case Taking)

In the course of writing down the symptoms of several cases of this kind, the sketch of the disease picture becomes ever more and more complete, not more spun out and verbose, but more significant (more characteristic), and including more of the peculiarities of this collective disease; on the one hand, the general symptoms (e.g., loss of appetite, sleeplessness, etc.) become precisely defined as to their peculiarities; and on the other, the more marked and special symptoms, which are peculiar to but few diseases and of rarer occurrence, at least in the same combination, become prominent and constitute what is characteristic of this malady.¹  All those affected with the disease prevailing at a given time have certainly contracted it from one and the same source and hence are suffering from the same disease; but the whole extent of such an epidemic disease and the totality of its symptoms (the knowledge whereof, which is essential for enabling us to choose the most suitable homeopathic remedy for this array of symptoms, is obtained by a complete survey of the morbid picture) cannot be learned from one single patient, but is only to be perfectly deduced (abstracted) and ascertained from the sufferings of several patients of different constitutions.

1. The physician who has already in the first cases, been able to choose a remedy approximating to the homoeopathic specific, will, form the subsequent cases, be enabled either to verify the suitableness of he medicine chosen, or to discover a more appropriate, the most appropriate homoeopathic remedy.

102 Therapeautics: Part II: Individualisation (epidemics) as in Herrings Guiding Symptoms (Case Taking)

    By writing down the symptoms of several cases of this kind, the sketch of the disease will gradually become more complete; without being enlarged by additional prases, it will be more closely defined (more characteristic) and made to embrace more of the peculiarities of such collective diseases.  General signs such a want of apetite, sleeplessness, etc., are specified and defined.  More prominant and special symptoms will be made conspicuous by proper notation, and constitute the characteristics of the epidemic.

103^(a) Therapeautics: Part II: Individualisation (miasmatic) (Case Taking)

In the same manner as has here been taught relative to the epidemic disease, which are generally of an acute character, the miasmatic chronic maladies, which, as I have shown, always remain the same in their essential nature, especially the psora, must be investigated, as to the whole sphere of their symptoms, in a much more minute manner than has ever been done before, for in them also, one patient only exhibits a portion of their symptoms, a second, a third, and so on, present some other symptoms, which also are but a (dissevered, as it were), portion of the totality of the symptoms which, constitute the entire extent of this malady, so that the whole array of the symptoms belonging to such a miasmatic, chronic disease, and especially to the psora, can only be ascertained from the observation of very many single patients affected with such a chronic disease, and without a complete survey and collective picture of these symptoms the medicines capable of curing the whole malady homeopathically (to wit, the antipsorics) cannot be discovered; and these medicines are, at the same time, the true remedies of the several patients suffering from such chronic affections.

104 Therapeautics: Part II: Individualisation (Case Taking)

When the totality of the symptoms that specially mark and distinguish the case of disease or, in other words, when the picture of the disease, whatever be its kind, is once accurately sketched,¹ the most difficult part of the task is accomplished. The physician has then the picture of the disease, especially if it be a chronic one, always before him to guide him in his treatment; he can investigate it in all its parts and can pick out the characteristic symptoms, in order to oppose to these, that is to say, to the whole malady itself, a very similar artificial morbific force, in the shape of a homeopathically chosen medicinal substance, selected from the lists of symptoms of all the medicines whose pure effects have been ascertained. And when, during the treatment, he wishes to ascertain what has been the effect of the medicine, and what change has taken place in the patient's state, at this fresh examination of the patient, he only needs to strike out from the list of the symptoms noted down at the first visit, all those that have become ameliorated, to mark what still remain, and add any new symptoms that may have supervened.

1. The old school physician gave himself very little trouble in this matter in his mode of treatment. He would not listen to any minute detail of all the circumstances of his case by the patient; indeed, he frequently cut him short in his relation of his sufferings, in order that he might not be delayed in the rapid writing of his prescription, composed of a variety of ingredients unknown to him in their true effects. No allopathic physician, as has been said, sought to learn all the circumstances of the patients case, and still less did he make a note in writing of them. On seeing the patient again several days afterwards he recollected nothing concerning the few details he had heard at the first visit (having in the meantime seen so many other patients laboring under different affections); he had allowed everything to go in at one ear and out at the other. At subsequent visits he only asked a few general questions, went through the ceremony of feeling the pulse at the wrist, looked at the tongue, and at the same moment wrote another prescription, on equally irrational principles, or ordered the first one to be continued (in considerable quantities several times a day), and, with a graceful bow, he hurried off to the fiftieth or sixtieth patient he had to visit, in this thoughtless way, in the course of that forenoon. The profession which of all others requires actually the most reflection, a conscientious, careful examination of the state of each individual patient and a special treatment founded thereon, was conducted in this manner by persons who called themselves physicians, rational practitioners. The result, as might naturally be expected, was almost invariably bad; and yet patients had to go to them for advise, partly because there were none better to be had, partly for fashions sake.

105 Therapeautics: Point III: Provings

The second point of the business of a true physician, relates to acquiring a knowledge of the instruments intended for the cure of the natural diseases, investigating the pathogenetic power of the medicines, in order, when called upon to cure, to be able to select from among them one, from the list of whose symptoms may be constructed, an artificial disease, as similar as possible to the totality of the principal symptoms of the natural disease for which  cure is sought.

106 Therapeautics: Point III: Provings

The whole pathogenetic effect of the several medicines must be known; that is to say, all the morbid symptoms and alterations in the health, that each of them is specially capable of developing in the healthy individual, must first have been observed as far as possible, before we can hope to be able to find among them, and to select, suitable homeopathic remedies for most of the natural diseases.

107 Therapeautics: Point III: Provings

If, in order to ascertain this, medicines are given to sick persons only, even though they may be administered singly and alone, then little or nothing precise is seen of their true effects, because those peculiar alterations of the health, to be expected from the medicine, are mixed up with the symptoms of the disease and can seldom be distinctly observed.

108 Therapeautics: Point III: Provings, Experiments on Healthy Persons.

There is, therefore, no other possible way in which the peculiar effects of medicines on the health of individuals can be accurately ascertained -- there is no surer, no more natural way of accomplishing this object, other than to administer the several medicines experimentally, in moderate doses, to healthy persons, in order to ascertain what changes, symptoms, and signs of their influence, each medicine individually produces on the health of the body and mind; that is to say, what disease elements they are able and tend to produce,¹ since, as has been demonstrated (24-27 ), all the curative power of medicines lies in this power they possess of changing the state of man's health, which is revealed by observation of these effects.

1. Not one single physician, as far as I know, during the previous two thousand five hundred years, thought of this so natural, so absolutely necessary and only genuine mode of testing medicines for their pure and peculiar effects in deranging the health of man, in order to learn what morbid state each medicine is capable of curing, except the great and immoral Albrecht von Haller. He alone, besides myself, saw the necessity of this (vide the Preface to the Pharmacopoeia Helvet, Basil, 1771, fol., p.12); Nempe primum in corpore sano medela tentanda est, sine peregrina ulla miscela; odoreque et sapore ejus exploratis, exigua illiu dosis ingerenda et ad ommes, quae inde contingunt, affectiones, quis pulsus, qui calor, quae respiratia, quaenam excretiones, attendum. Inde ad ductum phaenomenorum, in sano obviorum, transeas ad experimenta in corpore aegroro, etc. But no one, not a single physician, attended to or followed up this invaluable hint.

109 Therapeautics: Point III: Provings, Pursused.

I was the first that opened up this path, which I have pursued with a perseverance, which could only arise and be kept up by a perfect conviction of the great truth, fraught with such blessings to humanity, that it is only by the homeopathic employment of medicines ¹ that the certain cure of human maladies is possible.²

1. It is impossible that there can be another true, best method of curing dynamic diseases (i.e., all diseases not strictly surgical) besides homoeopathy, just as it is impossible to draw more than one straight line betwixt two given points. He who imagines that there are other modes of curing diseases besides it, could not have appreciated homoeopathy fundamentally nor practised it with sufficient care, nor could he ever have seen or read cases of properly performed homoeopathic cures; nor, on the other hand, could he have discerned the baselessness of all allopathic modes of treating diseases and their bad or even dreadful effects, if, with such lax indifference, he places the only true healing art on an equality with those hurtful methods of treatment, or alleges the latter to be auxiliaries to homoeopathy, which it could not do without! My true, conscientious followers, the pure homoeopathists, with their successful, almost never-failing treatment, might teach these persons better.

2. The first fruits of these labors, as perfect as they could be at that time, I recorded in the Fragmenta de viribus medicamentorum positivis, sive in sano corpore humano observatis, pts. I, ii, Lipsiae, 8, 1805, ap. J. A. Barth; the more mature fruits in the Reine Arzneimittellebre, I Th., dritte Ausg.; II Th., dritte Ausg., 1833; III Th., zweite Ausg., 1825; IV Th., zw. Ausg., 1827 (English translation, Materia Medica Pura, vols I and ii); and in the second, third, and fourth parts of Die chronischen Krankheiten, 1828, 1830, Dresden bei Arnold (2nd edit., with a fifth part, Dusseldorf bei Schaub, 1835, 1839).

110 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings, Morbid Lesions, Poisonings.

I saw, moreover, that the morbid lesions, which previous authors had observed to result from medicinal substances when taken into the stomach of healthy persons, either in large doses given by mistake or in order to produce death in themselves or others, or under other circumstances, accorded very much with my own observations, when experimenting with the same substances on myself and other healthy individuals.

These authors give details of what occurred as histories of poisoning and as proofs of the pernicious effects of these powerful substances, chiefly in order to warn others from their use; partly also for the sake of exalting their own skill, when, under the use of the remedies they employed to combat these dangerous accidents, health gradually returned; but partly also, when the persons so affected died under their treatment, in order to seek their own justification in the dangerous character of these substances, which they then termed poisons.

None of these observers ever dreamed, that the symptoms they recorded merely as proofs of the noxious and poisonous character of these substances, were sure revelations of the power of these drugs to extinguish curatively similar symptoms occurring in natural disease, that these their pathogenetic phenomena were intimations of their homeopathic curative action, and that the only possible way to ascertain their medicinal powers is to observe those changes of health, which medicines are capable of producing in the healthy organism; for the pure, peculiar powers of medicines available for the cure of disease are to be learned neither by any ingenious a priori speculations, nor by the smell, taste or appearance of the drugs, nor by their chemical analysis, nor yet by the employment of several of them at one time in a mixture (prescription) in diseases; it was never suspected that these histories of medicinal diseases would one day furnish the first rudiments of the true, pure materia medica, which from the earliest times until now, has consisted solely of false conjectures and fictions of the imagination - that is to say, did not exist at all.¹

1 See what I have said on this subject in the Examination of the Sources of the Ordinary Materia Medica, prefixed to the third part of my Reine Arzneimittellebre (translated in the Materia Medica Pura, vol. ii).

111 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings, Laws of Nature.

The agreement of my observations on the pure effects of medicines with these older ones - although they were recorded without reference to any therapeutic object, - and the very concordance of these accounts with others of the same kind by different authors, must easily convince us that medicinal substances act in the morbid changes they produce in the healthy human body according to fixed, eternal laws of nature, and by virtue of these, are enabled to produce certain, reliable disease symptoms, each according to its own peculiar character.

112^(a) Therapeautics: Point II: Provings, Secondary Opposite, Action.

In those older recorded prescriptions of the often dangerous effects of medicines ingested in excessively large doses, we notice certain states that were produced, not at the commencement, but towards the termination of these sad events, and which were of an exactly opposite nature to those that first appeared.  These symptoms, the very reverse of the primary action ( 63 ) or proper action of the medicines on the vital force, are the counteraction _g of the vital force of the organism, its secondary action ( 62 - 67 ), of which, however, there is seldom or hardly ever the least trace from experiments with moderate doses on healthy bodies, and from small doses none whatever.  In the homeopathic curative operation the living organism reacts from these only so much as is requisite to raise the health again to the normal healthy state ( 67).

113 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings, Narcotic Medicines

The only exceptions to this are the narcotic medicines. As they, in their primary action, take away sometimes the sensibility and sensation, sometimes the irritability, it frequently happens that in their secondary action , even from moderate experimental doses on healthy bodies, an increased sensibility (and a greater irritability) is observable.

114 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings, Observing Primary Action.

With the exception of these narcotic substances, in experiments with moderate doses of medicine on healthy bodies, we observe only their primary action, i. e., those symptoms wherewith the medicine deranges the health of the human being and develops in him a morbid state of longer or shorter duration.

115 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings, Alternating States.

Among these symptoms, there occur in the case of some medicines not a few which are partially, or under certain conditions, directly opposite to other symptoms that have previously or subsequently appeared, but which are not therefore to be regarded as actual secondary action or the mere reaction of the vital force, but which only represent the alternating state of the various paroxysms of the primary action; they are termed alternating actions.

116 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

Some symptoms are produced by the medicines more frequently - that is to say, in many individuals, others more rarely or in few persons, some only in a very few healthy bodies.

117^(a) Therapeautics: Point II: Provings, Idiosycrasises.

To the latter category belong the so - called idiosyncrasies, by which are meant peculiar corporeal constitutions which, although otherwise healthy, possess a disposition to be brought into a more or less morbid state by certain things, which seem to produce no impression and no change in many other individuals. ¹ But this inability to make an impression on every one is only apparent . For as two things are required for the production of these as well as all other morbid alterations in the health of man - to wit., the inherent power of the influencing substance, and the capability of the vital force that animates the organism to be influenced by it - the obvious derangements of health in the so - called idiosyncrasies cannot be laid to the account of these peculiar constitutions alone, but they must also be ascribed to these things that produce them, in which must lie the power of making the same impressions on all human bodies, yet in such a manner that but a small number of healthy constitutions have a tendency to allow themselves to be brought into such an obvious morbid condition by them. That these agents do actually make this impression on every healthy body is shown by this, that when employed as remedies they render effectual homeopathic service ² to all sick persons for morbid symptoms similar to those they seem to be only capable of producing in so - called idiosyncratic individuals.

1. Some few persons are apt to faint from the smell of roses and to fall into many other morbid, and sometimes dangerous states from partaking of mussels, crabs or the roe of the barbel, from touching the leaves of some kinds of sumach, etc.

2. Thus the Princess Maria Porphyroghnita restored her brother, the Emperor Alexius, who suffered from faintings, by sprinkling him with rose water in the presence of his aunt Eudoxia (Hist. byz. Alexias, lib. xv, p. 503, ed. Posser); and Horstius (Oper., iii, p.59) saw great benefit from rose vinegar in cases of syncope.

118 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings, Peculiar Actions.

Every medicine exhibits peculiar actions on the human frame, which are not produced in exactly the same manner by any other medicinal substance of a different kind. ¹

1. This fact was also perceived by the estimable A. v. Haller, who says (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.

119 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings, Substances, Peculiar.

As certainly as every species of plant differs in its external form, mode of life and growth, in its taste and smell from every other species and genus of plant, as certainly as every mineral and salt differs from all others, in its external as well as its internal physical and chemical properties (which alone should have sufficed to prevent any confounding of one with another), so certainly do they all differ and diverge among themselves in their pathogenetic - consequently also in their therapeutic - effects.¹  Each of these substances produces alterations in the health of human beings in a peculiar, different, yet determinate manner, so as to preclude the possibility of confounding one with another.²

1. Anyone who has a thorough knowledge of, and can appreciate the remarkable difference of, effects on the health of man of every single substance from those of every other, will readily perceive that among them there can be, in a medical point of view, no equivalent remedies whatever, no surrogates. Only those who do not know the pure, positive effects of the different medicines can be so foolish as to try to persuade us that one can serve in the stead of the other, and can in the same disease prove just as serviceable as the other. Thus do ignorant children confound the most essential different things, because they scarcely know their external appearances, far less their real value, their true importance and their very dissimilar inherent properties.

2. If this be pure truth, as it undoubtedly is, then no physician who would not be regarded as devoid of reason, and who would not act contrary to the dictates of his conscience, the sole arbiter of real worth, can employ in the treatment of diseases any medicinal substance but one with whose real significance he is thoroughly and perfectly conversant, i.e., whose positive action on the health of healthy individuals he has so accurately tested that he knows for certain that it is capable of producing a very similar morbid state, more similar than any other medicine with which he is perfectly acquainted, to that presented by the case of disease he intends to cure by means of it; for, as has been shown above, neither man, nor mighty Nature herself, can effect a perfect, rapid and permanent cure otherwise than with a homoeopathic remedy. Henceforth no true physician can abstain from making such experiment, in order to obtain this most necessary and only knowledge of the medicines that are essential to cure, this knowledge which has hitherto been neglected by the physicians in all ages. In all former ages - posterity will scarcely believe it - physicians have hitherto contented themselves with blindly prescribing for diseases medicines whose value was unknown, and which had never been tested relative to their highly important, very various, pure dynamic action on the health of man; and, moreover, they mingled several of these unknown medicines that differed so vastly among each other in one formula, and left it to chance to determine what effects should thereby be produced on the patient. This is just as if a madman should force his way into the workshop of an artisan, seize upon handfuls of very different tools, with the uses of all of which he is quite unacquainted, in order, as he imagines, to work at the objects of art he sees around him. I need hardly remark that these would be destroyed, I may say utterly ruined, by his senseless operations.

120 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings, Experiments.

Therefore medicines, on which depend man's life and death, disease and health, must be thoroughly and most carefully distinguished from one another, and for this purpose tested by careful, pure experiments on the healthy body for the purpose of ascertaining their powers and real effects, in order to obtain an accurate knowledge of them, and to enable us to avoid any mistake in their employment in diseases, for it is only by correct selection of them that the greatest of all earthly blessings, the health of the body and of the mind, can be rapidly and permanently restored.

121 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

In proving medicines to ascertain their effects on the healthy body, it must be borne in mind that the strong, heroic substances, as they are termed, are liable even in small doses to produce changes in the health even of robust persons. Those of milder power must be given for these experiments in more considerable quantities; in order to observe the action of the very weakest, however, the subjects of experiment should be persons free from disease, and who are delicate, irritable and sensitive.

122 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings, Experiments.

In these experiments - on which depends the exactitude of the whole medical art, and the weal of all future generations of mankind - no other medicines should be employed except such as are perfectly well known, and of whose purity, genuineness and energy we are thoroughly assured.

123 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

Each of these medicines must be taken in a perfectly simple, unadulterated form; the indigenous plants in the form of freshly expressed juice, mixed with a little alcohol to prevent it spoiling; exotic vegetable substances, however, in the form of powder, or tincture prepared with alcohol when they were in the fresh state and afterwards mingled with a certain proportion of water; salts and gums, however, should be dissolved in water just before being taken. If the plant can only be procured in its dry state, and if its powers are naturally weak, in that case there may be used for the experiment an infusion of it, made by cutting the herb into small pieces and pouring boiling water on it, so as to extract its medicinal parts; immediately after its preparation it must be swallowed while still warm, as all expressed vegetable juices and all aqueous infusions of herbs, without the addition of spirit, pass rapidly into fermentation and decomposition, whereby all their medicinal properties are lost.

124 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

For these experiments every medicinal substance must be employed quite alone and perfectly pure, without the admixture of any foreign substance, and without taking anything else of a medicinal nature the same day, nor yet on the subsequent days, nor during all the time we wish to observe the effects of the medicine.

125 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

During all the time the experiment lasts the diet must be strictly regulated; it should be as much as possible destitute of spices, of a purely nutritious and simple character, green vegetables,¹ roots and all salads and herb soups (which, even when most carefully prepared, possess some disturbing medicinal qualities) should be avoided. The drinks are to be those usually partaken of, as little stimulating as possible.2

1.Young green peas, green French beans [boiled potatoes in the Sixth Edition] and in all cases carrots are allowable, as the least medicinal vegetables.

2.The subject of experiment must either be not in the habit of taking pure wine, brandy, coffee or tea, or he must have totally abstained for a considerable time previously from the use of these injurious beverages, some of which are stimulating, others medicinal.

126 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

The person who is proving the medicine must ['be pre - eminently trust - worthy and conscientious and' in the Sixth Edition] during the whole time of the experiment avoid all over - exertion of mind and body, all sorts of dissipation and disturbing passions; he should have no urgent business to distract his attention; he must devote himself to careful self - observation and not be disturbed while so engaged; his body must be in what is for him a good state of health, and he must possess a sufficient amount of intelligence to be able to express and describe his sensations in accurate terms.

127^(a) Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

The medicines must be tested on both males and females, in order also to reveal the alterations of the health they produce in the sexual sphere.

128^(a) Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

The most recent observations have shown that medicinal substances, when taken in their crude state by the experimenter for the purpose of testing their peculiar effects, do not exhibit nearly the full amount of the powers that lie hidden in them which they do when they are taken for the same object in high dilution's potentized by proper trituration and succussion, by which simple operations the powers which in their crude state lay hidden, and, as it were, dormant, are developed and roused into activity to an incredible extent. In this manner we now find it best to investigate the medicinal powers even of such substances as are deemed weak, and the plan we adopt is to give to the experimenter, on an empty stomach, daily from four to six very small globules of the thirtieth potentized ['thirtieth potency' in the Sixth Edition] dilution of such a substance, moistened with a little water, ['or dissolved in more or less water and thoroughly mixed' in the Sixth Edition] and let him continue this for several days.

129 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

If the effects that result from such a dose are but slight, a few more globules may be taken daily, until they become more distinct and stronger and the alterations of the health more conspicuous; for all persons are not effected by a medicine in an equally great degree; on the contrary, there is a vast variety in this respect, so that sometimes an apparently weak individual may by scarcely at all affected by moderate doses of a medicine known to be of a powerful character, while he is strongly enough acted on by others of a much weaker kind. And, on the other hand, there are very robust persons who experience very considerable morbid symptoms from an apparently mild medicine, and only slighter symptoms from stronger drugs. Now, as this cannot be known beforehand, it is advisable to commence in every instance with a small dose of the drug and, where suitable and requisite, to increase the dose more and more from day to day.

130 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

If, at the very commencement, the first dose administered shall have been sufficiently strong, this advantage is gained, that the experimenter learns the order of succession of the symptoms and can note down accurately the period at which each occurs, which is very useful in leading to a knowledge of the genius of the medicine, for then the order of the primary actions, as also that of the alternating actions, is observed in the most unambiguous manner. A very moderate dose, even, often suffices for the experiment, provided only the experimenter is endowed with sufficiently delicate sensitiveness, and is very attentive to his sensations. The duration of the action of a drug can only be ascertained by a comparison of several experiments.

131  Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

If, however, in order to ascertain anything at all, the same medicine must be given to the same person to test for several successive days in ever increasing doses, we thereby learn, no doubt, the various morbid states this medicine is capable of producing in a general manner, but we do not ascertain their order of succession; and the subsequent dose often removes, curatively, some one or other of the symptoms caused by the previous dose, or develops in its stead an opposite state; such symptoms should be enclosed in brackets, to mark their ambiguity, until subsequent purer experiments show whether they are the reaction of the organism and secondary action or an alternating action of this medicine.

