Samuel Hahnemann's Organon of homoeopathic medicine.

  • Hahnemann, Samuel, 1755-1843.
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Samuel Hahnemann's Organon of homoeopathic medicine. 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.)

    49/242
    powers abandoned to their own resources, which, depending solely upon the organic laws of the body, only act in virtue of these laws, without reasoning or reflecting upon their actions. They copied nature, who could not, like an intelligent surgeon, bring together the gaping lips of a wound, and reunite them by the first intention; who, in an oblique fracture, can do nothing, however great may be the quantity of osseous matter which exudes, to adjust and attach the two ends of the bone ; who, not knowing how to tie up a wounded artery, suffers a man full of strength and health to bleed to death ; who, igno- rant of the art of reducing a dislocation, renders its reduction in a very short time impossible, by reason of the swelling which she excites in all the neighbouring parts ; who, in order to free herself from a foreign body that had penetrated the transparent cornea, destroys the whole eye by suppuration; who, in a strangulated hernia, cannot break the obstacle but by gangrene and death ; who, finally, in dynamic diseases, by changing their form, often renders the state of the patient worse than it was before. Besides, this unintelligent vital power ad- mits into the body, without hesitation, the greatest scourge of our earthly existence, the source of countless diseases which have afflicted the human species for centuries past—that is to say, chronic miasms, such as psora, syphilis, and sycosis. And, far from being able to relieve the system of any one of these miasms, she does not even possess the power of ameliorating them; but, on the contrary, suffers them quietly to continue diarrhrea, plentiful flow of urine, sweats, abscesses, &c. ; and the nervous powers, attacked dynamically, seek, in some degree, to unload themselves by material products. The animal economy, abandoned to its own resources, cannot save itself from acute diseases, but by the destruction and sacrifice of one part of the system itself; and even where death does not ensue, the harmony of life and health is restored only in a slow and imperfect manner. The great debility of those organs which have been exposed to the attacks of the malady, as well as that of the entire body, after this spontaneous cure, meagreness, &c, are sufficient testimonies of the truth of what we have as- serted. In shorty the whole proceedings by which the system delivers itself frDm the diseases with which it is attacked, only exhibit to the observer a tissue of sufferings, and show him nothing which he can or ought to imitate, if he truly exercises the art of healing.