In a footnote to § 7, Hahnemann writes:

It is not necessary to say that every intelligent physician would first remove this exciting or maintaining cause (causa occasionalis), where it exists; the indisposition thereupon generally ceases spontaneously.

You have, I believe, been led to conclude that there are apparent diseases, which are not diseases, but disturbed states that may be called indispositions.

A psoric individual has his periods of indispositions from external cause, but these external causes do not inflict psora upon him.

Such a patient may disorder his stomach from abusing it and thus create an indisposition.

Indispositions from external causes mimic the miasms, i.e., their group of symptoms is an imitation of a miasmatic manifestation, but the removal of the external cause is likely to restore the patient to health.

Business failures, depressing tribulations, unrequited affection producing suffering in young girls, are apparent causes of disease, but in reality they are only exciting causes of indispositions.

The active cause is within and the apparent cause of sickness is without.

If man had no psora, no deep miasmatic influence within his economy, he would be able to throw off all these business cares, he would not become insane from business depression, and the young girl would not suffer so from love affairs.

There would be an orderly state.

The physician then must discriminate between the causes that are apparent or external, the grosser things, from the truer causes of disease, which are from centre to circumference.

In every instance where Hahnemann speaks of true sickness, he speaks of it as a miasmatic disease, but here he employs another word.

‘Then the indisposition usually yields of itself, or if the psoric condition has been somewhat disturbed, order can be restored by a few doses of the homeopathic remedy.’

To illustrate, if a man has disordered his stomach it will right itself on his ceasing to abuse it; but, if the trouble seems somewhat prolonged, a dose of medicine, like Nux vomica or whatever remedy is indicated, will help the stomach to right itself, and so long as he lives in an orderly way he will cease to feel this indisposition.

‘The physician will remove from the room strong smelling flowers which have a tendency to cause syncope and hysterical sufferings.’

There are some nervous girls who are so sensitive to flowers that they will faint from the odor.

There are other individuals who are so psoric in their nature that they cannot live in the ordinary atmosphere; some must be sent to the mountains, some to warm lands, some to cold lands,

This is removing the occasioning cause, the apparent aggravating cause of suffering. A consumptive in the advanced stages, one who is steadily running down in Philadelphia, must be sent to a climate where he can be made comfortable.

The external or apparent cause, the disturbing cause in his sick state, is thus removed but the cause of his sickness is prior to this.

The physician does not send the patient away for the purpose of curing him, but for the purpose of making him comfortable.

He will extract from the cornea the foreign body that excites inflammation of the eye, loosen the over-tight bandage on a wounded limb that threatens to cause mortification, lay bare and put a ligature on the wounded artery that produces fainting, endeavour to promote the expulsion by vomiting of belladonna berries, etc., that may have been swallowed.

Now, without the circumstances and surroundings in which Hahnemann stated these things, it has been asserted in the public prints that Hahnemann advised emetics.

A class of so-called physicians have taken this note of Hahnemann’s for a cloak as a means of covering up their scientific rascality, their use of external applications.

They tell us Hahnemann said so, but we see it becomes a lie.

Here is another note:

‘In all times, the old school physicians, not knowing how else to give relief, have sought to combat and if possible to suppress by medicines, here and there a single symptom from among a number in diseases.’

This course of singling out a group of symptoms, and treating that group alone as the disease is incorrect, because it has no due relation to the entirety of the man.

A group of symptoms may arise through the uterus and vagina, and one who is of this understanding has a plan for removing only the group of symptoms that belong to his speciality, whereby he thinks he has eradicated the trouble.

Hahnemann condemns this doctrine, and we see at once its great folly.

In many instances there are, at the same time, manifestations of ‘heart disease,’ ‘liver disease,’ etc., (that is, speaking in their terms; these are not diseases at all, as we know), so that every specialist might be consulted, and each one would direct the assault at his own particular region, and so the patient goes the rounds of all the specialists and the poor man dies.

An old allopathic physician once made the remark about a case of pneumonia that he was treating, that he had broken up the pneumonia.

‘Yes,’ said another physician, ‘the pneumonia is cured, but the patient is going to die’.

That is the way when one of these groups of symptoms is removed; constipation may be removed by physic; liver symptoms may sometimes be removed temporarily by a big dose of calomel; ulcers can be so stimulated that they will heal up; but the patient is not cured.

Hahnemann says it is strange that the physician cannot see that the removal of these symptoms is Dot followed by cure, that the patient is worse off for it.

Some patients are not sufficiently ill to see immediately the bad consequences of the closure of a fistulous opening but if a patient is threatened. with phthisis, or is a weakly patient, the closure of that fistulous opening of the anus will throw him into a flame of excitement and will cause his death in a year or two.

The more rugged ones will live a number of years before they break down, and they are held up as evidences of cure.

Such treatment is not based upon principles, and close observation will convince a thoughtful man of its uselessness and danger.

The fistulous opening came there because it was of use, and probably if it had been permitted to exist would have remained as a vent until the patient was cured.

When the patient is cured the fistulous opening ceases to be of use, the necessity for it to remain open has ceased, and it heals up of itself.

The Organon condemns on principle the removal of external manifestations of disease by any external means whatever.

A psoric case is one in which there is no external or traumatic cause.

The patient perhaps has the habit of living as nearly an orderly life as it is possible for anyone to assume at the present day, going the regular rounds of service, using coffee and tea not at all or only in small quantity, careful in diet, removing all external things which are the causes of indispositions, and yet this patient remains sick.

The signs and symptoms that are manifested are the true impress of nature, they constitute the outwardly reflected image of the inward nature of the sickness.

‘Now as in a disease from which no manifest exciting or maintaining cause has to be removed we can perceive nothing but the morbid symptoms, it must be the symptoms alone by which the disease demands and points to the remedy suited to relieve it.’

Hahnemann’s teaching is that there is a use in this symptom image, and that every curable disease presents itself to the intelligent physician in the signs and symptoms that he can perceive.

In viewing a long array of symptoms an image is presented to the mind of an internal disorder, and this is all that the intelligent physician can rely upon for the purpose of cure.

This divides homeopathy into two parts, the science of homeopathy and the art of homeopathy.

The science treats of the knowledges relating to the doctrines of cure, the knowledge of principle or order, which you may say is physiology; the knowledge of disorder in the human economy, which is pathology (that is, the science of disease, not morbid anatomy), and the knowledge of cure.

The science of homeopathy is first to be learned to prepare one for the application of that science, which is the art of homeopathy.

If we cast our eyes over those who have been taught, self taught or otherwise, we see that some can learn the science, become quite famous and pass excellent examinations, and are utterly unable to apply the science, or, in other words, to practice the art of healing, for all healing consists in making application of the science.

We study disease as a disorder of the human economy in the symptoms of the disease itself.

We also study disease from the symptoms of medicines that have caused disorder in the economy. Indeed, we can study the nature and quality of disease as much by studying the Materia Medica as by studying symptoms of disease, and when we cannot fill our time in studying symptoms from sick folks it is well to use the time in studying the symptomatology of the Materia Medica.

True knowledge consists in becoming acquainted with and understanding the nature and quality of a remedy, its appearance, its image and its relation to man in his sickness; then by studying the nature of sickness in the human family to compare that sickness with symptoms of the Materia Medica.

By this means we become acquainted with the law of cure and all that it leads to, and formulate doctrines by which the law may be applied and made use of, by arranging the truth in form to be perceived by the human mind.

This is but the science and we may, notwithstanding, fail to heal the sick.

You will observe some, who know the science, go out and make improper application of the remedies, and seem to have no ability to perceive in a remedy that which is similar to a disease.

I believe if they had a candid love for the work they would overcome this, but they think more of their pocket books.

The physician who is the most successful is he who will first heal for the love of healing, who will practice first for the purpose of verifying his knowledge and performing his use for the love of it.

I have never known such a one to fail.

This love stimulates him to proceed and not to be discouraged with his first failures, and leads him to success, in simple things first and then in greater things.

If he did not have an unusual affection for it he would not succeed in it.

An artist once was asked how it was that he mixed his paints so wonderfully, and he replied, ‘With brains, Sir.’

So one may have all the knowledge of homeopathy that it is possible for a human being to have, and yet be a failure in applying that art in its beauty and loveliness.

If he have no affection for it, it will be seen to be a mere matter of memory and superficial intelligence,

As he learns to love it, and dwell upon it as the very life of him, then he understands it as art and can apply it in the highest degree.

The continuous application of it will lead any physician of ordinary intelligence so far into the perception of his work that he will be able to perceive by the symptoms the whole state of the economy, and when reading provings to perceive the very nature of the sickness expressed in the provings.

This degree of perception will enable him to see the ‘outwardly reflected image’.

You will not have to observe long, or be among physicians long, before you will find that many of them have a most external memory of the Materia Medica, that they have no idea of the nature of medicines they use, no perception of the quality or image of a remedy.

It does not come up before their mind as an artist’s picture it is cold, it is far away.

An artist works on a picture so that he sees it day and night, he figures it out from his very affections, he figures out every line that he is going to put in the next day, stands before it and he is delighted in it and loves it.

So it is with the image of a remedy.

That image comes out before the mind so that it is the outwardly reflected image of the inner nature, as if one man had proved it.

If the symptoms do not take form the physician does not know his patient and does not know his remedy.

