Allopathy and Homoeopathy Before the Judgement of Common Sense! Part 1

Allopathy and h.o.m.oeopathy Before the Judgement of Common Sense!

by Frederick Hiller.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:

It is a remarkable and at the same time a terrible and most lamentable fact, that the practice of medicine--an art of daily necessity and application, most nearly affecting the dearest interests and well being of mankind, and to the improvement of which we are encouraged and impelled by the strongest motives of interest and humanity, of love for our neighbor and emulous zeal for professional skill and superiority therein--should, after a probation of so long a period, and recorded experience of at least two thousand years, still remain, as it confessedly does in most respects, so little understood and generally of such doubtful and uncertain application.

The present age, unlike any that has preceded it, is peculiarly one of rigid, radical and fundamental examination. Everything in the Heavens above, or in the Earth beneath, is tested and retested; a.n.a.lyzed, synthetized and submitted to the crucible of stern reason, and the logical conclusion of experience; even to the extreme of possibility.

This is true not only of the material universe, but of all mental and moral conditions, of social, political and even religious inst.i.tutions. Nothing, in this day, and especially in this country of free thought and liberty of speech, is taken for granted merely because it can lay claim to the honors of a great antiquity, or can number thousands or millions of adherents. Vast differences are to be observed in governments, churches, creeds and social practices; and all, however opposite and apparently antagonistic, are working out a solution to the problem--

"WHAT IS TRUTH?"

Conservatism is fast dying out, hidden and smothered by the ever-flowing tidal-waves of progression. Radicalism ceases to become radical, by the daily and hourly recurrence of startling discoveries, and new, unheard-of, and unexpected adaptations of old laws.

The mistakes of to-day will be found to be mistakes, and will be rectified. Whenever and wherever freedom holds her sway, evil must work out its own destruction, and good enthrone itself in the hearts of those benefitted by its benign influence. In this spirit, and with such views, let us look at the progress of Medical Science that we may learn from the experience of the past to correctly estimate the developments of the present and aid wisely in the working for a more glorious future.

Medicine has been--not inaptly styled--"The daughter of dreams." From the time of Hippocrates until now, the great body of the profession has been swayed by conflicting theories, founded upon either the wholly unsupported fancies and conjectures of their authors, or unwarrantably built upon isolated facts, often accidental in their occurence, partial in their observation, and improperly understood in their inherent nature and theoretical significance, pointing to a law of action widely different from the one in support of which they had been adduced. All branches of medicine have been involved in these crude absurdities; nor has the nomenclature of any department of science, even in our day, been entirely purged from the errors and misleadings with which the past so fruitfully abounds.

To mark the improvement and advancement in the various branches of medical science; to compare the present with the past; to observe the unfolding growth, maturity, and decay of medical creeds; to discern the power of those master-minds, that, far beyond the ages in which they lived fore-shadowed the forth-coming discoveries that were to make other men immortal; to sigh over the incredulity of whole races, whose blind and dogmatical adherence to the theories of some prominent physiologist or anatomist--was at once silenced by the light of a new truth, suddenly and clearly promulgated by a single mind. To do all these things, was the labor of a whole life; volumes could be written in such investigation, and still thousands of facts be left untouched and forgotten, forever buried in the chaos of medical creeds, medical truths and medical fictions.

Old Physic has for several centuries past drifted in the wrong direction, striking occasionally upon a rock, but finds itself to day further off from sh.o.r.e than ever before.

Medicine, the oldest and most important of all branches of science, has not kept up with developments in other departments, but the rays of light have already deeply penetrated into the darkness of the past, fast undermining the building of the so-called "Rational Medicine"

with all its hypothesis and traditions.

It was near the end of the last century, that the idea occurred to a single man, that the reason he had failed in practice must be that the medical profession was entirely on the wrong path. He made the effort to cure diseases on the principle directly opposite to those on which he had been educated to act, and he was successful. He thought a reformation of medicine needful and desirable, and proper to be attempted. He set about it, hoping, if he should succeed in pointing out a more safe, certain and pleasant road to the life-giving and life-renewing fountain of health, that it would be a blessing to suffering humanity. That man was

SAMUEL HAHNEMANN.

Had the reform inaugurated by him been of an insignificant character, it might have been accepted by the medical world without controversy.

Had the new path into which he invited the profession been only a little smoother than the old one and lying right alongside of it, like that which led the pilgrims from the main high-way into the domains of the giant, physicians might have been easily lured into it. But the revolution was a radical one. It contemplated a counter-march such as the teachers and pract.i.toners of the healing art had never been called upon to make. It called upon the chiefs of the profession to reverse the wheels of the ponderous engine, and seek for the long-sought sh.o.r.e in the opposite direction.

The new doctrine came forth embodied in only three simple words: "_Similia Similibus Curantur_."

Thus the year 1790 gave birth to the celebrated system of Hahnemann, which has received from him a Greek t.i.tle, expressive of its peculiarities--Hom[oe]opathy, and in opposition to "_Contraria Contraries Curantur_."--Allopathy.