132 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

But when the object is, without reference to the sequential order of the phenomena and the duration of the action of the drug, only to ascertain the symptoms themselves, especially those of a weak medicinal substance, in that case the preferable course to pursue is to give it for several successive days, increasing the dose every day. In this manner the action of an unknown medicine, even of the mildest nature, will be revealed, especially if tested on sensitive persons.

133 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

On experiencing any particular sensation from the medicine, it is useful, indeed necessary, in order to determine the exact character of the symptom, to assume various positions while it lasts, and to observe whether, by moving the part affected, by walking in the room or the open air, by standing, sitting or lying the symptom is increased, diminished or removed, and whether it returns on again assuming the position in which it was first observed, - whether it is altered by eating or drinking, or by any other condition, or by speaking, coughing, sneezing or any other action of the body, and at the same time to note at what time of the day or night it usually occurs in the most marked manner, whereby what is peculiar to and characteristic of each symptom will become apparent.

134 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

All external influences, and more especially medicines, possess the property of producing in the health of the living organism a particular kind of alteration peculiar to themselves; but all the symptoms peculiar to a medicine do not appear in one person, nor all at once, nor in the same experiment, but some occur in one person chiefly at one time, others again during a second or third trail; in another person some other symptoms appear, but in such a manner that probably some of the phenomena are observed in the fourth, eighth or tenth person which had already appeared in the second, sixth or ninth person, and so forth; moreover, they may not recur at the same hour.

135 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

The whole of the elements of disease a medicine is capable of producing can only be brought to anything like completeness by numerous observations on suitable persons of both sexes and of various constitutions. We can only be assured that a medicine has been thoroughly proved in regard to the morbid states it can produce - that is to say, in regard to its pure powers of altering the health of man - when subsequent experimenters can notice little of a novel character from its action, and almost always only the same symptoms as had been already observed by others.

136 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

Although, as has been said, a medicine, on being proved on healthy subjects, cannot develop in one person all the alterations of health it is capable of causing, but can only do this when given to many different individuals, varying in their corporeal and mental constitution, yet the tendency to excite all these symptoms in every human being exists in it ( 117 ), according to an eternal and immutable law of nature, by virtue of which all its effects, even those that are but rarely developed in the healthy person, are brought into operation in the case of every individual if administered to him when he is in a morbid state presenting similar symptoms; it then, even in the smallest dose, being homeopathically selected, silently produces in the patient an artificial state closely resembling the natural disease, which rapidly and permanently (homeopathically) frees and cures him of his original malady.

137 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

The more moderate, within certain limits, the doses of the medicine used for such experiments are - provided we endeavour to facilitate the observation by the selection of a person who is a lover of truth, temperate in all respects, of delicate feelings, and who can direct the most minute attention to his sensation - so much the more distinctly are the primary effects developed, and only these, which are most worth knowing, occur without any admixture of secondary effects or reactions of the vital force. When, however, excessively large doses are used there occur at the same time not only a number of secondary effects among the symptoms, but the primary effects developed, and only these, which are most worth knowing, occur without any admixture of secondary effects or reactions of the vital force. When, however, excessively large doses are used there occur at the same time not only a number of secondary effects among the symptoms, but the primary effects also come on in such hurried confusion and with such impetuosity that nothing can be accurately observed; let alone the danger attending them, which no one who has any regard for his fellow = - creatures, and who looks on the meanest of mankind as his brother, will deem an indifferent manner.

138 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

All the sufferings, accidents and changes of the health of the experimenter during the action of a medicine (provided the above condition [ 124 - 127 ] essential to a good and pure experiment are complied with) are solely derived from this medicine, and must be regarded and registered as belonging peculiarly to this medicine, as symptoms of this medicine, even though the experimenter had observed, some considerable time previously, the spontaneous occurrence of similar phenomena in himself.
The reappearance of these during the trial of the medicine only shows that this individual is, by virtue of his peculiar constitution, particularly disposed to have such symptoms excited in him. In this case they are the effect of the medicine; the symptoms do not arise spontaneously while the medicine that has been taken is exercising an influence over the health of the whole system, but are produced by the medicine.

139 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

When the physician does not make the trial of the medicine on himself, but gives it to another person, the latter must note down distinctly the sensations, sufferings, accidents and changes of health he experiences at the time of their occurrence, mentioning the time after the ingestion of the drug when each symptom arose and, if it lasts long, the period of its duration. They physician looks over the report in the presence of the experimenter immediately after the experiment is concluded, or if the trial lasts several days he does this every day, in order, while everything is still fresh in his memory, to question him about the exact nature of every one of these circumstances, and to write down the more precise details so elicited, or to make such alterations as the experimenter may suggest.¹

1. He who makes known to the medical world the results of such experiments becomes thereby responsible for the trustworthiness of the person experimented on and his statements, and justly so, as the weal of suffering humanity is here at stake.

140 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

If the person cannot write, the physician must be informed by him every day of what has occurred to him, and how it took place. What is noted down as authentic information on this point, however, must be chiefly the voluntary narration of the person who makes the experiment, nothing conjectural and as little as possible derived from answers to leading questions should be admitted; everything must be ascertained with the same caution as I have counselled above (84 - 99) for the investigation of the phenomena and for tracing the picture of natural diseases.

141 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings, Experiments on Yourself.

But the best provings of the pure effects of simple medicines in altering the human health, and of the artificial diseases and symptoms they are capable of developing in the healthy individual, are those, which the healthy, unprejudiced and sensitive physician institutes on himself with all the caution and care here enjoined. He knows with the greatest certainty the things he has experienced in his own person.¹

1.  Those trials made by the physician on himself have for him other and inestimable advantages. 

In the first place, the great truth that the medicinal virtue of all drugs, whereon depends their curative power, lies in the changes of health he has himself undergone from the medicines he has proved, and the morbid states he has himself experienced from them, becomes for him an incontrovertible fact.  Again by such noteworthy observations on himself he will be brought to understand his own sensations, his mode of thinking and his disposition (the foundation of all true wisdom : in Greek), and he will be also trained to be, what every physician ought to be, a good observer. 

All our observations on others are not nearly so interesting as those made on ourselves. The observer of others must always dread lest the experimenter did not feel exactly what he said, or lest he did not describe his sensations with the most appropriate expressions. He must always remain in doubt whether he has not been deceived, at least to some extent. 

These obstacles to the knowledge of the truth, which can never be thoroughly surmounted in our investigations of the artificial morbid symptoms that occur in others from the ingestion of medicines, cease entirely when we make the trials on ourselves. He who makes these trials on himself knows for certain what he has felt, and each trial is a new inducement for him to investigate the powers of other medicines. He thus becomes more and more practised in the art of observing, of such importance to the physician, by continuing to observe himself, the one on whom he can most rely and who will never deceive him; and this he will do all the more zealously as these experiments on himself promise to give him a reliable knowledge of the true value and significance of the instruments of cure that are still to a great degree unknown to our art. 

Let it not be imagined that such slight indispositions caused by taking medicines for the purpose of proving them, can be in the main injurious to the health.  Experience shows on the contrary, that the organism of the prover becomes, by these frequent attacks on his health, all the more expert in repelling all external influences inimical to his frame and all artificial and natural morbific noxious agents, and becomes more hardened to resist everything of an injurious character, by means of these moderate experiments on his own person with medicines. His health becomes more unalterable; he becomes more robust, as all experience shows.

142 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings

But how some symptoms¹ of the simple medicine employed for a curative purpose can be distinguished amongst the symptoms of the original malady, even in diseases, especially in those of a chronic character that usually remain unaltered, is a subject appertaining to the higher art of judgement, and must be left exclusively to masters in observation.

1. Symptoms which, during the whole course of the disease, might have been observed only a long time previously, or never before, consequently new ones, belonging to the medicine.

143 Therapeautics: Point II: Provings, Materia Medica

If we have thus tested on the healthy individual a considerable number of simple medicines and carefully and faithfully registered all the disease elements and symptoms they are capable of developing as artificial disease - producers, then only have we a true materia medica - a collection of real, pure, reliable¹ modes of action of simple medicinal substances, a volume of the book of nature, wherein is recorded a considerable array of the peculiar changes of the health and symptoms ascertained to belong to each of the powerful medicines, as they were revealed to the attention of the observer, in which the likeness of the (homeopathic) disease elements of many natural diseases to be hereafter cured by them are present, which, in a word, contain artificial morbid states, that furnish for the similar natural morbid states the only true, homeopathic, that is to say, specific, therapeutic instruments for effecting their certain and permanent cure.

1. Latterly it has been the habit to entrust the proving of medicines to unknown persons at a distance, who were paid for their work, and the formation so obtained was printed. But by so doing, the work, which is of all others the most important, which is to form the basis of the only true healing art, and which demands the greatest moral certainty and trustworthiness, seems to me, I regret to say, to become doubtful and uncertain in its results and to lose all value.

144 Therapeautics:Point II:Materia Medica Materia Medica

From such a materia medica everything that is conjectural, all that is mere assertion or imaginary should be strictly excluded; everything should be the pure language of nature carefully and honestly interrogated.

145 Therapeautics:Point II:Materia Medica

Of a truth, it is only by a very considerable store of medicines accurately known in respect of these their pure modes of action in altering the health of man, that we can be placed in a position to discover a homeopathic remedy, a suitable artificial (curative) morbific analogue for each of the infinitely numerous morbid states in nature, for every malady in the world.¹ In the meantime, even now - thanks to the truthful character of the symptoms, and to the abundance of disease elements, which every one of the powerful medicinal substances has already shown in its action on the healthy body - but few disease remain, for which a tolerably suitable homeopathic remedy may not be met with among those now proved as to their pure action,² which, without much disturbance, restores health in a gentle, sure and permanent manner -infinitely more surely and safely than can be effected by all the general and special therapeutics of the old allopathic medical art with its unknown composite remedies, which do but alter and aggravate but cannot cure chronic diseases, and rather retard than promote recovery from acute diseases.*

*[These are added after 'acute diseases' in the Sixth Edition: "and frequently endanger life."]

1. At first,* I was the only person who made the proving of the pure powers of medicines the most important of his occupations. Since then, I have been assisted in this by some young men, who instituted experiments on themselves, and whose observation I have critically revised.[Following these, some genuine work of this kind was done by a few others,' additions in the Sixth Edition]But what shall we not be able to effect in the way of curing in the whole extent of the infinitely large domain of disease, when numbers of accurate and trustworthy observers shall have rendered their services in enriching this,the only true materia medica, by careful experiments on themselves!The healing ard will then come near the mathematical sciences in certainty.
2. See the second note to 109 .

*[ In the Sixth Edition the following phrase is added after 'At first'- "about forty years ago." ]

146^(a)  Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing

The third point of the business of a true physician relates to the judicious employment of the artificial morbific agents (medicines) that have been proved on healthy individuals to ascertain their pure action in order to effect the homeopathic cure of natural diseases.

147 Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing, Similarity

Whichever of these medicines, that has been investigated regarding it's power of altering man's health, where in we find the symptoms observed from its use, the greatest similarity to the totality of the symptoms of a given natural disease, then this medicine must be the most suitable, the most certain homeopathic remedy for the disease; in it is found the specific remedy of this case of disease.

148* Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing

A medicine selected in this manner, which has the power and the tendency to produce symptoms the most similar possible to the disease to be cured, consequently a similar artificial disease, given in a suitable dose, affects, in its dynamic action on the morbidly deranged vital force of the individual, those very parts and points in the organism now suffering from the natural disease, and produces in them its own artificial disease, which, on account of its great similarity and prepondering strength, occupies precisely the seat hitherto occupied by the natural morbid derangement, so that the instinctive, automatic vital force, is from that time forward, no longer affected by the natural disease but solely by the stronger, similar medicinal disease; which in its turn, on account of the small dose of the remedy, being, like every moderate medicinal disease, overcome by the increased energy of the vital force, soon spontaneously disappears, leaving the body free from all disease, that is to say, healthy and permanently cured.

148 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing: wholly re-written,Sixth Edition, as follows.

['The natural disease is never to be considered as a noxious material situated somewhere within the interior or exterior of man ( 11-13 ) but as one produced by an inimical spirit like (conceptual) agency which, like a kind of infection (note to 11 ) disturbs in its instinctive existence of the spirit like (conceptual) principle of life within the organism torturing it as an evil spirit and compelling it to produce certain ailments and disorders in the regular course of its life. These are known as symptoms (disease). If, now, the influence of this inimical agency that not only caused but strives to continue this disorder, be taken away as is done when the physician administers an artificial potency, capable of altering the life principle in the most similar manner (a homeopathic medicine) which exceeds in energy, even in the smallest dose, the similar natural disease ( 33 , 279 ), then the influence of the original noxious morbid agent on the life principle is lost during the action of this stronger similar artificial disease. Thence the evil no longer exists for the life principle - it is destroyed. If, as has been said, the selected homeopathic remedy is administered properly, then the acute natural disease which is to be overruled if recently developed, will disappear imperceptibly in a few hours.

An older, more chronic disease will yield somewhat later together with all traces of discomfort, by the use of several doses of the same more highly potentized remedy or after careful selection of one or another more similar homeopathic medicine. Health, recovery, follow in imperceptible, often rapid transitions. The life principle is freed again and capable of resuming the life of the organism in health as before and strength returns.]

149 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Acute

When the suitable homeopathic remedy has been thus selected and rightly employed, the acute disease we wish to cure, even though it be of a grave character and attended by many sufferings subsides insensibly, in a few hours if it be of recent date, in a few days if it be of a somewhat longer standing, along with all traces of indisposition, and nothing or almost nothing more of the artificial medicinal disease is perceived; there occurs, by rapid, imperceptible transitions, noting but restored health, recovery. Diseases of long standing (and especially such as are of a complicated character) require for their cure a proportionately longer time. More especially do the chronic medicinal dyscrasia so often produced by allopathic bungling, along with the natural disease left uncured by it, require a much longer time for their recovery; often, indeed, are they incurable, in consequence of the shameful robbery of the patient's strength and juices, the principal feat performed by allopathy in its so - called methods of treatment.

149 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescirbing: re-written as follows in the Sixth Edition,,

['Disease of long standing (and especially such as are of a complicated character) require for their cure a proportionately longer time. More especially do the chronic medicinal dyscrasia so often produced by allopathic bungling along with the natural disease left uncured by it, require a much longer time for their recovery; often, indeed, are they incurable, in consequence of the shameful robbery of the patient's strength and juices (venesections, purgatives, etc.), on account of long continued use of large doses of violently acting remedies given on the basis of empty, false theories for alleged usefulness in cases of disease appearing similar, also in prescribing unsuitable mineral baths, etc., the principal feat performed by allopathy in its so - called methods of treatment. ']

150 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Trivial Symptoms

If a patient complains of one or more trivial symptoms, that have been only observed a short time previously, the physician should not regard this as a fully developed disease that requires serious medical aid. A slight alteration in the diet and regimen will usually suffice to dispel such an indisposition.

151 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Violent Sufferings

But if the patient complain of a few violent sufferings, the physician will usually find, on investigation, several other symptoms besides, although of a slighter character, which furnish a complete picture of the disease.

152 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Acute Disease.

The worse the acute disease is, of so much the more numerous and striking symptoms, is it generally composed, but with so much the more certainly, may a suitable remedy for it be found, if there be a sufficient number of medicines known, with respect to their positive action, to choose from. Among the lists of symptoms of the many medicines, it will not be difficult to find one, from whose separate disease elements, an antitype of curative artificial disease, very like the totality of the symptoms of the natural disease, may be constructed, and such a medicine is the desired remedy.

153 Prescribing, Characteristic Symptoms

In this search for a homeopathic specific remedy, that is to say, in this comparison of the collective symptoms of the natural disease, with the list of symptoms of known medicines and in order to find from among these, an artificial morbific agent, which corresponds by similarity to the disease to be cured, the more striking, singular, uncommon and peculiar (characteristic) signs and symptoms ¹ of the case of disease, are chiefly and most solely to be kept in view; for it is more particularly these symptoms that the very similar ones in the list of symptoms, of the selected medicine, must correspond to, in order to constitute it the most suitable for effecting the cure. The more general and undefined symptoms: loss of appetite, headache, debility, restless sleep, discomfort, and so forth, demand but little attention, when of that vague and indefinite character, if they cannot be more accurately described, as symptoms of such a general nature are observed in almost every disease and from almost every drug. Commentary

1. Dr. von Bonninghausen, who has distingusihed himself by his labours in connection with the new system of medicine, has lately increased our obligation to him by the publication of his important little book setting forth the characteristic symptoms more, particularly of the antipsoric medicines, entitled Uebersicht der Hauptwirkungs-Sphare der antips. Arz., Munster, bei Coppenrath, 1833, and the appendix thereto (containing the, antisyphilitic and the antisycotic medicines) at the end of the second edition of his Systematisch-alphabetisches Repertorium der antipsorischen Arzeien, bei Coppenrath in Munster.*

*This foot-note in the Sixth Edition , appears as follows:
[ 'Dr. von Bonninghausen, by the publication of the characteristic symptoms of homoeopathic medicines and his Repertory has rendered a great service to Homoeopathy as well as Dr. J.H.Jahr in his hand-book of principal symptoms.']

154 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Charateristic Symptoms

If the antitype constructed from the list of symptoms of the most suitable medicine contains those peculiar, uncommon, singular and distinguishing (characteristic) symptoms, which are to be met with in the disease to be cured in the greatest number and in the greatest similarity, this medicine is the most appropriate homeopathic specific remedy for this morbid state. This state, if it be not one of very long standing, will generally be removed and extinguished by the first dose of this medicine, without any considerable disturbance.

155 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing: Characteristic Symptoms.

I say without any considerable disturbance. For in the employment of this most appropriate homeopathic remedy it is only the symptoms of the medicine that correspond to the symptoms of the disease, which are called into play.  The former occupying the place of the latter (weaker) in the organism, ['i. e., in the sensation of the life principle' in the Sixth Edition ] , and thereby annihilating them by overpowering them.  The other symptoms of the homeopathic medicine, which are often very numerous, and being in no way applicable to the case of disease in question, are not called into play at all. The patient, growing hourly better, feels almost nothing of them at all, because the excessively minute dose requisite for homeopathic use is much too weak to produce the other symptoms of the medicine that are not homeopathic to the case in those parts of the body that are free from disease, and consequently can allow only the homeopathic symptoms to act on the parts of the organism that are already most irritated and excited by the similar symptoms of the disease, ['in order that the sick life principle may react only to a similar but stronger medicinal disease, whereby the original malady is extinguished' in the Sixth Edition] thus changing the morbid affection of the vital force into a similar but stronger medicinal disease, whereby the original malady is extinguished.

156^(a)  Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, New Symptoms

Nevertheless, almost no homeopathic medicine, be it ever so suitably chosen, that, especially if it should be given in an insufficiently minute dose, will not produce, in very irritable and sensitive patients, at least one trifling, unusual disturbance, some slight new symptom while its action lasts; for it is next to impossible that medicine and disease should cover one another symptomatically as exactly as two triangles with equal sides and equal angles. But this (in ordinary circumstances) unimportant difference will be easily done away with by the potential activity (energy) of the living organism, and is not perceptible by patients who are not excessively delicate; the restoration goes forward, notwithstanding, to the goal of perfect recovery, if it be not prevented by the action of heterogeneous medicinal influences upon the patient, by errors of regimen or by excitement of the passions.

157^(a) Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Aggravation, Acute disease

But however certain it is that a homeopathically chosen remedy does, because of its appropriateness and the minuteness of the dose, gently remove and annihilates the acute disease analogous to it, without manifesting its other unhomoeopathic symptoms, that is to say, without the production of new, serious disturbances, yet it usually, immediately after ingestion - for the first hour, or for a few hours - causes a kind of slight aggravation ['when the dose has not been sufficiently small and' in the Sixth Edition ] (where the dose has been somewhat too large, however, for a considerable number of hours), which has so much resemblance to the original disease that it seems to the patient to be an aggravation of his own disease. But it is, in reality, nothing more than an extremely similar medicinal disease, somewhat exceeding in strength the original affection.

158 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Aggravation, Acute disease

This slight homeopathic aggravation during the first hours - a very good prognostic that the acute disease will most probably yield to the first dose - is quite as it ought to be, as the medicinal disease must naturally be somewhat stronger than the malady to be cured if it is to overpower and extinguish the latter, just as a natural disease can remove and annihilate another one similar to it only when it is stronger than the latter (43-48).

159 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Aggravation, Acute disease

The smaller the dose of the homeopathic remedy is, ['in the treatment of acute disease' in the Sixth Edition] so much the slighter and shorter is the apparent increase of the disease during the first hours.

160 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Aggravation, Acute disease

But as the dose of a homeopathic remedy can scarcely ever be made so small that it shall not be able to relieve, overpower, indeed completely cure and annihilate the uncomplicated natural disease of not long standing that is analogous to it (249,note), we can understand why a dose of an appropriate homeopathic medicine, not the very smallest possible, does always, during the first hour after its ingestion, produce a perceptible homeopathic aggravation of this kind.¹

1. This exaltation of the medicinal symptoms over those disease symptoms analogous to them, which looks like an aggravation, has been observed by other physicians also, when by accident they employed a homoeopathic remedy. When a patient suffering from itch complains of an increase of the eruption after sulphur, his physician who knows not the cause of this, consoles him with the assurance that the itch must first come out properly before it can be cured; he knows not, however, that this is a sulphur eruption, that assumes the appearance of an increase of the itch.
The facial eruption which the viola tricolor cured was aggravated by it at the commencement of its action, Leroy tells us (Heilk, fur Mutter, p.406), but he knew not that the apparent aggravation was owing to the somewhat too large dose of the remedy, which in this instance was to a certain extent homoeopathic. Lysons says (Med. Transact., vol ii, London, 1772), The bark of the elm cures most certainly those skin diseases which it increases at the beginning of its action. Had he not given the bark in the monstrous doses usual in the allopathic system, but in the quite small doses requisite when the medicine shows similarity of symptoms, that is to say, when it is used homoeopathically, he would have effected a cure without, or almost without, seeing this apparent increase of the disease (homoeopathic aggravation).

161^(a) Therapeautics: Point III:Prescribing:Aggravation, Chronic disease

When I here limit the so-called homeopathic aggravation, or rather the primary action of the homeopathic medicine that seems to increase somewhat the symptoms of the original disease, to the first or first few hours, this is certainly true with respect to diseases of a more acute character and of recent origin,¹  but where medicines of long action have to combat a malady of, considerable or of very long standing,* where one dose, consequently, must continue to act for many days, then we occasionally see, during the first six, eight or ten days, the occurrence of some such primary actions of the medicine, some such apparent increase of the symptoms of the original disease (lasting for one or several hours), while in the intervening hours amelioration of the whole malady is perceptible. After the lapse of these few days the amelioration resulting from such primary action of the medicine proceeds almost uninterruptedly for several days longer.