This is not a thing that can open out to the mind instantly. You are, as it were, coming out of a world where the education consists in memorizing symptoms or memorizing key-notes or learning prescriptions, with really nothing in the mind, and the memory is only charged with a mass of information that has no application, and is only confusion leading man to worse confusion. There is no order in it.

Hahnemann says:

‘In a word, the totality of the symptoms must be the principal, indeed the only thing the physician has to take note of in every case of disease, and to remove by means of his art, in order that it shall be cured and transformed into health.’

That is the turning of internal disorder into order manifested in the way we have heretofore explained, i.e., from above downward, from within out and in the reverse order of the coming of the symptoms.

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We wish to revert for a short time to the fourth paragraph, in which Hahnemann says:

‘The physician is likewise a preserver of health if he knows the things that derange health and cause disease, and how to remove them from persons in health.’

The homeopathic physician is a failure if he does not discriminate. It seems that among the earliest things he must learn is to ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s', to keep everything in its place, to keep everything in order.

This little paragraph might seem to relate to nothing but hygiene. One of the most superficial things in it is to say that persons about to be made sick from bad habits should break off their bad habits, they should move from damp houses, they should plug their sewers or have traps put in if they are being poisoned with sewer gas.

It is everybody’s duty to do these things, but especially the physician’s, and we might almost let it go without saying. To prevent coffee drinking, vinegar drinking, etc. is a superficial thing; but in this way he may preserve health .

To discriminate then, is a most important thing. To illustrate it in a general way we might say that one who is suffering from conscience does not need a surgeon. You might say he needs a priest. One who is sick in his vital force needs a physician. He who has a lacerated wound, or a broken bone, or deformities, has need of a surgeon. If his tooth must come out he must have a surgeon dentist.

What would be thought of a man who, on being sent for a surgeon to set an injured man’s bones should go for a carpenter to mend the roof of the man’s house? If the man’s house alone needs mending then he needs a carpenter and not a surgeon. The physician must discriminate between the man and his house, and between the repair of man and the repair of his house.

It is folly to give medicine for a lacerated wound, to attempt to close up a deep wound with a dose of remedy. Injuries from knives, hooks, etc., affect the house the man lives in and must be attended to by the surgeon.

When the gross exterior conditions which are brought on from exterior causes complicated with the interior man then medicine is required. If the physician acts also as a surgeon he must know when he is to perform his functions as a surgeon, and when he must keep back as a surgeon. He should sew up a wound, but should not burn out an ulcer with Nitrate of Silver. If he is not able to discriminate, and on every ulcer he plasters his external applications, he is not a preserver of health.

When signs and symptoms are present the physician is needed, because these come from the interior to the exterior. But if his condition is brought on only from external causes, the physician must delay action and let the surgeon do his work.

Yet we see around us that physicians bombard the house the man lives in and have no idea of treating the man. They are no more than carpenters, they attempt to repair the roof, put on boards and bandages, and yet by their bandaging the man from head to foot they often do an improper thing.

The physician must know the things that derange health and remove them. if a fang of an old tooth causes headache day and night that cause must be removed. To prescribe when a splinter is pressing on a nerve and leave the splinter in would be foolishness and criminal negligence. The aim should be to discriminate and remove external causes and turn into order internal causes.

A man comes for treatment, and he is living on deviled crabs and lobster salad and other trash too rich for the stomach of a dog. If we keep on giving Nux vomica to that man we are foolish. If a man who has been living viciously stops it he can be helped, but so long as that external cause is not removed the physician is not using discrimination.

Vicious habits bad living, living in damp houses are externals and must be removed. When a man avoids these externals, is cleanly, carefully chooses his food, has a comfortable home, and is still miserable, he must be treated from within.

You know how we are maligned and lied about. You have heard it said about some strict homeopath, ‘He tried to set a broken leg with the C.M. potency of Mercury. What a poor fool!’.

But still outside of such an instance this discrimination is an important matter. You must remember it especially when busy as at times it will be hard to decide. This kind of diagnosis is important, because it settles between things external and internal.

Every physician does not discriminate thus, for if he did there would not be so many poultices and murderous external applications used. Among those who do not discriminate are those who apply medicines externally and give them internally.

Now we return to the fifth paragraph, which reads:

Useful to the physician in assisting him to cure are the particulars of the most probable exciting cause of the acute disease, as also the most significant points in the whole history of the chronic disease to enable him to discover its fundamental cause, which is generally due to a chronic miasm.

In these investigations the ascertainable physical constitution of the patient (especially when the disease is chronic), his moral and intellectual character, his occupation, mode of living and habits, his social and domestic relations, his age, sexual functions, etc., are to be taken into consideration.’

Little is known of the real exciting causes. Acute affections are divided into two classes:

(1) those that are miasmatic, which are true diseases, and (2) those that may be called mimicking sicknesses.

The living in damp houses, grief, bad clothing, etc.; and the causes being latter have no definite cause, are produced by external causes such as removed the patient recovers.

But the first, the acute miasms have a distinct course to run. They have a prodromal period, a period of progress and a period of decline, if not so severe as to cause the patient’s death Measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough, smallpox, etc., are examples of acute miasms.

The physician must also be acquainted with the chronic miasms, psora, syphilis and sycosis, which we will study later. These have like the acute, a prodromal period and a period of progress, but unlike the acute they have no period of decline. When the times and circumstances are favorable the chronic miasm becomes quiescent, but adverse times rouse it into activity, and each time it is aroused the condition is worse than it was at the previous exacerbation.

In this paragraph Hahnemann teaches that the chronic miasms are the fundamental cause of the acute miasms, which is to say, if there were no chronic miasms there would be no acute. It is in the very nature of a chronic miasm to predispose man to acute diseases, and the acute diseases are as fuel added to an unquenchable fire.

Acute diseases then exist from specific causes co-operating with susceptibility. We do not recognize measles or scarlet fever except in sick people. Their influence might exist in the atmosphere, but we cannot see it. So apart from the subjects that take and develop them we could riot know that there were such diseases. If there were no children on the earth susceptible to measles we would have no measles, and if there were no chronic miasms there would be no susceptibility.

We will take up the subject of susceptibility later.

Psora is the cause of all contagion. If man had not had psora he would not have had the other two chronic miasms, but psora, the oldest became the basis of the others. The physicians of the present day do not comprehend Hahnemann’s definition of psora, they think it meant an itch vesicle or some sort of tetter. They regard itch as only the result of the action of a bug that crawls in the skin making vesicles, all of which is external. This is quite in keeping with man’s present form of investigation, because he can comprehend only that which he discovers by his senses.

Hahnemann’s idea of psora, as we shall see when we come to study it is wholly different from these perverted views. Psora corresponds to a state of man in which he has so disordered his economy to the very uttermost that he has become susceptible to every surrounding influence.

The other day I used the illustration of civil government and said if our civil government is evil in its centre it will be in disorder in its uttermost. So if a man is evil in his very interiors, i.e., in his will and understanding, and the result of this evil flows into his life, he is in a state of disorder.

Let man exist for thousands of years thinking false theories and bringing them into his life, and his life will become one of disorder. Later we will be able to show that this disordered condition of the economy is the underlying and fundamental state of the nature of psora which ultimates upon the body, in tissue changes.

Suppose a man starts out and believes that it is right for him to live upon a certain kind of food that is very distasteful to him; he lives upon that diet until he thinks (from his belief) that he really loves it, and in time his very outermost becomes as morbid as he is himself.

When man is insane in his interior it is only a question of time and his body will take on the results of insanity because the interior of man forms the exterior. If the interior is insane the exterior is distorted, and is only suitable to the kind of insane or disordered life that dwells in it. False in the interior, false in the exterior, so that the body becomes, as it were, false. This is speaking from analogy, but you will come to see that it is actually true.

Each and everything that appears before the eyes is but the representative of its cause, and there is no cause except in the interior. Cause does not flow from the outermost of man to the interior, because man is protected against such a state of affairs.

Causes exist in such subtle form that they cannot be seen by the eye. There is no disease that t exists of which the cause is known to man by the eye or by the microscope. Causes are infinitely too fine to be observed by any instrument of precision. They are so immaterial that they correspond to and operate upon the interior nature of man, and they are ultimated in the body in the form of tissue changes that are recognized by the eye.

Such tissue changes must be under stood as the results of disease only or the physician will never perceive what disease cause is, what disease is, what potentization is, or what the nature of life is.

This is what Hahnemann meant when he speaks of the fundamental causes as existing in chronic miasm. Just as soon as man lives a disorderly life he is susceptible to outside influences, and the more disorderly he lives the more susceptible he becomes to the atmosphere he lives in. When man thinks in a disorderly way he carries out his life in a disorderly way, and makes himself sick by disorderly habits of thinking and living. This deranged mental state Hahnemann most certainly recognizes, for he tells us everywhere in his teaching to pay most attention to the mental state.

We must begin with such signs as represent to the mind the beginning of sickness and this beginning will be found in the mental disorder as represented by signs and symptoms, and as it flows on we have the coarser manifestations of disease. The more that disease ultimates itself in the outward form the coarser it is and the less it points the physician to the remedy. The more mental it is the more signs there are to direct the physician to the remedy.

‘In these investigations the ascertainable physical constitution of the patient, etc., are, to be taken into consideration.’

This is the second state following the first one disordered. This deals with the outermost, it relates to externals. You have to consider both the internal and external man; that is, you have to consider causes that operate in this disordered innermost, and then the ultimates which constitute the outward appearance, particularly when the affection is chronic. These two things must be considered, the nature or the esse [– the essence –] of the disease and its appearance.

