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Homeopathic Biographies |
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Samuel Hahnemann(10th April 1755 - 2nd July 1842) -- R. E. Dudgeon, M. D. |
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This perseverance was conspicuous in the means he adopted of pursuing his studies in the great medical school of Vienna, for which he carefully accumulated as much money as was sufficient to maintain him in that expensive capital for some time, he had not been defrauded of it, and thereby obliged to cut his studies prematurely short, and accept of a post in the remote town of Hermannstadt. As further proofs of his iron perseverance, I have only to remind you of his undeviating efforts to follow up the truth he discovered, and to perfect the system he originated, undeterred for one instant by the hard necessities of poverty, or by the sneers and persecutions of those who should most have befriended and encouraged him his professional brethren. The inveterate and unceasing persecution to which he was subjected from the very commencement of his career and which increased in intensity as he developed his peculiar and novel doctrines, had not the slightest effect in making him relax in the least degree from his endeavors. His very first work of any importance, that on Syphilis, was, as he himself tells us, the subject of the most outrageous vituperations and abuse. Though this work was published long before he had any idea of homoeopathy, the views he promulgated with reference to the destruction by caustics of the primary sore, and the employment of very small quantities of a new mercurial preparation, running counter as they did to the prevalent notions on the subject, called forth the most unwarrantable abuse from his critics. The same thing happened on the publication of his Essay on a new Principle; and every other step in the progress of his great and beneficent discovery was greeted with similar discouragement. In 1799, the more practical annoyance of the apothecaries persecution was called into play, and the intrigues of his enemies drove him from place to place. With a large and increasing family to provide for, this system of persecution must have been the most painful and annoying to his feelings that could be devised. Wherever he went the espionage of the German Worshipful Company of Apothecaries accompanied him, and the moment he was detected dispensing his own medicines, a complaint was made on the part of that privileged guild that he was interfering with their vested rights. And it was no difficult matter to get evidence against him, for he held it to be indispensable to the right practice of his art to have the command over his own tools, and scorned to conceal that he dispensed his own medicines. Although all this persecution did not tend to him serve one jot from the line of conduct he had marked out for himself, it no doubt contributed greatly to his adoption of those secluded and recluse habits he was noted for in after-life, to render him intolerant of contradiction and to make him view with suspicion, not with envy, any one who ventured to differ from him by ever so little. Many of the acts which this disposition led him to commit are greatly to be lamented. This he took upon himself to summon to Coethen the Homoeopathic Society he had founded only three years previously, though the place of meeting had been fixed for Leipzic, because he was told that some of his doctrines were opposed by some of its members; and the next year he pronounced the dissolution of the Society on the same grounds. His intolerance for those who differed from him latterly attained to such a height, that he used to say, "He who does not walk on exactly the same line with me, who diverges, if it be but the breadth of straw, to the right or to the left, is an apostate and a traitor, and with him I will have nothing to do." Dr. Gross, who was one of his most industrious disciples and enjoyed his most perfect intimacy, having lost a child, wrote in the sorrow of a bereaved parent to Hahnemann, and said that his loss had taught him that homoeopathy did not suffice in every case; this gave great offence to Hahnemann, who never forgave Gross ior this remark and never afterwards restored to him to his favour. The hospital that had been established in Leipzic by private subscription was also the scene of Hahnemann’s intolerant spirit, for he never rested satisfied until the talented and zealous physician, Dr. M. Muller, who had the charge of it, and who performed the duties most efficiently and without payment, but who did not please Hahnemann because he ventured to exercise an independent judgment, was replaced by one entirely disposed to swear in verba magistri, with a salary of 300 thallers per anum. This spirit of intolerance of any difference of opinion on the part of those professing to be his disciples, which showed itself in many different ways, was doubtless partly occasioned by the violent opposition and persecution he had met with, and which had led him to retire as it were within himself, and adopt that almost hermit-life which we have see him leading, whereby his own ideas not being modified or enlarged by the collision of independent minds with own, always bore the distinctive characteristic of his own peculiar mental organization sharply defined, and anything that did nit chime in exactly with his own standard for the time being was looked upon by him with his suspicion and dislike, The reports, insinuations, and misrepresentations of