1. If the action of those medicines to which the longest duration of action is proper, quickly expires in acute diseases- most quickly in those that are most acute- it is proportionately long lasting in chronic diseases (of psoric origin), and hence it happens that the antipsoric medicines often do not show any such homoeopathic aggravation in the first hours, whilst they do so later and during various hours for the first eight of ten days.  (This foot note is entirely omitted in the Sixth Edition.)

*The remaining portion of this Section (161) has been re - written in the Sixth Edition, as follows:

['Where no such apparent increase of the original disease ought to appear during treatment and it does not so appear if the accurately chosen medicine was given in proper small, gradually higher doses, each somewhat modified with renewed dynamization ( 247 ). Such increase of the original symptoms of a chronic disease can appear only at the end of treatment when the cure is almost or quite finished']

162 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Insufficient remedies

It sometimes happens, owing to the moderate number of medicines yet known with respect to their true, pure action, that but a portion of the symptoms of the disease under treatment are to be met with in the list of symptoms of the most appropriate medicine, consequently this imperfect medicinal morbific agent must be employed for lack of a more perfect one.

163 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Insufficient remedies

In such cases, or course, no uncomplicated cure can be expected from the medicine, because during its use some symptoms appear, which were not previously observable in the disease. These are accessory symptoms of the not perfectly appropriate remedy. This by no means prevents a considerable part of the disease (the symptoms of the disease that resemble those of the medicine) from being eradicated by this medicine, thereby establishing a fair commencement of the cure, but still this does not take place without those accessory symptoms, which are, however, always moderate when the dose of the medicine is sufficiently minute.

164 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Insufficient remedies

The small number of homeopathic symptoms present in the best selected medicine, is no obstacle to the cure in cases, where these few medicinal symptoms are chiefly of an uncommon kind, and such as are peculiarly distinctive (characteristic) of the disease; the cure takes place under such circumstances without any particular disturbance.

165 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Insufficient remedies: Unhomeopathic Medicine.

If, however, among the symptoms of the remedy selected, there be none that accurately resemble the distinctive (characteristic), peculiar, uncommon symptoms of the case of disease, and if the remedy correspond to the disease only in the general, vaguely described, indefinite states (nausea, debility, headache, and so forth), and if there be among the known medicines none more homeopathically appropriate, in that case the physician cannot promise himself any immediate favourable result from the employment of this unhomoeopathic medicine

166 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Insufficient remedies

Such a case is, however, very rare, owing to the increased number of medicines whose pure effects are now known, and the bad effects resulting from it, when they do occur, are diminished whenever a subsequent medicine, of more accurate resemblance, can be selected.

167 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing: Accessory Symptoms

Thus if there occur, during the use of this imperfectly homeopathic remedy first employed, accessory symptoms of some moment, then, in the case of acute diseases, we do not allow this first dose to exhaust its action, nor leave the patient to the full duration of the action of the remedy, but we investigate afresh the morbid state in its now altered condition, and add the remainder of the original symptoms to those newly developed in tracing a new picture of the disease.

168 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing

We shall then be able much more readily to discover, among the known medicines, an analogue to the morbid state before us, a single dose of which, if it does not entirely destroy the disease, will advance it considerably on the way to be cured. And thus we go on, if even this medicine be not quite sufficient to effect the restoration of health, examining again and again the morbid state that still remains, and selecting a homeopathic medicine as suitable as possible for it, until our object, namely, putting the patient in the possession of perfect health, is accomplished.

169 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing

If, one the first examination of a disease and the first selection of a medicine, we should find that the totality of the symptoms of the disease would not be effectively covered by the disease elements of a single medicine - owing to the insufficient number of known medicines, - but that two medicines contend for the preference in point of appropriateness, one of which is more homeopathically suitable for one part, the other for another part of the symptoms of the disease, it is not advisable, after the employment of the more suitable of the two medicines, to administer the other without fresh examination, ['and much less to give both together (272, note)' in the Sixth Edition] for the medicine that seemed to be the next best would not, under the change of circumstances that has in the meantime taken place, be suitable for the rest of the symptoms that then remain; in which case, consequently, a more appropriate homeopathic remedy must be selected in place of the second medicine for the set of symptoms as they appear on a new inspection.

170^(a) Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing

Hence in this as in every case, where a change of the morbid state has occurred, the remaining set of symptoms now present must be inquired into, and (without paying any attention to the medicine, which at first appeared to be the next in point of suitableness) another homeopathic medicine, as appropriate as possible to the new state now before us, must be selected. If it should so happen, as is not often the case, that the medicine, which at first appeared to be the next best seems still to be well adapted for the morbid state that remains, so much the more will it merit our confidence, and deserve to be employed in preference to another.

171^(a) Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Successive Remedies

In non-venereal chronic disease, those, therefore, that arise from psora, we often require, in order to effect a cure, to give several anti psoric remedies in succession, every successive one being homeopathically chosen in consonance with the group of symptoms remaining after ['completion of the action of the previous remedy' in the Sixth Edition] the expiry of the action of the previous remedy (which may have been employed in a single dose or in several successive doses).

172 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Too few symptoms

A similar difficulty in the way of the cure occurs from the symptoms of the disease being too few; -a circumstances that deserves our careful attention, for by its removal almost all the difficulties that can lie in the way of this most perfect of all possible modes of treatment (except that its storehouse of known homeopathic medicines is still incomplete) are removed.

173 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Too few symptoms

The only diseases that seem to have too few symptoms, and on that account seem to be less amenable to cure, are those which may be termed one-sided, because they display only one or two principal symptoms, which obscure almost all the others. They belong chiefly to the class of chronic diseases.

174 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Too few symptoms

Their principal symptom may be either an internal complaint (e.g. a headache of many years' duration, a diarrhoea of long standing, an ancient cardialgia, etc.), or it may be an affection more of an external kind. Diseases of the latter character are generally distinguished by the name of local maladies.

175 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Too few symptoms

In one-sided diseases of the first kind, it may often be attributed to the medical observer's want of discernment, in that he does not fully discover the symptoms actually present, which would enable him to complete the sketch of the portrait of the disease.

176 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Too few symptoms

There are, however, still a few diseases, which, after the most careful initial examination (84 - 98 ), present but one or two severe, violent symptoms, while all the others are but indistinctly perceptible.

177 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Too few symptoms

In order to meet most successfully such a case as this , which is of very rare occurrence, we are in the first place to select, guided by these few symptoms, the medicine which in our judgement is the most homeopathically indicated.

178 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Too few symptoms

It will, no doubt, sometimes happen that this medicine, selected in strict observance of the homeopathic law, furnishes the similar artificial disease suited for the annihilation of the malady present; and this is much more likely to happen when these few morbid symptoms are very striking, decided, uncommon and peculiarly distinctive (characteristic).

179 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Too few symptoms

More frequently, however, the medicine first chosen in such a case will be only partially, that is to say, not exactly suitable, as there was no considerable number of symptoms to guide to an accurate selection.

180 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Too few symptoms

In this case the medicine, which has been chosen as well as was possible, but which, for the reason above stated, is only imperfectly homeopathic, will, in its action upon the disease that is only partially analogous to it - just as in the case mentioned above (Paragraph 162,et seq. ) where the limited number of homeopathic remedies renders the selection imperfect - produce accessory symptoms, and several phenomena from its own array of symptoms are mixed up with the patient's state of health, which are however at the same time, symptoms of the disease itself, although they may have been hitherto never or very rarely perceived; some symptoms, which the patient had never previously experienced appear, or others, which he had only felt indistinctly, become more pronounced.

181 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Too few symptoms

Let is not be objected that the accessory phenomena and new symptoms of this disease that now appear should be laid to the account of the medicament just employed. They owe their origin to it¹ certainly, but they are always only symptoms of such a nature as this disease was itself capable of producing in this organism, and which were summoned forth and induced to make their appearance by the medicine given, owing to its power to cause similar symptoms. In a word, we have to regard the whole collection of symptoms now perceptible as belonging to the disease itself, as the actual existing condition, and conduct further treatment accordingly.

1. When they were not caused by an important error in regimen, a violent emotion, or a tumultuous revolution in the organism, such as the occurrence or cessation of the menses, conception, childbirth, and so forth.

182 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing, Too few symptoms

Thus the imperfect selection of the medicament, which was in this case almost inevitable owing to the too limited number of the symptoms present, serves to complete the display of the symptoms of the disease, and in this way facilitates the discovery of a second, more accurately suitable, homeopathic medicine.

183 Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing:Too few symptoms

Whenever, therefore, the dose of the first medicine ceases to have a beneficial effect (if the newly developed symptoms do not, by reason of their gravity, demand more speedy aid - which, however, from the minuteness of the dose of the homeopathic medicine in very chronic diseases, is excessively rare), a new examination of the disease must be instituted, the status morbi as it now is must be noted down, and a second homeopathic remedy selected in accordance with it, which shall exactly suit the present state, and one which shall be all the more appropriate can then be found, as the group of symptoms has become larger and more complete.¹

1. In cases where the patient (which, however, happens excessively seldom in chronic, but not infrequently in acute, diseases) feels very ill, although his symptoms are very indistinct, so that this state may be attributed more to the benumbed state of the nerves, which does not permit the patient's pains and sufferings to be distinctly perceived, this torpor of the internal sensibility is removed by opium, and in its secondary action the symptoms of the disease become distinctly apparent.

184 Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing:Too few symptoms

In like manner, after each new dose of medicine has exhausted its action, ['when it is no longer suitable and helpful, ' in the Sixth Edition] the state of the disease that still remains is to be noted anew with respect to its remaining symptoms, and another homeopathic remedy sought for, as suitable as possible for the group of symptoms now observed, and so on until the recovery is complete.

185 Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing:Local Maladies

Among the one-sided diseases an important place is occupied by the so-called local maladies, by which term is signified those changes and ailments that appear on the external parts of the body. Till now the idea prevalent in the schools was that these parts were alone morbidly affected, and that the rest of the body did not participate in the disease - a theoretical, absurd doctrine, which has led to the most disastrous medical treatment.

186 Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing:Local Maladies

Those so-called local maladies, which have been produced a short time previously, solely by an external lesion, still appear at first sight to deserve the name of local disease. But then the lesion must be very trivial, and in that case it would be of no great moment. For in the case of injuries accruing to the body from without, if they be at all severe, the whole living organism sympathizes; there occur fever, etc. The treatment of such diseases is relegated to surgery; but this is right only in so far as the affected parts require mechanical aid, whereby the external obstacles to the cure, which can only be expected to take place by the agency of the vital force, may be removed by mechanical means, e.g.,

• by the reduction of dislocations,
  
• ['by needles' in the Sixth Edition],
  
• by bandages to bring together the lips of wounds,
  
• ['by mechanical pressure to still the flow of blood from open arteries, ' in the Sixth Edition],
  
• by the extraction of foreign bodies that have penetrated into the living parts,
  
• by making an opening into a cavity of the body in order to remove an irritating substance or to procure the evacuation of effusions or collections of fluids,
  
• by bringing into apposition the broken extremities of a fractured bone and retaining them in exact contact by an appropriate bandage, etc.
  

But when in such injuries the whole living organism requires, as it always does, active dynamic aid to put it in a position to accomplish the work of healing, e.g.,

• when the violent fever resulting from extensive contusions, lacerated muscles, tendons and blood-vessels, requires to be removed by medicine given internally,
  
• or when the external pain of scalded or burnt parts needs to be homeopathically subdued,

then the services of the dynamic physician and his helpful homeopathy come into requisition.

187^(a) Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing:Local Expression of Internal Maladies

But those affections, alterations and ailments appearing on the external parts, that do not arise from any external injury or that have only some slight external wound for their immediate exciting cause, are produced in quite another manner; their source lies in some internal malady. To consider them as mere local affections, and at the same time to treat them only, or almost only, as it were surgically, with topical applications - as the old school have done from the remotest ages - is as absurd as it is pernicious in its results.

188 Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing:Local Expression of Internal Maladies

These affections were considered to be merely topical, and were therefore calledlocaldiseases, as if they were maladies exclusively limited to those parts wherein the organism took little or no part, or affections of these particular visible parts of which the rest of the living organism, so to speak, knew nothing.¹

1. One of the many great and pernicious bluders of the old school.

189 Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing:Local Expression of Internal Maladies

And yet very little reflection will suffice to convince us that no external malady (not occasioned by some important injury from without) can arise, persist or even grow worse without some internal cause, without the co-operation of the whole organism, which must consequently be in a diseased state. It could not make its appearance at all without the consent of the whole of the rest of the health, and without the participation of the rest of the living whole (of the vital force that pervades all the other sensitive and irritable parts of the organism); indeed, it is impossible to conceive its production without the instrumentality of the whole (deranged) life; so intimately are all parts of the organism connected together to form an indivisible whole in sensation and functions. No eruption on the lips, no whitlow can occur without previous and simultaneous internal ill - health.

190 Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing:Local Expression of Internal Maladies

All true medical treatment of a disease on the external parts of the body that has occurred from little or no injury from without must, therefore, be directed against the whole, must effect the annihilation and cure of the general malady by means of internal remedies, if it is wished that the treatment should be judicious, sure, efficacious and radical.

191 Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing:Local Expression of Internal Maladies

This is confirmed in the most unambiguous manner by experience, which shows in all cases that every powerful internal medicine immediately after its ingestion causes important changes in the general health of such a patient, and particularly in the affected external parts (which the ordinary medical school regards as quite isolated), even in a so - called local disease of the most external parts of the body, and the change it produces is most salutary, being the restoration to health of the entire body, along with the disappearance of the external affection (without the aid of any external remedy), provided the internal remedy directed towards the whole state was suitable chosen in a homeopathic sense.

192 Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing:Local Expression of Internal Maladies

This is best effected when, in the investigation of the case of disease, along with the exact character of the local affection, all the changes, sufferings and symptoms observable in the patient's health, and which may have been previously noticed when no medicines had been used, are taken in conjunction to form a complete picture of the disease before searching among the medicines, whose peculiar pathogenetic effects are known, for a remedy corresponding to the totality of the symptoms, so that the selection may be truly homeopathic.

193 Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing:Local Expression of Internal Maladies

By means of this medicine, employed only internally (and, if the disease be but of recent origin, often by the very first dose of it), the general morbid state of the body is removed along with the local affection, and the latter is cured at the same time as the former, proving that the local affection depended solely on a disease of the rest of the body, and should only be regarded as an inseparable part of the whole, as one of the most considerable and striking symptoms of the whole disease.

194^(a) Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing:Local Applications:Psora.

It is not useful, either in acute local diseases of recent origin or in local affections that have already existed a long time, to rub in or apply externally to the spot an external remedy, even though it be the specific and, when used internally, salutary by reason of its homoeopathicity, even although it should be at the same time administered internally; for the acute topical affections (e. g., inflammations of the individual parts, erysipelas, etc.), which have not been caused by external injury of proportionate violence, but by dynamic or internal causes, yield most surely to internal remedies homeopathically adapted to the perceptible state of the health present in the exterior and interior, selected from the general store of proved medicines, ¹ and generally without any other aid; but if these diseases do not yield to them completely, and if there still remain in the affected spot and in the whole state, notwithstanding good regimen, a relic of disease, which the vital force is not competent to restore to the normal state, then the acute disease was (as is frequently the case) a product of psora, which had hitherto remained latent in the interior, but has now burst forth and is on the point of developing into a palpable chronic disease.

1.  As for instance, aconite, rhus, belladonna, mercury, &c.*
*This foot-note is entirely omitted in the Sixth Edition.

195 Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing:After acute:Psora

In order to effect a radical cure in such cases, which are by no means rare, after the acute state has pretty well subsided, an appropriate anti psoric treatment (as is taught in my work on Chronic Diseases ) must then be directed against the symptoms that still remain and the morbid state of health to which the patient was previously subject. In chronic local maladies that are not obviously venereal, the anti psoric internal treatment is, moreover, alone requisite.

196 Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing: External Applicatioins.

It might, indeed, seem as though the cure of such diseases would be hastened by employing the medicinal substance, which is known to be truly homeopathic to the totality of the symptoms, not only internally, but also externally, because the action of a medicine applied to the seat of the local affection might effect a more rapid change in it.

197 Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing: External Applicatioins.

This treatment, however, is quite inadmissible, not only for the local symptoms arising from the miasm of psora, but also and especially for those originating in the miasm of syphilis or sycosis, for thesimultaneous local application, along with the internal employment, of the remedy in diseases whose chief symptom is a constant local affection , has this great disadvantage, that, by such a topical application, this chief symptom (local affection) ¹ will usually be annihilated sooner than the internal disease, and we shall now be deceived by the semblance of a perfect cure; or at least it will be difficult, and in some cases impossible, to determine, from the premature disappearance of the local symptom, if the general disease is destroyed by the simultaneous employment of the internal medicine.

1. Recent itch eruption charcre condyloma, [' as I have indicated in my book of Chronic Diseases' in the Sixth Edition.]

198^(a)Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing:Topical Applications.

The mere topical employment of medicines, that are powerful for cure when given internally, to the local symptoms of chronic miasmatic diseases is for the same reason quite inadmissible; for if the local affection of the chronic disease be only removed locally and in a one - sided manner, the internal treatment indispensable for the complete restoration of the health remains in dubious obscurity; the chief symptom (the local affection) is gone, and there remain only the other, less distinguishable symptoms, which are less constant and less persistent than the local affection, and frequently not sufficiently peculiar and too slightly characteristic to display after that, a picture of the disease in clear and peculiar outlines.

199 Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing:Indefinite Symptoms.

If the remedy perfectly homeopathic to the disease had not yet been discovered ¹ at the time when the local symptoms were destroyed by a corrosive (caustic) or desiccative external remedy or by the knife, then the case becomes much more difficult on account of the too indefinite (uncharacteristic) and inconstant appearance of the remaining symptoms; for what might have contributed most to determine the selection of the most suitable remedy, and its internal employment until the disease should have been completely annihilated, namely, the external principal symptom, has been removed from our observation.

1. As was the case before my time with the remedies for the condylomatous disease ( and the antipsoric medicines).

200 Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing:

Had it still been present to guide the internal treatment, the homeopathic remedy for the whole disease might have been discovered, and had that been found, the persistence of the local affection during its internal employment would have shown that the cure was not yet completed; but were it cured on its seat, this would be a convincing proof that the disease was completely eradicated, and the desired recovery from the entire disease was fully accomplished - an inestimable, indispensable advantage, ['to reach a perfect cure' in the Sixth Edition]

201^(a) Therapeautics:Point III:Prescribing:Local External Malady.

It is evident that man's vital force, when encumbered with a chronic disease, which it is unable to overcome by its own powers, ['instinctively' in the Sixth Edition] adopts the plan of developing a local malady on some external part, solely for this object, that by making and keeping in a diseased state this part, which is not indispensable to human life, it may thereby silence the internal disease, which otherwise threatens to destroy the vital organs (and to deprive the patient of life), and that it may thereby, so to speak, transfer the internal disease to the vicarious local affection and, as it were, draw it thither. The presence of the local affection thus silences, for a time, the internal disease, though without being able either to cure it or to diminish it materially.¹ The local affection, however, is never anything else than a part of the general disease, but a part of it increased all in one direction by the organic vital force, and transferred to a less dangerous (external) part of the body, in order to allay the internal ailment. But (as has been said) by this local symptom that silences the internal disease, so far from anything being gained by the vital force towards diminishing or curing the whole malady, the internal disease, on the contrary, continues, in spite of it, gradually to increase and Nature is constrained to enlarge and aggravate the local symptom always more and more, in order that it may still suffice as a substitute for the increased internal disease and may still keep it under. Old ulcers on the legs get worse as long as the internal psora is uncured, the chancre enlarges as long as the internal syphilis remains uncured, ['the fig warts increased and grow while the sycosis is not cured whereby the latter is rendered more and more difficult to cure', in the Sixth Edition] just as the general internal disease continues to increase as time goes on.

1. The issues of the old-school do something similar; as artificial ulcers on external parts, they silence some internal chronic diseases, but only for a short time, without being able to cure them; but, on the other hand, they weaken and destroy the general health much more than is done by most of the metastases effected by the instinctive vital force.

202 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing: Local External Malady

If the old - school physician should now destroy the local symptom by the topical application of external remedies, under the belief that he thereby cures the whole disease, Nature makes up for its loss by rousing the internal malady and the other symptoms that previously existed in a latent state side by side with the local affection; that is to say, she increases the internal disease. When this occurs it is usual to say, though incorrectly, that the local affection has been driven backinto the system or upon the nerves by the external remedies.

203 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing: Local External Malady - Chronic Miasms

Every external treatment of such local symptoms, the object of which is to remove them from the surface of the body, while the internal miasmatic disease is left uncured, as, for instance, driving off the skin the psoric eruption by all sorts of ointments, burning away the chancre by caustics and destroying the condylomata on their seat by the knife, the ligature or the actual cautery; this pernicious external mode of treatment, hitherto so universally practised, has been the most prolific source of all the innumerable named or unnamed chronic maladies under which mankind groans; it is one of the most criminal procedures the medical world can be guilty of, and yet it has hitherto been the one generally adopted, and taught from the professional chairs as the only one.¹

1.  For any medicines that might at the same time be given internally served but to aggravate the malady, as these remedies possessed no specific power of curing the whole disease, but assailed the organism, weakened it and inflicted on it, in addition, other chronic medicinal diseases.

204 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing: Chronic Miasms

If we deduct all chronic affections, ailments and diseases that depend on a persistent unhealthy mode of living, (77) as also those innumerable medicinal maladies (74) caused by the irrational, persistent, harassing and pernicious treatment of diseases often only of trivial character by physicians of the old school, all the remainder, ['most the remainder of chronic diseases' in the Sixth Edition], without exception, result from the development of these three chronic miasms, internal syphilis, internal sycosis, but chiefly and in infinitely greater proportion, internal psora, each of which, was already in possession of the whole organism, and had penetrated it in all directions before the appearance of the primary, vicarious local symptom of each of them (in the case of psora the scabious eruption, in syphilis the chancre or the bubo, and in sycosis the condylomata) that prevented their outburst; and these chronic miasmatic diseases, if deprived of their local symptom, are inevitably destined by mighty Nature sooner or later to become developed and to burst forth, and thereby propagate all the nameless misery, the incredible number of chronic diseases which have plagued mankind for hundreds and thousands of years, none of which would so frequently have come into existence had physicians striven in a rational manner to cure radically and to extinguish in the organism these three miasms by the internal homeopathic medicines suited for each of them, without employing topical remedies for their external symptoms. (See note to 282 ).

