Evidences of the power of small doses and attenuated medicines : including a theory of potentization : a discourse before the New York Homoeopathic Society, March 9th., 1847 / by B. F. Joslin.

  • Joslin, Benjamin F. (Benjamin Franklin), 1796-1861.
Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Evidences of the power of small doses and attenuated medicines : including a theory of potentization : a discourse before the New York Homoeopathic Society, March 9th., 1847 / by B. F. Joslin. 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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    question of quality is complicated with it. If homoeopathic physicians generally made the disease worse, it would be a matter of notoriety. But if their agents have any efficiency, they must make it either worse or better. Let this general defence against the antipathists suffice, until they detect a decided and permanent aggravation — a making of the dis- ease really worse — as the usual ultimate effect of homoeo- pathic treatment. This we challenge them to detect. Instead of confining ourselves to the defensive, it would be easy to maintain higher ground, and challenge a comparison between results obtained by opposites, and those by similars. Cold water transiently allays the irritation of a burn, but leaves it permanently irritable. Cathartics move the bow- els, but leave them afterwards incapable of moving them- selves. A plausible common sense tells the physicking phy- sician, that he is removing costiveness ; reason and experi- ence should teach him that he is only stereotyping it. To relieve pain and nervous irritation, the community are per- petually drugged with opiates and other narcotics, which increase the sleeplessness and nervousness, and even the cough and pain, unless the drug is continually repeated. This last is the usual expedient. The blow has not weak- ened the disease: if it has not fatally stunned nature, she may eventually effect a cure. If a patient would know the real effect which a medicine has produced, let him suspend its use. If the symptoms dis- appear whenever the medicine is taken, and reappear when- ever it is omitted, the medicine is doing absolutely nothing towards a cure. Homoeopathia can safely appeal to this test; for she uses no mere paliatives. A single homoeopath- ic dose will — after a slight retrograde impulse — move the patient forward on the track of amendment, for hours, days or weeks, according to the nature of the disease, and bring him to a permanently advanced position, from which other doses will carry him forward to perfect and permanent health. But whilst Homoeopathia never sacrifices the future to the present, she, on the other hand, never sacrifices the pres- ent to the future : she arrests the most violent and rapid dis- eases, more forcibly and speedily than any other system. To show the advantage of giving a medicine, which at the first instant, coincides with the disease, instead of one' which at the first instant opposes it, I have deemed it suffi- cient to appeal to the results, and to give a plain rule for testing the two modes of treatment at every stage. In regard to another branch of the old school practice, the