Reply to a French review of essay LII : essay LVI / by William Sharp.

Date:
1889
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Reply to a French review of essay LII : essay LVI / by William Sharp. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    made for more than a hundred years ; in “ blue-pill ” it is triturated with conserve of roses, in “ grey-powder ” with chalk. Other inert substances, as several metals, the earths, &c., are now in the same manner triturated with sugar of milk. It is with these mechanical sub- divisions of such drugs that experiments have to be made, and contrary actions, or actions in contrary direc- tions, between the first and second or third triturations —that is, between the hundredth part of a grain and the ten thousandth, or the millionth, may be expected. The three examples given by the reviewer have to be thus dealt with. Common salt.—This is one of those border substances which baffle the ingenuity of human classification. No one hesitates to put lions and horses in a different class from that containing oaks and roses, but to this day the line of demarcation between the two classes of animals and plants has not been satisfactorily drawn. So bread as a food, and arsenic as a poison, cannot be classed together—they must needs be put into separate classes— and yet there are substances which have a claim to appear in both these classes. Common salt is one of these substances. Chloride of Sodium, in the form known as common salt, is taken by us in every meal, and is essential to the process of healthy digestion; in this form, therefore, it is not a drug according to the defi- nition several times given in these Essays. To become a drug it must be divided into minute particles either by trituration or by solution in water; and when successive subdivisions have been made in either of these ways, experiments may be undertaken with them, and contrary actions between certain larger and certain smaller doses will, no doubt, be discovered. Hahnemann admits that “ salt when ordinraily used, has no pernicious effect upon the organism,” but he gives provings of it by himself and four other physicians. His direction is “ dynamise one grain of the crystals in the usual fashion.” From which it must be concluded that these experiments or provings were made, as just now suggested, with these minute subdivisions. The list of symptoms recorded, amounting to many hundreds, cover forty pages, and include almost every imaginable uncomfortableness which human nature has to bear. But Hahnemann does not give us any intimation of the