Homoeopathy : its present state and future prospects : being the presidential address, delivered at the British Homoeopathic Congress, held at Malvern, September 11, 1879 / by Richard Hughes.

  • Hughes, Richard, 1836-1902.
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Homoeopathy : its present state and future prospects : being the presidential address, delivered at the British Homoeopathic Congress, held at Malvern, September 11, 1879 / by Richard Hughes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    prejudice the system itself in their eyes, and keep up a bitterness against it which is quite out of place in a ques- tion of science. Our desire must be that it should leaven to the uttermost the practice of medicine, and acquire the confidence of the greatest possible number of medical men. With this view, we must heartily welcome the obliteration of distinctions which keep men apart from one another, and too often cause the subject to be viewed in that lumen madiclim of passion which Bacon deprecated, instead of the lumen siccum of unclouded reason. If our cause can best be served by our individual extinction, or rather absorption into the common mass, let us not shrink from any self- abnegation that may be required. Nor need we doubt that here, as elsewhere, to lose our life may be to gain it. Though we are not the cause of the schism which isolates us, we are the sufferers from it. The dangers which haunt all small societies, gathered round a special principle, and withdrawn from the main current of the life of the body from which they are separated, do press sorely upon us. We all know how among men so situated narrowness of sentiment and exclusiveness of view is almost inevitable; how rife are personalities, rivalries, jealousies, how vehement controversies about the details of the common faith. In such associations those dispro- portions come to prevail which have given rise to the figure of the triton among the minnows, and the proverb parmi les aveugles le borgne est roi. And when, as here, there is bread-winning connected with the questions at issue, there is the additional peril that the standard may be joined for the sake of gain, that men may trade on the distinctive name and position taken up. I am sure that we homceo- pathists cannot claim to have been exempt from the evils thus incident to our situation. See with what bitterness we conduct the discussion between the two sections into which such a body must needs fall, its cote gauche and its cote droit, those who cultivate exclusively and to the utmost the method of Hahnemann, and those who seek to harmonise it with general medicine. Such a division has existed among us in every country, and it has involved us in continual warfare. See how difficult it is for us to unite in any common course of action. The storms which have raged around the cradle of the London School of Homoeo- pathy are only a recurrence of those which marked the early days of the British Homoeopathic Society and the London Homoeopathic Hospital. I may be pardoned for