Organon of the specific healing art / By Gottlieb Ludwig Rau, M.D. Tr. from the German, with an essay on the present internal condition of the homoeopathic school, by C.J. Hempel, M.D.

Rau, Gottlieb Ludwig, 1779-1840.

Date:: 1847

Credit: Organon of the specific healing art / By Gottlieb Ludwig Rau, M.D. Tr. from the German, with an essay on the present internal condition of the homoeopathic school, by C.J. Hempel, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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$with Hahnemann at their head, suspect nothing but latent psora; others, lastly, trace every disease to some rheumatic affection, and, whatever the patient may say, they will succeed in making out that the functions of the skin had been disturbed some time previous. Upon this supposition they wrap him in flannel, and administer sudorifics, which make him still more sensitive to the disturbing action of the air. At the present time, tubercles in the brain, ulcers in the intestines, inflam- mations of the spinal marrow, are all the fashion, and serve to account for a great number of morbid conditions. No system has as yet succeeded in limiting this arbitrary mode of gener- alizing, and this mania of tracing certain fundamental dis- orders. Frequently, however, the wish has been expressed of possessing a therapeutic law which would give us some cer- tainty, and would enable us to avoid the danger of groping in darkness, or losing ourselves in the maze of hypotheses. For many years, in order to apply a rational treatment, and conform to the principle, tolle causam, physicians have en- deavored to determine by their reason the proximate hidden cause of disease, and to base their treatment upon such a cause. This treatment has been more or less successful, ac- cording as one started from premises that were more or less correct. The tendency to idealize, to arrive at a knowledge of the invisible causes of disease by pure reason, is the dangerous cliff that Samuel Hahnemann has endeavored to avoid in esta- blishing the principle that nothing can be known of disease with certainty except its perceptible phenomena. With this principle he has coupled the assertion that this is all that a phy- sician who is otherwise acquainted with the pathogenetic effects of drugs, requires to select the proper remedy. The author of this doctrine has developed it with a boldness which has scarcely ever been equalled \ and, in order to make the want of fixed principles more keenly felt, he has described the weak sides of the old school in the most repulsive colors, deny- ing that it has been of any use whatever. The partisans of the old school, called rational not without a good deal of pre- sumption, have used every endeavor to preserve for it the in- fluence it enjoyed, and to cover the new doctrine with igno- miny. The revolutionary boldness with which it overthrew every thing which had been previously admitted in medicine,, excited an extraordinary sensation. It would be improper to find fault with the desire implanted in human nature, to pre- serve what had been carefully cultivated for years. Frequent- ly, however, that desire increases to a censurable conservatism^ betraying weakness, an unwillingness to free one's self from$