205 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing: Chronic Miasms

The homeopathic physician never treats one of these primary symptoms of chronic miasms, nor yet one of their secondary affections that result from their further development, by local remedies (neither by those external agents that act dynamically,¹ nor yet by those that act mechanically), but he cures, in cases where the one or the other appears, only the great miasm on which they depend, whereupon its primary, as also its secondary symptoms disappear spontaneously; but as this was not the mode pursued by the old - school practitioners who preceded him in the treatment of the case, the homeopathic physician generally, alas!, finds that the primary symptoms²  have already been destroyed by them by means of external remedies, and that he has now to do more with the secondary ones, i.e., the affections resulting from the breaking forth and development of these inherent miasms, but especially with the chronic disease evolved from internal psora, the internal treatment of which, as far as a single physician can elucidate it by many years of reflection, observation and experience, I have endeavoured to point out in my work on Chronic Diseases, to which I must refer the reader.

1. I cannot therefore advise, for instance, the local extirpation of the so-called cancer of the lips and face by means of the arsenical remedy of Frere Cosme, not only because it is excessively painful and often fails, but more for this reason, because, if this dynamic remedy should indeed succeed in freeing the affected part of the body from the malignant ulcer locally, the basic malady is thereby not diminished in the slightest, the preserving vital force is therefore necessitated to transfer the field of operation of the great internal malady to some more important part (as it does in every case of metastasis), and the consequence is blindness, deafness, insanity, suffocative asthma, dropsy, apoplexy, etc. But this ambiguous local liberation of the part from the malignant ulcer by the topical arsenical remedy only succeeds, after all, in those cases where the ulcer has not yet attained any great size, and when the vital force is still very energetic; but it is just in such a state of things that the complete internal cure of the whole original disease is also still practicable.
The result [' without : previius cure of the inner miasm' in the Sixth Edition ] is the same without previous cure of the inner miasm when cancer of the face or breast is removed by the knife alone and when encysted tumors are enucleated; something worse ensues, or at any rate death is hastened. This has been the case times without number, but the old school still goes blindly on in the same way in every new case, with the same disastrous results.

2. Itch eruption, chancre (bubo), condylomata.

206 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing: Chronic Miasms

Before commencing the treatment of a chronic disease, it is necessary to make the most careful investigation¹ as to whether the patient has had a venereal infection (or an infection with condylomatous gonorrhea); for then the treatment must be directed towards this alone, when only the signs of syphilis (or of the rarer condylomatous disease) are present, but this disease is very seldom met with alone nowadays. If such infection have previously occurred, this must also be borne in mind in the treatment of those cases in which psora is present, because in them the latter is complicated with the former, as is always the case when the symptoms are not those of pure syphilis; for when the physician thinks he has a case of old venereal disease before him, he has always, or almost always, to treat a syphilitic affection accompanied mostly by (complicated with) psora, for the internal itch dyscrasia (the psora) is far the most frequent(most certain) fundamental cause of chronic diseases, either united (complicated) with syphilis (or with sycosis), if the latter infections have avowedly occurred; ['At times, both miasms may be complicated also with sycosis in chronically diseased organisms' in the Sixth Edition] or, as is much more frequently the case, psora is the sole fundamental cause of all other chronic maladies, whatever names they may bear, which are, moreover, so often bungled, increased and disfigured to a monstrous extent by allopathic unskillfulness.

1. In investigations of this nature we must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the assertions of the patients of their friends, who frequently assign as the cause of chronic, even of the severest and most inveterate diseases, either a cold caught (a thorough wetting, drinking cold water after being heated) many years ago, or a former fright, a sprain, a vexation (sometimes even a bewitchment), etc. These causes are much too insignificant to develop a chronic disease in a healthy body, to keep it up for years, and to aggravate it year by year, as is the case with all chronic diseases from developed psora. Causes of a much more important character than those remembered noxious influences must lie at the root of the initiation and progress of a serious, obstinate disease of long standing; the assigned causes could only rouse into activity the latent chronic miasm.

207 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing: Chronic Miasms: Allopathic Treatment.

When the above information has been gained, it still remains for the homeopathic physician to ascertain what kinds of allopathic treatment had up to that date been adopted for the chronic disease, what perturbing medicines had been chiefly and most frequently employed, also what mineral baths had been used and what effects these had produced, in order to understand in some measure the degeneration of the disease from its original state, and, where possible, to correct in part these pernicious artificial operations, or to enable him to avoid the employment of medicines that have already been improperly used.

208 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing: Chronic Miasms: Mode of Living etc.

The age of the patient, his mode of living and diet, his occupation, his domestic position, his social relation and so forth, must next be taken into consideration, in order to ascertain whether these things have tended to increase his malady, or in how far they may favour or hinder the treatment. In like manner the state of his disposition and mind must be attended to, to learn whether that presents any obstacles to the treatment, or requires to be directed encouraged or modified.

209 Therapeautics: Point III: Prescribing: Chronic Miasms

After this is done, the physician should endeavour in repeated conversations with the patient to trace the picture of his disease as completely as possible, according to the directions given above, in order to be able to elucidate the most striking and peculiar (characteristic) symptoms, in accordance with which he selects the first anti psoric or other remedy having the greatest symptomatic resemblance, for the commencement of the treatment, and so forth.

210^(a)Therapeautics: Point III: Psora.

Of psoric origin are almost all those diseases that I have above termed one sided, which appear to be more difficult to cure in consequence of this one-sidedness, all their other morbid symptoms disappearing, as it were, before the single, great, prominent symptom.  Of this character are what are termed mental diseases.  They do not, however, constitute a class of disease sharply separated from all others, since in all other so-called corporeal diseases, the condition of the disposition and mind is always altered;¹ and in all cases of disease we are called on to cure, the state of the patient's disposition is to be particularly noted, along with the totality of the symptoms, if we would trace an accurate picture of the disease, in order to be able therefrom to treat it homeopathically with success.

1. How often for instance, do we not meet with a mild, soft disposition, in patients who have for years been afflicted with the most painful diseases, so that the pysician feels constrained to esteem and compassionate the sufferer!  (To tender consideration and compassion. GW)  But if he subdue the disease and restore the patient to health --as is frequently done in homoeopathic practice -- he is often astonished and horified at the frightful alteration in his disposition.  He often witnessis the occurrecce of ingratitude, cruelty, refined malice and propensites most digraceful and degrading to humanity, which were precisely the qualities possessed by the patient before he grew ill.
Those who were patient, when well often become obstinate, violent, hasty, even intolerant and capricious, of impatient of desponding when ill;those formerly chase and modest often become lascivious and shameless.  A clear-headed person not imfrequently becomes obtuse of intellect, while one ordinarily weak-minded becomes more prudent and thoughtful;  and a man slow to make up his mind sometimes acquires great presence of mind and quickness of resolve, etc.

211 Therapeautics: Point III: State of Disposition.

This holds good to such an extent, that the state of the disposition of the patient often chiefly determines the selection of the homeopathic remedy, as being a decidedly characteristic symptom, which can least of all remain concealed from the accurately observing physician.

212 Therapeautics: Point III: State of Disposition.

The Creator of therapeutic agents has also had particular regard to this main feature of all diseases, the altered state of the disposition and mind, for there is no powerful medicinal substance in the world which does not very notably alter the state of the disposition and mind in the healthy individual who tests it, and every medicine does so in a different manner.

213 Therapeautics: Point III: Changes in the State of Mind and Disposition.

We shall, therefore, never be able to cure conformably to nature - that is to say, homeopathically - if we do not, in every case of disease, even in such as are acute, observe, along with the other symptoms, those relating to the changes in the state of the mind and disposition, and if we do not select, for the patient's relief, from among the medicines, a disease - force, which in addition to the similarity of its other symptoms to those of the disease, is also capable of producing a similar state of the disposition and mind.¹

1. Thus aconite will seldom or never effect either a rapid of permanent cure in a patient of a quiet, calm, equabel disposition; and just as little will nux vomica be servicable where disposition is mild and phlegmatic, pulsatilla where it is happy, gay and obstinate, of ingatia where it is imperturble and disposed neither to be frightenednor vexed.

214 Therapeautics: Point III:

The instructions I have to give relative to the cure of mental diseases may be confined to a very few remarks, as they are to be cured in the same way as all other diseases, namely, by a remedy which shows, by the symptoms it causes in the body and mind of a healthy individual, a power of producing a morbid state as similar as possible to the case of disease before us, and in no other way can they be cured.

215 Therapeautics: Point III: Mental and Emotional Diseases

Almost all the so - called mental and emotional diseases are nothing more than corporeal diseases in which the symptom of derangement of the mind and disposition peculiar to each of them is increased, while the corporeal symptoms decline (more or less rapidly), till it a length attains the most striking one-sidedness, almost as though it were a local disease in the invisible subtle organ of the mind or disposition.

216 Therapeautics: Point III:

The cases are not rare in which a so - called corporeal disease that threatens to be fatal - a suppuration of the lungs, or the deterioration of some other important viscous, or some other disease of acute character, eg., in child bed, etc. - becomes transformed into insanity, into a kind of melancholia or into mania by a rapid increase of the psychical symptoms that were previously present, whereupon the corporeal symptoms lose all their danger; these latter improve almost to perfect health, or rather they decrease to such a degree that their obscured presence can only be detected by the observation of a physician gifted with perseverance and penetration.In this manner they become transformed into a one - sided and, as it were, a local disease, in which the symptom of the mental disturbance, which was at first but slight, increases so as to be the chief symptom, and in a great measure occupies the place of the other (corporeal) symptoms, whose intensity it subdues in a palliative manner, so that, in short, the affections of the grosser corporeal organs become, as it were, transferred and conducted to the almost spiritual, mental and emotional organs, which the anatomist has never yet and never will reach with his scalpel.

217 Therapeautics: Point III:

In these diseases we must be very careful to make ourselves acquainted with the whole of the phenomena, both those belonging to the corporeal symptoms, and also, and indeed particularly, those appertaining to the accurate apprehension of the precise character of the chief symptom, of the peculiar and always predominating state of the mind and disposition, in order to discover, for the purpose of extinguishing the entire disease, among the remedies whose pure effects are known, a homeopathic medicinal pathogenetic force - that is to say, a remedy which in its list of symptoms displays, with the greatest possible similarity, not only the corporeal morbid symptoms present in the case of disease before us, but also especially this mental and emotional state.

218 Therapeautics: Point III:

To this collection of symptoms belongs in the first place to accurate description of all the phenomena of the previous so - called corporeal disease, before it degenerated into a one - sided increase of the physical symptom, and became a disease of the mind and disposition. This may be learned from the report of the patient's friends.

219 Therapeautics: Point III:

A comparison of these previous symptoms of the corporeal disease with the traces of them that still remain, though they have become less perceptible (but which even now sometimes become prominent, when a lucid interval and a transient alleviation of the psychical disease occurs), will serve to prove them to be still present, though obscured.

220 Therapeautics: Point III:

By adding to this the state of the mind and disposition accurately observed by the patient's friends and by the physician himself, we have thus constructed the complete picture of the disease, for which in order to effect the homeopathic cure of the disease, a medicine capable of producing strikingly similar symptoms, and especially an analogous disorder of the mind, must be sought for among the anti psoric remedies, if the physical disease have already lasted some time.

221 Therapeautics: Point III:

If, however, insanity or mania (caused by fright, vexation, the abuse of spirituous liquors, etc.) have suddenly broken out as an acute disease in the patient's ordinary calm state, although it almost always arises from internal psora, like a flame bursting forth from it, yet when it occurs in this acute manner it should not be immediately treated with anti psoric, but in the first place with remedies indicated for it out of the order class of proved medicaments (e. g., aconite, belladonna, stramonium, hyoscyamus, mercury, etc.) in highly potentized, minute, homeopathic doses, in order to subdue it so far that the psora shall for the time revert to its former latent state, wherein the patient appears as if quite well.

222 Therapeautics: Point III:

But such a patient, who has recovered from an acute mental or emotional disease by the use of these non - antipsoric medicines, should never be regarded as cured; on the contrary, no time should be lost in attempting to free him completely,¹ by means of a prolonged antipsoric treatment, from the chronic miasm of the psora, which, it is true, has now become once more latent but is quite ready to break out anew; if this be done, there is no fear of another similar attack, if he attend faithfully to the diet and regimen prescribed for him.

1. It very rarely happens that a mental or emotional disease of long standing ceases spontaneously (for the internal dyscrasia transfers itself again to the grosser corporeal organs); such are the few cases met with now and then, where a former inmate of a madhouse has been dismissed apparently recovered. Hitherto, moreover, all madhouses have continued to be chokefull, so that the multitude of other insane persons who seek for admission into such institutions could scarcely find room in them unless some of the insane in the house died. Not one is ever really and permanently cured in them!  A convincing proof, among many others, of the complete nullity of the non-healing art hitherto practised, which has been ridiculously honored by allopathic ostentation with the title of rational medicine. How often, on the other hand, has not the true healing art, genuine pure homoeopathy, been able to restore such unfortunate beings to the possession of their mental and corporeal health, and so give them back again to their delighted friends and to the world!

223 Therapeautics: Point III:

But if the antipsoric treatment be omitted, then we may almost assuredly expect, from a much slighter cause than brought on the first attack of the insanity, the speedy occurrence of a new and more lasting the severe fit, during which the psora usually develops itself completely, and passes into either a periodic or continued mental derangement, which is then more difficult to be cured by antipsorics.

224 Therapeautics: Point III:

If the mental disease be not quite developed, and if it be still somewhat doubtful whether it really arose from a corporeal affection, or did not rather result from faults of education, bad practices, corrupt morals, neglect of the mind, superstition or ignorance; the mode of deciding this point will be, that if it proceed from one or other of the latter causes it will diminish and be improved by sensible friendly exhortations, consolatory arguments, serious representations and sensible advice, whereas a real moral or mental malady, depending on bodily disease, would be speedily aggravated by such a course, the melancholic would become still more dejected, querulous, inconsolable and reserved, the spiteful maniac would thereby become still more exasperated, and the chattering fool would become manifestly more foolish.¹

1. It would seem as though the mind, in these cases, felt with uneasiness and grief the truth of these rational representations and acted upon the body as it wished to restore the lost harmony, but that the body, by means of its disease, reacted upon the organs of the mind and disposition and put them in still greater disorder by a fresh transference of its sufferings on to them.

225 Therapeautics: Point III: Emotional Causes.

There are, however, as has just been stated, certainly a few emotional diseases, which have not merely been developed into that form out of corporeal diseases, but which, in an inverse manner, the body being but slightly indisposed, originate and are kept up by emotional causes, such as continued anxiety, worry, vexation, wrongs and the frequent occurrence of great fear and fright. This kind of emotional diseases in time destroys the corporeal health, often to a great degree.

226 Therapeautics: Point III: Emotional Diseases.

It is only such emotional diseases as these, which were first engendered and subsequently kept up by the mind itself, that, while they are yet recent and before they have made very great inroads on the corporeal state, may, by means of psychical remedies, such as a display of confidence, friendly exhortations, sensible advice, and often by a well - disguised deception, be rapidly changed into a healthy state of the mind (and with appropriate diet and regimen, seemingly into a healthy state of the body also.)

227 Therapeautics: Point III: Fundamental Cause.

But the fundamental cause in these cases also is a psoric miasm, which was only not yet quite near its full development, and for security's sake, the seemingly cured patient should be subjected to a radical, antipsoric treatment, in order that he may not again, as might easily occur, fall into a similar state of mental disease.

228^(a)Therapeautics: Point III: Mental and Emotional Disease.

In mental and emotional diseases resulting from corporeal maladies, which can only be cured by homeopathic antipsoric medicine conjoined with carefully regulated mode of life, an appropriate psychical behaviour towards the patient on the part of those about him and of the physician must be scrupulously observed, by way of an auxiliary mental regimen. To furious mania we must oppose clam intrepidity and cool, firm resolution - to doleful, querulous lamentation, a mute display of commiseration in looks and gestures - to senseless chattering, a silence not wholly inattentive - to disgusting and abominable conduct and to conversation of a similar character, total inattention. We must merely endeavour to prevent the destruction and injury of surrounding objects, without reproaching the patient for his acts,and everything must be arranged in such a way that the necessity for any corporeal punishments and tortures¹ whatever may be avoided. This is so much the more easily effected, because in the administration of the medicine - the only circumstance in which the employment of coercion could be justified - in the homeopathic system the small doses of the appropriate medicinenever offend the taste, and may consequently be given to the patient without his knowledge in his drink, so that all compulsion is unnecessary.

1. It is impossible to marvel at the hard-heartedness and indiscretion of the medical men in many establishments for patients of this kind, who, without attempting to discover the true and only efficacious mode of curing such disease, which is by homoeopathic medicinal (antipsoric) means, content themselves with torturing these most pitiable of all human beings with the most violent blows and other painful torments. By this unconscientious and revolting procedure they debase themselves beneath the level of the turnkeys in a house of correction, for the latter inflict such chastisement as the duty devolving on their office, and on criminals only, whilst the former appear, from a humiliating consciousness of their uselessness as physicians, only to vent their spite at the supposed incurability of mental diseases in harshness towards the pitiable, innocent sufferers, for they are too ignorant to be of any use and too indolent to adopt a judicious mode of treatment.

229 Therapeautics: Point III:

On the other hand, contradiction, eager explanations, rude corrections and invectives, as also weak, timorous yielding, are quite out of place with such patients; they are equally pernicious modes of treating mental and emotional maladies. But such patients are most of all exasperated and their complaint aggravated by contumely, fraud, and deceptions that they can detect.The physician and keeper must always pretend to believe them to be possessed of reason.
All kinds of external disturbing influences on their senses and disposition should be if possible removed; there are no amusements for their clouded spirit, no salutary distractions, no means of instruction, no soothing effects from conversation, books or other things for the soul that pines or frets in the chains of the diseased body, no invigoration for it, but the care; it is only when the bodily health is changed for the better that tranquillity and comfort again beam upon their mind.*

* A new foot-note is added in the Sixth Edition, as follow:
[ 'The treatment of the violent insane manic and melancholic can take place only in an institution specially arranged for their treatment but not within the family circle of the patient.' ]

230 Therapeautics: Point III:

If the antipsoric remedies selected for each particular case of mental or emotional disease (there are incredibly numerous varieties of them) be quite homeopathically suited for the faithfully traced picture of the morbid state, which, if there be a sufficient number of this kind of medicines known in respect of their pure effects, is ascertained by an indefatigable search for the most appropriate homeopathic remedy all the more easily, as the emotional and mental state, constituting the principal symptom of such a patient, is so unmistakably perceptible, - then the most striking improvement in no very long time, which could not be brought about by physicking the patient to death with the largest oft - repeated doses of all other unsuitable (allopathic) medicines. Indeed, I can confidently assert, from great experience, that the vast superiority of the homeopathic system over all other conceivable methods of the treatment is nowhere displayed in a more triumphant light than in mental and emotional diseases of long standing, which originally sprang from corporeal maladies or were developed simultaneously with them.

231^(a)Therapeautics: Point III: Intermittent Diseases

The intermittent diseases deserve a special consideration, as well those that recur at certain periods - like the great number of intermittent fevers, and the apparently non - febrile affections that recur at intervals like intermittent fevers - as also those in which certain morbid states alternate at uncertain intervals with morbid states of a different kind.

232^(a) Therapeautics: Point III: Alternating Diseases.

These latter, alternating diseases, are also very numerous,¹  but all belong to the class of chronic diseases; they are generally a manifestation of developed psora alone, sometimes, but seldom, complicated with a syphilitic miasm, and therefore in the former case may be cured by antipsoric medicines; in the latter, however, in alternation with antisyphilitics as taught in my work on the Chronic Diseases.

1. Two or three states may alternate with one another. Thus, for instance, in the case of double alternating diseases, certain pains may occur persistently in the legs, etc., immediately on the disappearance of a kind of ophthalmia, which latter again appears as soon as the pain in the limbs has gone off for the time - convulsions and spasms may alternate immediately with any other affection of the body or some part of it - in a case of threefold alternating states in a common indisposition, periods of apparent increase of health and unusual exaltation of the corporeal and mental powers (extravagant gaiety, extraordinary activity of the body, excess of comfortable feeling, inordinate appetite, etc.) may occur, after which, and quite unexpectedly, gloomy, melancholy humor, intolerable hypochondriacal derangement of the disposition, with disorder of several of the vital operations, the digestion, sleep, etc., appear, which again, and just as suddenly, give place to the habitual moderate ill-health; and so also several and very various alternating states. When the new state makes its appearance, there is often no perceptible trace of the former one. In other cases only slight traces of the former alternating state remain when the new one occurs; few of the symptoms of the first state remain on the appearance and during the continuance of the second.  Sometimes the morbid alternating states are quite of opposite natures, as for instance, melancholy periodically alternating with gay insanity or frenzy.

233 Therapeautics: Point III: Intermittent Disease.

The typical intermittent disease are those where a morbid state of unvarying character returns at a tolerably fixed period, while the patient is apparently in good health, and takes its departure at an equally fixed period; this is observed in those apparently non-febrile morbid states that come and go in a periodical manner (at certain times), as well as in those of a febrile character, to wit, the numerous varieties of intermittent fevers.

234^(a) Therapeautics: Point III: Alternating States, Epidemic

Those apparently non-febrile, typical, periodically recurring morbid states just alluded to observed in one single patient at a time (they do not usually appear sporadically or epidemically) always belong to the chronic diseases, mostly to those that are purely psoric, are but seldom complicated with syphilis, and are successfully treated by the same means; yet it is sometimes necessary to employ as an intermediate remedy, a small dose of a potentized solution of cinchona bark, in order to extinguish completely their intermittent type.

235^(a) Therapeautics: Point III: Intermittent Fever:

With regard to the intermittent fevers¹, that prevail sporadically or epidemically (not those endemically located in marshy districts), we often find every paroxysm likewise composed of two opposite alternating states (cold, heat - heat, cold), more frequently still of three (cold, heat, sweat). Therefore the remedy selected for them from the general class of proved (common, not antipsoric) medicines must either (and remedies of this sort are the surest) be able likewise to produce in the healthy body two (or all three) similar alternating states, or else must correspond by similarity of symptoms, in the most homeopathic manner possible, to the strongest, best marked, and most peculiar alternating state (either to the cold stage, or to the hot stage, or to the sweating state, each with its accessory symptoms, according as the one or other alternating state is the strongest and most peculiar); but the symptoms of the patient's health during the intervals when he is free from fever must be the chief guide to the most appropriate homeopathic remedy.²

1. The pathology hitherto in vogue, which is still in the stage of irrational infancy, recognizes but one single intermittent fever, which it likewise termed ague, and admits of no varieties but such as are constituted by the different intervals at, which the paroxysms recur, quotidian, tertian, quartan etc. But there are much more important differences among them than what are marked by the periods of their recurrence. 