At the present day diseases are named in the books from their appearance and not from any idea as to what the nature or esse of sickness is, hence the disease names in our books are misleading, as they do not have reference to the sick man but to ultimates.

If the disease has terminated in the liver, numerous names are applied to the liver; if in the kidney or heart, these organs have names applied to them, and such terminations are called diseases. Consumption is a tubercular state of the lungs, which is but the result of an internal disorder which was operating in the interior long before the breakdown of tissue.

The physicians of these days will tell you that they go back to the cause, but they present no cause; they only bring up the superficial conditions that make the consumptive man worse.

They will also tell you that a bacillus is the cause of tuberculosis. But if the man had not been susceptible to the bacillus he could not have been affected by it. As a matter of fact, the tubercles come first and the bacillus is secondary. It has never been found prior to the tubercle, but it follows that, and comes then as a scavenger.

The cause of the tubercular deposit rests with the psora, the chronic miasm. Bacilli are not the cause of disease, they never come until after the disease. Allopaths are really taking the sequence for the consequence, thus leading to a false theory, the bacteria theory.

You may destroy the bacteria and yet not destroy the disease. The susceptibility remains the same, and only those that are susceptible will take the disease. Bacteria have a use, for there is nothing in the whole world that does not have a use, and there is nothing sent on earth to destroy man. The bacteria theory would make it appear that the all-wise Creator has sent these micro-organisms here to make man sick.

We see from this paragraph that Hahnemann did not adopt any such theory as bacteriology. This subject will be taken up in these lectures and fully illustrated, but I might throw out a few hints to set you thinking until we come to it again.

We know that a dissecting wound is very serious if the body dissected is recently dead, and this we would suppose to be due to some bacteria of wonderful power capable of establishing such a dreadful erysipelatous poisoning that would go into man’s blood and strike him down with a sort of septicemia.

In truth, soon after death we have a ptomaine poison the dead body poison, which is alkaloidal in character, but we do not yet discover the presence of bacteria. The poison is there, and if a man pricks himself while dissecting that body and does not take care of the wound he may have a serious illness and die.

But if after the cadaver has remained some time and become infected with bacteria, the dissector pricks himself the wound is not dangerous. The more bacteria the less poison. A typhoid stool when it first passes from the bowel has a very scanty allowance of bacteria, and yet it is very poisonous. But let it remain until it becomes black with bacteria and it is comparatively benign.

Why does the poison not increase with the bacteria? You can potentise, as I have done, a portion of a tuberculous mass alive with tubercular bacilli, and after potentizing it, after being triturated with sugar of milk and mashed to a pulp, it will continue to manifest its symptoms in the most potent form.

You can precipitate the purulent tubercular fluid in alcohol, precipitate the entire animal life and potentize the supernatant fluid until you have reached the thirtieth potency, and having potentized or attenuated it until no microbe can be found, yet, if administered to healthy man, it will establish the nature of the disease in the economy, which is prior to phthisis.

Thus we have the cause of phthisis not in the bacteria, but in the virus, which the bacteria are sent to destroy. Man lives longer with the bacteria than he would without them. If we could succeed today in putting a fluid into the economy that would destroy the bacteria that consumptive would soon die.

The study of disease as to fundamental cause and apparent cause is an important subject. We cannot study cause unless we have first understood government associated with law.

Hence recall to your mind that the law directs and experience confirms.Law is nothing but an orderly state of government from centre to circumference, a government in which there is a head. You show me a company that has no captain and you show me a disorderly company. Order exists from the highest to the lowest from centre to circumference.

Now I have led up to the point where you may ask, Is it not disorder for man to settle what is true by the senses? Let us as homeopaths turn our lives, our thinking abilities and our scientific life into order that we may begin to turn the human race into order. Let us adopt the plan of thinking of things from their beginning and following them in a series to their conclusions.

No man is authority, but principle and law are authority. If this cannot be seen there is no use of proceeding any further with the study of homeopathy. If man cannot see this he cannot see the necessity of harmony from centre to circumference, of government which has one head, and hence it would be useless for him to study the human body for the purpose of applying medicine to it. It must be accepted in this form or it will not satisfy man, it will not sustain his expectation, it will not do what he expects it to do; it will only accomplish what allopathy has accomplished, i.e., the establishment of confusion upon the economy.

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We will take up today the study of the last part of the third paragraph relating to the fixed principles by which the physician must be guided.

In time past, outside of the doctrinal statements of homeopathy, medicine has never been a matter of experience, and medicine today, outside of homeopathy, is a ‘medicine of experience’. Now, in order that the mind may be open to receive the doctrines, it is necessary that the exact and proper position of experience should be realized. If the true conception of law and doctrine, order and government, prevailed in man’s mind he would not be forever hatching out theories, as they would not be necessary, and moreover he would be wise enough to know and see clearly what is truth and what is folly.

Experience has a place in science, but only a confirmatory place. It can only confirm that which has been discovered through principle or law guiding in the proper direction. Experience leads to no discoveries, but when man is fully indoctrinated in principle that which he observes by experience may confirm the things that are consistent with law.

One who has no doctrines, no truth, no law, who does not rely upon law for everything, imagines he discovers by experience. Out of his experience he will undertake to invent, and his inventions run in every conceivable direction; hence we may see in this century a medical convention of a thousand physicians who rely entirely upon experience, at which one will arise and relate his experience, and another will arise and tell his experience, and the talkers of that convention continue to debate and no two talkers agree.

When they have finished they compare their experiences, and that which they settle upon they call science, no matter how far they may be from the truth. Next year they come back and they have different ideas and have had different experiences, and they then vote out what they voted in before. This is the medicine of experience. They confirm nothing, but make from experience a series of inventions and theories. This is the wrong direction. The science of medicine must be built on a true foundation.

To be sure, man must observe, but there is a difference between true observation in a science under law and principle and the experience of a man who has no law and no principle. Old-fashioned medicine denies principle and law, calls its system the medicine of experience, and hence its doctrines are kaleidoscopic, changing every year and never appearing twice alike.

Let me again impress the necessity of knowing something about the internal government of man in order to know how disease develops and travels. If we observe any government, the government of the universe, civil government, the government of commerce physical government, we find that there is one centre that rules and controls and is supreme.

A man has within him by endowment of the Divine a centre of government which is in the grey matter of the cerebrum centre and in the highest portion of the grey matter. Everything in man, and everything that takes place in man, is prescribed over primarily by this centre, from centre to circumference,

If man is injured from the external, e.g., if he has his finger torn, it will soon be repaired; the order which is in the economy from centre to circumference will repair every wrong that is on the surface caused by external violence. The order of repair is the same in external as in internal violence. injuries are external violence, but diseases are internal disorder performing violence.

All true diseases of the economy flow from centre to circumference. All miasms are true diseases.

In the government of the man, there is a triad, a first, a second and third, which gives direction, i.e.: the cerebrum, cerebellum and spinal cord, or when taken more collectively orally, the brain, spinal cord and the nerves.

Considered more internally, we have the will and understanding forming a unit making the interior man; the vital force or vice regent of the soul, that is, the limbs or soul stuff, the formative substance which is immaterial; and then the body which is materia .

Thus from the innermost, the will or voluntary principle, through the limbus or simple substance to the outermost, the actual or material substance of man, which is in every cell, we have this order of direction. Every cell in man has its representative of the innermost, the middle and the outermost; there is no cell in man that does not have its will and understanding, its soul stuff or limbus or simple substance, and its material substance.

Disease must flow in accordance with this order, because there is no inward flow. Man is protected against things flowing in from the outward toward the centre. All disease flows from the innermost to the outermost, and unless drug substances are prepared in a form to do this they can neither produce nor cure disease.

There are miasms in the universe, acute and chronic. The chronic, which have no tendency toward recovery, are three, psora, syphilis and sycosis; we shall study these later. Outside of acute and chronic miasms there are only the results of disease to be considered.

The miasms are contagious; they flow from the innermost to the outermost; and while they exist in organs yet they are imperceptible, for they cannot exist in man unless they exist in form subtle enough to operate upon the innermost of man’s physical nature.

The correspondence of this innermost cannot be discovered by man’s eye, by his fingers, or by any of his senses, neither can any disease cause be found with the microscope.

Disease can only be perceived by its results, and it flows from within out, from centre to circumference, from the seat of government to the outermost. Hence cure must be from within out.

In our civil government we see the likeness to this. Let any great disturbance come upon our government at Washington and see how, like lightning, this is felt to the circumference of the nation. How the whole country becomes shaken and disturbed as if by disease if it is an evil government. If the government be good, we observe it in the form of improvement, and everybody is benefited by it.

If in the great centres of commerce, London, Paris or New York, some great crash or crisis takes place, how the very circumference that depends upon these centres is shaken, as it were, by disease.

Every little political office depends upon Washington, and that order must be preserved most thoroughly. The sheriff and constable, the judge and the courts, are little governments dependent upon the law that is formed by the state. The law of the state would be nothing if the centre of our government at Washington were dethroned by another nation.

All the law and principles in Pennsylvania depended upon the permanency and orderliness of the government in Washington, and there is a series from Washington to Harrisburg and from Harrisburg to Philadelphia. There can be no broken link.

