The Journal Of The British Homoeopathic Society Volume 8

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1879 edition. Excerpt: ...is any justification for these accusations, although my letter was certainly meant to conciliate. Had I addressed the Lancet in the language of rebuke and of self-assertion, I should simply have been excluded from its pages, and the important discussion and movement which my letter lias created in the profession would not have arisen. It has been said that I have abandoned my belief in the law of similars; but the untruthfulness of this assertion is at once shown by my quotation of Hippocrates' double law of similars and contraries, as in my belief a true law, and, far from abandoning the law of similars, I say that my practice is rational medicine, plus the law of similars; I am told that I should rather have said our practice was the law of similars, plus rational medicine. The expression, however, which I used was not original, having been two years ago, in a different form, printed in the Lancet and left unchallenged. I accept it, however, as nearly correct with reference to myself, because the first movement of my mind in any new case is in the direction of hygiene. I desire in the first place to know, and if necessary correct, the habits and practices of my patients, and I would rather cure them by inducing a right mode of life than patch them up by minute doses of medicine laboriously and homceo-pathically selected. At the same time I admit that the law of similars is a wonderful index to the selection of a true drug remedy, and that in many obscure cases it is our only guide to a true remedy, and that so guided cases of a most obscure character are frequently cured after all other means have failed. I have also been accused of disbelieving in the action of infinitesimals, whereas I only say that it is wise to abaudon the use of...