It is not my purpose to entertain you with a detailed history of medicine, nor even to notice the successive and conflicting theories that have arisen from time to time; but simply to show that the old, or Allopathic system of medicine as practiced till this day is unworthy of our confidence; that its theory of therapeutics is irrational and worthless; that there is an absence of any reliable principle to guide the physicians in the treatment of diseases; and that the sick are far better off when left to nature, than when subject to the pernicious system of dosing, while a growing want of confidence in this system, both in the public mind and the medical profession, loudly calls for something more rational in its theory and more successful in its practice.

I shall not ask you to accept my individual opinions in support of these views, but shall place upon the witness-stand, and give you the declarations of men who have spent their lives in the practice of this system--most of them authors and teachers, men living in different countries, and from the highest ranks of the profession, and who, if any, should be able to p.r.o.nounce a eulogy upon this system of practice.

I introduce to you first BOERHAVE, a man justly ill.u.s.trious in the history of medicine, he lived a century before HAHNEMANN, and was for over forty years Professor at the University at Leiden.

Hear him! He says:

"If we compare the good which a half dozen true disciples of aesculapius have done since their art began, with the evil which the immense number of doctors have inflicted upon mankind, we must be satisfied that it would have been infinitely better for mankind if medical men had never existed."

The celebrated BICHAT of Paris, thus speaks of the therapeutic system of his day:

"It is an incoherent a.s.semblage of incoherent opinions; it is perhaps, of all the physiological sciences that which best shows the caprice of the human mind. What do I say?--It is not a science for a methodical mind; it is a shapeless a.s.semblage of inexact ideas, of observations often peurile, of deceptive remedies and of formula as fastidiously and fantastically conceived, as they are tediously arranged."

Then we find the equally celebrated French physician, MAJENDIE, saying:

"I hesitate not to declare, no matter how sorely I shall wound our vanity, that so gross is our ignorance of the physiological disorders called diseases, that it would perhaps be better to do nothing, and resign the complaint we are called upon to treat to the resources of Nature, than to act as we frequently do, without knowing the why and the wherefore of our conduct, and at the obvious risk of hastening the end of our patient."

DR. GOOD, the great nosologist, a.s.serts that

"The science of medicine is a barbarous jargon, and the effects of our medicines on the human system are in the highest degree uncertain; except, indeed, that they have already destroyed more lives than war, pestilence and famine combined."

SIR ASTLEY COOPER, England's greatest surgeon says:

"The science of medicine is founded on conjecture and improved by murder."

But, it may be said, these men lived in the past, and since their time the science of medicine has improved and its practice has become more rational and safe.

Let us then come down to a later period, and listen to DR. CHRISTISON, the present eminent Professor of _Materia Medica_ at the University of Edinburgh. He says:

"Of all medical sciences, therapeutics is the most unsatisfactory in its present state, and the least advanced in progress, and surrounded by the most deceitful sources of fallacy."

SIR JOHN FORBES, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians: Physician to the Queen's Household, late editor of the "British and Foreign Medical Review," after a frank admission of the imperfections of Allopathic medicine, says:

"FIRST. That in a large proportion of the cases treated by Allopathic physicians, the disease is cured by Nature and not by them."

"SECOND. That in a lesser, but still not a small proportion, the disease is cured in spite of them; in other words, their interference opposing instead of a.s.sisting the cure."

"THIRD. That, consequently in a considerable proportion of diseases, it would be as well, or better with patients, in the actual condition of the medical art, as more generally practiced, if all remedies, at least active remedies especially drugs were abandoned." And finally adds, "Things have arrived at such a pitch that they cannot be worse. They must mend or end."

But, I may be asked, what are the views of the Professors and writers in our own country. Have they no more confidence in the healing art than their brethren in the old world? Let us see:

DR. RUSH, one of the lights of the profession in his day, remarks:

"The healing art is an unroofed temple, uncovered at the top and cracked at the foundation."

And again:

"Our want of success results from the following causes: FIRST.--Ignorance of the law governing disease. SECOND.--Our ignorance of a suitable remedy THIRD.--Want of efficacy in the remedy; and finally we have a.s.sisted in multiplying disease; nay, we have done more: we have increased their mortality."

Professor CHAPMAN, who stood at the head of the profession in Philadelphia, in an address to the medical society, after speaking of the pernicious effects of calomel, adds:

"Gentlemen, it is a disgraceful reproach to the profession of medicine; it is quackery, horrid unwaranted murderous quackery.... But I will ask another question, who is it that can stop the career of mercury at will, after it has taken the reins into its own destructive and ungovernable hands? He, who for an ordinary cause resigns the fate of his patient to mercury is a vile enemy to the sick; and if he is tolerably popular, will, in one successful season, have paved the way for the business of life, for he has enough to do ever afterwards to stop the mercurial breach of the const.i.tutions of his dilapidated patients."

And yet, this article of the _Materia Medica_ in some of its various forms, is still more frequently prescribed than any other by the allopathic physicians. A writer in the June number, 1868, of the "London Chemist," having submitted to a careful examination one thousand prescriptions, taken _seriatim_ from the files of a druggist, states, among other curious facts, that mercury takes the lead, and stands prominently at the head of the list. Mercury, the very name of which strikes terror into the minds of nervous and timid patients, is still the foremost remedial agent employed by the medical profession.

Professor DRAPER, in one of his introductory lectures, before the University College of New York, makes the following statement: