Volume 1

Samuel Hahnemann : his life and work / by Richard Haehl ; translated from the German by Marie L. Wheeler and W.H.R. Grundy ; edited by J.H. Clarke & F.J. Wheeler.

  • Haehl, Richard, 1873-1932.
Date:
[1931]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Samuel Hahnemann : his life and work / by Richard Haehl ; translated from the German by Marie L. Wheeler and W.H.R. Grundy ; edited by J.H. Clarke & F.J. Wheeler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    nature of this science, as great men have already said, is such that it is not capable of any great certainty. “ What a shameful, blasphemous thought ! —I clasped my brow—• '' that the sapience of the Inhnite Spirit, animating the universe, should not be able to create means to pacify the sufferings of diseases which He, after all, allowed to arise ! ” . . . Would He, the Father of all, coldly survey the torments of disease of His dearest creatures ? Would He leave open no way to the genius of mankind—otherwise so infallible—no easy, certain and dependable way of regarding disease from the right angle, of determining the use and the specific, safe and dependable results obtainable from the medicines ? Before I would have given credence to this blasphemy, I should have forsworn all the school systems of the world. . . . Well then, I thought, if there must be a safe, more dependable method of healing, as sure as God is the wisest and most beneficent of beings, let me no longer seek it in the thorn hedges of ontological [the doctrine of the existing] statements, in arbitrary opinions and false conclusions, even though they may adapt themselves wonderfully to a splendid system, nor yet in the authorities of highly celebrated men of delusions. No, let me seek it where it might be nearest at hand, and where they have all passed by, because it did not seem artificial or learned enough, and was not adorned with victorious laurel wreaths for its system, its pedantry or its high falutin abstractions. It made its appeal only to me, who, with no system or faction-head to please, wished to be able to look on with normally easy conscience, should my endangered children die. To any man not utterly devoid of feeling, these are such moving state- ments that he is obliged at any rate to recognise the honesty and sincerity of the desperate explorer. Hahnemann further says, that the next question for him had been : How could you divide up medicines with reference to the patho- logical states for which they are created ? And then he arrives at the thought of observing how medicines act on the perfectly healthy human body. That is the stage which he has reached in 1796. In his essay quoted above: Essay on a New Principle for ascertaining the curative powers of drugs, and some examinations of the previous principles, he explains there have previously been three ways of healing : “The first way, that of removing or destroying the original causes of the malady,“—the preventive practice of physicians, is the most sublime. But he was obliged on this occasion “ to turn aside from this royal road.“ The second way, the most used, contraria contrariis, i.e., healing opposites by opposites, is objectionable in chronic diseases, and even with diseases which will easily degenerate into chronic diseases. The palliative treatment of constipation by laxatives, of blood surgings by phlebotomy, of acid eructation with alkalies, of chronic pains with opium. 5