THE MONTHLY

HOMEOPATHIC REVIEW.

THE PROGRESS OF HOMEOPATHY.

ANOTHER year dawns upon us; and once again we endeavour to answer the enquiry-What progress have our therapeutic principles, commonly expressed by the word homœopathy, made during the last twelve months? We believe that we shall be able to show that this progress has been both substantial and considerable.

One hundred years have not elapsed since HAHNEMann, in the chief medical periodical of Europe, urged the importance the pre-eminent importance of the principle similia similibus curantur in the selection of medicines. He did so at a time when drugs were prescribed without any definite principle whatever, and when they were ordered, not only in doses detrimental to the structures of body, but so numerously mixed as effectually to preclude any reliable inferences being drawn as to the influence any single drug might have exerted. The idea, then, that one single principle was all that the physician needed to guide him in prescribing, that one single medicine was alone required to meet the indications of medicinal treatment, that the efficient dose of such a remedy was greatly less than that generally supposed to be required, and that the only way in which the real nature of the influence of a drug upon the body could be ascertained was by experiments made with it upon the healthy human being, No. 1, Vol. 19.

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constituted a body of therapeutic doctrine as simple as it was novel, as subversive of all current medical teaching as any that could well be devised. Of the storm of opposition, the practical enforcement of these doctrines encountered, it is needless now to write. It was an opposition based entirely upon ignorance, those who opposed resolutely refused to investigate the principles taught, or to test the practice resulting from them. Such small doses as Hahnemann declared to be all sufficient they simply sneered at, and they did so solely because, in administering medicines upon different, nay opposite, principles, they had found much larger ones essential to obtain the ends they aimed at. Their acquaintance with drugs was, for all practical purposes, limited to evacuants and narcotics; the idea of a specific remedy was one which they could not comprehend and would not seek to understand. And it was in the difference between a specific and an evacuant or narcotic remedy that the size of the proper dose lay. The antagonism to Hahnemann and his method of treatment took shape in every species of cruelty and persecution that ignorance and vested interests could suggest. On the side of Hahnemann-who in no long time was surrounded with a band of earnest, warmhearted and devoted disciples, of men who, having tested and found true the principle he had taught them, were prepared, most resolutely, in verba magistri jurare—this antagonism provoked the bitterness which is bred of disappointment, it envenomed much that he wrote; while the absence of healthy criticism, the flattery extended to him by his pupils, and the wide spread reputation engendered by the practical success of his therapeutics gave rise to that dogmatism which disfigures no small portion of his Organon, and not a little of some other of his writings. It is easy to be wise after the event; and especially easy to say how much wiser and better it would have been had Hahnemann treated his opponents with a little more courtesy and been somewhat less confident

in asserting his opinions. But which of us, who of all his critics, is prepared to say that had he been in Hahnemann's position, had he been called upon to endure all that Hahnemann endured, solely because he felt the fullest confidence-a confidence amply verified by a large experience that his opinions were not only right but of untold importance in the treatment of disease, in the saving of human life, who is there that would have the hardihood to say, that he is sure he would have been milder to his enemies, and more deferential to his friends?

The opposition encountered by homoeopathy in its earliest days exists still. It is less noisy, somewhat less demonstrative than it was even twenty years ago, but it is alive even now. The resolutions which exclude medical men who acknowledge that they practise homœopathy from the chief medical societies are unrepealed. The denunciations hurled against all non-homœopathic physicians and surgeons who consent to assist such as openly practise homœopathy in saving life, are still in forcethough indeed but comparatively rarely acted upon. No medical officer of any public institution dare admit that he prescribes homœopathically for his patients-did he do so he would without doubt be compelled to forfeit his position. Until these and similar restrictions upon a free exercise of therapeutic judgment are removed, until such trades-union shackles as these are thoroughly and for ever cast aside, until the professional status of the physician or surgeon who practises homœopathy is as freely acknowledged as that of one who declares that he does not do so, homœopathists must maintain a quasi separate existence. Homœopathic hospitals, homœopathic societies, and homœopathic journals are the necessities imposed upon us by this invidious, unjust and unjustifiable line of conduct on the part of the majority of the profession.

If, however, the antagonism to homeopathic practitioners, as such, is but little altered, that which was evinced towards the principles of homoeopathy is wonder

Review, Jan. 1, 1875.

fully changed. These principles are now, all more or less, taught in our chief schools of medicine, and practised in our most prominent hospitals! The word "homœopathy" is indeed rarely, if ever, mentioned save to enable a lecturer to perpetrate a bad joke, or to misrepresent its meaning; but the doctrine expressed by the word is constantly taught. Of this fact we have had no inconsiderable amount of gratifying evidence during the past

year.

The protests, which from the days of Hahnemann until now, homœopathists have never ceased to urge against those unscientific and practically useless methods of prescribing drugs, which are and have been in vogue among members of the dominant school, were thoroughly endorsed by Dr. MoxON at Guy's Hospital last May. As the first step to improved knowledge is a full confession of present ignorance, Dr. Moxon's address is worthy of study. Drugs, he assured his pupils, were simply to be regarded as "stepping stones to faith in the weary time." They were in short useless in modifying the structures of the body, and only really serviceable because the patient was superstitiously impressed with their importance ! Dr. Moxon in this address succeeded, most thoroughly, in convincing his hearer that he, at any rate, was entirely ignorant of the subject he was appointed to teach! He endeavoured also to make out that all physicians were in the same plight, and argued that those who professed some information capable of being rendered valuable at the bedside were little else than impostors! The only way in which it appeared to Dr. Moxon that drugs could be rendered serviceable in the future was by studying their effects in disease. Patients were to be the corpora vilia which should throw light upon the nature of drug action. On what principles the drugs should be selected first of all, why in a grave case aloes should be preferred to morphia Dr. Moxon did not say-on the contrary, he

denounced all attempts at "reasonings on medical therapeutics" in no measured terms. An empiricism of the most primitive type is to redeem therapeutics from the slough of despond in which Dr. Moxon represented it as lying!

Dr. FERRIER, at King's College, while estimating current drug-therapeutic knowledge much as Dr. Moxon had done at Guy's, was not like him disposed to trust to mere empiricism, to the observation of hap-hazard plans of treatment for a therapeutic reform. On the contrary, he argued the absolute need of a "rational scientific basis," he pointed to the want of " accurate generalisation and the establishment of definite and precise laws" respecting the efficacy and employment of drugs, as the true sources whence the regeneration of therapeutics was to be derived. But he went further and directed attention to a careful study of the recorded experience of past ages, and to experiments with drugs upon the lower animals as the means by which such generalisation, such definite and precise laws might be arrived at. In all this he did but teach in an imperfect manner what Hahnemann taught and practised ere this century had begun, what those who now professedly practise homœopathy teach to-day.

A little later, and Professor RUTHERFORD of Edinburgh was called upon to address the class he had but just been appointed to instruct. He too pointed to the study of the physiological action of drugs, first upon the lower animals and then upon man, as essential for true progress in the study of drug action.

In these contributions to the medical literature of the past year, we see clearly enough a silent admission of the truths comprised in the word homeopathy. The necessity for a law of drug-selection, the method adopted by Hahnemann to discover one, and the mode of studying the physiological properties of drugs which he was the first to practise, to any useful extent, and which his