There are innumerable varieties of these fevers, some of which cannot even be denominated ague, as their fits consist solely of heat.  Others, again, are characterised by cold alone, with or without subsequent perspiration.  Yet others, which exhibit general coldness of the surface, with a sensation on the patients part, or whilst the body feels externally hot, the patient feels cold; others, again, in which one paroxysm consists entirely of a rigor or simple chilliness followed by an interval of health, while the next consists of heat alone, followed or not by perspiration; others, again, in which the heat comes first and the cold stage not till that is gone; others, again, wherein after a cold or hot stage apyrexia ensues, and then perspiration comes on like a second fit, often many hours subsequently; others, again, in which no perspiration at all comes on, and yet others in which the whole attack consists of perspiration alone, without any cold or hot stage, or in which the perspiration is only present during the heat; and there are innumerable other differences, especially in regard to the accessory symptoms, such as headache of a peculiar kind, bad taste of the mouth, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, want of or excessive thirst, peculiar pains in the body or limbs, disturbed sleep, deliria, alterations of temper, spasms, etc., before, during or after the sweating stage, and countless other varieties. All these are manifestly intermittent fevers of very different kinds, each of which, as might naturally be supposed, requires a special (homoeopathic) treatment. It must be confessed that they can almost all be suppressed (as is often done) by enormous doses of bark and of its pharmaceutical preparation, the sulphate of quinine; that is to say, their periodical recurrence (their typus) may be extinguished by it, but the patients who suffered from intermittent fevers for which cinchona bark is not suitable, as is the case with all those epidemic intermittent fevers that traverse whole countries and even mountainous districts, are not restored to health by the extinction of the typus; on the contrary, they now remain ill in another manner, and worse, often much worse, than before; they are affected by peculiar, chronic bark dyscrasias, and can scarcely be restored to health even by a prolonged treatment by the true system of medicine - and yet that is what is called curing, forsooth!

2. Dr. von Bonninghausen, who has rendered more services to our beneficent system of medicine than any other of my disciples, has best elucidated this subject, which demands so much care, and has facilitated the choice of the efficient remedy for the various epidemics of fever, in his work entitled Versuch einer homoopathischen Therapie der Wechselfieber, 1833, Muster bi Regensberg. (Another Experimental Homeopathic Therapy for Intermittent fever?)

236 Therapeautics: Point III: Intermittent Fever

The most appropriate and efficacious time for administering the medicine in these cases is immediately or very soon after the termination of the paroxysm, as soon as the patient has in some degree recovered from its effects; it has then time to effect all the changes in the organism requisite for the restoration of health, without any great disturbance or violent commotion; whereas the action of a medicine, be it ever so specifically appropriate, if given immediately before the paroxysm, coincides with the natural recurrence of the disease and causes such a reaction in the organism, such a violent contention, that an attack of that nature produces at the very least a great loss of strength, if it do not endanger life.1 But if the medicine be given immediately after the termination of the fit, that is to say, at the period when the apyretic interval has commenced and a long time before there are any preparations for the next paroxysm, then the vital force of the organism is in the best possible condition to allow itself to be quietly altered by the remedy, and thus restored to the healthy state.

1. This is observed in the fatal cases, by no means rare, in which a moderate dose of opium given during the cold stage quickly deprived the patients of life.

237 Therapeautics: Point III: Intermittent Fever

But if the stage of apyrexia be very short, as happens in some very bad fevers, or if it be disturbed by some of the after sufferings of the previous paroxysm, the dose of the homeopathic medicine should be administered when the perspiration begins to abate, or the other subsequent phenomena of the expiring paroxysm begin to diminish.

238 Therapeautics: Point III: Fifth Edition Intermittent Fever

It is only when the suitable medicine has with a single dose destroyed several fits and manifest health and ensued, but after some time indications of a new paroxysm appear, only then can and must the same medicine be given again, provided always the totality of the symptoms is still the same. This recurrence of the same fever after an interval of health is, however, only possible when the noxious influence that first excited the intermittent fever still continues to act upon the convalescent, as happens in marshy districts; in which case a permanent cure is often only possible by the removal of this exciting cause (as, for instance, a residence in a mountainous country if the case was one of marsh intermittent fever).

  238 Therapeautics: Point III: Intermittent Fever Sixth Edition re-written in the, as follows:

[ 'Not infrequently, the suitable medicine has with a single dose destroyed several attacks and brought about the return of health, but in the majority of cases, another dose must be administered after such attack. Better still, however, when the character of the symptoms has not changed, doses of the same medicine given according to the newer discovery of repetition of doses (see note to 270 ), may be given without difficulty in dynamizing each successive dose with 10 - 12 succussions of the vial containing the medicinal substance. Nevertheless, there are at times cases, though seldom, where the intermittent fever returns after several days' well being. This return of the same fever after a healthy interval is only possible when the noxious principle that first caused the fever, is still acting upon the convalescent, as is the case in marshy regions. Here a permanent restoration can often take place only by getting away from this causative factor, as is possible by seeking a mountainous retreat, if the cause was a marshy fever.' ]

239 Therapeautics: Point III: Intermittent Fever

As almost every medicine causes in its pure action a special, peculiar fever and even a kind of intermittent fever with its alternating states, differing from all other fevers that are caused by other medicines, homeopathic remedies may be found in the extensive domain of medicines for all the numerous varieties of natural intermittent fevers and, for a great many of such fevers, even in the moderate collection of medicines already proved on the healthy individual.

240 Therapeautics: Point III: Intermittent Fever^(a)

But if the remedy found to be the homeopathic specific for a prevalent epidemic of intermittent fever do not effect a perfect cure in some one or other patient, if it is not the influence of a marshy district that prevents the cure, it must always be the psoric miasm in the background, in which case antipsoric medicines must be employed until complete relief is obtained.

241 Therapeautics: Point III: Intermittent Fever^(a)

Epidemics of intermittent fever, in situations where none are endemic, are of the nature of chronic diseases, composed of single acute paroxysms; each single epidemic is of a peculiar, uniform character common to all the individuals attacked, and when this character is found in the totality of the symptoms common to all, it guides us to the discovery of the homeopathic (specific) remedy suitable for all the cases, which is almost universally serviceable in those patients who enjoyed tolerable health before the occurrence of the epidemic, that is to say, who were not chronic sufferers from developed psora.

242 Therapeautics: Point III: Intermittent Fever

If, however, in such an epidemic intermittent fever the first paroxysms have been left uncured, or if the patients have been weakened by improper allopathic treatment; then the inherent psora that exists, alas! in so many persons, although in a latent state, becomes developed, takes on the type of the intermittent fever, and to all appearance continues to play the part of the epidemic intermittent fever, so that the medicine, which would have been useful in the first paroxysms (rarely an antipsoric), is now no longer suitable and cannot be of any service. We have now to do with a psoric intermittent fever only, and this will generally be subdued by minute and rarely repeated doses of sulphur or hepar sulphuris in a high potency.

243 Therapeautics: Point III: Intermittent Fever^(a)

In those often very pernicious intermittent fevers which attack a single person, not residing in a marshy district, we must also at first, as in the case of acute diseases generally, which they resemble in respect to their psoric origin, employ for some days, to render what service it may, a homeopathic remedy selected for the special case from the other class of proved (not antipsoric) medicines; but if, notwithstanding this procedure, the recovery is deferred, we know that we have psora on the point of its development, and that in this case antipsoric medicines alone can effect a radical cure.

244 Therapeautics: Point III: Intermittent Fever

The intermittent fevers endemic in marshy districts and tracts of country frequently exposed to inundations, give a great deal of work to physicians of the old school, and yet a healthy man may in his youth become's habituated even to marshy districts and may remain in good health, provided he preserves a faultless regimen and his system is not lowered by want, fatigue or pernicious passions. The intermittent fevers endemic there would at the most only attack him on his first arrival; but one or two very small doses of a highly potentized solution of cinchona bark would, conjointly with the well - regulated mode of living just alluded to, speedily free him from the disease. But persons who, while taking sufficient corporeal exercise and pursuing a healthy system of intellectual occupations and bodily regimen, cannot be cured of marsh intermittent fever by one or a few of such small doses of cinchona - in such persons psora, striving to develop itself, always lies at the root of their malady, and their intermittent fever cannot be cured in the marshy district without antipsoric treatment.¹ It sometimes happens that when these patients exchange, without delay, the marshy district for one that is dry and mountainous, recovery apparently ensues (the fever leaves them) if they be not yet deeply sunk in disease, that is to say, if the psora was not completely developed in them and can consequently return to its latent state; but they will never regain perfect health without antipsoric treatment.

1. Large oft-repeated doses of cinchona bark, as also concentrated cinchinic remedies, such as the sulphate of quinine, have certainly, have certainly the power of feeing such patients form the periodical fits of the marsh ague; but those thus deceived tin to belief that they are cured remain diseased in another [ 'frequently with and incurabel quinine intoxication.(See 276 note)' in the Sixth Edition] with out antipsoric aid.

245 Therapeautics: Point III: Posology^(a)

Having thus seen what attention should, in the homeopathic treatment, be paid to the chief varieties of diseases and to the peculiar circumstances connected with them, we now pass on to what we have to say respecting the remedies and the mode of employing them, together with the diet and regimen to be observed during their use.

Every perceptibly progressive and strikingly increasing amelioration in a transient (acute) or persistent (chronic) disease, is a condition which, as long as it lasts, completely precludes every repetition of the administration of any medicine whatsoever, because all the good the medicine taken continues to effect is newhastening towards its completion. Every new dose of any medicine whatsoever, even of the one last administered, that has hitherto shown itself to be salutary, would in this case disturb the work of amelioration.*

*This paragraph is totally omitted in the Sixth Edition.

246^(a) Therapeautics: Point III: Posology Fifth Edition

On the other hand, the slowly progressive amelioration consequent upon a very minute dose, whose selection has been accurately homeopathic, when it has met with no hindrance to the duration of its action, sometimes accomplishes all the good that the remedy in question is capable from its nature of performing in a given case, in periods of forty, fifty or a hundred days. This is, however, but rarely the case; and besides, it must be a matter of great importance to the physician, as well as to the patient that, were it possible, this period should be diminished to one - half, one - quarter, and even still less, so that a much more rapid cure might be obtained. This may be very happily affected, as recent and oft - repeated observations have shown, under three conditions:

1. In the former editions of the Organon, ( see here) I have advised that a single dose of a well-selected homoeopathic medicine should always be allowed first fully to expend its action before a new medicine is given or the same one repeated -- a doctrine which was the result of the positive experience that neither by a larger dose of the remedy, which may have been well chosen (as has been again recently proposed, which would be very like a retrograde movement), nor, by what amounts to the same thing, several doses of it given in quick succession, can the greatest possible good be effected in the treatment of diseases, more especially of chronic ones.  The reason for this, is that by such a procedure the vital force, does not quietly adapt itself to the transition from the natural disease, to the similar medicinal disease, but is usually so violently excited and disturbed, by a larger dose, or by smaller doses of even a homoeopathically chosen remedy given rapidly one after the other, that in most cases its reaction will be anything but salutary and will do more harm than good.

As long as no more efficacious mode of proceeding than that then taught by me was discovered, the safe philanthropic maxim of sin non juvat, modo ne noceat, rendered it imperative for the homoeopathic practitioner, for whom the weal of his fellow-creatures was the highest object, to allow, as a general rule in diseases, but a single dose at a time, and that the very smallest, of the carefully selected remedy to act upon the patient, and moreover, to exhaust its action. The very smallest, I repeat, for it holds good and will continue to hold good as a homoeopathic therapeutic maxim not to be refuted by any experience in the world, that the best doses of the properly selected remedy is always the very smallest one, in one of the high potencies (X), as well for chronic as for acute as for acute diseases - a truth that is the inestimable property of pure homoeopathy and which as long as allopathy and the new mongrel sect, whose treatment is a mixture of allopathic and homoeopathic processes, which is not much better, continues to gnaw like a cancer at the life of sick human beings, and to ruin them by large and ever larger doses of drugs, will keep pure homoeopathy separated from these spurious arts as by an impassable gulf.

On the other hand, however, practice shows us that though a single one of these small doses may suffice to accomplish almost all that it was possible for this medicine to do under the circumstances, in some, and especially in slight cases of disease, particularly in those of young children and very delicate and excitable adults, yet that in many, indeed in most cases, not only of very chronic diseases that have already made great progress and have frequently been aggravated by a previous employment of inappropriate medicines, but also of serious acute diseases, one such smallest dose of medicine in our highly potentized dynamization is evidently insufficient to effect all the curative action that might be expected from that medicine, for it may unquestionably be requisite to administer several of them, in order that the vital force may be pathogenetically altered by them to such a degree and its salutary reaction stimulated to such a height, as to enable it to completely extinguish, by its reaction, the whole of that portion of the original disease that it lay in the power of the well-selected homoeopathic remedy to eradicate; the best chosen medicine in such a small dose, given but once, might certainly be of some service, but would not be nearly sufficient.

But the careful homoeopathic physician would not venture soon to repeat the same dose of the same remedy again, as from such a practice he has frequently experienced no advantage, but most frequently, on close observation, decided disadvantage. He generally witnessed aggravation, from even the smallest dose of the most suitable remedy, which he has given one day, when he repeated the next day and the next.

Now, in cases where he was convinced of the correctness of his choice of the homoeopathic medicine, in order to obtain more benefit for thepatient than he was able to get hitherto from prescribing a single small dose, the idea often naturally struck him to increase the dose, since, for the reason given above, one single dose only should be given; an, for instance, in place of giving a single very minute globule moistened with the medicine in the highest dynamization, to administer six, seven or eight of them at once, and even a half or a whole drop. But the result was almost always less favourable than it should have been; it was often actually unfavourable, often even very bad - an injury that, in a patient so treated, is difficult to repair.

The difficulty in this case is not solved by giving,instead, lower dynamizations of the remedy in a large dose.

Thus, increasing the strength of the single doses of the homoeopathic medicine, with the view of effecting the degree of pathogenic excitation of the vital force necessary to produce satisfactory salutary reaction, fails altogether as experience teaches, to accomplish the desired object.  This vital force is thereby too violent and too suddenly assailed and excited to allow it time to exercise a gradual equable, salutary reaction, to adapt itself to the modification effected in it; hence it strives to repel, as if it were an enemy, the medicine attacking it in excessive force, by means of vomiting, diarrhoea, fever, perspiration, and so forth, and thus in a great measure it diverts and renders nugatory the aim of the incautious physician -- little or no good towards curing the disease will thereby be accomplished; on the contrary, the patient will perceptibly weakened and, for a long time, the administration of even the smallest dose of the same remedy must not be thought of unless we would wish it to injure the patient.( Nugatory =Trifling, worthless, futile; inoperative, not valid.) g.

But it happens, moreover, that a number of the smallest doses given for the same object in quick succession accumulate in the organism into a kind of excessively large dose, with (a few cases excepted) similar bad results; in this case the vital force, not being able to recover itself betwixt every dose, though it be but small, becomes oppressed and overwhelmed, and thus being incapable of reacting in a salutary manner, it is necessitated passively to allow involuntary the continuance of the over-strong medicinal disease that has thus been forced upon it, just in the same manner as we may every day observe from the allopathic abuse of large cumulative doses of one and the same medicine, to the lasting injury of the patient.

Now, therefore, in order, whilst avoiding the erroneous method I have here pointed out, to attain the desired object more certainly than hitherto, and to administer the medicine selected in such a manner that it must exercise all its efficacy without injury to the patient, that it may effect all the good it is capable of performing in a given case of disease, I have lately adopted a particular method.

I perceived that, in order to discover this true middle path, we must be guided as well;

i. by the nature of the different medicinal substances,

ii. by the corporeal constitution of the patient,

iii. and the magnitude of the disease,

so that - to give an example from the use of sulphur in chronic (psoric) diseases - the smallest dose of it (tinct, sulph. X⁰) can seldom be repeated with advantage, even in the most robust patients and in fully developed psora, oftener than every seven days, a period of time, which must be proportionally lengthened when we have to treat weaker and more excitable patients of this kind. In such cases we would do well to give such a dose only every nine, twelve, or fourteen days, and continue to repeat the medicine until it ceases to be of service. We thus find (to abide by the instance of sulphur) that in psoric diseases seldom fewer than four, often however, six, eight and even ten doses ( tinct. sulph. X⁰) are required to be successively administered at these intervals for the complete annihilation of the whole portion of the chronic disease that is eradicable by sulphur - provided always there had been no previous allopathic abuse of sulphur in the case. Thus even a (primary) scabious eruption of recent origin, though it may have spread all over the body, may be perfectly cured, in persons who are not too weakly, by a dose of tinct sulph. X⁰ given every seven days, in the course of from ten to twelve weeks (accordingly with ten or twelve such globules), so that it will seldom be necessary to aid the cure with a few doses of carb. veg. X⁰ (also given at the rate of one dose per week) without the slightest external treatment besides frequent changes of linen and good regimen.

When for other serious chronic diseases also we may consider it requisite, as far as we can calculate, to give eight, nine or ten doses of tinct. sulph. ( at X⁰ ) it is yet more expedient in such cases, instead of giving them in uninterrupted succession, to interpose after every, or every second or third dose, a dose of another medicine, which in this case is next in point of homoeopathic suitableness to sulphur (usually hep. sulph.) and to allow this likewise to act for eight, nine, twelve or fourteen days before again commencing a course of three doses of sulphur.

But it not infrequently happens that the vital force refuses to permit several doses of sulphur, even though they may be essential for the cure of the chronic malady and are given at the intervals mentioned above, to act quietly on itself; this refusal it reveals by some, though moderate, sulphur symptoms, which it allows to appear in the patient during the treatment. In such cases it is sometimes advisable to administer a small dose of nux vom. X^0, allowing it to act for eight or ten days, in order to dispose the system again to allow succeeding doses of the sulphur to act quietly and effectually upon it. In those cases for which it is adapted, puls. X ⁰ is preferable.

But the vital force shows the greatest resistance to the salutary action upon itself of the strongly indicated sulphur, and even exhibits manifest aggravation of the chronic disease, though the sulphur be given in the very smallest dose, though only a globule of the size of a mustard seed moistened with tinct. sulph X ⁰ be smelt, if the sulphur have formerly (it may be years since) been improperly given allopathically in large doses. This is one lamentable circumstance that renders the best medical treatment of chronic disease almost impossible among the many that the ordinary bungling treatment of chronic diseases by the old school would leave us nothing to do butto deplore, were there not some mode of getting over the difficulty.

In such cases we have only to let the patient smell a single time strongly at a globule the size of a mustard seed moistened with mercur metall. X, and allow this olfaction to act for about nine days, in order to make the vital force again disposed to permit the sulphur (at least the olfaction of tinct. sulph. X⁰ ) to exercise a beneficial influence on itself - a discovery for which we are indepted to Dr. Griesselich, of Carlsruhe.

Of the other antipsoric remedies (except perhaps phosph.X) it is necesssary to administer fewer doses at similar intervals ( of sepia, and sil. as longer intervals, without any intermediate remedy, where they are homoeopathically indicated), in order to cure all that curable in a given case by the remedy indicated. Hep. sulph. calc. (hep.) X⁰ can rearely be taken or smelt at shorter intervals than every fourteen or fifteen days.

Before making such a reptition of the dose the physician must of course be convinced that his selection is truly homoeopathic.

In acute diseases, the time for repeating the fitly chosen medicine is regulated by the greater or less reapidity of the course of the disease we have to comabt, so that, when necessary, it should be repeated after twenty-four, sixteen, twelve, eight, four and even fewer hours, if the medicine continues to to prove beneficial without interruption-without producing new symptoms-but it is not sufficiently rapid in its action for the excessively quick and dangerous course of the acute diseases, so that in cholera the most speedily fatal disase we know, at the commencement of the disease, one or two drops of a mild solution of camphor must be given every five minutes, in order to procure speedy and certain relief, and in the more developeded cholera, doses of cuprum, veratrum, phosphorus &c.(X⁰), frequently require to be given every two or three hours, and also arsenic, carbo vegetabilis, &c., at similar short intervals.

In the treatment of so-called typhus fevers and other continued fevers, the repetition, tin smallest doses, of the medicine that proves itself of service, must be regulated by the above directions.

In pure syphilitic diseases I have generally found a single dose of metallic mercury (X⁰) sufficient; and yet not infrequently two or three such doses were requisite, given intervals of six or eight days, when the slightest complication with psora was perceptible.

In cases where some particular medicine is urgently indicated, by where the patient is very excitabel and wead, a more efficient and certain procedure that giving a more substantial, though ever som small doses of the highly potentized medicine, is a single olfaction fo a dry globule the size of a mustard seed that has been impregnated with the same medicine;this is effected by holding the mouth of the phial that contains it first in one and then ( if t is wished to give a stronger dose) in the other nostril and makin a monentary inspiration; the action f this medicned, thus administered, lasts just as long as that of the medicine that has been taken in substance, hence even this olfaction ought not to be repeated at shorter intervals.

Note: X = 30c and X⁰ = 1 globule of X. g.

Sec. 246 Therapeautics: Point III: Sixth Edition Posology (repetition) rewritten, as follows:

['Every perceptibly progressive and strikingly increasing amelioration during treatment is a condition which, as long as it lasts, completely precludes every repetition of the administration of any medicine whatsoever, because all the good the medicine taken continues to effect is now hastening towards its completion. This is not infrequently the cause in acute diseases, but in more chronic diseases, on the other hand, a single dose of an appropriately selected homeopathic remedy will at times complete even with but slowly progressive improvement and give the help which such a remedy in such a case can accomplish naturally within 40, 50, 60, 100 days. This is, however, but rarely the case; and besides, it must be a matter of great importance to the physician as well as to the patient that were it possible, this period should be diminished to one - half, one - quarter, and even still less, so that a much more rapid cure might be obtained. And this may be very happily affected, as recent and oft - repeated observations have taught me under the following conditions:

Firstly, if the medicine selected with the utmost care was perfectly homeopathic;
Secondly, if it is highly potentized, dissolved in water and given in proper small dose that experience has taught as the most suitable in definite intervals for the quickest accomplishment of the cure but with the precaution, that the degree of every dose deviate somewhat from the preceding and following in order that the vital principle, which is to be altered to a similar medicinal disease, be not aroused to untoward reactions and revolt as is always the case* with unmodified and especially rapidly repeated doses. ']

*[ What I said in the fifth edition to the Organon, in a long note to this paragraph in order to prevent these undesirable reactions of the vital energy, was all that the experience I  had then justified. But during the last four or five years, however, all these difficulties are wholly solved by my new altered but prefected method.  The same carefully selected medicine may now be given daily and for months, if necessary in this way, namely, after the lower degree of potency has been used for one or two weeks in the treatment of chronic disease, advance is made in the same way to higher degrees, beginning according to the new dynamization method, taught herewith with the use of the lowest degrees)' ].

247 Therapeautics: Point III: Fifth Edition  Posology *

Under these conditions, the smallest doses of the best selected homeopathic medicine may be repeated with the best, often with incredible results, at intervals of fourteen, twelve, ten, eight, seven days, and, where rapidity is requisite, in chronic diseases resembling cases of acute disease, at still shorter intervals, but in acute diseases at very much shorter periods - every twenty - four, twelve, eight, four hours, in the very acutest every hour, up to as often as every five minutes, - in ever case in proportion to the more or less rapid course of the diseases and of the action of the medicine employed, as is more distinctly explained in the last note.

