Reply to Dr. Simpson's pamphlet on homœopathy, and, Second edition of the letter to the President of the Medico-Chirurgical Society : with a postscript / by William Henderson.

  • Henderson, William, 1810-1872.
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Reply to Dr. Simpson's pamphlet on homœopathy, and, Second edition of the letter to the President of the Medico-Chirurgical Society : with a postscript / by William Henderson. 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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    experiencing some symptoms of their habitual disorder. Now, ipecacuan is one of our cliief Homoeopathic remedies for spasmodic asthma, and since it is capable of exciting the disease in such minute quantities as are present in the air of a room, in the instances I have mentioned, common sense must perceive, that, according to all analogy, still more minute, or infinitesimal quantities, must be se- lected as the doses that should be administered during an attack of asthma from ordinary causes, in order to secure the curative without the aggravating or injurious action of the medicine ; just as we know, although the instance is •not perfectly apposite, that a scalded part of the skin can- not bear the application of water at a temperature nearly so high as it would have borne previously to the injury. It is, indeed, experience alone that can determine the de- gree to which medicines must be attenuated in order to produce only their beneficial eflFects when given Homoeo- pathically; but, apart from such experience, there are facts known to scientific men which ought to prevent those Avho aspire to the same honourable designation, from ridiculing infinitesimal doses as things incapable of having any efiect even in circumstances the most fa- vourable to their action. In the words of Dr. Samuel Brown, Illustrations of the manifestations of great forces by little bodies, drawn from the region of pure physics, as distinguished from tlie study of animated objects, might dis- abuse of this vulgarity ; and it would be worth while to marshal an array of them before contemptuous objectors, to confound their inbred prejudices. Davy, fearlessly following the principle of electrical induction by contact, discovered that half a dozen square feet of the copper sheathing of the British fleet are rendered electro-negative—(that is, tlio polarities of all the innumerable particles which make up that extent of surface arc reversed)—by a zinc nail driver