The prescriber : a dictionary of the new therapeutics with an essay on how to practice homœopathy / by John H. Clarke.

  • Clarke, John Henry, 1852-1931.
Date:
1942
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The prescriber : a dictionary of the new therapeutics with an essay on how to practice homœopathy / by John H. Clarke. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    48/360 (page 44)
    same, it is by looking on the screen that you can read the story of the changes in the invisible life-force in a way you could not do by going behind the screen. “ Hence the totality of the symptoms ” constitutes the disease as our senses apprehend it. The academic name we give to it is a secondary matter. As Hahnemann once said to a patient who asked him what his disease was, and what he was going to give him,—“ The name of your disease is no concern of mine, and the name of the medicine I give is no concern of yours.” The totality of the signs, pains and sensations is for practical purposes the concrete problem, and the less we trouble about the film and the light, the more clearly shall we be able to follow the story and discern our actual task. 3. “ Treating Symptoms.” Hahnemann’s Case. Among the many absurd objections which Hahne¬ mann had to meet and which his followers still have to meet is that Homoeopathy “ only treats symptoms and if it gets rid of them it leaves the disease un¬ touched.” The very opposite is the truth. Homoeo¬ pathy is compelled to extinguish the internal, morbid action before it can cause the external symptoms to vanish. The Allopathic method is to get rid of the symptoms even at the cost of producing other and worse symptoms. The outward and visible signs and symptoms are the guides to the internal and invisible causes—that is all. There are a number of ways in which the totality may be dealt with when once we have got it. The way Hahnemann favoured was to write out the symptoms in a string, affix to each the remedies winch are credited in the Materia Medica and repertories with having produced it, and then, having selected the one which corresponds to the greatest number of symptoms, giving it to the patient. Hahnemann published very few of his own cases, because, as he explained, he did not wish to give his pupils an excuse for treating cases by the names of