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Samuel Hahnemann(10th April 1755 - 2nd July 1842) -- R. E. Dudgeon, M. D. |
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In 1789 he removed to Leipzic, and in that year published his treatise on Syphilis, written in the year before in Lockowits which I must confess, betrays no lack of confidence in the powers of medicine, and shows an intimate acquaintance with the best works of that period on the subject. But what this work is chiefly remarkable for, is its description of a new preparation, know to this day in Germany by the name of Hahnemann’s soluble mercury, and some very novel views relative to the treatment of syphilis; the dose of mercury to be given (which is remarkably small), the signs when enough has been ingested for the cure of the diseases, and the denunciation of the local treatment of the primary sore, in 1790 he translated Cullen’s Materia Medica and discovered the fever-producing property of cinchona bark ; which was to him what the falling apply was to Newton, and the swinging lamp in the Baptistery at Pisa, to Galileo. From this single experiments his mood appears to have been impressed by the conviction, that the pathogenetic effects of medicines would give the key to their therapeutic power. He seems, how ever, to have contented himself with hunting up in the works of the ancient authors for hints respecting the physiological action of different substances, and to have tested them but sparingly, if at all, on his own person or on his friends; and in his researches, to the drugs than for those minute shades of symptoms which we find he so carefully recorded in his later years. In fact, he seems rather to have searched to those abstract forms of disease described in the works on nosology, than for analogues to the individual concrete cases of actual practice. I think any one who will read his first Essay on a New Principle, published in 1796, and the two papers, on Continued and Remittent Fevers, and on Hebdomadel Diseases, published in 1798, will agree with me in this opinion. However, to return to our history Hahnemann seems to have had little or no opportunity to test his ideas by practice in Leipzic and the little village of Stottorits close by, and must have been completely occupied with his chemical lucubration’s and translation; for he wrote at his period a large number of chemical essays, and translated several chemical and other works, besides Cullen’s just named. He diligence must have been something extraordinary at this time, and no doubt his increasing family was a source of great anxiety to him, and caused him to slave to the extent of which we have evidence from his publication. How sorely the ‘res angusta domi’ must now have pressed on Hahnemann, longing as he was for the opportunity to pursue the investigations of which he had just discovered the clue, how his great but impatient soul must have chafed and fretted at that oppressive clog of poverty – that necessity for providing bread for the daily wants of his children, which hindered him from soaring on his eagle flight into unexplored – of regions discovery! And the poverty which Hahnemann endured was not merely an income so small as to prohibit and indulgence in the luxuries of life, but often, and actual want of the common necessaries of existence; and this with all anxiety of an increasing and helpless family of young children! And yet had it not been for his poverty, Hahnemann had probably never made the discovery on which his fame has built.. Naturalists tell us that the oyster forms the lustrous pearl found certain extraneous that intrude themselves within the cavity of its shell, and irritate and vex its tender flesh--and so it with the great and good; the vexations and annoyances of life are often the means of eliciting and developing those pearl of the mind that we admire and marvel at. With what eagerness must not Hahnemann now have accepted the offer of the reigning Duke of Saxe Gotha to take the charge of an asylum for the insane in Georgenthal, in the Thuringian forest,-- a charge which would give him a present competency, and, above all, leisure to pursue his how painfully interesting investigation, and an opportunity of putting his discovery to the test. Here, then, we find him settled for a time in 1792. A cure that he made in this institution of the Hanoverian minister Klolenburg, who had been rendered insane by a satire of Kotzebue’s, created, we are told, some sensation; and, from the account he published in 1796 of this case, we find that he was one of the earliest, if not the very first advocate for that system of the insane by mildness instead of coercion which has became all but universal. ``I never allow any insane person,’’ he writes, "to be punished by blows or other painful corporeal inflictions, since there can be no punishment where there is no sense of responsibility ; and since such patients cannot be improved, hut must be rendered worse, by such rough treatment.’’ May we not, than, justly claim for Hahnemann the honour of being the first who advocated and practised the moral treatment of the insane? At all events, he may divide this honor with Pinel; for we find that toward the end of this same year 1792, when Hshemsnn was applying his principle of moral treatment to practice. Pinel made his first experiment of unchaining the mainace in the Blcentre. Hahnemann does not seem to have remained long in this situation; for the same year be removed to Walschleben, where he wrote the first part of the Friend of Health, a popular miscellany, on hygiene principally, and the first part of his Pharmaceutical Laxicon, and in 1794 he went first to Pyrmont, a little watering-place in Westphalia, and thereafter to Brunswick. In 1795 he migrated to Wolfenbuttel, and thence to Konigslutter, where he remained until 1799. In this interval of comparative settlement he gave out the second parts of his Friend of Health and Pharmaceutical lexicon; and he had leisure to pursue his investigations and to write, in 1796, for his friend Hufeland’s journal, that remarkable Essay on a New Principle for ascertaining the Remedial power of Medicinal Substances, wherein he modestly but firmly expresses his belief that, for chronic diseases at least, medicines should be employed that have the power of producing similar affections in the healthy body ; and the following year he published in the same journal an interesting case illustrative of his views ; and wrote another essay on the irrationality of complicated systems of diet and regimen, and complex prescriptions. Several other essays followed this in rapid succession among which I may mention that on antidotes, and those on the treatment of fever and periodical diseases.’’ But already the hostility of his colleagues began to display itself. Hahnemann, who had now abandoned the complicated medication of absurdity of giving complex mixtures of medicines which he now invariably administered singly and along. The physicians of Konigslutter, jealous of the rising fame of the innovator, incited the apothecaries to bring an action against him far interfering with their privileges by dispensing his own medicines. It was in vain Hahnemann appealed to their letter and spirit of the law regulating the apothecaries business and argued, that their privileges only extended to the compounding of medicines, but that every man, and therefore still more every medical man, had the right to give or sell uncompounded drugs, which were the only things he employed, and which he administered, moreover gratuitously. All in vain; the apothecaries and their allies, his jealous brethren, were too powerful for him; and contrary to law. Justice, and common sense, Hahnemann, who had shown himself a master of the apothecaries’ art by his learned and laborious Pharmaceutical Lexicon, was prohibited from dispensing his own simple medicines. |
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