Introductory lecture delivered at the London Homoeopathic Hospital.

  • Russell, John Rutherfurd, 1816-1866.
Date:
1853
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Introductory lecture delivered at the London Homoeopathic Hospital. 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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    clear light the fact that the time for Reformation had come, that with the time came the man, and that Hahnemann added the particular element required for the progress of medicine, the absence of which had caused its arrest. In doing so we hope to vindicate both the honour of our old art, and the legitimacy of our present position in having established and maintained an institution upon the new foundation of a positive principle. From such a principle alone can we expect our drooping art to imbibe a new life, which, while it tends to develope itself in an emphatically practical direction, shall at the same time assimilate the erudition of the past as well as the scientific attainments of the present. The fundamental characteristic of Homoeopathy is that it alone is the system of prospective and immediate antidote. The sources of mortality and disease are threefold. The first, and in past ages much the most fatally prolific, is the class of poisons generated out of the human body, emanating it may be from the earth, or air, or their inhabitants—such as cholera, plague, small-pox, scarlet fever, and many more. The germs of some of these deadly poisons are always floating in the atmosphere we breathe ; others are occasionally present and depend on teluric conditions which we have not yet discovered, and which, even should we ascertain their causes, there is as little probability of our being able to modify or arrest as of controlling the tempests. Though we cannot affect the causes, we may neutralize their effect; we may so prepare the human frame by prospective or prophylactic treatment, that the germs find no ground to fructify. We have an example of this in vaccination, and we might take our stand on this alone to put to silence and the blush the so-called expectant medicine. What would expectant medicine have done for Iceland when small-pox first descended on the shores of that devoted island, and destroyed one fourth of its wdiole population, disfiguring many of those who survived to such an extent as to make them almost envy those who died ! Nothing—except proposing better ventilation or superior di'ainage, or some such board of health expedient. Contrast this laissez-faire medicine with the effects of the prophy- lactic antidote vaccination, by which, where properly carried out as in Prussia, the whole mortality from small-pox is only one in one hundred and twenty deaths. We shall not pause to consider the question whether in the strictest sense vaccination be a homoeo- pathic remedy. If it be not, all we have to do is to enlarge Homoeopathy, so that it shall embrace this and all antidotes; which may be done without infringing, but merely by developing, its principles. At the same time I feel inclined to agree with a remark once made to me by Professor Henderson—that if Jenner had not anticipated Hahnemann, that greatest of physicians would