It is now seen what is to be understood by order and directions, and that there are directions; nothing can flow in from the outer most o affect the innermost. Disturb one of the courts in Philadelphia and this does not disturb the country or the constitutional government.

If the finger is burnt this does not to any great extent disturb the constitutional government of the man, but the constitutional government repairs it. It is not a disease, it does not rack the whole frame.

It is only that which shakes the whole economy, disturbs the government, which is a disease. So man may have his hand cut off without the system being disturbed, but let a little disease, measles for example, flow in from the centre and his whole economy is racked.

Old-fashioned medicine talks of experience, but it is entirely dependent on the eyes and fingers; appearances are wonderfully deceptive. If you examine any acute miasm you may know what it looks like, but the esse [– the fundamental being –] of it cannot be discovered by any of the senses.

We have seen that everything is governed from the centre. Now what comes in the direction of law, what comes from principle, comes from the centre, is flowing in accordance with order and can be confirmed by experience. To apply it more practically, what we learn from the use of the law of homeopathics, what we observe after learning that law and the doctrines that relate to it – all our subsequent experience – confirms the principles.

For example, every experience with Bryonia makes Bryonia so much brighter in mind. With experience one grows stronger; one does not change or alter with every mood, but becomes firmly established.

If everything tends to disturb the mind, that means that you are in a state of folly or that you are insane; it may be a little of both. A man that relies on experience to guide him never knows; his mind is constantly changing, never settled; it has no validity. Validity is something absolutely essential to science. It is necessary for homeopaths to look upon law as valid and not upon man, as there is no man valid. In homeopathy it is the very principle itself that is valid, and things that are not in accordance with principle should not be admitted.

We see from all this the necessity of potentization. All causes are so refined in character, so subtle in their nature, that they can operate from centre to circumference, operate upon man’s interiors and from the interior to the very exterior.

The coarser things cannot permeate the skin. Man’s skin is an envelope, protecting him against contagion from coarser materials; but against the immaterial substance he is protected only when in perfect health. In an unguarded moment he suffers, and this is the nature and quality of disease cause. It can only flow into man from the centre and towards the outermost in a way to disturb his government.

The disturbance of government is a disturbance of order, and this is all there is of sickness, and we have only to follow this out to find that the very house man lives in, and his cells, are becoming deranged. Changes are the result of disorder and end in breaking down, degeneration, etc.; pus cells and the various forms of degeneration are only the result of disorder.

So long as order and harmony go on perfectly, so long the tissues are in a state of health, the metamorphosis is healthy, the tissue change is normal, the physiological state is maintained.

We can only comprehend the nature of disease, and tissue changes, – the result of disease – by going back to its beginning. The study of etiology in the old school is a wonderful farce, because it begins with nothing. It is an assumption that tissue changes are the disease. From the doctrines of homeopathy it will be seen that morbid anatomy, no matter where it occurs, must be considered to be the result of disease.

All curable diseases make themselves known to the physician by signs and symptoms.
When the disease does not make itself known in signs and symptoms, and its progress is in the interior, we at once perceive that, that man is in a very precarious condition. Conditions of the body that are incurable are such very often as have no external signs or symptoms.

In the fourth paragraph Hahnemann says:

‘The physician is likewise a preserver of health if he knows the things that derange health and cause disease and how to remove them from persons in health.’

If the physician believes that causes are external, if he believes that the material changes in the body are the things that disturb health, are the fundamental cause of sickness, he will undertake to remove these, e.g., he will cut off hemorrhoids or remove the tumor. But these are not objects Hahnemann means. The objects he means are invisible and can only be known by signs and symptoms.

Of course, it is quite right for the physician to remove those things that are external to the sick man and are troubling him. These are not disease, but they are in a measure disturbing him and making him sick, aggravating his chronic miasm so that it will progress and destroy. These are outward obstacles and not the disease, but in this way man is very often rendered more susceptible to acute miasms. The things ‘which keep up disease’ relate more particularly to external things.

There are conditions in man’s life which keep up or encourage man’s disorder. The disorder is from the interior, but many of the disturbances that aggravate the disorders are external.

The cause of disorder is internal, and is of such quality that it affects the Government from the interior, while the coarser things are such as can disturb more especially the body, such as improperly selected food, living in damp houses, etc.

It is hardly worth while to dwell upon these things, because any ordinary physician is sufficiently well versed in hygiene to remove from his patients the external obstacles.

In the fifth paragraph Hahnemann says:

‘Useful to the physician in assisting him to cure are the particulars of the most probable exciting cause of the acute disease, etc.’

The probable exciting cause is the inflowing of the cause as an invisible, immaterial substance, which, having fastened upon the interior, flows from the very centre to the outermost of the economy, creating additional disorder. These miasms all require a given time to operate before they can affect the external man, and this time is called the prodromal stage. This is true of psora, syphilis and sycosis and of every acute contagious disease known to Man.

While the influx is upon the innermost of the physical man it is not apparent, but when it begins to operate upon his nerves and tissues, affecting him in his outermost, then it becomes apparent.

Each miasm produces upon the human economy its own characteristics, just as every drug produces upon the human economy its own characteristics. Hahnemann says that these must be recognized, that the homeopathic physician must be familiar enough with disease cause, with disease manifestations and drug manifestations to be able to remove them in accordance with principles fixed and certain.

There should be no hypothesis nor opinion, neither should simple experience have a place.

If the physician is dealing with acute cases he must take into consideration the nature of the case as a malady, and so also with chronic cases.

It is supposed that he is conversant with the disease from having observed the symptoms of a great many cases, and is therefore able to hold before the mind the image of the disease. When he is thoroughly conversant with the very image of the sicknesses that exist upon the human race, he is then prepared to study Materia Medica.

All the imitations of miasms are found in drugs. There is no miasm of the human race that does not have its imitation in drugs. The animal kingdom has in itself the image of sickness, and the vegetable and mineral kingdoms in like manner, and if man were perfectly conversant with the substances of these three kingdoms he could treat the whole human race.

By application the physician must fill his mind with images that correspond to the sicknesses of the human race. It is being conversant with symptomatology, with the symptom images of disease, that makes one a physician.

The books of the present time are defective, in that they ignore symptomatology and do not furnish us an image of the sickness. They are extensively treatises on pathology, upon heredity, with very little of the patient himself.

If we go back to earlier times, when the physician did not know so much about the microscope, when he did not examine into the cause of disease so minutely, we will find in such works as Watson’s Practice much better descriptions of sickness. Watson stands at the bedside and relates what his patients look like, and hence it is a grand old book for the homeopathic physician. Chambers, in his lectures at St. Mary’s Hospital, London, also relates with accuracy the appearance of the patient.

At the present time the old-school physician says, ‘I want to know nothing about your symptoms; take this and go to the first drug store and have it filled’. This is the state of things at the present time, a look at the tongue, a feel of the pulse, and ‘take this’, handing a prescription to be filled at the nearest pharmacy.

Is that observing the sick? Can such a man be the guardian of the sick, when it requires time to bring out every little detail of sickness, and a nervous girl is driven off and never permitted to tell her symptoms?

Such patients have told me after an hour’s conversation and taking of symptoms: ‘The other doctor told me I had hysteria, that there was nothing the matter with me, that I was just nervous’. That is what modem pathology leads men to think and say. Everything is denied that cannot be discovered by the senses; hence this false science has crept upon us until it is a typical folly.

As to the end of sickness, what sickness will do is of no great matter, because by the symptoms we have perceived the nature of the illness and may safely trust to the remedy. If no remedy be applied to check the progress of the disease it may localize in the heart, lungs or kidneys, but the nature of the sickness exists in that state of disordered government expressed by signs and symptoms.

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Organon § 3. ‘If the physician clearly perceives what is to be cured in diseases, that is to say, in every individual case of disease: if he clearly perceives what is curative in medicines, that is to say, in each individual medicine; and if he knows how to adapt, according to clearly-defined principles, what is curative in medicines to what he has discovered to be undoubtedly morbid in the patient, so that recovery must ensue-to adapt it as well in respect to the suitability of the medicine most appropriate according to its mode of action to the case before him, as also in respect to the exact mode of preparation and quantity of it required, and the proper period for repeating the dose; if, finally, he knows the obstacles to recovery in each case and is aware how to remove them so that the restoration may be permanent: then he understands how to treat judiciously and rationally, and he is a true practitioner of the healing art.’

The translator has correctly used here the word ‘perceive’, which is to see into, not merely to look upon with the external eye, but to clearly understand, to apprehend with the mind and understanding. If Hahnemann had said ‘see’ instead of ‘perceive’, it might have been taken to mean seeing with the eye a tumor to be cut or, by opening the abdomen, to see the diseased kidney. Or, by examination of the urine, to see that there is albumen or sugar present, by removing which in some mysterious way the patient would be cured.

It is evident by this that Hahnemann did not look upon pathological change or morbid anatomy as that which in disease constitutes the curative indication.

The physician must perceive in the disease that which is to be cured, and the curative indication in each particular case of disease is the totality of the symptoms, i.e., the disease is represented or expressed by the totality of the symptoms, and this totality (which is the speech of nature) is not itself the esse [– the essence –] of the disease, it only represents the disorder of the internal economy. This totality, which is really external, a manifestation in the tissues will arrange itself into form, to present, as it were, to the physician the internal disorder.

The first thing to be considered in a case is, What are the curative indications in this case? What signs and symptoms call the physician’s attention as curative signs and symptoms?

