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Sorry to disagree with you Soroush
The Ancients Greeks already knew about the 'two methods of healing' - the laws of opposites or similars, which Hippocrates had written about. Hahnemann, being a Greek scholar, was aware of what Hippocrates had written about this - Hahnemann's genius was to notice this, take this knowledge and develop it into a system. It was when he was reading and writing about the use of China in malaria that the two bits of information came together in his mind and made sense - eureka! So he did not 'discover' this Law - it already existed, had been commented on, and Hahnemann expanded it. Which is not to detract from his genius in any way.
He also drew upon the writings of Paracelsus in order to experiment with the production of smaller doses of potentially dangerous substances.
As for the word 'homeopathy' itself - I have no idea whether it existed before - maybe not. But the fact that Hahnemann called his new system by a Greek word shows you how deeply versed he was in Greek medicinal knowledge (which has left its mark on all medicine, thanks in large part to Hippocrates)
Liz
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See my reply to Soroush - I'm not talking about the word 'homeopathy' - would have put it into quotes. I'm talking about the system of medicine.
Liz
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Liz
Are you implying that Hn had read on what had happened in ancient Greece and decided to revive it? If so that is incorrect.
No - I believe he found it from the scratch - the fact that the old boys had mentioned it somewhere but no one had ever seriously used it, puts in to perspective.
It is Hn's genius to formulate the meaning of a discovery and make it into a system about which we are proud.
Rgds
Soroush
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From: minutus@yahoogroups.com [mailto:minutus@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Liz Brynin
Sent: 23 July 2009 07:34
To: minutus@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Minutus] Re: Recommended Reading
See my reply to Soroush - I'm not talking about the word 'homeopathy' - would have put it into quotes. I'm talking about the system of medicine.
Liz
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Are you implying that Hn had read on what had happened in ancient Greece and decided to revive it? If so that is incorrect.
No - I believe he found it from the scratch - the fact that the old boys had mentioned it somewhere but no one had ever seriously used it, puts in to perspective.
Yes, I am implying just that. As you know, Hahnemann was very widely read - and spoke eight languages, including Greek. He had done a lot of research into early medicine, and had read widely among the ancient texts. During his readings he had come across the medical theory of 'like cures like' - Hippocrates mentions it and also Paracelsus. It was also common in German folk medicine at the time of Paracelsus, which Hahnemann would have known all about, and this is where Paracelsus got the idea from. Paracelsus was famous for using mineral poisons like mercury and antimony, as he believed in 'like cures like' and therefore the effects of a poison are counteracted by another poison. Paracelsus also said "It depends only upon the dose whether a poison is poison or not" - and this is where Hahnemann got the idea of experimenting with reducing the dosage of a drug to make it less poisonous.
So what I am saying is that the germ of ideas from previous medical writings and herbal traditions blossomed when H. was writing about China and pondering how it worked. He came to the conclusion that it worked because of its similarity (a theory he was already familiar with). So it was old ideas and theories that Hahnemann revived and developed further into a system which he called homeopathy.
Liz
It is true that Hippocrates has written about two systems of healing ,and the laws of opposites and similars but the main question is similar or opposite with what.
what are the indexes of similarity to disease.
Hahnemann revealed the true remedies virtue by proving them on healthy people, and said that these symptoms of remedies are true indicators of similarity .before Hahnemann no one knows the of indexes of similarity for disease,it was only an empirical method.But Hahnemann found a scientific and experimental way for it.
Further more Hahnemann found three way of treatment,homeopathy ,antipathy and allopathy.
--- On Thu, 7/23/09, Liz Brynin wrote:
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Liz, such speculations are easy: Hahnemann had every opportunity to read some crackpot idea, so when he discovered through a single experiment that there was something to it, he was effectively inspired to experiment simply through having once read the crackpot idea. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, the only available evidence suggests that Hahnemann had something much more practical on his mind than some crackpot theory when he undertook his experiment, an experiment that clearly led to his subsequent provings. And that something was, explicitly, the purpose of learning what reason there could be for the power of Peruvian bark to disrupt intermittent fevers. The scientific mind annoyed at the pure speculation in Cullen's materia medica of astringent qualities as any explanation for that effectiveness leaped at the insight that knowing the drug's power to alter health, without the complications of that health first having been lost, might offer something useful.