* Sec. 247 Therapeautics: Point III: Sixth Edition Posology rewritten, as follows:

['It is impractical to repeat the same unchanged dose of a remedy once, not to mention its frequent repetition (and at short intervals in order not to delay the cure). The vital principle does not accept such unchanged (identical) doses without resistance, ie., without other symptoms of the medicine manifesting themselves, which are not similar to the disease to be cured.g  This is because the former dose has already accomplished the expected change in the vital principle and a second dynamically wholly similar and unchanged dose of the same medicine, no longer finds, therefore, the same conditions of the vital force.g The patient may indeed be made sick in another way by receiving other such unchanged doses, even sicker than he was, for now only those symptoms of the given remedy remain active, which were not homeopathic to the original disease, hence no step towards cure can follow.  Only a true aggravation of the condition of the patient results.g  But if the succeeding dose is changed slightly every time, namely potentized somewhat higher ( 269 - 270 ) then the vital principle may be altered without difficulty by the same medicine (the sensation of natural disease diminishing) and thus the cure brought nearer.¹ ]

1. [ 'We ought not even with the best chosen homoeopathic medicine, for instance one pellet of the same potency that was beneficial at first, to let the patient have a second or third dose, taken dry. In the same way, if the medicine was dissolved in water and the first dose proved beneficial, a second or third and even smaller dose from the bottle standing undisturbed, even in intervals of a few days, would prove no longer beneficial, even though the original preparation had been potentized with ten succussions or as I suggested later with but two succussions in order to obviate this disadvantage and this according to above reasons. But through modification of every dose in its dynamiztion degree, as I herewith teach, there exists no offence, even if the doses be repeated more frequently, even if the medicine be ever so highly potentized with ever so many succussions. It almost seems as if the best selected homoeopathic remedy could best extract the morbid disorder from the vital force and in chronic disease to extinguish the same only if applied in several different forms.']

248 Therapeautics: Point III: Posology Fifth Edition

The dose of the same medicine may be repeated several times according to circumstances, but only so long as until either recovery ensues, orthe same remedy ceases to do good and the rest of the disease, presenting a different group of symptoms, demands a different homeopathic remedy.

248 Therapeautics: Point III: Posology Sixth Edition re-written, as follows:

['For this purpose, we potentize a new the medicinal solution,¹ with perhaps 8, 10, 12 succussions, from which we give the patient one or (increasingly) several teaspoonful doses, in long lasting diseases daily or every second day, in acute diseases every two to six hours and in very urgent cases every hour or oftener. Thus in chronic diseases, every correctly chosen homeopathic medicine, even those whose action is of long duration, may be repeated daily for months with ever increasing success. If the solution is used up, in seven to fifteen days, it is necessary to add to the next solution of the same medicine, if still indicated, one or (though rarely) several pellets of a higher potency, with which we continue, so long as the patient experiences continued improvement, without encountering a complaint, that he never had before in his life. For if this happens, if the balance of the disease appears in a group of altered symptoms then another medicine, one more homeopathically related, must be chosen in place of the last and administered in the same repeated doses, mindful, however, of modifying the solution of every dose with thorough vigorous succussions, thus changing its degree of potency and increasing it somewhat.

On the other hand, should there appear during the almost daily repetition of the well indicated homeopathic remedy, towards the end of the treatment of a chronic disease, the so-called ( 161 ) homeopathic aggravations, in which casem the balance of the morbid symptoms seem again to increase somewhat, the medicinal disease, similar to the original, now alone persistently manifests itself. The doses in that case must then be reduced still further and repeated at longer intervals and possibly stopped several days, in order to see if the convalescence needs no further medicinal aid. The apparent symptoms (Schein-Symptome) caused by the excess of the homeopathic medicine, will soon disappear and leave undisturbed health in its wake.

If one is using in the treatment, a small vial, say a dram (3ml) of dilute alcohol, in which is contained and dissolved through succussion, one globule of the medicine, which is to be used by olfaction every two, three or four days, this also must be thoroughly succussed eight to ten times before each olfaction. ']

  1. Made in 40, 30, 20 ,15 or 8 tablespoonfuls of water with the addition of some alcohol or a piece of charcoal in order to preserve it. If charcoal is used. it is suspended by means of a thread in the vial and is taken out when the vial is succussed.

Instead of dissolving the medicinal globule (one rarely needs to use more than a globule of a thoroughly potentized medicine) in a large quantity of water, one can disolve it for example in only 7-8 tablespoonfuls of water, shake the bottle vigourously, poor a tablespoon of this into a glass containing 7-8 tablespoons of water, stir this vigorusly and a give the patient a specific a dose it.

If he is unusually excited and sensitive , a teaspoonfull fo this solution may be put in a second glass of water, thoroughly stirred and teaspoonful doses of more be given.There are patients of so great sensitiveness that a third or forth glass, similarly prepared, may be necessary. Each such prepared glass must be made fresh daily.The globule of the high potency is best crushed in a few grains of sugar of milk which the patient can put in the vial and be dissolved in the requisite quantity of water.( 8 tablespoonfulls = 200mls gw, but my converter says 118mls.)g.

• 1 Teaspoonfull = 4cc = 4mls
• 1 Desertspoonfull = 8cc = 8mls
• 1 Tablespoonfull = 15cc = 15mls (Gould's Medical Dictonary 5th Ed.)
• So 8 x 15 = 120mls
• See http://www.calculateme.com/Volume/index.htm

Commentary

249 Therapeautics: Point III: Aggravation

Every medicine prescribed for a case of disease which, in the course of its action, produces new and troublesome symptoms not appertaining to the disease to be cured, is not capable of effecting real improvement,1 and cannot be considered as homeopathically selected; it must, therefore, either, if the aggravation be considerable, be first partially neutralized as soon as possible by an antidote before giving the next remedy chosen more accurately according to similarity of action; or if the troublesome symptoms be not very violent, the next remedy must be given immediately, in order to take the place of the improperly selected one.*

1. As all experience shows that the dose of the specially suited homoeopathic medicine can scarcely be prepared too small to effect perceptible amelioration in the disease for which it is appropriate ( 275-278), we should act injudiciously and hurtfully were we when no improvement, or some, though it be even slight, aggravation ensues, to repeat or even increase the dose of the same medicine, as is done in the old system, under the delusion that it was not efficacious on account of its small quantity (its too small dose). Every aggravation by the production of new symptoms - when nothing untoward has occurred in the mental or physical regimen - invariably proves unsuitableness on the part of the medicine formerly given in the case of disease before us, but never indicates that the dose has been too weak.

* A new foot-note is added in the Sixth Edition, as follows.

[ ' The well informed and conscientiously careful physician will never be in a position to require an antidote in his practice if he will begin, as he should, to give the selected medicine in the smallest possible dose. Like minute doses of a better chosen remedy will re-establish order throughout.' ]

250 Therapeautics: Point III:

When, to the observant practitioner who accurately investigates the state of the disease, it is evident, in urgent cases after the lapse of only six, eight or twelve hours, that he has made a bad selection in the medicine last given, in that the patient's state is growing perceptibly, however slightly, worse from hour to hour, by the occurrence of new symptoms and sufferings.  It is not only allowable for him, but it is his duty to remedy his mistake, by the selection and administration of a homeopathic medicine not merely tolerably suitable, but the most appropriate possible for the existing state of the disease ( 167 ).

251 Therapeautics: Point III: Alternating actions^(a)

There are some medicines (e. g., ignatia, also bryonia and rhus, and sometimes belladonna) whose power of altering man's health consists chiefly in alternating actions - a kind of primary action-symptoms, that are in part opposed to each other. Should the practitioner find, on prescribing one of these, selected on strictly homeopathic principles, that no improvement follows, he will in most cases soon effect his object by giving (in acute diseases, even within a few hours) a fresh and equally small dose of the same medicine.¹

1. As I have more particularly described in the Indroduction to " Ignatia "(in the first volume of the Materia Medicia Pura).

252 Therapeautics: Point III:Evaluating a perscription^(a)

But should we find, during the employment of the other medicines in chronic (psoric) diseases, that the best selected homeopathic (antipsoric) medicine in the suitable (minutest) dose does not effect an improvement, this is asuresign that the cause that keeps up the disease still persists, and that there is some circumstances in the mode of life of the patient or in the situation in which he is placed, that must be removed in order that a permanent cure may ensue.

253 Therapeautics: Point III: Evaluating a perscription

Among the signs that, in all diseases, especially in such as are of an acute nature, inform us of a slight commencement of amelioration or aggravation that is not perceptible to every one, the state of mind and the whole demeanor of the patient are the most certain and instructive. In the case of ever so slight an improvement we observe a greater degree of comfort, increased calmness and freedom of the mind, higher spirits - a kind of return of the natural state. In the case of ever so small a commencement of aggravation we have, on the contrary, the exact opposite of this: a constrained helpless, pitiable state of the disposition, of the mind, of the whole demeanor, and of all gestures, postures and actions, which may be easily perceived on close observation, but cannot be described in words.¹

1. The signs of improvement in the disposition and mind, however, may be expected only soon after the medicine has been taken when the dose has been sufficiently minute ( ie.; as small as possible ) ; an unnecessarily larger dose, of even the most suitable homoeopathic medicine, acts to violently, and at first produces too great and too lasting a disturbance of the mind and disposition, to allow us soon to percieve the imperovement in them.I must here observe that this so essential rule is chiefly transgressed by presumptuous tyros in homoeopathy, and by physicians who are converted to homoeopathy from the ranks of the old school.From old prejudices these persons abhor the smallest doses of the lowest (a) dilutions of medicine in such cases, and hence they fail to experience the great advantages and blessings of that mode of proceeding which a thousandfold esperience has shown to be the most salutary; they cannot effect all that homoeopathy is capable of doing, and hence they have no claim to be considerde its adherents.

254 Therapeautics: Point III: Evaluating a perscription

The other new or increased symptoms or, on the contrary, the diminution of the original ones without any addition of new ones, will soon dispel all doubts from the mind of the attentively observing and investigating practitioner with regard to the aggravation or amelioration; though there are among patients persons who are either incapable of giving an account of this amelioration or aggravation, or are unwilling to confess it.

255 Therapeautics: Point III: Evaluating a perscription^(a)

But even with such individuals we may convince ourselves on this point by going with them through all the symptoms enumerated in our notes of the disease one by one, and finding that they complain of no new unusual symptoms in addition to these, and that none of the old symptoms are worse. If this be the case, and if an improvement in the disposition and mind have already been observed, the medicine must have effected positive diminution of the disease, or, if sufficient time have not yet elapsed for this, it will soon effect it.
Now, supposing the remedy is perfectly appropriate, if the improvement is delayed too long in making its appearance, this depends either on some error of conduct on the part of the patient, or* on the homeopathic aggravation produced by medicine lasting too long ( 157 ), consequently on the dose not being small enough.

* The remaining portion of this sentence is replaced in the Sixth Edition by the following phrase - ['on other interfering circumstances. ']

256 Therapeautics: Point III: Evaluating a perscription

On the other hand, if the patient mention the occurrence of some fresh accidents and symptoms of importance - signs that the medicine chosen has not been strictly homeopathic - even though he should good-naturedly assure us that he feels better, ['as is not infrequently the case in phthisical (pulmonary tuberculosis)g. patients with lung abscess' in the Sixth Edition ] we must not believe this assurance, but regard his state as aggravated as it will soon be perfectly apparent it is.

257 Therapeautics: Point III: Favourite Remedies

The true physician will take care to avoid making favorite remedies of medicines, the employment of which he has, by chance, perhaps found often useful, and which he has had opportunities of using with good effect. If he do so, some remedies or rarer use, which would have been more homeopathically suitable, consequently more serviceable, will often be neglected.

258 Therapeautics: Point III:

The true practitioner, moreover, will not practice with mistrustful weakness and neglect the employment of those remedies that he may now and then have employed with bad effects, owing to an erroneous selection (from his own fault, therefore), or avoid them for other (false) reasons, except that they were unhomeopathic for the case of disease before him. He must bear in mind the truth, that amungst the medicinal agents, invariably only one, deserves the preference in every case of disease, which corresponds most accurately by similarity to the totality of the characteristic symptoms, and that no paltry prejudices should interfere with this serious choice.

259 Therapeautics: Point III: Obstacles to cure

Considering the minuteness of the doses, necessary and proper, in homeopathic treatment, we can easily understand that during this treatment, everything must be removed from the diet and regimen, which can have any medicinal action, in order that the small dose may not be overwhelmed and extinguished or disturbed, by any foreign medicinal irritant.¹

1. The softest tones of a distant flute that in the still midnight hours would inspire a tenter heart with exalted feelings and dissolve it in religious ecastasy, are inaudible and powerless amid discordant cries and the noise of the day.

260 Therapeautics: Point III: Obstacles to cure

Hence the careful investigation into such obstacles to cure, is so much more necessary, in the case of patients affected by chronic diseases, as their diseases are usually aggravated by such noxious influences and other disease-causing errors in the diet and regimen, which often pass unnoticed.¹

1.  Coffee; fine Chinese and other hebal; teas; beer prepared with medicinal vegetable substances unsuitable for the patient's state;so-called fine liquors made with medicinal spices;all kinds of punch; spiced chocolate; odorous waters and perfumes of may kinds;strong-scented flowers in the apartment;tooth powders and essences and perfumed sachets compounded of drugs; highly spiced dishes and sauces;spiced cakes and ices; crude medicnial vegetables for soups; dishes of herbs, roots and stalks of plants possessing medicinal qualities; ['asparagus with long green tips, hops, and all vegetebles possessing medicinal properties, celery, onions' in the Sixth Edition] old cheese, and meats that are in a state of decomposition, or that possess medicinal properties (as the flesh and fat of pork, ducks and geese, or veal that is too young and sour viands), ought just as certainly to be kept from patients as they should avoid all excess in food, and in the use of sugar and salt, as also spirituous drinks ['undiluted with water' in the Sixth Edition' heated rooms, woolen colthing next the skin (which should be exchanged in warm, weather, first for cotton, then for linen garments), a sedentary life in close apartments, of the frequent indulgence in mere passive exercise (such as riding, driving or swiging), prolonged suckling, taking a long siesta in a recumbent posture (in bed), sitting up long at noght, uncleanliness, unnaaturaldebauchery, enervation by feadin obscene books, ['reading while lying down, Onanism of imperfect of suppressed intercourse in order ot prevent concetpion' in the Sixth Edition] subject of anger, grief, or vexation, a passion for play, over-exertion of mind or body, dwelling marshy districts, damp rooms, penurious living, &c. All these things must be as far as posible avoided of removed, in order that the core may not be obstructed of rendered impossibel.Some of my disciples seem needlessly to encrease the difficulties of the patoent's dietary by forbidding the use of may more, tolerably inderrerent things, whis not to be commended.

261 Therapeautics: Point III: Obstacles to cure

The most appropriate regimen during the employment of medicine in chronic diseases, consists in the removal of such obstacles to recovery, and in supplying where necessary, the reverse: innocent moral and intellectual recreation, active exercise in the open air in almost all kinds of weather (daily walks, slight manual labor), suitable, nutritious, unmedicinal food and drink, etc.

262 Therapeautics: Point III: Obstacles to cure (refusing food etc)

In acute diseases, on the other hand, - except in cases of mental alienation, the subtle, unerring internal sense of the awakened life - preserving faculty, determines so clearly and precisely, that the physician only requires to counsel the friends and attendants to put no obstacles in the way of this voice of nature by refusing anything the patient urgently desires in the way of food, or by trying to persuade him to partake of anything injurious.

263 Therapeautics: Point III: Obstacles to cure (food cravings)

The desire of the patient affected by an acute disease, with regard to food and drink, is certainly, chiefly for things that give palliative relief. They are, however, not strictly speaking of a medicinal character, and merely supply a sort of want. The slight hindrances, that the gratification of this desire, within moderate bounds, could oppose to the radical removal of the disease, will be amply counteracted and overcome, by the power of the homeopathically suited medicine and the vital force set free by it, as also by the refreshment that follows from taking what has been so ardently longed for. In a like manner, in acute diseases, the temperature of the room and the heat or coolness of the bed - coverings must also be arranged entirely in conformity with the patients' wish. He must be kept free from all over - exertion of mind and exciting emotions.

264 Therapeautics: Point III: Obstacles to cure

The true physician must be provided with genuine medicines of unimpaired strength , so that he may be able to rely upon their therapeutic powers; he must be able, himself, to judge of their genuineness.

265 Therapeautics: Point III: Obstacles to cure

It should be a matter of conscience with him to be thoroughly convinced in every case that the patient always takes the right medicine.

265: Therapeautics: Point III: The following is the addition in the Sixth Edition:

['and therefore he must give the patient the correctly chosen medicine prepared, moreover, by himself'.]

266 Therapeautics: Point III: Pharmacy^(a) Animal and Vegitable

Substances belonging to the animal and vegetable kingdoms possess their medicinal qualities most perfectly in their raw state.¹

1. All crude animal and vegetable substances have a greater or less amount of medicinal power, and are capable of altering mans health, each in its own peculiar way. Those plants and animals used by the most enlightened nations as food, have this advantage over all others, that they contain a larger amount of nutritious constituents; and they differ from the others in this; that their medicinal powers in their raw state are either not very great in themselves, or are diminished by the culinary processes, which they are subjected to in cooking for domestic use.

Such processes include:-

Expression of the pernicious juice (like the cassava root of South America)
Fermentation (of the rye-flour in the dough for making bread,
of sour-crout prepared without vinegar and pickled gherkins),
Smoking and the action of heat (in boiling, stewing, toasting, roasting, baking), whereby the medicinal parts of many of these substances are in part destroyed and dissipated.
By the addition of salt (pickling) and vinegar (sauces, salads) animal and vegetable substances are certain lose much of their injurious medicinal qualities, but other disadvantages result from these additions.

But even those plants that possess most medicinal power lose that in part or completely by such processes. By perfect desiccation all the roots of the various kinds of iris, of the horseradish, of the different species or arum and the peonies lose almost all their medicinal virtue. The juice of the most virulent plants often becomes inert, pitch-like mass, from the heat employed in preparing the ordinary extracts. By merely standing a long time, the expressed juice of the most deadly plants becomes quite powerless; even at moderate atmospheric temperature it rapidly takes on the vinous* fermentation (and thereby loses much of its medicinal power), and immediately thereafter the acetous and putrid fermentation, whereby it is deprived of all peculiar medicinal properties; the fecula** that is then deposited, if well washed, is quite innocuous, like ordinary starch. By the transudation that takes place when a number of green plants are laid one above the other, the greatest part of their medicinal properties is lost.

* adjective: of, resembling, or associated with wine : a vinous smell.

** fecula \fec"u*la\, n.; pl. fecul[ae] [L.faecula burnt tartar or salt of tartar, dim. of faex, faecis, sediment, dregs: cf. F. f['e]cule.]
Any pulverulent matter obtained from plants by simply breaking down the texture, washing with water, and subsidence. Especially:
(a) The nutritious part of wheat; starch or farina; -- called also amylaceous fecula.
(b) The green matter of plants; chlorophyll.
[1913 Webster]

267 Therapeautics: Point III: Pharmacy: Plants:Fresh

We gain possession of the powers of indigenous plants and of such as may be had in a fresh state in the most complete and certain manner by mixing their freshly expressed juice immediately with equal parts of spirits of wine of a strength sufficient to burn in a lamp.

After this has stood a day and a night in a close stoppered bottle and deposited the fibrinous and albuminous matters, the clear superincumbent fluid is then to be decanted off for medicinal use.¹

All fermentation of the vegetable juice will be at once checked by the spirits of wine mixed with it and rendered impossible in future, and the entire medicinal power of the vegetable juice is thus retained (perfect and uninjured) for ever by keeping the preparation in well corked bottles and excluded from the sun's light.²

1. Buchholz (Taschenb. f. Scheidek. u. Apoth. a. d. J., 1815, Weimar, Abth. I, vi) assures his readers (and his reviewer in the Leipziger Literaturzeitung, 1816, No. 82, does not contradict him) that for this excellent mode of operating medicines we have to thank the campaign in Russia, whence it was (in 1812) imported into Germany. According to the noble practice of many Germans to be unjust towards their own countrymen, he conceals the fact that this discovery and those directions, which he quotes in my very words from the first edition of the Organon of Rational Medicine, 230 and note, proceed from me, and that I first published them to the world two years before the Russian campaign (the Organon appeared in 1810). Some folks would rather assign the origin of a discovery to the deserts of Asia than to a German to whom the honor belongs. O tempora! O mores!
Alcohol has certainly been sometimes before this used for mixing with vegetable juices, e.g., to preserve them some time before making extracts of them, but never with the view of administering them in this form.

2. Although equal parts of alcohol and freshly expressed juice are usually the most suitable proportion for affecting the deposition of the fibrinous and albuminous matters, yet for plants that contain much thick mucus (e.g. Symphytum officinale, Viola tricolor, etc.), or an excess of albumen (e.g., Aethusa cynapium, Solanum nigrum, etc.), a double proportion of alcohol is generally required for this object.

Plants that are very deficient in juice, as Oleander, Buxus, Taxus, Ledum, Sabina, etc., must first be pounded up alone into a moist, fine mass and the stirred up with a double quantity of alcohol, in order that the juice may combine with it, and being thus extracted by the alcohol, may be pressed out; these latter may also when dried be brought with milk-sugar to the millionfold trituration, and then be further diluted and potentized (v. 271)

268 Therapeautics: Point III: Pharmacy :Plants:Preservation:Powder

The other exotic plants, barks, seed and roots that cannot be obtained in the fresh state, will never be accepted in powerdered form by the sensible physician on trust; he will make sure that they are genuine while they are still in crude, unpowdered form and before making any medicinal use of them whatsoever.¹

In order to preserve them in powdered form, one has to take a precaution, which has hitherto been almost unknown to phamacists, and hence powders, even of well-dried animal and vegetable substances could not be preserved uninjured even in well-corked bottles.

The entire crude vegetable substances, though perfectly dry, still contain, a certain amount of moisture,, to hold their fabric together. While this amount does not allow the unpulverized drug to spoil, it is quite enough to spoil the drug, when it is finely pulverized.

The animal or vegetable substance, which in its entire state was perfectly dry, furnishes, therefore, when finely pulverized, a somewhat moist powder, which without rapidly becoming spoilt and mouldy, cannot yet be preserved in corked bottles if not previously freed from this superfluous moisture. This is the best effected by spreading out the powder in a flat tin saucer with a raised edge, which floats in a vessel full of boiling water (i.e. a water-bath), and, by means of stirring it about, drying it to such a degree that all the small atoms of it (no longer stick together in lumps, but) like dry, fine sand, are easily separated from each other, and are readily converted into dust.