This means not every manifestation is a curative indication. The results of disease occurring in the tissues, in chronic diseases, such as cancerous changes, tumors etc., are of such a character that they cannot constitute curative signs; but those things which are curable, which are capable of change, which can be materially affected by the administration of remedies, the physician must know; they are the curative indications.

The physician ought to have a well-grounded idea of government and law to which there are no exceptions; he ought to see the cause of disease action to be from centre to circumference, from the innermost of the man to his outermost. If law and government are present, then law directs every act taking place in the human system.

Every government is from the centre to the circumference. Look at it politically: Whenever the system of central political government is not bowed to, anarchy and loss of confidence prevail.

There are also commercial centres. We must recognize London, Paris, and New York as centres of commercial government in their different spheres. Even the spider entrenches himself in his web and governs his universe from the centre. There cannot be two governments; such would lead to confusion.

There is but one unit in every standard. In man the centre of government is in the cerebrum and from it every nerve cell is governed. From it all actions take place for good or evil, for order or disorder; from it disease begins and from it begins the healing process.

It is not from external things that man becomes sick, not from bacteria nor environment, but from causes in himself. If the homeopath does not see this, he cannot have a true perception of disease. Disorder in the vital economy is the primary state of affairs, and this disorder manifests itself by signs and symptoms.

In perceiving what is to be cured in disease one must proceed from generals to particulars, study disease in its most general features, not as seen upon one particular individual, but upon the whole human race.

We will endeavor to bring this idea before the mind by taking as an example one of the acute miasms, not for the purpose of diagnosis, as this is easy, but to arrange it for a therapeutic examination.

Let us take an epidemic, say, of scarlet fever, or grippe, or measles, or cholera. If the epidemic is entirely different from anything that has hitherto appeared in the neighborhood it is at first confusing. From the first few cases the physician has a very vague idea of this disease, for he sees only a fragment of it, and gets only a portion of its symptoms. But the epidemic spreads and many patients are visited, and twenty individuals have perhaps been closely observed.

Now if the physician will write down all the symptoms that have been present in each case in a schematic form, arranging the mind symptoms of the different patients under ‘mind’ and the head symptoms under ‘head,’ and so on, following Hahnemann’s method, they – considered collectively – will present one image, as if one man had expressed all the symptoms, and in this way he will have that particular disease in schematic form.

If he places opposite each symptom a number corresponding to the number of patients in which that symptom occurred, he will find out the essential features of the epidemic.

For example, twenty patients had aching in the bones, and at once he sees that that symptom is a part of this epidemic. All the patients had catarrhal affections of the eye, and a measly rash, and these also must be recorded as pathognomonic symptoms.

And so by taking the entire scheme and studying it as a whole, as if one patient had experienced all the symptoms, he is able to perceive how this new disease, this contagious disease, affects the human race, and each particular patient, and he is able to predicate of it what is general and what is particular.

Every new patient has a few new symptoms; he has put his own stamp on that disease. Those symptoms that run through all are the pathognomonic symptoms; those which are rare are the peculiarities of the different people. This totality represents to the human mind, as nearly as possible, the nature of this sickness, and it is this nature that the therapeutist must have in mind.

Now let him take the next step, which is to find in general the remedies that correspond to this epidemic. By the aid of a repertory he will write after each one of these symptoms all the remedies that have produced that symptom.

Having in this way gone through the entire schema, he can then begin to eliminate for practical purposes, and he will see that six or seven remedies run through the picture, and, therefore, are related to the epidemic, corresponding to its whole nature. This may be called the group of epidemic remedies for that particular epidemic, and with these he will manage to cure nearly all his cases.

The question now arises, which one is the remedy for each individual case? When he has worked out the half dozen remedies he can go through the Materia Medica and get their individual pictures so fixed in his head that he can use them successfully. Thus he proceeds from generals to particulars, and there is no other way to proceed in homeopathy.

He is called to a family with half a dozen patients in bed from this epidemic, and he finds a little difference in each case so that one remedy is indicated in one patient and another remedy in another patient. There is no such thing in homeopathy as administering one of these remedies to all in the family because of a diagnostic name.

Now, while one of the remedies in the epidemic group will most likely be indicated in many cases, yet if none of these should fit the patient, the physician must return to his original anamnesis to see which one of the other remedies is suitable. Very rarely will a patient demand a remedy not in the anamnesis.

Every remedy has in itself a certain state of peculiarities that identifies it as an individual remedy, and the patient has also a certain state of peculiarities that identifies him as an individual patient, and so the remedy is fitted to the patient. No remedy must be given because it is in the list, for the list has only been made as a means of facilitating the study of that epidemic.

Things can only be made easy by an immense amount of hard work, and if you do the drudgery in the beginning of an epidemic, the prescribing for your cases will be rapid. You will find your remedies abort cases of sickness, make malignant cases simple, so simplify scarlet fever that classification would be impossible, stop the course of typhoids in a week, and cure remittent fevers in a day.

If the physician does not work this scheme out on paper he must do it in the mind, but if he becomes very busy and sees a large number of cases it will be too much to carry in the mind. You will be astonished to find that if you put an epidemic on paper you will forever be able to carry the knowledge of it in mind. I have done this, and have been surprised to find that after a dozen references to it I did not need it any more.

Now you may say, how is this in regard to typhoid fever? It is not a new disease, it is an old form. The old practitioner has unconsciously made an anamnesis of his typhoid cases, he has unconsciously written it out in his mind and carries it around. It is not difficult to work out the group of typhoid remedies, and from this group he works.

The same is true with regard to measles, certain remedies correspond to the nature of measles, i.e., when studied by its symptoms and not by name.

Of course, every now and then will come up a rare and singular case, which will compel you to go outside of the usual group. Never allow yourself to be so cramped that you cannot go outside of the medicines that you have settled upon as medicines, say, for measles. All your nondescript cases of course will get Pulsatilla, because it is so similar to the nature of measles, but it does not do to be too limited or routine, but be sure in administering a remedy that the indications are clear. Every busy practitioner thinks of Ailanthus, Apis, Belladonna and Sulphur for malignant cases of scarlet fever, and yet he has often to go outside of that group.

So the physician perceives in the disease what it is that constitutes the curative indication. This presents itself to his mind only when he is clearly conversant with the nature of the sickness, as, for instance, with the nature of scarlet fever, of measles, of typhoid fever – the zymosis, the blood changes, etc. – so that when they arrive he is not surprised; when the typhoid state progresses he expects the tympanitic abdomen, the diarrhoea, the continued fever, the rash, the delirium and unconsciousness.

These things stand out as the nature of typhoid. When, therefore, he goes to the Materia Medica he at once calls up before his mind this nature of typhoid, and so is able to pick out the remedies that have such a nature. He sees in Phosphorus, Rhus tox, Bryonia, Baptisia, Arsenicum, etc., low forms of fever, corresponding to the typhoid condition. But when the patient jumps away out of the ordinary group of remedies, then it is that he has to go outside of the beaten track and find another remedy that also corresponds to the nature of typhoid fever.

By these remarks I am endeavoring to hold up before you what the physician regards as me curative indications of disease. First he sees the disease in general as to its nature, and then when an individual has this disease this individual will present in his own peculiarities the peculiar features of that disease.

The homeopath is in the habit of studying the slightest shades of difference between patients, the little things that point to the remedy. If we looked upon disease only as the old-school physician sees it we would have no means of distinction, but it is because of the little peculiarities manifested by every individual patient, through his inner life, through everything he thinks, that the homeopath is enabled to individualize.

‘If the physician clearly perceives what is curative in medicines, that is to say, in each individual medicine.’

Here again he progresses from generals to particulars. He cannot become acquainted clearly with the action of medicines individually until he becomes acquainted with the action of medicines collectively, proceeding from a collective study to a particular. This is to be done by studying provings.

Suppose we were to start out in this class and make a proving of some unknown drug, it would be expected that you would all bring out the same symptoms, but the same general features would run through this class of provers; each individual would have his own peculiarities. No. 1 might bring out the symptoms of the mind more clearly than No. 2; No. 2 might bring out the symptoms of the bowels more clearly than No. 1; No. 3 might bring out heal symptoms very strongly, etc.

Now if these were collected together as if one man had proved the medicine, we would then have an image of that medicine. If we had a hundred provers we would go through the whole nature of this remedy and perceive how it affected the human race, how it acted as a unit.

What I have said before about studying the nature of disease must be applied to the study of the nature of a remedy. A remedy is in condition to be studied as a whole when it is on paper, the mind symptoms under one head, the symptoms of the scalp under another, and so on throughout the entire body in accordance with Hahnemann’s schema.

We may go on adding to it, developing it, noting which of the symptoms or groups of symptoms are the most prominent. A remedy is not fully proved until it has permeated and made sick all regions of the body. When it has done this it is ready for study and for use. Many of our provings are only fragments and are given in the books for what they are worth.

Hahnemann followed up in full all the remedies that he handed down to us; in these the symptoms have been brought out upon the entire man. Each individual medicine must be studied in that way, as to how it changes the human race.

To understand the nature of the chronic miasms, psora, syphilis and sycosis, the homeopath must proceed in identically the same way as with the acute. Hahnemann has put on paper an image of psora. For eleven years he collected the symptoms of those patients who were undoubtedly psoric and arranged them in schematic form until the nature of this great miasm became apparent. Following upon that be published antipsoric remedies which in their nature have a similarity to psora. To be a really successful physician the homeopath must proceed along the same lines in regard to syphilis and sycosis.