That process, fully documented by Hahnemann himself, is completely plausible, and far more so than the idea that he chose to apply one of dozens of speculative notions all of which he had decided were no basis for treating the sick.
Perhaps it doesn't matter quite what unconscious psychological influences may have had their slight influence in moving him to learn the pure effects of the drug. Perhaps it doesn't matter really that before Hahnemann the Greek roots homoios and pathos (as we'd anglicise them) had never been adjoined, because nobody had taken the possibility of curing by similars seriously enough to conduct a single test of a drug's pure effects for the purpose of testing.
What does matter and is essential to understand about homoeopathy is that the minimum dose was not Hahnemann's contribution to a "law of similars" already formulated by others; that the identity of homoeopathy has nothing whatever to do with dosage or potency; that the word itself conveys in shorthand its meaning in whole: prescription guided by similar suffering. For some two decades before discovering the liberation that potentisation offers from the primary effects of a medicinal substance, Hahnemann practised homoeopathy. It was homoeopathy no less than the practice he developed in response to the discovery that there need be no minimum dose, and no less than the practice he developed of taking account of symptoms absent at the present moment of an illness, even of a chronic illness, to enable a prescription more homoeopathic to the patient's entire (largely invisible) illness.
What matters, in understanding what homoeopathy is, is that with guidance by the similarity of natural and pathogenetic symptoms, one practises homoeopathy, and that without that guidance, one doesn't.
Your question having been why everyone jumped on Irene for treating minimal dosage as being of equal importance, the short answer then is that minimal dosage simply is not of equal importance in identifying homoeopathic practice. No matter how minimal your dose, if it's prescribed other than upon similiarity of symptoms, the method is not homoeopathic. Irene got jumped on, not for suggesting that minimal dose is important in homoeopathy -- which it is -- but for suggesting that symptom similarity is inessential -- which it is not.
John
"the crackpot idea"
I am sorry that you dismiss the wisdom of generations before Hahnemann, who used a system of 'like cures like', as 'crackpot ideas.
Not sure where you're going with this!
Liz
Hi, Liz --
If generations used a "system of 'like cures like'", and if it was indeed a system, meaning that it was systematic in method, then presumably it approached if not preempted Hahnemann's own invention of the system of treatment, homoeopathy, that followed his discovery of the curative nature of the homoeopathic relationship.
But if this indeed occurred, then it's news to me and it was unknown to Hahnemann, who was not at all averse to giving credit where it was due.
My reference to "some crackpot idea" was to any of the several throwaway lines that, in his later researches, Hahnemann came across from Hippocrates onward: crackpot in the sense that they had no evident foundation in fact but were just another speculative fancy.
So I hope that it's obvious that I was not including homoeopathy amongst them.
Hahnemann made his attitude to such groundless fancies fairly evident throughout the Organon. To take a ripe example:
"But ever since that time (soon after Hippocrates, therefore, for 2500 years) men have occupied themselves with the treatment of the ever increasing multiplicity of diseases, who, led astray by their vanity, sought by reasoning and guessing to excogitate the mode of furnishing this aid. Innumerable and dissimilar ideas respecting the nature of diseases and their remedies sprang from so many dissimilar brains, and the theoretical views these gave rise to the so-called systems, each of which was at variance with the rest and self-contradictory."
Leaving aside the mistranslation that gives us a non-sentence, Hahnemann's overall meaning here is fairly clear: these were merely ideas.
The sentences following from the above are of great significance:
"Each of these subtle expositions at first threw the readers into stupefied amazement at the incomprehensible wisdom contained in it, and attracted to the system-monger a number of followers, who re-echoed his unnatural sophistry, to none of whom, however, was it of the slightest use in enabling them to cure better, until a new system, often diametrically opposed to the first, thrust that aside, and in its turn gained a short-lived renown."
Hahnemann immediately amplifies: "... they were mere theoretical webs, woven by cunning intellects out of pretend consequences, which could not be made use of in practice... and only served for empty disputations."
The significance of this that I'd draw your attention to is Hahnemann's discounting of these "systems" as practicable.
These excerpts are from the opening paragraph of Hahnemann's Introduction to the 6th edition (Jain, 1976 reprint, pp. 32 to 33).
