Minutus

§ 67 Sixth Edition

These incontrovertible truths, which spontaneously offer themselves to our notice and experience, explain to us the beneficial action that takes place under homœopathic treatment; while, on the other hand, they demonstrate the perversity of the antipathic and palliative treatment of diseases with antagonistically acting medicines.1

1 Only in the most urgent cases, where danger to life and imminent death allow no time for the action of a homœopathic remedy - not hours, sometimes not even quarter-hours, and scarcely minutes - in sudden accidents occurring to previously healthy individuals - for example, in asphyxia and suspended animation from lightning, from suffocation, freezing, drowning, etc. - is it admissible and judicious, at all events as a preliminary measure to stimulate the irritability and sensibility (the physical life) with a palliative, as for instance, with gentle electrical shocks, with clysters of strong coffee, with a stimulating odor, gradual application of heat, etc. When this stimulation is effected, the play of the vital organs again goes on in its former healthy manner, for there is here no disease* to be removed, but merely an obstruction and suppression of the healthy vital force. To this category belong various antidotes to sudden poisoning: alkalies from mineral acids, hepar sulphuris for metallic poisons, coffee and camphora (and ipecacuanha) for poisoning by opium, etc.

It does not follow that a homœopathic medicine has been ill selected for a case of disease because some of the medicinal symptoms are only antipathic to some of the less important and minor symptoms of the disease; if only the others, the stronger well-marked (characteristic), and peculiar symptoms of the disease are covered and matched by the same medicine with similarity of symptoms - that is to say, overpowered, destroyed and extinguished; the few opposite symptoms also disappear of themselves after the expiry of the term of action of the medicament, without retarding the cure in the least.

* And yet the new sect that mixes the two systems appeals (though in vain) to this observation, in order that they may have an excuse for encountering everywhere such exceptions to the general rule in diseases, and to justify their convenient employment of allopathic palliatives, and of other injurious allopathic trash besides, solely for the sake of sparing themselves the trouble of seeking for the suitable homœopathic remedy for each case of disease - and thus conveniently appear as homœopathic physicians, without being such. But their performances are on a par with the system they pursue; they are corrupting.
Regards

Soroush Ebrahimi Peter Hughes
Finrod Ltd

Treat others as you would wish to be treated.

Hi, Soroush --

Thanks for persisting with the Organon.
A note about § 67: Hahnemann does not say here that the beneficial secondary action of a minute dose implies that its primary action must be homoeopathic to the patient!
To do so would be to argue in a circle. The argument would go something like this: having observed that a patient who got better in response to a drug did so as a secondary result after the drug's primary influence wore off; assume that it follows that the drug's primary action must be similar to the patient's illness; note that from this it follows that the drug is indeed homoeopathic; and, from this, that the drug's secondary action will be curative. Since this curative action has already been observed to occur, it must therefore be that the assumption was correct. By this method of argument, all that one needs do is assume that what one wants to prove is true, and the mere act of wandering through a series of implications will often eventually bring one back either to something known to be true or to the initial assumption, and -- voila! -- one produces from the hat the very rabbit one placed there to begin with.
The argument Hahnemann makes in §§ 63–67 is something of an entirely different order.
He begins with observations:
• that a substance has a medicinal effect through its ability to derange health, and that health is restored by the effort to oppose that primary effect (§§ 63–65); and
• that a sufficiently small "homoeopathic" dose, by which he here means a potentised dose rather than one homoeopathic to the patient (as is evident in his referring to its effect "on the healthy body") is followed by a reaction only strong enough to restore the organism to health (§ 66).
Hahnemann then notes (§ 67) that what these observations permit, without the need for assumptions, is an understanding of what occurs when one prescribes a medicine whose primary, deranging effect is similar to the (untreated) state of the patient: as in the healthy patient, the primary action is in one direction (obviously, the direction of the patient's untreated state, explaining also the aggravations that occur with insufficiently small doses); the reaction is in the direction of restoring health from a state resembling that untreated state; and the result should be freedom from that state.
§ 67 cannot, then, validly be interpreted as a way of defining homoeopathic treatment. Rather, it commences by using the term "homoeopathic treatment" to mean treatment by a drug of greatest similarity, in deranging (primary) effect, to the patient's untreated state, and argues from there that the observed secondary effect of such a medicine on the patient is perfectly in accord with the observed secondary effect of a medicine on the healthy.
Cheers --
John
2009/10/14 >