An answer to the homoeopathic delusions of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes / by Charles Neidhard.

  • Neidhard, C. (Charles), 1809-1895.
Date:
1842
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An answer to the homoeopathic delusions of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes / by Charles Neidhard. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    Odours of musk and of roses will affect some persons only. If his mind is not entirely overshaded, does not a glimpse of a great law, which the specific method seeks to develope, strike on his encumbered senses? Many explanations of the action of minute doses have been given at different periods by a number of Homoeopathic physicians, because the specific school naturally sought to reason on what was a truth without it, and which experience had fully verified. To all these some objections can be raised, although great pains have been taken to obtain a correct idea of their action. Our author, as we have seen, takes no such trouble, the laws of nature are clearly unfolded to his mind, and because a healthy child can swallow a teaspoonful of a substance in its crude state, without harm, this sub- stance can have no effect on it in its developed state in case of sickness, thus even forgetting the old maxim— Corpora non agunt nisi soluta. The most satisfactory attempt to explain the action of Homoeopathic remedies, has been furnished by Professor Doppler of Prague, whose work, I believe, has not yet been translated into English. Professor Doppler's explanation of the action of Homoeopathic remedies. The main points are briefly the following: The active strength of a medicine is not to be judged of according to its weight, but according to the size of its effective surface. The physical surface is to be distinguished from the mathematical one; the general physical surface increases by trituration of the medicine with another body (sugar of milk) in a greater proportion, than the diameter of the individual particle di- minishes itself. Now if we only consent to the hundredfold diminution of an atom by each trituration, calculation will show, that the physical surface after the third trituration amounts to about two square miles, and that the small point of a knife full of the thirtieth trituration offers a surface of many