Now, when the physician sees, as it were, in an image, the nature of disease, when he is acquainted with every disease to which we are subject, and when he sees the nature of the remedies in common use, just as clearly as he perceives disease, then on listening to the symptoms of a sick man he knows instantly the remedies that have produced upon healthy man symptoms similar to these.

This is what paragraph 3 teaches; it looks towards making the homeopathic physician so intelligent that when he goes to the bedside of a patient he can clearly perceive the nature of disease and the nature of the remedy. It is a matter of perception; he sees with his understanding. When a physician understands the nature of disease and of remedies, then it is that he will be skilful.

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The subject this morning relates to cure, to what the nature of a cure is.

It is stated in the second paragraph of the Organon that ‘The highest ideal of a cure is rapid, gentle and permanent restoration of the health, or removal and annihilation of the disease in its whole extent, in the shortest, most reliable and most harmless way, on easily comprehensible principles’.

If you were to ask a physician, who had not been trained in homeopathy, of what a cure consists, his mind would only revolve around the idea of the disappearance of the pathological state. If an eruption on the skin were the given instance, the disappearance of the eruption from the skin under his treatment would be called a cure. If hemorrhoids, the removal of these would be called a cure. If constipation, the opening of the bowels would be called a cure; if some affection of the knee joint, an amputation above the knee would be considered a cure. Or if it were an acute disease and the patient did not die, it would be considered a cure of the disease.

And that is really the idea of the patient as it is derived from the physician.

The patient will often wonder at the great skill of the physician in removing an eruption from the skin, and will go back again when the graver manifestations, the tissue changes threatening death, have come on as a consequence, and will say to the doctor: ‘You so wonderfully cured me of my skin disease, why cannot you cure of my liver trouble?’

But this very scientific ignorant doctor has made a failure; he has driven what was upon the surface and harmless into the innermost precincts of the economy and the patient is going to die as a result of scientific ignorance.

There are three distinct points involved in this paragraph and these must be brought out.

Restoring health, and not the removing of symptoms, is the first point. Restoring health has in view the establishment of order in a sick human being. Removing symptoms has not in view a human being. Removing the constipation, the hemorrhoids, the white swelling of the knee, the skin disease or any local manifestation or particular sign of disease, or even the removal of a group of symptoms does not have in view the restoration to health of the whole economy of man.

If the removal of symptoms is not followed by a restoration to health, it cannot be called a cure.

We learned in our last study that the sole duty of the physician is to heal the sick, and therefore it is not his duty merely to remove the symptoms, to change the aspect of the symptoms the appearance of the disease image, imagining that lie has thereby established order.

What a simple-minded creature he must be! What a groveller in muck and mire he must be, when he can meditate upon doing such things, even a moment!

How different his actions would be if he but considered that every violent change which be produces in the aspect of the disease aggravates the interior nature of the disease, aggravates the sickness of the man and brings about an increase of suffering within him.

The patient should be able to realize by his feelings and continue to say, that he is being restored to health, whenever a symptom is removed. There should be a corresponding inward improvement whenever an outward symptom has been caused to disappear, and this will be true whenever disease has been displaced by order.

The perfection of a cure consists, then: first in restoring health, and this is to be done promptly, mildly and permanently, which is the second point. The cure must be quick or speedy, it must be gentle, and it must be continuous or permanent.

Whenever an outward symptom has been caused to disappear by violence, as by cathartics to remove constipation, it cannot be called mild or permanent, even if it is prompt. Whenever violent drugs are resorted to there is nothing mild in the action or the reaction that must follow.

At the time this second paragraph of the Organon was written, physicking was not so mild as at the present day. Bloodletting, sweating, etc., were in vogue at the time Hahnemann wrote these lines.

Medicine has changed somewhat in its appearance. Physicians are now using sugar-coated pills and contriving to make medicines appear tasteless or tasteful; they are using concentrated alkaloids.

But none of these things have been done because of the discovery of any principle. Blood-letting and sweating were not abandoned on account of principle, for the old men deprecate their disuse, and often say they hope the time will come when they can again go back to the lancet.

But the drugs of today are ten times more powerful than those formerly used, because more concentrated. The cocaine, sulphonal and numerous other modern concentrated products of the manufacturing chemists are extremely dangerous and their real action and reaction unknown.

The chemical discoveries of petroleum have opened a field of destruction to human intelligence, to the understanding and to the will, because these products are slowly and insidiously violent.

When drugs were used that were instantly dangerous and violent, the action was manifest, it showed upon the surface, and the common people saw it. But the patient of the present day goes through more dangerous drugging, because it destroys the mind.

The apparent benefits produced by these drugs are never permanent. They may in some cases seem to be permanent, but then it is because upon the economy has been engrafted a new and most insidious disease, more subtle and more tenacious than the manifestation that was upon the external. And it is because of this tenacity that the original symptoms remain away.

The disease in its nature, its esse – its fundamental being – has not been changed. It is still there, causing the internal destruction of the man. But its manifestation has been changed, and there has been added to this natural disease a drug disease, more serious than the former.

The manner of cure can only be mild if it flows in the stream of natural direction, establishing order and thereby removing disease.

The direction of old-fashioned medicine is like pulling a cat up a hill by the tail. Whereas the treatment that is mild, gentle and permanent, flows with the stream, scarcely producing a ripple. It adjusts the internal disorder, and the outermost of man returns to order.

Everything becomes orderly from the interior.

The curative medicine does not act violently upon the economy, but establishes its action in a mild manner. But while the action is mild and gentle, very often that which follows, which is the reaction, is a turmoil, especially when the work of traditional medicine is being undone and former states are being re-established.

The third point is ‘upon principles that are at once plain and intelligible’.

This means law, it means fixed principles. It means a law as certain as that of gravitation; not guess work, empiricism, or roundabout methods, or a cut-and-dried use of drugs as laid down by the last manufacturer.

Our principles have never changed, they have always been the same and will remain the same.

To become acquainted with these principles and doctrines, with fixed knowledge, with exactitude or method, to become acquainted with medicines that never change their properties, and to become acquainted with their action, is the all-important aim in homeopathic study.

When one has learned these principles, and continues to practise them, they grow brighter and stronger. The use of these fixed principles is the removal of disease, the restoration to health in a mild, prompt and permanent manner.

If one were to ask an allopathic graduate in this class how he could demonstrate that he had cured some body, the answer could only be such as I have mentioned already, i.e., the patient did not die, or that the manifestations prescribed for had disappeared.

If one were to ask to a physician trained in homeopathic principles the same question, one would find that there are means of distinctly demonstrating why he knows his patient is better.

You would naturally expect, if it is the interior of man that is disordered in sickness, and not his tissues primarily, that the interior must first be turned into order and the exterior last.

The first of man is his voluntary and the second of man is his understanding, the last of man is his outermost; from his center to his circumference, to his organs, his skin, hair, nails, etc.

This being true, the cure must proceed from center to circumference. From center to circumference is from above downward, from within outwards, from more important to less important organs, from the head to the hands and feet.

Every homeopathic practitioner who understands the art of healing, knows that symptoms which go off in these directions remain away permanently. Moreover he knows that symptoms which disappear in the reverse order of their coming are removed permanently.

It is thus he knows that the patient did not merely get well in spite of the treatment, but that he was cured by the action of the remedy.

If a homeopathic physician goes to the bedside of a patient and, upon observing the onset of the symptoms and the course of the disease, sees that the symptoms do not follow this order after his remedy, he knows that he has had but little to do with the course of things.

But if on the contrary, he observes after the administration of his medicine that the symptoms take a reverse course, then he knows that his medicine has had to do with it. Because if the disease were allowed to run its course, such a result would not take place.

The progression of chronic diseases is from the surface to the center. All chronic diseases have their first manifestations upon the surface, and from that to the innermost of man.

Now in the proportion in which they are thrown back upon the surface, it is to be seen that the patient is recovering.

Here it is that the turmoil spoken of above follows the true homeopathic remedy, and the ignorant do not desire their old outward symptom to be brought back even when it is known as the only possible form of cure.

Complaints of the heart and chest and head must in recovery be accompanied by manifestations upon the surface, in the extremities upon the skin, nails and hair. Hence you will find that these parts become diseased when patients are getting well. The hair falls out or eruptions come upon the skin.

In cases of rheumatism of the heart you find, if the patient is recovering, that his knees become rheumatic, and he may say: ‘Doctor, I could walk all over the house when you first came to me, but now I cannot walk, my joints are so swollen’.

If the doctor does not know that that means recovery he will make a prescription that will drive the rheumatism away from the feet and knees and it will go back to the heart and the patient will die. And it need hardly be stated that the traditional doctor does not know this, as he resorts to this plan as his regular and only plan of treatment, and in the most innocent way kills the patient.

This is a simple illustration of how it is possible for the interiors of man to cease to be affected and the exteriors to become affected.

It may be impossible for the man to be entirely cured, it may be impossible for this state to pass off, but that is the direction of its passing off and there is no other course.

If the patient is incurable, while the means used are mild, he may experience great suffering in the evolution of his disease, in the course of his partial recovery. To him it may not appear mild, but the means that were used were mild.

In acute diseases we do not observe so much distress after prescribing as we see in old incurable cases, in deep-seated chronic complaints that have existed a long time.