In this dry state the fine powders may be kept forever uninjured in well-corked and sealed bottles, in all their original complete medicinal power, without ever being injured by mites or mould; and they are best preserved when the bottles are kept protected from the daylight (in covered boxes, chests, cases).If not shutup in air-tight vessels and not preserved from access of the light of the sun and day, all animal and vegetable substances in time gradually lose their medicinal power more and more, even in the entire state, but still more in the form of powder.

269^(a) 5th. Therapeautics: Point III: Pharmacy:Potentisation

The homeopathic system of medicine develops for its special use, to a hitherto unheard of degree, the spirit-like medicinal powers of the crude substances, by means of a process peculiar to it, and which has hitherto never been tried, whereby they all become immeasurably and penetratingly efficacious ¹ and remedial, even those that in the crude state, give no evidence of the slightest medicinal power on the human body. >> 270 in the 5th.

1. This footnote is added here in the Sixth Edition:

[ Long before I made this discovery, people were aware throught experience of different changes that can be brought about in different natural substances by means of friction, for instance, warmth, heat, fire; development of odor in odorless objects; magnetization of steel; and so forth. But all these properties produced by friction, manifested only on a liveless physical level, whereas there is a law of nature by which physiological and pathogenic forces capable of altering the health of the living organism, are generated in the crude material of drugs, even in such as had never shown any medicinal properties. This is brought about by trituration and succussion, but under the condition of employing a indifferent vehicle in certain proportions. This wonderful law, which is physical but more especially physiological and pathogenic, was not known before me. No wonder then, that the present students of nature and physicians (so for unknowing) cannot have faith in the magical curative powers of the minute doses of medicines prepared according to homoeopathic rules (dynamized). ]

269 6th Ed. Therapeautics: Point III: Pharmacy - Another paragraph with footnotes is added in the Sixth Edition, as follows:

['This remarkable change in the qualities of natural bodies develops the latent, hitherto unperceived, as if slumbering ¹ hidden, dynamic (& 11) powers which influence the life principle, and change the wellbeing of animal life.²  This is effected by mechanical action upon their smallest particles by means of rubbing and shaking and through the addition of an indifferent substance, dry of fluid, are separated from each other. This process is called dynamizing, potentizing (development of medicinal power) and the products are dynamizations or potencies in different degrees.³.]

1. The same thing is seen in a bar of iron and steel where a slumbering trace of latent magnetic force cannot but be recognized in their interior. Both, after their completion by means of the forge stand upright, repulse the north pole of a magnetic needle with the lower end and attract the south pole, while the upper end shows itself as the south pole of the magnetic needle. But this is only a latent force; not even the finest iron particles can be drawn magnetically or held on either end of such a bar.Only after this bar of steel is dynamized, rubbing it with a dull file in one direction, will it become a true active powerful magnet, one able to attract iron and steel to itself and impart to another bar of steel by mere contact and even some distance away, magnetic power and this in a higher degree the more it has been rubbed. In the same way will triturating a medicinal substance and shaking of its solution (dynamization, potentation) develop the medicinal powers hidden within and manifest them more and more or if one may say so, spiritualizes the material substance itself.

2. On this account it refers to the increase and stronger development of their power to cause changes in the health of animals and men if these natural substances in this improved state, are brought very near to the living sensitive fibre or come in contact with it (by means of intake or olfaction). Just as a magnetic bar especially if its magnetic force is increased (dynamized) can show magnetic power only in a needle of steel whose pole is near or touches it. The steel itself remains unchanged in the remaining chemical and physical properties and can bring about no changes in other metals (for instance, in brass), just as little as dynamized medicines can have any action upon lifeless things.

3. We hear daily how homoeopathic medicinal potencies are called mere dilutions, when they are the very opposite, i.e., a true opening up of the natural substances bringing to light and revealing the hidden specific medicinal powers contained within and brought forth by rubbing and shaking.The aid of a chosen, unmedicinal medium of attenuation is but a secondary condition.  Simple dilution, for instance, the solution of a grain of salt will become water, the grain of salt will disappear in the dilution with much water and will never develop into medicinal salt which by means of our well prepared dynamization, is raised to most marvellous power.

270 Therapeautics: Point III: Pharmacy, Fifth Edition: Liquids, Vegitable juice

Thus two drops of the fresh vegetable juice mingled with equal parts of alcohol are diluted with ninety - eight drops of alcohol and potentized by means of two succussions, whereby the first development of power is formed and this process is repeated through twenty-nine more phials, each of which is filled three - quarters full with ninety-nine drops of alcohol, and each succeeding phial is to be provided with one drop from the preceding phial (which has already been shaken twice) and is in its turn twice shaken,¹ and in the same manner at last the thirtieth development of power (potentized decillionth dilution X) which is the one most generally used.

1. In order to maintain a fixed and measured standard for developing the power of liquid medicines, multiplied experience and careful observation have led me to adopt two succussions for each phial, in preference to the greater number formerly employed (by which the medicines were too highly potentized).
There are, however, homoeopathists who carry about with them on their visits to patients homoeopathic medicines in the fluid state, and who yet assert that they do not become more highly potentized in the course of time, but they thereby show their want of ability to observe correctly.  
I discovered a grain of soda in half an once* of water mixed with alcohol in a phial, which was thereby filled two-thirds full, and shook this solution continuously for half an hour, and this fluid was in potency and energy equal to the thirtieth development of power.

(1 grain = 0.06479891g and *0.5oz = 29.57353mL)

( Say 50mg soda in 30mL H ₂O)

Someone needs to define soda.  (Soda 1. A term loosely applied to various salts of sodium, esp. to caustic soda (sodium hydroxide) and baking soda (sodium bicarbonate).g.

270 Therapeautics: Part III: Pharmacy: Trituration etc. Sixth Edition is wholly rewritten in the, as follows:

['In order to best obtain this development of power, a small part of the substance to be dynamized, say one grain (65mg), is triturated ^* for three hours with three times one hundred grains (19.5g) sugar of milk according to the method described below¹ up to the one millionth part in powder form. For reasons given below (b) one grain of this powder is dissolved in 500 drops of a mixture of one part of alcohol and four parts of distilled water, of which one drop is put in a vial.
To this are added 100 drops of pure alcohol² and given one hundred strong succussions with the hand against a hard but elastic body.³ This is the medicine in the first degree of dynamization with which small sugar globules⁴may then be moistened⁵ and quickly spread on blotting paper to dry and kept in a well-corked vial with the sign of "I", the first degree of potency. Only one⁶ globule of this is taken for further dynamization, put in a second new vial (with a drop a water in order to dissolve it) and then with 100 powerful succussions.

With this alcoholic medicinal fluid globules are again moistened, spread upon blotting paper and dried quickly, put into a well - stoppered vial and protected from heat and sun light and given the sign "II" of the second potency. And in this way the process is continued until the 29th is reached. Then with 100 drops of alcohol by means of 100 succussions, an alcoholic medicinal fluid is formed with which the 30th dynamization degree is given to properly moistened and dried sugar globules.

By means of this manipulation of crude drugs are produced preparations which only in this way reach the full capacity to forcibly influence the suffering parts of the sick organism. In this way, by means of similar artificial morbid affection, the influence of the natural disease on the life principle present within is neutralized. By means of this mechanical procedure, provided it is carried out regularly according to the above teaching, a change is effected in the given drug, which in its crude state shows itself only as material, at times as unmedicinal material but by means of such higher and higher dynamization, it is changed and subtlized at last into spirit⁷ - like medicinal power, which, indeed,in itself does not fall within our senses but for which the medicinally prepared globule, dry, but more so when dissolved in water, becomesthe carrier , and in this condition, manifests the healing power of this invisible force in the sick body. ']

* Triturate: verb, grind to a fine powder.

1. One-third of one hundred grains sugar of milk ( 2.1g ) is put in a glazed porcelain mortar, the bottom dulled previously by rubbing it with fine, moist sand.
Upon this powder is put one grain of the powdered drug to be triturated (one drop of quicksilver, petroleum, etc.).
The sugar of milk used for dynamization must be of that special pure quality that is crystallized on strings and comes to us in the shape of long bars.
For a moment the medicines and powder are mixed with a porcelain spatula and triturated rather strongly, six to seven minutes, with the pestle rubbed dull, then the mass is scraped from the bottom of the mortar and from the pestle for three to four minutes, in order to make it homogeneous.
This is followed by triturating it in the same way 6 - 7 minutes without adding anything more and again scraping 3 - 4 minutes from what adhered to the mortar and pestle.

The second third of the sugar of milk is now added, mixed with the spatula and again triturated 6 - 7 minutes, followed by the scraping for 3 - 4 minutes and trituration without further addition for 6 - 7 minutes.

The last third of sugar of milk is then added, mixed with the spatula and triturated as before 6 -7 minutes with most careful scraping together.
The powder thus prepared is put in a vial, well corked, protected from direct sunlight to which the id of the substance and the designation of the first product marked /100 is given.
In order to raise this product to 1/10000, one grain of the powdered 1/100 is mixed with the third part of 100 grains (2.1g)of powdered sugar of milk and then proceed as before, but every third must be carefully triturated twice thoroughly each time for 6 -7 minutes and scraped together for 3 -4 minutes before the second and last third of sugar of milk is added.
After each third, the same procedure is taken.

When all is finished, the powder is put in a well corked vial and labelled /10000, i.e., (I), each grain containing 1/1,000,000 the original substance. Accordingly, such a trituration of the three degrees requires six times six to seven minutes for triturating and six times 3 -4 minutes for scraping, thus one hour for every degree. After one hour such trituration of the first degree, each grain will contain 1/000; of the second 1/10,000; and in the third 1/1,000,000 of the drug used.*Mortar and spatula must be cleaned well before they are used for another medicine. Washed first with warm water and dried, both mortar and pestle, as well as spatula are then put in a kettle of boiling water for half an hour. precaution might be used to such an extent as to put these utensils on a coal fire exposed to a glowing heat.

* These are the three degrees of the dry powder trituration, which if carried out correctly, will effect a good beginning for the dynamization of the medicinal substance.

2. The vial used for potentizing is filled two-thirds full.

3. Perhaps on a leather bound book.

4. They are prepared under supervision by the confectioner from starch and sugar and the small globules freed from fine dusty parts by passing them through a sieve. Then they are put through a strainer that will permit only 100 to pass through weighing one grain, the most serviceable size for the needs of a homoeopathic physician.
( So 1 globule = 0.64798981mg )

5. A small cylindrical vessel shaped like a thimble, made of glass, porcelain or silver, with a small opening at the bottom in which the globules are put to be medicated. They are moistened with some of the dynamized medicinal alcohol, stirred and poured out on blotting paper, in order to dry them quickly.

6. According to first directions, one drop of the liquid of a lower potency was to be taken to 100 drops of alcohol for higher potentiation. This proportion of the medicine of attenuation to the medicine that is to be dynamized (100:1) was found altogether too limited to develop thoroughly and to a high degree the power of the medicine by means of a number of such succussions without specially using great force of which wearisome experiments have convinced me.

But if only one such globule be taken, of which 100 weigh one grain, (0.6479891mg say 0.5mg) and dynamize it with 100 drops of alcohol (about 5ml), the proportion of 1 to 50,000 and even greater will be had, for 500 such globules can hardly absorb one drop,for their saturation. With this is proportionate higher ratio between medicine and diluting medium many successive strokes of the vial filled two-thirds with alcohol can produce a much greater development of power. But with so small a diluting medium as 100 to 1 of the medicine, if many succussions by means of a powerful machine are forced into it, medicines are then developed which, especially in the higher degrees of dynamization, act almost immediately, but with furious, even dangerous violence , especially in weakly patients, without having a lasting, mild reaction of the vital principle.

But the method described by me, on the contrary, produces medicines of highest development of power and mildest action, which, however, if well chosen, touches all suffering parts curatively.**

In acute fevers, the small doses of the lowest dynamization degrees of these thus perfected medicinal preparations, even of medicines of long continued action (for instance, belladonna) may be repeated in short intervals.

In the treatment of chronic diseases, it is best to begin with the lowest degrees of dynamization and when necessary advance to higher, even more powerful but mildly acting degrees.

** In very rare cases, notwithstanding almost full recovery of health and with good vital strength, an old annoying local trouble continuing undisturbed it is wholly permitted and even indispensably necessary, to administer in increasing doses the homoeopathic remedy that has proved itself efficacious but potenized to a very high degree by means of many succussions by hand. Such a local disease will often then disappear in a wonderful way.

7. This assertion will not appear improbable, if one considers that by means of this method of dynamization (the preparations thus produced, I have found after many laborious experiments and counter-experiments, to be the most powerful and at the same time mildest in action, i.e., as the most perfected) the material part of the medicine is lessened with each degree of dynamization 50,000 times yet incredibly increased in power, so that the further dynamization of 125 and 18 ciphers ( 125X 10¹⁸) reaches only the third degree of dynamization. The thirtieth thus progressively prepared would give a fraction almost impossible to be expressed in numbers. It becomes uncommonly evident that the material part by means of such dynamization (development of its true, inner medicinal essence) will ultimately dissolve into its individual spirit-like, (conceptual) essence. In its crude state therefore, it may be considered to consist really only of this underdeveloped conceptual essence.

B.K. Sarkar gives a commentary which you can read here.

271 Fifth Edition Part III: Therapeautics: Pharmacy: Trituration

All other substances adapted for medicinal use - except sulphur, which has of late years been only employed in the form of a highly diluted (X) tincture - as pure or oxidized and sulphuretted metals and other minerals, petroleum, phosphorus, as also parts and juices of plants that can only be obtained in the dry state, animal substances, neutral salts, etc., all these are first to be potentized by trituration for three hours, up to the millionfold pulverulent attenuation, and of this one grain is to be dissolved, and brought to the thirtieth development of power through twenty - seven attenuating phials, in the same manner as the vegetable juices.

271 Therapeautics: Point III: Pharmacy, wholly re-written in the Sixth Edition, as follows:

['If the physician prepares his homeopathic medicines himself, as he should reasonably do in order to save men from sickness, he may use the fresh plant itself, as but little of the crude article is required, if he does not need the expressed juice perhaps for purposes of healing. He takes a few grains in a mortar and with 100 grains sugar of milk three distinct times brings them to the one - millionth trituration ( Paragraph 270 6th ) before further potentizing of a small portion of this by means of shaking is undertaken, a procedure to be observed also with the rest of crude drugs of either dry or oily nature. ']

272 5th. Edition Therapeatuics:Part  III

In no case is it requisite to administer more than one single, simple medicinal substance at one time.

272 is wholly re - written in the Sixth Edition, as follows:

['Such a globule, placed dry upon the tongue, is one of the smallest doses for a moderate recent case of illness. Here but few nerves are touched by the medicine. A similar globule, crushed with some sugar of milk and dissolved in a good deal of water ( 247 ) and stirred well before every administration will produce a far more powerful medicine for the use of several days. Every dose, no matter how minute, touches, on the contrary, many nerves. ']

273 Fifth Edition Therapeatuics:Part  III

It is not conceivable how the slightest dubiety could exist as to whether it was more consistent with nature and more rational to prescribe a single well - known medicine at one time in a disease, or a mixture of several differently acting drugs.

273 is wholly re-written in the Sixth Edition, as follows: Therapeatuics:Part  III

['In no case under treatment is it necessary is it necessary and therefore not permissible, to administer to a patient more than one single, simple medicinal substance at one time. It is inconceivable how the slightest doubt could exist as to whether it was more consistent with nature and more rational to prescribe a single, simple medicine at one time in a disease or a mixture of several differently acting drugs. It is absolutely not allowed in homeopathy, the one true, simple and natural art of healing, to give the patientat one time two different medicinal substance. ']

274 Part III: Therapeautics:Part III: Pharmacy:

As the true physician finds in simple medicines, administered singly and uncombined, all that he can possibly desire (artificial disease - forces which are able by homeopathic power completely to overpower, extinguish, and permanently cure natural diseases), he will, mindful of the wise maxim that "it is wrong to attempt to employ complex means when simple means suffice," never think of giving as a remedy any but a single, simple medicinal substance; for these reasons also, because even though the simple medicines were thoroughly proved with respect to their pure peculiar effects on the unimpaired healthy state of man, it is yet impossible to fore see how two and more medicinal substances might, when compounded, hinder and alter each other's actions on the human body; and because, on the other hand, a simple medicinal substance when used in diseases, the totality of whose symptoms is accurately known, renders efficient aid by itself alone, if it be homeopathically selected; and supposing the worst case to happen, that it was not chosen in strict conformity to similarity of symptoms, and therefore does no good, it is yet so far useful that it promoted our knowledge of therapeutic agents, because, by the new symptoms excited by it in such a case, those symptoms, which this medicinal substance had already shown in experiments on the healthy human body are confirmed, an advantage that is lost by the employment of all compound remedies.

275 Part III: Therapeautics: Prescibing, Potency

The suitableness of a medicine for any given case of disease does not depend on its accurate homeopathic selection alone, but likewise on the proper size, or rather smallness, of the dose.

If we give too strong a dose of a medicine, which may have been even quite homeopathically chosen for the morbid state before us, it must, notwithstanding the inherent beneficial character of its nature, prove injurious by its mere magnitude, and by the unnecessary, too strong impression which, by virtue of its homeopathic similarity of action, it makes upon the vital force which it attacks and, through the vital force, upon those parts of the organism which are the most sensitive, and are already most affected by the natural disease.

276 Fifth Edition, Part III:Therapeautics:Prescibing, Potency

For this reason, a medicine, even though it may be homeopathically suited to the case of disease, does harm in every dose that is too large, the more harm the larger the dose, and by the magnitude of the dose ['and in strong doses' in the Sixth Edition] it does more harm the greater its homeopathicity and the higher the potency selected, and it does much more injury than any equally large dose of a medicine that is unhomeopathic, and in no respect adapted (allopathic) to the morbid state; for in the former case the so - called homeopathic aggravation (# 157 - 160) - that is to say, the very analogous medicinal disease produced by the vital force stirred up by the excessively large dose of medicine, in the parts of the organism that are most suffering and most irritated by the original disease - which medicinal disease, had it been ofappropriate intensity , would have gently effected a cure - rises to an injurious height;the patient, to be sure, no longer suffers from the original disease, for that has been homeopathically eradicated, but he suffers all the more from the excessive medicinal disease and from useless exhaustion of his strength.

The remaining portion (marked) of 276 is re - written in the Sixth Edition, as follows:

['Too large doses of an accurately chosen homeopathic medicine, and especially when frequently repeated, bring about much trouble as a rule. They put the patient not seldom in danger of life or make this disease almost incurable. They do indeed extinguish the natural disease so far as the sensation of the life principle is concerned and the patient no longer suffers from the original disease from the moment the too strong dose of the homeopathic medicine acted upon him but he is in consequence more ill with the similar but more violent medicinaldisease whichis most difficult to destroy. ']

277 Part III: Therapeautics: Prescibing, Potency

For the same reason, and because a medicine, provided the dose of it was sufficiently small, is all the more salutary and almost marvelously efficacious the more accurately homeopathic its selection has been, a medicine whose selection has been accurately homeopathic must be all the more salutary the more its dose is reduced to the degree of minuteness appropriate for a gentle remedial effect.

278 Part III: Therapeautics: Prescibing, Potency

Here the question arises, what is this most suitable degree of minuteness for sure and gentle remedial effect; how small, in other words, must be the dose of each individual medicine, homeopathically selected for a case of disease, to effect the best cure? To solve this problem, and to determine for every particular medicine, what dose of it will suffice for homeopathic therapeutic purposes and yet be so minute that the gentlest and most rapid cure may be thereby obtained - to solve this problem is, as may easily be conceived, not the work off theoretical speculation; not by fine - spun reasoning, not by specious sophistry can we expect to obtain the solution of this problem. ['It is just as impossible as to tabulate in advance all imaginable cases' in the Sixth Edition] Pure experiment, careful observation ['of the sensitiveness of each patient' in the Sixth Edition], and accurate experience can alone determine this; and it were absurd to adduce the large doses of unsuitable ( allopathic ) medicines of the old system, which do not touch the diseased side of the organism homeopathically, but only attack the parts unaffected by the disease, in opposition to what pure experience pronounces respecting the smallness of the doses required for homeopathic cures.

279 Part III:Therapeautics:Prescibing:Potency

This pure experience shows UNIVERSALLY, that if the disease does not manifestly depend on a considerable deterioration of an important viscus (even though it belongs to the chronic and complicated diseases), and if during the treatment all other alien medicinal influences are kept away from the patients, the dose of the homeopathically selected remedy ['selected and highly potentized' in the Sixth Edition] can never be prepared so small, that it shall not be stronger than the natural disease, and shall not be able to overpower, extinguish and cure it, at least in part, as long as it is capable of causing some, though but a slight preponderance of its own symptoms over those of the disease resembling it (slight homeopathic aggravation,  157 -160) immediately after its ingestion.
The remaining portion of this Section is re - written in the Sixth Edition as follows:
['and extinguish it from the sensation of the principle of life and thus make a beginning of a cure. ']

280 Fifth Ed. Part III:Therapeautics:Prescibing:Potency

This incontrovertible axiom of experience is the standard of measurement by which the doses of all homeopathic medicines, without exception, are to be reduced to such an extent that after their ingestion, they shall excite a scarcely observable homeopathic aggravation, let the diminution of the dose go ever so far, and appear ever so incredible to the materialistic ideas of ordinary physicians; their idle declamations must before the verdict of unerring experience.

280  Sixth Edition, entirely re-written in the as follows: Part III:Therapeautics:

['The dose of medicine that continues to be serviceable without producing new troublesome symptoms is to be continued while gradually ascending , so long as the patient with general improvement, begins to feel, in a mild degree, the return of one or several old original complaints. This indicates an approaching cure through a gradual ascending of the moderate doses modified each time by succussion (Paragraph 247). It indicates that the vital principal no longer needs to be affected by the similar medicinal disease in order to lose the sensation of the natural disease (148 ). It indicates that the life principle now free from the natural disease begins to suffer only something of the medicinal disease hitherto known as homeopathic aggravation . ']

281 Fifth Ed. Therapeautics: Point III:

Every patient is, especially in his diseased point, capable of being influenced in an incredible degree by medicinal agents corresponding by similarity of action; and there is no person, be he ever so robust, and even though he be affected only with a chronic or so - called local disease, who will not soon experience the desired change in the affected part, if he takes the salutary, homeopathically suited medicine in the smallest conceivable dose, who, in a word, will not thereby be much more altered in his health than a healthy infant of but a day old would be. How insignificant and ridiculous is mere theoretical scepticism in opposition to this unerring, infallible experimental proof!

281 Edition, entirely re - written in the Sixth as follows:

['In order to be convinced of this, the patient is left without any medicine for eight, ten of fifteen days, giving him only some powders of sugar of milk during this time.

If the few last complaints are due to the medicine simulating the former original disease symptoms, then these complaints will disappear in a few days or hours.

