Homoeopathy : its tenets and tendencies, theoretical, theological, and therapeutical / by James Y. Simpson.

Date:
1853
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Homoeopathy : its tenets and tendencies, theoretical, theological, and therapeutical / by James Y. Simpson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    PflOVlNGS NECESSAKY FOR EACH PERSON. We have already had occasion to notice, that the medicinal effects of various important medicines, as iodine, kousso, male-shield-fern, etc., were not, and could not, he ascertained by experiments upon healthy individuals, but only by experiments upon the sick. The general therapeutic effects, however, of some drugs certainly could be, and have been, ascertained fl*om their employment by healthy persons, as emetics, diuretics, purgatives, etc. But in order that such 2lro^dngs ” and experiments on the healthy, as the homoeo- pathists speak of, could be of any pi’actical value in the homoeo- pathic mode of treatment, it would be necessary also to ascertain, what Hahnemann and his followers have forgotten to ascertain, that the same drug produces the same symptoms, not only in all different individuals to whom it is exhibited in practice, but also in the same individual, equally in the state of health and in different states of diseases. Often wo see the same drug, or even the same ai’ticle of diet, i)roduce opposite effects in health and in illness. The kind of food which was safe and grateful to the patient when well, will frequently, if forced upon the same patient when sick, pro- duce nothing but loathing and nausea, or perhaps indigestion and fever. Opium, which in the state of health, usually produces sleep, will in some diseased states, as delirium tremens, fail, as a genei’al law, to act so in its ordinary doses. Digitalis, squills, s])irit of nitrous ether, and other drugs which freely act as diiu’etics in the state of health, will fail entirely to do so in some states of disease and dro])sy. Senna, jalap, sulphate of magnesia, and medi- cines which act as purgatives upon man in health, often fail to have any such effects when colic and ileus are present; and, on the other hand, would have, in all probability, too great and dangerous a purgative effect in phthisis and some other forms of disease. According to the homoeopathic creed, “ remedies (observes Dr Bushnan) can only cure those symptoms which are similar to their effects on the healthy body. They cure them by substituting artificial symptoms for the morbid symptoms. Such is the homoeo- pathic doctrine. Again, cases of disease are to be regarded as in- diwdualities, that is to say, made up of the particular symptoms Avhich exist at the time of observation. Now, as medicines can only em’e such symptoms as are similar to their physiological effects, it follows that the effects of the medicine on the individual must bo similar to the symptoms of his disease, othenvise no cure can ensue. But medicines produce different effects on different indi-