Hahnemann's Organon of Medicine - Aphorism 141

[Ardavan Shahrdar]

Hahnemann's Organon of Medicine
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Aphorism 141:

'But the best provings of the pure effects of simple
medicines in altering the human health, and of the
artificial diseases and symptoms they are capable of
developing in the healthy individual, are those which
the healthy, unprejudiced and sensitive physician
institutes on himself with all the caution and care
here enjoined. He knows with the greatest certainty
the things he has experienced in his own person.1
Footnote:

1 Those trials made by the physician on himself have
for him other and inestimable advantages. In the first
place, the great truth that the medicinal virtue of
all drugs, whereon depends their curative power, lies
in the changes of health he has himself undergone from
the medicines he has proved, and the morbid states he
has himself experienced from them, becomes for him an
incontrovertible fact. Again by such noteworthy
observations on himself he will be brought to
understand his own sensations, his mode of thinking
and his disposition (the foundation of all true
wisdom), and he will be also trained to be, what every
physician ought to be, a good observer. All our
observations on others are not nearly so interesting
as those made on ourselves. The observer of others
must always dread lest the experimenter did not feel
exactly what he said, or lest he did not describe his
sensations with the most appropriate expressions. He
must always remain in doubt whether he has not been
deceived, at least to some extent. These obstacles to
the knowledge of the truth, which can never be
thoroughly surmounted in our investigations of the
artificial morbid symptoms that occur in others from
the ingestion of medicines, cease entirely when we
make the trials on ourselves. He who makes these
trials on himself knows for certain what he has felt,
and each trial is a new inducement for him to
investigate the powers of other medicines. He thus
becomes more and more practised in the art of
observing, of such importance to the physician, by
continuing to observe himself, the one on whom he can
most rely and who will never deceive him; and this he
will do all the more zealously as these experiments on
himself promise to give him a reliable knowledge of
the true value and significance of the instruments of
cure that are still to a great degree unknown to our
art. Let it not be imagined that such slight
indispositions caused by taking medicines for the
purpose of proving them can be in the main injurious
to the health. Experience shows on the contrary, that
the organism of the prover becomes, by these frequent
attacks on his health, all the more expert in
repelling all external influences inimical to his
frame and all artificial and natural morbific noxious
agents, and becomes more hardened to resist everything
of an injurious character, by means of these moderate
experiments on his own person with medicines. His
health becomes more unalterable; he becomes more
robust, as all experience shows.'

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Minutus appreciates your fruitful contribution!

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"Life is beautiful, if you look at it in a beautiful way."

Dr Ardavan Shahrdar, MD, DIHom
President of Iranian Homeopathic Association
Website: http://www.minutus.org
Email: ashahrdar@yahoo.com
Mailing list: http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/minutus

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