A new and comprehensive system of materia medica and therapeutics, arranged upon a physiologico-pathological basis: for the use of practitioners and students of medicine (Volume 1).

  • Hempel, Charles J. (Charles Julius), 1811-1879.
Date:
1864-1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A new and comprehensive system of materia medica and therapeutics, arranged upon a physiologico-pathological basis: for the use of practitioners and students of medicine (Volume 1). 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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    more than any other, it is the canting hypocrisy and the arrogant self-sufficiency of professional men. Behold by whom the ranks of the medical profession are filled! God be praised, we can boast of a few thoughtful, honest, liberal-minded men, who love truth more than a creed, and who would rather serve the sick than sordid interest or hollow-hearted ambition; but what, besides their parch- ments, entitles a majority of medical practitioners to their seats in the council-chambers of medicine ? Where is the ever-active ambi- tion for the good of man, the ever-aspiring love of progress, the comprehensive liberality of thought and feeling that distinguish the good Samaritan among us? To hear such a man as Hahnemann, the gifted son of Heaven, whom the wise and good Hufeland delighted to honor as a friend and brother, traduced by the brainless multitude of the common leechers and calomel-venders, or by the arrogant pedants who fill professors' chairs in alloeopathic colleges— men who, under cover of their parchments, and the semblance of ethical morality, permit themselves to practice the most cruel decep- tions and extortions upon their patients—is enough to make an honest man's blood boil with indignation. May God have mere}* upon their nameless frames, when the memory of Hahnemann shall be wreathed in the temple of Immortality with the homage of a redeemed humanity! Homoeopathy was ushered into the world an infant giant, turges- cent with the new life. At the very threshold of his discovery I request you to identify yourselves with the position -and the mind of Hahnemann. What was it that flashed through his mind when he beheld the new truth? What was that one glimpse, that one inspiring thought, that inmost revelation of genius which was as yet unfettered by the chains of words, and emerged from the chambers of his mind like a shapeless consciousness, a vague aspiration, if you please, before the understanding had time to recover from its surprise and examine the quality of this instantaneous unfolding of thought ? Gentlemen, it is because the followers of Hahnemann have failed to grasp the nature of that inmost perception, that the heavenly science which he was commissioned to announce to the world, has been misapprehended by some of her earliest apostles, and has been developed into channels that will require a thorough purification before the healing powers of their waters can be commended to the sick with uniform confidence in all curable diseases. Behold Hahnemann in the presence of the new truth; its inmost, etherial essence floating before his mental vision like a wavelet of transcendent light. What was it that this focus of revealing bri ness conveyed to his startled reason ? Why, it was simply this: that there is no essential difference between the principle of disease and the principle of the drug. Be disease what it may, a purely physi- ological disturbance as Broussais would have it, an effect without a cause as it were; or the result of some morbific agent acting upon the living tissues as a subverter of their functional equilibrium: the drug-action must not only be analogous to it, but must meet it from beginning to end, must be its exact counterpart, a sort of framework into which the essential principle of disease will fit as its own home