The return of the outward manifestations upon the extremities are noticed in such cases where they have been suppressed.

To illustrate: there are many patients who have had rheumatism in the hands and feet, in the wrists and knees and elbows, who have been rubbed and stimulated with lotions and strong liniments, with chloroform, with evaporating lotions, with cooling applications, until the rheumatism of the extremities has disappeared to a great extent.

But every physician knows that as the disappearance of his rheumatism progresses, cardiac symptoms are likely to occur. When this patient is prescribed for the rheumatism of the extremities must come back or the heart will not be relieved.

That is true of every condition that has been upon the extremities and driven in by local treatment. Just as surely as you live and observe the action of homeopathic remedies upon man, so surely will you see these symptoms come back.

The patient will return and say: ‘Doctor, I have the same symptoms that I had when I was treated by Dr. So-and-so for rheumatism’.

This comes out in practice nearly every day. It requires a little explanation to the patient, and if he is intelligent enough to understand it, he will wait for the remedy to act.

But the physician who thinks most of his pocketbook will say: ‘If I don’t give him a liniment to put on that limb he will go off and get another physician’.

Now let me tell you right here is the beginning of evil. You had better trust to the intelligence of humanity and trust that he will stay and be cured.

If you have learned to prescribe for the patient even though he suffer, if you have learned what is right and do not do it, it is a violation of conscience.

This paragraph appeals to man’s integrity. It is said in the last line, ‘On principles that are at once plain and intelligible’. Just as soon as you leave out integrity, and believe that a man can do just as be pleases, you leave out everything that pertains to principle and you leave out the foundation of success.

But when these principles are carried out, when a man has made himself thoroughly conversant with the Materia Medica and thoroughly intelligent in its application, when he is circumspect in his very interior life as to the carrying out of these principles, then he will lead himself into a use that is most delightful. Because by such means he may cause diseases to disappear, and may win the lasting friendship and respect of a class of people worth working for.

He has more than that, he has a clear conscience with all that belongs to it; he is living a life of innocence.

When he lives such a life he does not allow himself to wink at the notions that are carried out in families, as, for example, how to prevent the production of offspring, how to avoid bearing children, how to separate man and wife by teaching them the nasty little methods of avoiding the bringing forth of offspring.

The meddling with these vices and the advocating of them will prevent the father and mother from being cured of their chronic diseases.

Unless people lead an orderly life they will not be cured of their chronic diseases. It is your duty as physicians to inculcate such principles among them that they may live an orderly life.

The physician who does not know what order is ought not to be trusted.

It is the duty of the physician, then, first to find out what is in man that is disorder, and then to restore him to health. And this return to health, which is a perfect cure, is to be accomplished by means that are mild, that are orderly, that flow gently like the life force itself, turning the internal of man into order, with fixed principles as his guide, and by the homeopathic remedy.

Thank you for listening. This reading is part of the homeopathic audio library brought to you by Homeocast at homeocast dot com.

Homeopathy asserts that there are principles which govern the practice of medicine.

It may be said that, up till the time of Hahnemann, no principles of medicine were recognized, and even at this day in the writings and actions of the Old School there is a complete acknowledgment that no principles exist.

The Old School declares that the practice of medicine depends entirely upon experience, upon what can be found out by giving medicines to the sick.

Their shifting methods and theories, and rapid discoveries and abandonment of the same, fully attest the sincerity of their acknowledgments and declarations.

Homeopathy leaves allopathy at this point, and so in this manner the great division between the two schools is affected.

That there are principles homeopathy affirms.

The Old School denies the existence of principles, and with apparent reason, looking at the matter from the standpoint of their practice and methods.

They deal only with ultimates, they observe only results of disease, and either deny or have no knowledge of the real nature of man, what he is, where he came from, what his quality is in sickness or in health.

They say nothing about the man except in connection with his tissues; they characterise the changes in the tissues as the disease and all there is of the disease, its beginning and its end. In effect they proclaim disease to be something that exists without a cause.

They accept nothing but what can be felt with the fingers and seen with the eyes or otherwise observed through the senses, aided by improved instruments.

The finger is aided by the microscope to an elongated point, and the microscopic pathological results of disease are noted and considered to be the beginning and the ending, i.e., results without anything prior to them.

That is a summary of allopathic teaching as to the nature of sickness.

But homeopathy perceives that there is something prior to these results.

Every science teaches, and every investigation of a scientific character proves, that everything which exists does so because of something prior to it.

Only in this way can we trace cause and effect in a series from beginning to end, and back again from the end to the beginning.

By this means we arrive at a state in which we do not assume, but in which we know.

The first paragraph of the Organon will be understood by an inexperienced observer to mean one thing, and by a true and experienced homeopath to mean another.

Organon §1. ‘The physician’s high and only mission is to restore the sick to health, to cure as it is termed.’

No controversy will arise from a superficial reading of this statement, and until Hahnemann’s hidden meaning of the word ‘sick’ is fully brought to view, the physician of any school will assent.

The idea that one person will entertain as to the meaning of the word ‘sick’, will be different at times from that which another will entertain.

So long as it remains a matter of opinion, there will be differences of opinion. Therefore the homeopath must abandon the mere expressions of opinion.

Allopathy rests on individual opinion and allopaths say that the science of medicine is based on the consensus of opinion. But that is an unworthy and unstable foundation for the science of curing the sick.

It will never be possible to establish a rational system of therapeutics until we reason from facts as they are, and not as they sometimes appear.

Facts as they appear are expressed in the opinions of men. But facts as they are, are facts and truths from which doctrines are evolved and formulated which will interpret or unlock the kingdoms of nature in the realm of sickness or health.

Therefore, beware of the opinion of men in science.

Hahnemann has given us principles which we can study and advance upon.

It is law that governs the world and not matters of opinion or hypotheses.

We must begin by having a respect for law, for we have no starting point unless we base our propositions on law.

So long as we recognize men’s statements, we are in a state of change, for men and hypotheses change.

Let us acknowledge authority.

The true homeopath, when he speaks of the sick, knows who it is, that is sick, whereas the allopath does not know.

The latter thinks that the house which the man lives in, which is being torn down, expresses all there is of sickness. In other words, that the tissue changes – which are only the results of disease – are all that there is of the sick man.

The homeopath observes wonderful changes resulting from potentised medicines. And being compelled to reflect, he sees that crude drugs cannot heal the sick, and that, what changes they do effect, are not real but only apparent.

Modern physiology has no vital doctrine in its teaching, and therefore no basis to work upon.

The doctrine of the vital force is not admitted by the teachers of physiology. And, therefore, the homeopath sees that true physiology is not yet taught. For without the vital force, without simple substance, without the internal as well as the external, there can be no cause, and no relation between cause and effect.

Now what is meant by ‘the sick?’

It is a man that is sick and to be restored to health, not his body, not the tissues.

You will find many people who will say, ‘I am sick.’

They will enumerate pages of symptoms, pages of suffering. They look sick.

But they tell you: ‘I have been to the most eminent physicians. I have had my chest examined. I have been to the neurologist. I have been to the cardiac specialist and have had my heart examined. The eye specialist has examined my eyes. I have been to the gynaecologist and have had my uterus examined’, says the woman. ‘I have been physically examined from head to foot, and they tell me I am not sick, I have no disease.’

Many a time have I heard this story after getting three or four pages of symptoms.

What does it mean? It is true if that state progresses there will be evidences of disease, i.e., evidences which the pathologist may discover by his physical examination.

But at present the patient is not sick, says the learned doctor.

‘But what do all these symptoms mean? I do not sleep at night, I have pains and aches. My bowels do not move.’

‘Oh, well, you have constipation.’

That is the first thing that has been diagnosed. But do all these things exist without a cause?

It would seem from one opinion that the ‘constipation’ is the disease per se. But from another opinion it would appear to be the cause of disease. The ‘diagnosis’ is made to apply to one as much as to the other.

But this is the character of vagaries, so common to Old School whims.

These symptoms are but the language of nature, talking out as it were, and showing as clearly as daylight the internal nature of the sick man or woman.

If this state progresses the lungs break down. The doctor says, ‘Oh, now you have consumption’.

Or a great change appears in the liver, and he says, ‘Oh, now you have fatty degeneration of the liver’.

Or albumen appears in the urine, and he tells the patient, ‘Now I am able to name your disease – you have some one of the forms of Bright’s disease’.

It is nonsense to say that prior to the localization of disease, the patient is not sick. Does it not seem clear that this patient has been sick, and very sick, even from childhood?

Under traditional methods it is necessary that a diagnosis be made, before the treatment can be settled. But in most cases the diagnosis cannot be made until the results of disease have rendered the patient incurable.

Again, take the nervous child. It has wild dreams, twitching, restless sleep, nervous excitement, hysterical manifestations. But if we examine all the organs of the body we will find nothing the matter with them.

This sickness, however, which is present, if allowed to go on uncured, will in twenty or thirty years result in tissue change. The organs will become affected and then it will be said that the body is diseased. But the individual has been sick from the beginning.

It is a question whether we will start out, and consider the results of disease, or begin at the beginning with the causes.

If we have material ideas of disease, we will have material ideas of the means of cure.

If we believe an organ is sick, and alone constitutes the disease, we must feel that if we could remove the organ, we would cure the patient.

A man has a necrotic condition of the hand. Then if we believe that only the hand is sick we would think we had cured the patient by removing his hand.