those few persons who retained his intimacy by agreeing with him in everything he said, had also, it would seem, the effect of making his judgments on others more harsh than they would have been had he knows them or suffered them to discuss with him their ideas. It should also be mentioned, his confidence in others had on several occasions received rude shocked, more especially in the case of a young physician of the name of Robbi, who insinuated himself into his intimacy be feigned respect and admiration for his genius, and subsequently turned round and was one of foremost is ridiculing the system of the man for whom he expressed such esteem, This circumstance, which occurred soon after his arrival in Leipzic, no doubt made him suspicious and impatient of the opposition of others. I am of opinion that it would have greatly contributed to the more general adoption of homoeopathy had been more a man of the world, and had he taken into his confidence some of those of his followers who were distinguished for their independence of thought and proficiency in the medical sciences. Homoeopathy would in that case not have presented such a harsh contrast, and stood in such violent antagonism to the old system of medicine; for what was good and true in the latter would have been adopted and amalgamated with the reformed system to its advantage; and the improvements and discoveries in physiology, and chemistry world have probably been made use of by Hahnemann for the development of his system, had these not proceeded from members of a party that had declared war to the knife against Hahnemann and the new school, ruptured every bond of amity between them. Who can doubt that the inveterate enmity and persecution of the apothecaries its certain amount of influence in giving a bias to Hahnemann’s mind of the subject of the dose, and that it ultimately led to that Procrustean standard for regulating the does which Hahnemann adopted, without sufficient grounds as I believe? Who can doubt that the forced retirement of Hahnemann, and the unfortunate resolution he adopted of never visiting patients, must have latterly confined his practice almost entirely to one class of patients, those affected with chronic diseases, and that had he seen more acute diseases, his practice would have been considerably modified? The persecution of the apothecaries began in 1799. Previous to this time Hahnemann had given material and palpable doses, as we learn from the cases he published anterior to that date. In 1800 we first meet with anything like infinitesimals, and these only in certain cases. An the opposition of the apothecaries became more violent, and the injury they inflicted on him, pecuniarily and otherwise, more severe, Hahnemann’s doses became more and more refined and attenuated, until at length we find stating that the mere smelling at a globule is not only sufficient but the best of all methods of administering the remedy; and he adds, with marked emphasis, that this will enable us to dispense entirely with the apothecary’s services. When he got out of the sphere of the apothecaries’ influence and annoyance he entirely altered his mode of giving the remedy and the method he adopted in Paris, which I have elsewhere described, is a much nearer approximation to the method of the dominant school. But although the persecution of Hahnemann is to be regretted for the unfortunate influence it exercised on his doctrines in some respects, yet is probably that on the whole this persecution was altogether disadvantageous to the internal development of the new systems. The myth of Prumetheus chained to the solitary rock with the vulture gnawing at his liver is an emblem of the fate that awaited all who have the presumption to steal celestial fire; they are mostly condemned to solitude their great minds can find no companionship among the common herd a mankind, and they are incessantly preyed upon by the ever-greatly vulture their discoverers should be so treated. Their isolation and forced retirement from the world enable them to work more constantly at their subject, and to develop it by the light of their own great minds, unswayed by the well-meaning but shallow friends, who are generally the most officious and persevering in their injudicious suggestions. Thought, by the enforced intellectual solitude on the part of the discoverer of new truth, the systems they build up may appear to be deficient in catholicity, and to bear too prominently the stamp of their authors individuality, yet on the other hands, there is no fear of their truths being lost amid a medley of distracting doubts and irrelevant fancies, that would not fail to suggest themselves to the various minds of multitude of learned pundits, The persecutions endured by the pioneers of truth serve only to stimulate them more so to work out and perfect their truth, that their very enemies and persecutors shall be forced ultimately to bow down before it. While the sham melts away like snow before the fire of persecution, the truth is only rendered more bright and more compact by it, as the soft iron only becomes steel by passing through the furnace. That Hahnemann felt and felt deeply the unjust calumnies and unceasing persecution to which he was subjected we have ample evidence from various passages in his works from the year 1800 onwards. Among the papers found at his death one bore the following inscription, intended as an epitaph on his tomb, which reads live the last sigh of a martyr-liber tendem quiesco. |
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