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. known quality compounded together, applied to diseases arbi- trarily classified, and arranged in reference to their materiality, called Allceopathia. The pernicious results of such a practice, at variance with nature and experience, maybe easily imagined. Without seeking to detract from the reputation which many physicians have justly acquired by their skill in the sciences auxiliary to medicine, such as Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Natural History in all its branches, and that of man in particu- lar, Anthropology, Physiology, Anatomy, &c., &c., I shall occupy myself here with the practical part of Medicine only, in order to show the imperfect manner in which diseases have been treated till the present day. It is also far from my intention to pursue that mechanical routine by which the precious lives of our fellow-creatures are treated according to pocket-book recipes, volumes of which are still daily appearing before the public, and show, alas! how frequently, and to what extent, they are resorted to even at the present time. I turn from these, as undeserving of notice, and as a lasting reproach to the Faculty of Medicine. I shall merely speak of the Medi- cal Art, such as it has existed till the present day, and which, on account of its antiquity, is supposed to be founded upon scientific principles. It was the boast of the former schools of medicine, that their doctrine alone deserved the title of rational art of healing because it was pretended that they alone sought after and removed the morbid cause, send folloived the traces of Nature her- self in diseases. Tolle causam ! cried they continually; but that was all: they seldom went farther than that vain exclamation. They talked of being able to discover the cause of disease, without succeed- ing in their pretended attempts ; for, by far the greater number of diseases being of dynamic origin, as well as of a dynamic nature, and their cause, therefore, not admitting of discovery to the senses, they were reduced to the necessity of inventing one. By comparing, on the one hand, the normal state of the parts of the dead human body (anatomy) with the visible changes which those parts had undergone in subjects that had died of disease, (pathological anatomy,) and on the other, the functions of the living body, (physiology,) with the endless aberrations to which they are subject in the various stages of disease, (semei-