If, during these days without medicine, while continuing good hygienic regulations, nothing more of the original disease is seen, then he is probably cured.  But if in the later days, traces of the former morbid symptoms should show themselves, they are remnants of the original disease not wholly extinguished, which must be treated with renewed higher potencies of the remedy as directed before.

If a cure is to follow, the first small doses must likewise be again gradually raised higher, but less and more slowly in patients where considerable irritability is evident than in those of less susceptibility, where the advance to higher dosage may be more rapid. There are patients whose impressionability compared to that of the insusceptible ones is like the ratio as 1000 to 1. ']

282 Part III:Therapeautics:Prescribing:Aggravation

The smallest possible dose of homeopathic medicine capable of producing only the very slightest homeopathic aggravation, will, because it has the power of exciting symptoms bearing the greatest possible resemblance to the original disease (but yet stronger even in the minute dose), attack principally and almost solely the parts in the organism that are already affected, highly irritated, and rendered excessively susceptible to such a similar stimulus, and will alter the vital force that rules in them to a state of very similar artificial disease, somewhat greater in degree than the natural one.g

This artificial disease will substitute itself for the natural (the original) disease, so that the living organism now suffers from the artificial medicinal disease alone, which, from its nature and owing to the minuteness of the dose, will soon be extinguished by the vital force that is striving to return to the normal state, and (if the disease were only an acute one) the body is left perfectly free from disease - that is to say, quite well.

282 Sixth Edition Prescibing, Potency, is entirely re-written in the , as follows:

['It would be a certain sign that the doses were altogether too large, if during treatment, especially in chronic disease, the first dose should bring forth a so - called homeopathic aggravation , that is, a marked increase of the original morbid symptoms first discovered and in the same way every repeated dose ( 247 ) however modified somewhat by shaking before its administration (i. e., more highly dynamized). ']

283 Part III:Therapeautics:Prescibing, Potency

Now, in order to act really in conformity with nature, the true physician will prescribe his well - selected homeopathic medicine only in exactly as small a dose as will just suffice to over power and annihilate the disease before him - in a dose of such minuteness, that if human fallibility should betray him into administering an inappropriate medicine, the injury, accruing from its nature being unsuited to the disease will be diminished to a mere trifle; moreover the harm done by the smallest possible dose is so slight, that it may be immediately extinguished and repaired by the natural vital powers, and by the speedy administration of a remedy more suitable selected according to similarity of action, and given also in the smallest dose.

283 is entirely re-written in the Sixth Edition, as follows: Part III:Therapeautics:

['In order to work wholly according to nature, the true healing artist will prescribe the accurately chosen homeopathic medicine most suitable in all respects in so small a dose on account of this alone. For should he be misled by human weakness to employ an unsuitable medicine, the disadvantage of its wrong relation to the disease would be so small that the patient could through his own vital powers and by means of early opposition (249) of the correctly chosen remedy according to symptom similarly (and this also in the smallest dose) rapidly extinguish and repair it. ']

284 Part III:Therapeautics:

The action of a dose, moreover, dose not diminish in the direct ratio of the quantity of material medicine contained in the dilutions used in homeopathic practice. Eight drops of the tincture of a medicine to the dose do not produce four times as much effect on the human body as two drops, but only about twice the effect that is produced by two drops to the dose. In a like manner, one drop of a mixture of a drop of the tincture with ten drops of some unmedicinal fluid, when taken, will not produce ten times more effect than one drop of mixture ten times more attenuated, but only about (scarcely) twice as strong an effect, and so on, in the same ratio - so that a drop of the lowest dilution must, and really does, display still a very considerable action.

284 Part III:Therapeautics: is entirely omitted in the Sixth Edition, and replaced by a new Section, as follow:

['Besides the tongue, mouth and stomach, which are most commonly affected by the administration of medicine, the nose and respiratory organs are receptive of the action of medicines in fluid form, by means of olfaction and inhalation through the mouth. But the whole remaining skin of the body clothed with epidermis, is adapted to the action of medicinal solutions, especially if the inunction is connected with simultaneous internal administration. ']

285 Part III:Therapeautics:

The diminution of the dose essential for homeopathic use, will also be promoted by diminishing its volume, so that, if, instead of a drop of a medicinal dilution, we take but quite a small part of such a drop for a dose, the object of diminishing the effect still further will be very effectually attained; and that this will be the case may be readily conceived for this reason, because with the smaller volume of the dose but few nerves of the living organism can be touched, whereby the power of the medicine is certainly also communicated to the whole organism, but it is a weaker power.

285 Part III: Therapeautics:  is entirely omitted in the Sixth Edition, and replaced by a new Section, as follows:

['In this way, the cure of very old disease may be furthered by the physician applying externally, rubbing it in the back, arms, extremities, the same medicine he gives internally and which showed itself curatively. In doing so, he must avoid parts subject to pain or spasm or skin eruption. ']

286 Fifth Edition, Part III:Therapeautics:Prescribing, Quantity of Fluid.

For the same reason the effect of a homeopathic dose of medicine increases, the greater the quantity of fluid, in which it is dissolved when administered to the patient, although the actual amount of medicine it contains remains the same. For in this case, when the medicine is taken, it comes in contact with a much larger surface of sensitive nerves responsive to the medicinal action. Although theorists may imagine there should be a weakening of the action of dose of medicine by its dilution with a large quantity of liquid, experience asserts exactly the opposite, at all events when the medicines are employed homeopathically.¹

1. It is only the most simple of all stimulants, wine and alcohol, that have their heating and intoxicating action diminished by dilutin with much water.

286 Sixth Edition is entirely omitted in the Sixth Edition , and replaced by a new Section, as follows:

['The dynamic force of minerals magnets, electricity and galvanism act no less powerfully upon our life principle and they are not less homeopathic than the properly so - called medicines which neutralize disease by taking them through the mouth, or by rubbing them on the skin or by olfaction. There may be diseases, especially diseases of sensibility and irritability, abnormal sensations, and involuntary muscular movements which may be cured by those means. But the more certain way of applying the last two as well as that of the so - called electromagnetic lies still very much in the dark to make homeopathic use of them. So far both electricity and Galvanism have been used only for palliation to the great damage of the sick. The positive, pure action of both upon the healthy human body have until the present time been but little tested. ']

287 Part III:Therapeautics:

But in this increase of action by the mixture of the dose of medicine with a larger quantity of liquid (before its ingestion), the result is vastly different whether the mixture of the dose of medicine with a certain quantity of liquid is performed merely superficially and imperfectly, or so uniformly and intimately that the smallest portion of the diluting fluid received the same quantity of medicine in proportion as all the rest; for the latter becomes much more medicinally powerful by the diluting mixture than the former. From this every one will be able to judge for himself how to proceed with the regulation of the homeopathic medicinal doses when he desires to diminish their medicinal action as much as possible, in order to make them suitable for the most sensitive patients.

287 is entirely omitted in the Sixth Edition and replaced by a new Section, as follows:

['The powers of the magnet for healing purposes can be employed with more certainty according to the positive effects detailed in the Materia Medica Pura under north and south pole of a powerful magnetic bar. Though both poles are alike powerful, they nevertheless oppose each other in the manner of their respective action. The doses may be modified by the length of time of contact with one or the other pole, according as the symptoms of either north or south pole are indicated. As antidote to a too violent action the application of a plate of polished zinc will suffice. ']

288 Part III:Therapeautics:

The action of medicines in the liquid¹ from upon the living human body takes place in such a penetrating manner, spreads out from the point of the sensitive fibers provided with nerves whereto the medicine is first applied, with such inconceivable rapidity and so universally through all parts of the living body, that this action of the medicine must be denominated a spirit-like (a dynamic, virtual) action.

1. It is especially in the form of vapour, by olfaction and inhalation of the medicinal aura that is always emanation from a globule impregnated with a medicinal fluid in high develoment of power, and placed, dry, in samll phial, that the homeopathici remedies act most surely and most powerfully.  The homeopathc physician allows the patient to hold the open mouth of the phial first in one nostril, and in the act of inspriation draw the air aout of it into himself, it is is wished to give a stronger dose, smell in the same manner with the other nostril, more or less strongly, according to the strength it is intended the dose should e, he then corks up the phial and replaces it in his pcket case, to prevent any misues of it, and unless he wish it, he has not occasion for an apothecary's assistance in his practice.
  A globule of which ten, twenty or onehundred weigh one grain, impregnated with the thirtieth potentized dilution, and then dried, retains for this purpose all is power undminished for at least eighteen or twenty years (my experience estends this lingth of time), even thoght the phila be opened an thousand times during that period, it it be but protected from heat and the sun's light.  Should both hostrils be stopped up by coryza or poiypus, the patient should inhale by mouth, holding the orifice of the phial betwixt his lips. 

In little children it may be applied close to their hostrils whilst they are asleep with the certainty of producing and effect.  the medicinal aura thus inhaled comes in contact with the nerves  in the walls of the spacious cavities it traverses without obstruction, and thus produces a salutary influence on the vital force, in the mildest yet most powerful manner, and this is much preferable to every other mode of administration the medicament n substnce by the mouth. 

All that homeopathy is capable of curing (and what can in not cure beyond the domain of mere manual surgical affections? ) among the most severe chronic diseases that have not been quite ruined by allopathy, as aso among acute disease, will be most safely and certainly cured by this olfaction.  I can scarcely name one in a hundred of may patients that have sought the advice of myself and my assistant during the past year, whose chronic or acute disease we have not treated with the most happy results, soley by means of this olfaction; during the latter half of this year, moreover, I have become convinced (of what I never could previously have believed) that by this olfaction the power of the medicine is exercised upon the patien in, at least, the same degreee of strength, and that more quitely and yet just as long as when the dose of medicine is take by the mouth, and that, consequently, the intervals at which the olfaction should be repeated shold not be shorter than in the ingestin of the material dose by the mouth.(a)

288 is entirely omitted in the Sixth Edition, and replaced by a new Section, as follows:

['I find it yet necessary to allude here to animal magnetism , as it is termed, or rather Mesmerism (as it should be called in deference to Mesmer, its first founder), which differs so much in its nature from all other therapeutic agents. This curative force, often so stupidly denied and disdained for a century, acts in different ways. It is a marvellous, priceless gift of God to mankind by means of which, the strong will of a well intentioned person upon a sick one by contact and even without this and even at some distance, can bring the vital energy of the healthy mesmerizer endowed with this power into another person dynamically (just as one of the poles of a powerful magnetic rod upon a bar of steel).

It acts in part by replacing in the sick whose vital force within the organism is deficient here and there, in part also in other parts where the vital force has accumulated too much and keeps up irritating nervous disorders it turns it aside, diminishes and distributes it equally and in general extinguishes the morbid condition of the life principle of the patient and substitutes in its place the normal of the mesmerist acting powerfully upon him, for instance, old ulcers, amaurosis, paralysis of single organs and so forth. Many rapid apparent cures performed in all ages, by mesmerizers endowed with great natural power, belong to this class. The effect of communicated human power upon the whole human organism was most brilliantly shown, in the resuscitation of persons who had lain some time apparently dead, by the most powerful sympathetic will of a man in full vigor of vital energy,^** and of this kind of resurrection history records many undeniable examples.

If the mesmerizing person of either sex capable at the same time of a good - natured enthusiasm (even its degeneration into bigotry, fanaticism, mysticism or philanthropic dreaming) will be empowered all the more with this philanthropic self-sacrificing performance to direct exclusively the power of his commanding good will to the recipient requiring his help and at the same time to concentrate these, he may at times perform apparent miracles. ']

** A new foot-note is added in the Sixth Edition, as follows:

[' Especially of one of such persons, of whom there are not many, who, along with great kindness of disposition and perfect bodily powers, possesses but a very moderate desire for sexual intercourse, which it would give him very little trouble wholly to suppress, in whom, consequently, all the fine vital spirits that would otherwise be employed in the production of the semen, are ready to be communicated to others, by touching them and powerfully exerting the will. Some powerful mesmerisers, with whom I have become aquatinted, had all this peculiar character.']

289 5th Part III:Therapeautics:

Every part of our body that possesses the sense of touch is also capable of receiving the influences, and of propagating their power to all other parts.¹

1. A patient even destitute of the sense of smell may expect an equally perfect action and cure from the medicine by olfaction.

* 289 6th is entirely omitted in the Sixth Edition, and replaced by a new Section, as follows:

['All the above - mentioned methods of practicing mesmerism depend upon influx of more or less vital force into the patient, and hence are termed positive mesmerism.¹ An opposite mode of employing mesmerism, however, as it produces just the contrary effect, deserves to be termed negative mesmerism. To this belong the passes which are used to rouse from the somnambulic sleep, as also all the manual processes known by the names of soothing and ventilating. This dischargeby means of negative mesmerism of the vital force accumulated to excess in individual parts of the system of undebilitated persons is most surely and simply performed by making a very rapid motion or the flat extended hand, held parallel to, and about an inch distant from the body, from the top of the head to the tips of the toes.²  The more rapidly this pass is made, so much the more effectually will the discharge be effected. Thus, for instance, in the case where a previously healthy woman,³ from the sudden suppression of her catamenia by a violent mental shock, lies to all appearance dead, the vital force which is probably accumulated in the precordial region, will, by such a rapid negative pass, be discharged and its equilibrium throughout the whole organism restored. So that the resuscitation generally follows, immediately.⁴  In like manner, a gentle, less rapid, negative pass diminishes the excessive restlessness and sleeplessness accompanied with anxiety sometimes produced in very irritable persons by a too powerful positive pass, etc. ']

1. [ 'When I here speak of the decided and certain curative power of positive mesmerism, I most assuredly do not mean that abuse of it, where, by repeated passes of this kind, continued for half an hour or a whole hour at a time, and, even day after day, performed on weak, nervous patients, that monstrous revolution of the whole human system is effected which is termed somnambulism, wherein the human being is ravished from the world of sense and seems to belong more to the world of spirits - a highly unnatural and dangerous state, by means of which it has not infrequently been attempted to cure chronic diseases. ']

2. [ 'It is a well known rule that a person who is either to be positively or negatively mesmerised, should not wear silk on any part of the body.']

3. [ 'Hence a negative pass, especially if it be very rapid, is extremely injurious to a delicate person affected with a chronic ailment and deficient in vital force.']

4. [ 'A strong country lad, ten years of age, received in the morning, on account of slight indisposition, from a professed female mesmeriser, several very powerful passes with the points of both thumbs, from the pit of the stomach along the lower edge of the ribs, and he instantly grew deathly pale, and fell into such a state of unconsciousness and immobility that no effort could arouse him, and he was almost given up for dead. I made his eldest brother give him a very rapid negative pass from the crown of the head over the body to the feet, and in one instance he recovered his consciousness and became lively and well.' ]

290 5th Part III:Therapeautics:Parts susceptible to medicine.

Besides the stomach, the tongue and the mouth are the parts most susceptible to the medicinal influences; but the interior of the nose is more especially so, and the rectum, the genitals, as also all particularly sensitive parts of our body are almost equally capable of receiving the medicinal action; hence also, parts that are destitute of skin, wounded or ulcerated spots permit the powers of medicines to exercise almost as penetrating an action upon the organism as if the medicine had been taken by the mouth or still better by olfaction and inhalation.
290 corresponds to some extent to 284 of the Sixth Edition :

290 6th in the Sixth Edition is as follows: Part III:Therapeautics:

['Here belongs also the so - called massage of vigorous good - natured person given to a chronic invalid, who, though cured, still suffers from loss of flesh, weakness of digestion and lack of sleep due to slow convalescence. The muscles of the limbs, breast and back, separately grasped and moderately pressed and kneaded arouse the life principle to reach and restore the tone of the muscles and blood and lymph vessels. The mesmeric influences of this procedure is the chief feature and it must not be used to excess in patients still hypersensitive. ']

291 5th Part III:Therapeautics:

Even those organs which have lost their peculiar sense, e. g., a tongue and palate that have lost the faculty of tasting, or a nose that has lost the faculty of smelling, communicate the power of the medicine that acts first on them alone not less perfectly to all the other organs of the body.

291 6th Part III:Therapeautics:

*This Section is entirely omitted in the Sixth Edition but 291 in the Sixth Edition is as follows:

['Baths of pure water prove themselves partly palliative, partly as homeopathic serviceable aids in restoring health in acute diseases as well as in convalescence of cured chronic patients with proper consideration of the conditions of the convalescent and the temperature of the bath, its duration and repetition. But even if well applied, they may bring only physically beneficial changes in the sick body, in themselves they are no true medicine. The lukewarm baths at 25 to 27 ¡ serve to arouse the slumbering sensibility of fibre in the apparent dead (frozen, drowned, suffocated) which benumbed the sensation of the nerves. Though only palliative, still they often prove themselves sufficiently active, especially when given in conjunction with coffee and rubbing with the hands. They may give homeopathic aid in cases where the irritability is very unevenly distributed and accumulated too unevenly in some organs as is the case in certain hysteric spasms and infantile convulsions. In the same way, cold baths 10 to 6 ¡ in persons cured medically of chronic diseases and with deficiency of vital heat, act as an homeopathic aid. Byinstantaneousand later withrepeated immersions they act as a palliative restorative of the tone of the exhausted fibre. For this purpose, such baths are to be used for more than momentary duration, rather for minutes and of gradually lowered temperature, they are a palliative, which, since it acts only physically has no connection with the disadvantage of a reverse action to be feared afterwards, as takes place with dynamic medicinal palliatives. ']

292 5th Part III:Therapeautics:

Even the external surface of the body, covered as it is with skin and epidermis, is not insusceptible of the powers of medicines, especially those in a liquid form, but the most sensitive parts are also the most susceptible.¹

Sec 292 is entirely omitted in the Sixth Edition.

1. Rubbing-in appears to favour the action of the medicines only in this way, that the friction makes the skin more sensitive, and the living fibres thereby more capable of feeling, as it were, the medicinal power and of communicating to the whole organism this health-affecting sensation. The previous employment of friction to the inside of the thigh makes the mere laying on the mercurial ointment afterwards quite as powerfully medicinal as if the ointment itself had been rubbed upon that part, a process which is termed rubbing-in, but it is very doubtful whether the mental itself can penetrate in substance into the interior of the body, or be taken up by the absorbent vessels by means of this so-called rubbing-in. Homoeopathy, however, hardly ever requires for its cures the rubbing-in of any medication, nor does it need any mercurial ointment.

293^(a) 5th Part III:Therapeautics:Mesmerism

I find it necessary to allude here to animal magnetism , as it is termed, or rather mesmerism (as it should be called, out of gratitude to Mesmer, its first founder), which differs so much in its nature from all other therapeutic agents. This curative power, often so stupidly denied, which streams upon a patient by the contact of a well-intentioned person powerfully exerting his will, either acts homeopathically, by the production of symptoms similar to those of the diseased state to be cured; and for this purpose a single pass made, without much exertion of the will, with the palms of the hands not too slowly from the top of the head downwards over the body to the tips of the toes, is serviceable in, for instance, uterine hemorrhages, even in the last stage when death seems approaching; or it is useful by distributing the vital force uniformly throughout the organism, when it is in abnormal excess in one part and deficient in other parts, for example, in rush of blood to the head and sleepless, anxious restlessness of weakly persons, etc., by means of a similar, single, but somewhat stronger pass; or for the immediate communication and restoration of the vital force to some one weakened part or to the whole organism, - an object that cannot be attained so certainly and with so little interference with the other medicinal treatment by any other agent besides mesmerism. If it is wished to supply a particular part with the vital force, this is effected by concentrating a very powerful and well - intentioned will for the purpose, and placing the hands or tips of the fingers on the chronically weakened parts, whither an internal chronic dyscrasia has transferred its important local symptom, as, for example, in the case of old ulcers, amaurosis, paralysis of certain limbs, etc.²

Many rapid apparent cures performed in all ages, by mesmerizers endowed with great natural power, belong to this class. The effect of communicated human power upon the whole human organism was most brilliantly shown, in the resuscitation of persons who had lain some time apparently dead, by the most powerful sympathetic will of a man in full vigor of vital force,³ and of this kind of resurrection history records many undeniable examples.

1. The smallest homoeopathic dose, which however, often effects wonders when used on proper occasions. Imperfect homoeopathists, who think themselves monstrously clever, not infrequently deluge their patients in difficult diseases with doses of different medicines, given rapidly one after the other, which, although they may have been homoeopathically selected and given in highly potentized attenuation, bring the patients into such an over-excited state that life and death are struggling for the mastery, and the least additional quantity of medicine would infallibly kill them. In such cases a mere gentle mesmeric pass and the frequent application, for a short time of the hand of a well-intentioned person to the part that is particularly affected, produce the harmonious uniform distribution of the vital force throughout the organism, and therewith rest, sleep and recovery.

2. Although by this restoration of the vital force, which ought to be repeated from time to time, no permanent cure can be effected in cases where, as has been taught above, a general internal dyscrasia lies at the root of the old local affection, as it always does, yet this positive strengthening and immediate saturation with the vital force (which no more belongs to the category of palliatives than does eating and drinking when hunger and thirst are present) is no mean auxiliary to the actual treatment of the whole disease by homoeopathic medicines.

3. Especially of one of those persons, of whom there are not many who, along with great kindness of disposition and perfect bodily powers, possesses but a very moderate desire for sexual intercourse, which it would give him very little trouble to suppress, in whom, consequently, all the fine vital spirits that would otherwise be employed in the preparation of the semen, are ready to be communicated to others, by touching them and powerfully exerting the will. Some powerful mesmerisers, with whom I have become acquainted, has all this peculiar character.

294 5th* / 289 6th

All the above - mentioned methods of practicing mesmerism depend upon an influx of more or less vital force into the patient, and hence are termed positive mesmerism. An opposite mode of employing mesmerism, however, as it produces just the contrary effect, deserves to be termed negative mesmerism. To this belong the passes which are used to rouse from the somnambulic sleep, as also all the manual processes known by the names ofsoothing and ventilating . This dischargeby means of negative mesmerism of the vital force accumulated to excess in individual parts of the system of undebiliated persons is most surely and simply performed by making a very rapid motion of the flat extended hand, held parallel to, and about an inch distant from the body, from the top of the head to the tips of the toes. The more rapidly this pass is made, so much the more effectually will the discharge be effected. Thus, for instance, in the case where a previously healthy woman, from the sudden suppression of her catamenia by a violent mental shock, lies to all appearance dead, the vital force which is probably accumulated in the precordial region, will by such a rapid negative pass, be discharged and its equilibrium throughout the whole organism restored, so that the resuscitation generally follows immediately. In like manner, a gentle, less rapid, negative pass diminishes the excessive restlessness and sleeplessness accompanied with anxiety sometimes produced in very irritable persons by a too powerful positive pass, etc.**

* This Section corresponds to 289 of the Sixth Edition.

**Section 290 of the Sixth Edition deals with massage # 291 of the Sixth Edition deals with Water and Baths as remedial agents.