Hahnemann goes on to give a potted history of the accidental use of homoeopathy in allopathic medicine in his eighth paragraph, in which he quotes Rau pointing out that such relationships were relegated to a conceptual byway through use of the term "specific" and asserts (p. 37) that "in consequence of the receptivity for homogeneous irritation being so highly increased in diseases, such medicines in the usual large doses are dangerous to life... Accordingly no attempt was made to cure, in the direct (the most natural) way, by means of homogeneous, specific medicines; nor could it be done, as the effects of most of medicines were, and continued to remain, unknown..."
And his tenth to twelfth paragraphs (pp. 38 to 45) give many further examples of such crackpot ideas.
On page 87 of the 1976 Jain reprint appears Hahnemann's summary of the final two pages of the Introduction, which immediately follow it and contain all the examples he had found of the foreshadowing of the principle of curing by similarity of symptoms:
"There have occasionally been physicians who vaguely surmised that medicines cure analogous morbid states by the power they possess of producing analogous morbid symptoms."
And Hahnemann goes on to detail them. But, to repeat him again (p. 37):
"... no attempt was made to cure, in the direct (the most natural) way, by means of homogeneous, specific medicines; nor could it be done, as the effects of most of medicines were, and continued to remain, unknown..."
Thus any previous knowledge of the principle -- which would imply knowing the effects of a substance on the healthy -- has been absent except in instances of a physician's isolated observation of the similarity between a single medicine's effects and a single patient's illness of which it apparently was curative. Such an observation is no more a "system" or even a "principle" than any other chance observation of a particular relationship is a system or a principle.
The closest anybody before Hahnemann came to stating it as a workable principle was Stahl, in his express conviction that "The rule generally acted on in medicine, to treat by means of oppositely acting remedies (contraria contrariis), is quite false and the reverse of what ought to be; I am, on the contrary, convinced that diseases will yield to, and be cured by, remedies that produce a similar affection (similia similibus)... I have treated a tendency to acidity of the stomach by a very small dose of sulphuric acid with the most successful result, in cases where a number of absorbent remedies had been fruitlessly employed".
Does this not sound like homoeopathy to you? Why, then, do I discount this as a previous discovery of the homoeopathic principle? It is because it is mere conjecture. Stahl has explicitly based his entire conviction upon what he imagines to be a similarity between the effects of sulphuric acid and an overly acidic stomach, and even if observation had justified his conviction in this particular circumstance -- which it did not! -- this peculiar observation on one medicine would not and could not serve as a basis for his idea, which therefore -- despite its truth -- was as crackpot as any other in lacking a foundation in observation.
The reader may be puzzled, incidentally, as to why I claim that Stahl had no observational basis for concluding that sulphuric acid acted to quell stomach acidity with good results, though it is well-known to us that it indeed does cause that condition. My reason does not chiefly concern the other symptoms of the patient -- though, if they're not included in the pathogenesis of sulphuric acid, they are unlikely to be cured homoeopathically by it, due to only partial homoeopathicity. My reason concerns something even more fundamental than this: that Stahl had no evident knowledge of the pathogenesis of sulphuric acid, not even of whether in the healthy it increased production of stomach acid; he instead based his surmise of the significance of the symptomatic similarity on the presumption of that primary effect.
Lack of any factual basis for the espousal of principles, including the espousal of a principle of cure by symptom similarity, is why it's my contention that no statement of curative relationship before Hahnemann's Similis similibus curantur -- not even Stahl's proposal of similia similibus (the only proposal of the general principle before Hahnemann of which Hahnemann was aware) -- was more than a conjecture (or "crackpot idea") amongst all the crackpot ideas that Hahnemann rightly recognised as so much idle fancy rather than as reason for prescribing a medicine. There was no reason, before Hahnemann conducted pathogenetic trials, to prescribe upon a basis of symptom similarity.
Cheers!
John
2009/7/25 Liz Brynin >
It is my understanding from what I have read that 'like cures like' was indeed used by folk medicine in Germany centuries before Hahnemann.
I am unhappy that you dismiss previous practices - or 'speculations' even - as 'crackpot ideas'. They obviously weren't, as Hahnemann used them!
As I said in a previous post - this is not to detract from homeopathy and from Hahnemann - I also mentioned his genius. But neither should you denigrate others, who were clearly on the right track, but working in isolation before books were widely available, and therefore without the advantage that Hahnemann had of coming later in history, with the possibility of exploring and uniting all these suggestions together.
Liz
