Samuel Hahnemann's Organon of homœopathic medicine.

  • Hahnemann, Samuel, 1755-1843.
Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Samuel Hahnemann's Organon of homœopathic medicine. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    INTRODUCTION. A VIEW OP THE PREVAILING MEDICAL TREATMENT, ALLOEOPATHIC AND PALLIATIVE, TO THE PRESENT TIME. From the earliest period of time, mankind have been liable to disease, individually and collectively, arising from causes natural and moral. In the rude and simple forms of primitive life, few maladies appeared, and little skill was requisite to remove -them; but as society became more dense, and men formed themselves into states, diseases multiplied, and medical aid became, in the same degree, necessary. Thenceforward, at least after the days of Hippocrates, during a lapse of nearly two thousand five hundred years, men have fondly supposed, that these multiplied and complicated mala- dies were to be removed by methods originating purely in scheming and conjecture. Innumerable opinions on the nature and cure of diseases, have successively been promulgated; each distinguishing his own theory with the title of system, though directly at variance with every other, and inconsistent with itself. Each of these refined productions dazzled the reader at first with its unintelligible display of wisdom, and attracted to the system-builder crowds of adherents, echoing his unnatural sophistry, but from which none of them could derive any im- provement in the art of healing, until a new system, frequently in direct opposition to the former, appeared, supplanting it, and for a season acquiring celebrity. Yet none were in har- mony with nature and experience—mere theories spun out of a refined imagination, from apparent consequences, which, on account of their subtilty and contradictions, were practically inapplicable at the bedside of the patient, and only fitted for idle disputation. By the side of these theories, but unconnected with them all, a mode of cure was contrived, with medical substances of un- 3