Dear John
You must be using an incredibly LARGE envelope.
To be honest, your answer is so long that I cannot follow your arguments - some of which appeared be totally irrelevant to subject of discussion.
But then my intelligence is faulty according to you!
Definition of Medicinal substance = Something that can cause disease symptoms. How do we find out? We prove it.
Is the source important? No!
Can it be a mixture of things? Yes - So long as it is potentised as one, it forms a SINGLE SIMPLE SUBSTANCE.
I think your stance arises from the fact that you have not really understood what a Homeopathic SIMPLE SUBSTANCE is. You are looking at it from the view point of the material world.
To understand about SIMPLE SUBSTANCE, please read Kent's Philosophy chapter 8.
The SIMPLE SUBSTANCE is the quality of the substance that can interact with the Vital force which we achieve through potentisation.
Best wishes
Soroush
________________________________
From:
minutus@yahoogroups.com [mailto:
minutus@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of John Harvey
Sent: 21 July 2009 01:07
To:
minutus@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Minutus] Of substance
Hi again, Soroush --
Good points you've raised here; thank you.
(1)
Well, I don't consider air a substance that's medicinal in its raw state, but I mentioned that too as something excluded by Hahnemann's definition of "single, simple medicinal substance". I bothered to mention that it's a mixture because he's obviously using the term "single, simple medicinal substance" to mean a single, simple substance whose medicinal properties may be developed -- not to mean a single, simple substance with medicinal properties that are wholly evident or at all evident in the crude form.
This is a matter, I think, that can be seen by taking a commonsense approach, but is also, fortunately, in explicit evidence. The common sense I'm thinking of concerns the very substance silica, which Hahnemann was fully aware was medicinally ineffective in its crude form and yet took no pains to suggest was in any way to be regarded as a substance that was nonmedicinal or at all exceptional in being a single, simple medicinal substance. In fact, his every reference to it that I've seen refers to its medicinal properties.
That's just a commonsense view, and it should be preferred to any interpretations that require outlandish assumptions. Moreover, Hahnemann cannot be expected to have guessed that anybody would ever argue that "one single, simple medicinal substance" results from simply potentising a mixture of "more than one single, simple medicinal substance".
So the existence of positive evidence of his intent to include in that phrase such an "inert" substance as silica may be entirely fortuitous. If we had to depend on mere common sense and reason to work this out, I'm not sure we'd ever manage it. Fortunately, such evidence does indeed exist.
One form of this evidence is Hahnemann's inclusion, amongst those single, simple medicinal substances that he exemplifies so well in footnote 159 to § 273, of Nat. mur., a "neutral natrum... salt".
However harmful we may see crude sodium chloride as being in the 21st century, in Hahnemann's time it was not regarded as having medicinal properties; the recognition that it does anything at all, because its effects are so slow, has been a long time in the development. Yet Hahnemann did include this substance, one supposedly medicinally inert in its crude state, amongst examples of a "single, simple medicinal substance".
Clearer evidence still of Hahnemann's inclusion of such "inert" substances as silica and Lycopodium each as a "medicinal substance" lies in the following excerpts from footnote 7 to § 11, which I happened upon quite serendipitously (bold type my emphasis):
"The medicinal property of those material substances which we call medicines proper relates only to their energy to call out alterations in the well-being of animal life. Only upon this conceptual principle of life depends their medicinal health-altering, conceptual (dynamic) influence.... And thus every special medicinal substance alters through a kind of infection, that well-being of man in a peculiar manner exclusively its own... These medicines act upon our well-being wholly without communication of material parts of the medicinal substances, thus dynamically, as if through infection. Far more healing energy is expressed in a case in point by the smallest dose of the best dynamized medicines, in which there can be, according to calculation, only so little of material substance that its minuteness cannot be thought and conceived by the best arithmetical mind, than by large doses of the same medicine in substance. That smallest dose can therefore contain almost entirely only the pure, freely-developed, conceptual medicinal energy, and bring about only dynamically such great effects as can never be reached by the crude medicinal substance itself taken in large doses."
Let me interrupt to note that here Hahnemann is expressing sufficiently well in passing what he has expressed elsewhere with explicit definitiveness: that the medicinal properties of a substance are released and developed, rather than created, in the process of dynamisation (potentisation or trituration) from the crude medicinal substance.
More directly addressing your question, though, is Hahnemann's specific reference to the "crude medicinal substance", a reference whose import may be more obvious in the following (continuing from the previously quoted passage):
"It is not in the corporeal atoms of these highly dynamized medicines, nor their physical or mathematical surfaces (with which the higher energies of the dynamized medicines are being interpreted but vainly as still sufficiently material) that the medicinal energy is found. More likely, there lies invisible in the moistened globule or in its solution, an unveiled, liberated, specific, medicinal force contained in the medicinal substance which acts dynamically by contact with the living animal fibre upon the whole organism (without communicating to it anything material however highly attenuated) and acts more strongly the more free and more immaterial the energy has become through dynamization."
These words are, or should be, potent reminders of Hahnemann's conception: that the medicinal force of all medicinal substances is due not to their substance but to their dynamic properties, which are "unveiled" and "liberated" through dynamisation.
To argue that we should assume that Hahnemann would exclude Silicea or Lycopodium from this all-encompassing observation, and therefore possibly from the term "medicinal substance", would be to argue that his observations apply to everything but these apparently inert substances. Yet the process of unveiling and liberation that he refers to is one that applies more strongly to such substances than it does to ones that are patently chemically strong. With such obvious examples of what he intended, it would be perverse indeed to argue that he was excepting from this observation those substances whose dynamic powers are most clearly unveiled and most astonishingly liberated and simply forgot even to mention them as another class, one of "non-medicinal substances", in which exactly the same effect is even more pronounced.
It seems to me that the division of substances into medicinally active and medicinally inert is not one that Hahnemann himself drew at all; certainly not in relation to what is a medicinal substance. Hahnemann rather distinguishes between the medicinal substance and the vehicle of its dilution, as in § 269 (bold type my emphasis):
"The homoeopathic system of medicine develops for its special use, to a hitherto unheard-of degree, the inner medicinal powers of the crude substances by means of a process peculiar to it and which has hitherto never been tried, whereby they all become immeasurably and penetratingly efficacious [146] and remedial, even those that in the crude state give no evidence of the slightest medicinal power on the human body.
"This remarkable change in the qualities of natural bodies develops the latent, hitherto unperceived, as if slumbering [147], hidden, dynamic (§ 11) powers which influence the life principle, change the well-being of animal life [148]. This is effected by mechanical action upon their smallest particles, [which] by means of rubbing and shaking and through the addition of an indifferent substance, dry or fluid, are separated from each other."
Notice that Hahnemann makes no assumption here that the diluent is inert; only that it is indifferent to the medicine. I'll return to this critical point.
Significantly, footnote 148 to this aphorism states the following (bold type my emphasis):
"On this account it refers only to the increase and stronger development of their power to cause changes in the health of animals and men if these natural substances in this improved state are brought very near to the living sensitive fibre or come in contact with it (by means of intake or olfaction)",
and footnote 149 speaks of salt as a chemical that (bold type my emphasis)
"will never develop into medicinal salt" except "by means of our well prepared dynamization"
-- confirming his view that sodium chloride, Nat. mur., is medicinally as inert in its crude form as silica is.
It's of little importance in this regard whether Hahnemann regarded lactose as medicinally inert, as his § 269 clarifies that it's the being "indifferent" that matters there in terms of a medium. If, for instance, one wished to potentise an acid using as its medium of potentisation an alkali, one would not succeed, as the alkali, far from being indifferent to the acid, would rapidly combine with it and recombine its elements into a salt and water. What is of significance, and what shines clearly through the above-quoted passages all taken together, is that Hahnemann's classification of "medicinal substance" is one not of the nature of the substance, which may be as medicinally inactive in its crude state as silica, but of its relative purity and its indifference to any medium of potentisation. Silicea and Lycopodium, crude and in potency, are not non-medicinal of themselves, in Hahnemann's view, any more than alcohol is; yet alcohol, in its role of "indifferent substance" during potentisation, is not a "medicinal substance", any more than lactose is. So neither alcohol nor lactose constitutes a "medicinal substance" when used as potentisation's "indifferent substance"; and it is only their role as indifferent substance (i.e. as chemically nonreactive diluent) that prevents their entering into the dynamisation process themselves.
Let me point out too, if any more clarification were needed, that it is for that reason and that reason alone that Hahnemann, who is perfectly aware that alcohol has medicinal activity, recommends alcohol as a preservative of the potentised remedy.
For the above reasons, Hahnemann's distinction is clear between a mixture of two medicinal substances and a mixture of one medicinal substance (such as the silica used to make potentised Silicea) and a non-medicinal substance such as the water, alcohol, or lactose that is chemically indifferent to it and, precisely because it is the medium of dilution, will not enter into the potentisation process.
(2)
Here's a sample (again one I just happened upon):
"The mixture of several medicines... therewith in order to obtain some purposed, certain, curative effect, is a piece of folly repugnant to every reflecting and unprejudiced person." (Organon Introduction, p. 75.)
If you'd like more, though, they won't be hard to find; Hahnemann protests against such "folly" everywhere. Here's something from footnote 29 to the same page of the Introduction:
"In fact, our knowledge of what is essential to be known respecting all our remedies, as also respecting the perhaps hundred-fold relationship among each other into which they enter when combined, is far too little to be relied upon to enable us to tell with certainty the degree and extent of the action of a substance, seemingly ever so unimportant, when introduced into the human body in combination with other substances."
Furthermore, there has been little suggestion and no evidence that I've ever come across that Hahnemann was engaged in mere word games in using the words "not permissible to administer to a patient more than one single, simple medicinal substance at one time": that he meant "but go ahead as long as you potentise the result sufficiently". On any plain interpretation, he was stating in that sentence that a patient should be given no more than one medicinal substance (or its dynamisation) at one time, not merely that a patient should not have these various substances unmixed!
From memory, I think you'll find various other references to this matter in the Introduction to Materia Medica Pura. (But it's been many years since I last saw a copy, and I may be mistaken.)
(3)
It is actually evidence of nothing more than somebody's collection and use of lake water and somebody's collection and use of spring water. It has, of course, no bearing whatever upon Hahnemann's meaning of "medicinal substance".
The 1 Feb 2002 edition of Alternative Medicine Review boasts an article claiming some effectiveness by an "oral homeopathic medication" -- one consisting of a mixture of potassium bromide, sodium bromide, nickel sulphate, and sodium chloride -- in "effective treatment" of seborrheic dermatitis.
Would you argue on that basis that not only is that mixture of four chemicals a "homoeopathic remedy" (since it has been created) but also that it has a proven pathogenesis (since it has "cured" seborrheic dermatitis) and that applying it to a patient on the basis of that one patient symptom is homoeopathic treatment (since somebody called it that) and required no knowledge of pathogenetic symptoms (since none were known or used)?
To my mind, the argument that Hahnemann's meaning in single, simple medicinal substance is affected by what anybody chooses to call a homoeopathic remedy, chooses to attempt to prescribe, or even chooses to attempt to prove is equivalent to an argument that the meaning of telephone is affected by the design of toy telephones for children that carry no sound but light up when squeezed. The first cannot be affected by the invention of the second, regardless of the inventor's possible intent. The same is true of the intent to create a homoeopathic remedy that violates the definition of what can become one: a single, simple medicinal substance. No such intent can affect what Hahnemann meant.
(4)
Of course.
An old habit -- the hardest kind to kick. Keep reminding me, and I may learn to kick it.
(5)
Hmm... yes, that's a significant blow to the idea that one might possess and prove such a remedy! But I'm unsure what your point is here. Could you spell it out for me?
Thanks, Soroush --
John
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"Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose that our views of science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are complete; and that there are no new worlds to conquer."
- Sir Humphry Davy, in "An Account of some Galvanic Combinations", Philosophical Transactions 91 (1801), pp. 397-402 (as quoted by David Knight, Humphry Davy: Science and Power, Cambridge, 1998, p. 87)
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"Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose that our views of science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are complete; and that there are no new worlds to conquer."
- Sir Humphry Davy, in "An Account of some Galvanic Combinations", Philosophical Transactions 91 (1801), pp. 397-402 (as quoted by David Knight, Humphry Davy: Science and Power, Cambridge, 1998, p. 87)