Yes, you and Leilanae have both said it… in a way. What you've said here really represents isopathy rather than homoeopathy. What Leilanae says in her message -- "'Similia similibus curantur' - heat to a burn" -- represents homoeopathy, but doesn't say how Hahnemann knew that the cure of burns by the decreasing application of heat and of frostbite by cool applications allowed to warm was a homoeopathic cure.
I said you've said it in a way, and you have. But the essence of the matter is that he knew it was homoeopathic through his knowledge of what derangement excess heat causes and of what derangement excess cold (heat drainage) causes. He didn't acquire his certainty that the cure was homoeopathic through a knowledge that the state of being burnt came about through heat (causation); he acquired it through a knowledge of the symptomatic similarity of the heat he was applying to the patient. The difference is subtle in this case but essential nonetheless. The burn could have come about from some other cause -- electricity, say, or microwave radiation -- and the homoeopthicity would remain, though the isopathicity would not. Whilst knowledge of causation could establish the isopathic relationship, it would not establish a homoeopathic one. And whilst knowledge of the deranging effects of the remedy to be applied may establish its homoeopathicity (symptom similarity) to the state of the patient, it will not establish its isopathicity (causation).
Yes, it would seem to.
But it's not what he said. What he wrote was that it is only homoeopathy that cures. That's because homoeopathy was the only method he'd been able to identify that had ever produced cures (leaving aside mesmerism and a few other bits and pieces that might or might not find a homoeopathic relationship of some kind). He had never witnessed cures due to acupuncture, for instance, or to osteopathic or chiropractic manipulation, or anything else.
As far as it goes, what he said was correct: that, of the medicinal relationships clearly identifiable in medical history and in the records of homoeopathic practitioners, those that had produced a cure were homoeopathic. It was therefore reasonable for him to assert that only homoeopathic relationships were curative.
So Hahnemann said that similarity is the only basis for curative responses. But how far do we stretch the meaning of "curative" or "cure", and how far do we stretch that of "similar"?
To the extent that camphor is "similar" to the first stage of all cholera cases, it is "curative" of them all. Probably every cholera case will benefit, for some small time at least, from a dose of Camphora early on. But will it complete the cure? The answer to that obviously depends on how similar it is to the individual case. Many different homoeopathic medicines can similarly produce some good effect early on in a case, by virtue of their partial homoeopathicity. How many of them are capable of completing the cure, though? Possibly each of half a dozen medicinal substances has that potential in a particular case (though one will be faster than the rest); possibly none at all, with a cure reachable only by a zigzag of several remedies in succession. Partial cure is what you get through partial similarity, and entire cure is what you get through great similarity, the kind of similarity that Hahnemann described in referring to "a medicine which can itself produce an affection similar (ηομοιον πάθος) to that sought to be cured". In other words, homoeopathicity is not absolute but relative, and removal of symptoms may not indicate great similarity at all.
But there are two more things to consider here as well. The first is that when a medicine is truly homoeopathic (i.e. similar to the totality of the entire affection), it is capable of curing symptoms that it is incapable of causing. That is, a medicine can cure more than it can cause. If we think about it, we know the truth of this through the success of a medicine as well proven as Thuja or Sulphur in curing natural symptoms it has never been recorded as causing; and we know it too through the existence of antidotal relationships, which have often been shown to be not merely partially antidotal but rather completely antidotal.
The other thing to consider is that the matter of distinguishing a rapid, gentle cure from merely routine allopathic suppression is not necessarily a trivial one -- as you'll recall from a conversation four or five years ago between yourself, H2002, and me about about a medicine rapidly clearing up ear infection and adjudged on that basis to be curative before it was revealed that the medicine was penicillin.
For all these reasons, judging the homoeopathicity of a medicine to a state by the response of that state to the medicine is fraught with difficulties that are nontrivial, even insurmountable.
But even if one knew that a medicine had cured an individual pathological state in one case, what potential would exist to apply that knowledge in the next case? Frankly, none at all! The next patient's state would never ever be a duplicate (or subset) of the preceding patient's state; and the symptoms that the medicine is capable of causing would be no more known after its successful application than before it. So neither the "entire affection" cured nor even the individual symptoms cured would contribute to knowledge of the medicine's pattern of health derangement.
So that's a fair few factors that prevent us from using clinical evidence to build a pure materia medica. In a nutshell, it isn't possible, and even were it possible, our capacity to distinguish cure from suppression is not up to the task any more than was Hahnemann's. If we were at all realistic, we'd recognise that we don't have anything approaching Hahnemann's capacity for discrimination between cure and suppression. But we're not realistic enough even to recognise that; we have no chance at all of being able to make the far subtler distinction itself.
Kind regards,
John