Say the hand is cancerous. According to this idea it is cancerous in itself and from itself, and seeing he would later die from the cancer of his hand we would conscientiously remove the hand and so cure the patient.

For an eruption on the skin we would use local means to stimulate the functions of the skin and make it heal. And believing the eruption had no cause behind it, we would conscientiously think we had cured the patient.

But this is the reductio ad absurdum, for nothing exists without a cause. The organs are not the man. The man is prior to the organs. From first to last is the order of sickness as well as the order of cure. From man to his organs and not from the organs to the man.

Well, then who is this sick man?

The tissues could not become sick unless something prior to them had been deranged and so make them sick.

What is there of this man that can be called the internal man? What is there that can be removed so that the whole that is physical may be left behind?

We say that man dies but he leaves his body behind. We dissect the body and find all of his organs.

Everything that we know by the senses belongs to physical man. Everything that we can feel with the fingers and see with the eyes he leaves behind.

The real sick man is prior to the sick body and we must conclude that the sick man is somewhere in that portion which is not left behind.

That which is carried away is primary and that which is left behind is ultimate.

We say the man feels, sees, tastes, hears. He thinks and he lives. But these are only outward manifestations of thinking and living.

The man wills and understands. The cadaver does not will and does not understand. Then that which takes its departure is that which knows and wills. It is that, which can be changed, and is prior to the body.

The combination of these two, the will and the understanding, constitute man. Conjoined, they make life and activity. They manufacture the body, and cause all things of the body.

With the will and understanding operating in order, we have a healthy man.

It is not our purpose to go behind the will and the understanding, to go prior to these. It is enough to say that they were created.

Then man is the will and the understanding, and the house which he lives in, is his body.

We must, to be scientific homeopaths, recognize that the muscles, the nerves, the ligaments and the other parts of man’s frame are a picture and manifest to the intelligent physician the internal man.

Both the dead and the living body are to be considered, not from the body to the life, but from the life to the body.

If you were to describe the difference between two human faces, their character and everything you observe of their action, you would be describing scarcely more than the will. The will is expressed in the face; its result is implanted on the countenance.

Have you ever studied the face of an individual who has grown up a murderer or villain of some sort? Is there no difference between his face and that of one who has the will to do good, to live uprightly?

Go down into the lowest parts of our great city and study the faces of these people. These people are night prowlers; they are up late at night studying villainy.

If we inquire into it we will see that their affections are of that kind. They have the stamp upon their faces. They have evil affections and an evil face.

The countenance, then, is expressive of the heart.

Allopathic pathology recognizes nothing but man’s body.

Yet one can easily confuse the allopath by asking him what man’s thought is, what man is.

The homeopath must master these things before he can perceive the nature of the cause of disease and before he can understand, what cure is.

It is the sole duty of the physician to heal the sick. It is not his sole duty to heal the results of sickness, but the sickness itself. When the man himself has been restored to health, there will be restored harmony in the tissues and in the activities.

Then the sole duty of the physician is to put in order the interior of the economy, i.e., the will and understanding conjoined.

Tissue changes are of the body and are the results of disease. They are not the disease.

Hahnemann once said, ‘There are no diseases, but sick people’. From which it is clear that Hahnemann understood that the diseases so-called, e.g., Bright’s disease, liver disease, etc. were but the grosser forms of disease results, i.e., appearances of disease.

There is first disorder of government, and this proceeds from within outward, until we have pathological changes in the tissues.

In the practice of medicine today, the idea of government is not found, and the tissue changes only, are taken into account.

He who considers disease results to be the disease itself, and expects to do away with these as disease, is insane. It is an insanity in medicine, an insanity that has grown out of the milder forms of mental disorder in science, crazy whims.

The bacteria are results of disease. In the course of time we will be able to show perfectly that the microscopical little fellows are not the disease cause, but that they come after. That they are scavengers accompanying the disease, and that they are perfectly harmless in every respect.

They are the outcome of the disease, are present wherever the disease is, and by the microscope it has been discovered that every pathological result has its corresponding bacteria.

The Old School consider these the cause. But we will be able to show that disease cause is much more subtle than anything that can be shown by a microscope.

We will be able to show you by a process of reasoning, step by step, the folly of hunting for disease cause by the implements of the senses.

In a note, Hahnemann says: ‘The physician’s mission is not, however, to construct so-called systems, by interweaving empty speculations and hypotheses concerning the internal essential nature of the vital processes and the mode in which diseases originate in the invisible interior of the organism,’ etc.

We know that in the present day, people are perfectly satisfied if they can find the name of the disease they are supposed to have, an idea cloaked in some wonderful technicality.

An old Irishman walked into the clinic one day, and after giving his symptoms, said: ‘Doctor, what is the matter with me?’.

The physician answered, ‘Why, you have Nux vomica’, that being his remedy. Whereupon the old man said, ‘Well, I did think I had some wonderful disease or other’.

That is an outgrowth of the old-fashioned folly of naming sickness.

Except in a few acute diseases no diagnosis can be made, and no diagnosis need be made except that the patient is sick.

The more one thinks of the name of a disease so-called, the more one is beclouded in the search for a remedy. For then the mind is only upon the result of the disease, and not upon the image expressed in symptoms.

A patient of twenty-five years of age, with gravest inheritances, with twenty pages of symptoms, and with only symptoms to furnish an image of sickness, is perfectly curable if treated in time. After being treated there will be no pathological results. He will go on to old age without any tissue destruction.

But that patient, if not cured at that early age, will take on disease results in accordance with the circumstances of his life and his inheritances.

If he is a chimney sweep, he will be subject to the diseases peculiar to chimney sweeps. If she is a housemaid, she will be subject to the diseases peculiar to housemaids etc.

That patient has the same disease he had when he was born. This array of symptoms represents the same state before the pathological conditions have been formed, as after.

And it is true – if he has liver disease or brain disease or any of the many tissue changes that they call disease, you must go back and procure these very symptoms before you can make a prescription.

Prescribing for the results of disease causes changes in the results of disease, but not in the sickness, except to hurry its progress.

We will see peculiarities running through families.

In the beginning is this primary state which is presented only by signs and symptoms, and the whole family needs the same remedy or a cognate of that remedy. But in one member of the family the condition runs to cancer, in another to phthisis, etc., but all from the same common foundation.

This fundamental condition which underlies the diseases of the human race must be understood. Without a knowledge of this it will be impossible to understand the acute miasmatic diseases, which will be considered later.

It is a well-known fact that some persons are susceptible to one thing, and some to another. If an epidemic comes upon the land, only a few come down with it. Why are some protected and why do others take it?

These things must be settled by the doctrines of homeopathy. Idiosyncrasies must be accounted for.

Many physicians waste their time in searching after the things that make their patients sick. The sick man will be made sick under every circumstance, whereas the healthy man could live in a leper colony.

It is not the principal business of the physician to be hunting in the rivers and the cellars and examining the food we eat for the cause of disease. It is his duty to hunt out the symptoms of the sickness until a remedy is found that covers the disorder.

That remedy, which will produce on healthy man similar symptoms, is the master of the situation. It is the necessary antidote, will overcome the sickness, restore the will and understanding to order, and cure the patient.

To get at the real nature of the human economy, and to lead up from that to sickness, opens out a field for investigation in a most scientific way.

Sickness can be learned by the study of the provings of drugs upon the healthy economy. Hahnemann made use of the information thus obtained when he stated that the mind is the key to the man.

The symptoms of the mind have been found by all his followers to be the most important symptoms in a remedy and in a sickness.

Man consists in what he thinks and what he loves, and there is nothing else in man. If these two grand parts of man – the will and the understanding – be separated, it means insanity, disorder, death.

All medicines operate upon the will and the understanding first – sometimes extensively on both – affecting man in his ability to think, or to will, and ultimately upon the tissues, the functions and sensations. In the study of Aurum, we find the affections are most disturbed by that drug.

Man’s highest possible love is for his life. Aurum so destroys this, that he does not love his life, he will commit suicide. Argentum, on the other hand, so destroys man’s understanding that he is no longer rational; his memory is entirely ruined.

So with every proved drug in the Materia Medica. We see them affecting first man’s mind, and proceeding from the mind to the physical economy, to the outermost, to the skin, the hair, the nails.

If medicines are not thus studied you will have no knowledge of them that you can carry with you. The Materia Medica has been established upon this basis.

Sickness must therefore be examined by a thorough scrutiny of the elements that make up morbid changes that exist in the likeness of drug symptoms.

To the extent that drugs in provings upon healthy men have brought out symptoms on animal ultimates, must we study sickness, with the hope of adjusting remedies to sickness in man, under the Law of Similars.

Ultimate symptoms, function symptoms, sensorium symptoms and mind symptoms, are all useful and none should be overlooked.

The idea of sickness in man must be formed from the idea of sickness perceived in our Materia Medica.

As we perceive the nature of sickness in a drug image, so must we perceive the nature of the sickness in a human being to be healed.

Therefore our idea of pathology must be adjusted to such a Materia Medica as we possess, and it must be discovered wherein these are similar, in order to heal the sick.

The totality of the symptoms written out carefully is all that we know of the internal nature of sickness.

Then, the proper administration of the similar remedy will constitute the art of healing.

Thank you for listening. This reading is part of the homeopathic audio library brought to you by Homeocast at homeocast dot com.