What is Homeopathy?

-- C. M. Boger, 1932

Read before the I. H. A., Bureau of Materia Medica, June 9-11, 1932, and the Ohio Homeopathic Society.

Homoeopathy displays an essential tenacity of life not always apparent on the surface; it is to this inner life that it owes its continued existence. The menaces of isopathy, pathology, serology and the isms in general, all finally lay down their little contribution at the feet of the one great law of cure, before sinking into comparative insignificance. We have fondly stressed its superiority, its spheres of influence, etc., without seriously impressing the nineteenth century type of mind now functioning as twentieth century physicians.

That likes may be cured by likes has been believed for many long ages, but it was left for the genius of Hahnemann to prove that likes are cured by likes, implying that this is the way of nature. Why this is so cannot be easily grasped without a fair knowledge of the principles of physics and an understanding of the contents of the Organon, for they are mutually interdependent. Until you can see this point you are not in a position to really understand it and are but little better than other empirical prescribers who work without any sort of rule or guidance. This is a pivotal point which you cannot disregard and still hope to learn how to cure. It is also, because of his education, the stumbling block for the unseeing allopath, who has only too often been hypnotised by the glamour of what he calls surgery, a needful thing truly, but vastly abused. If the true homeopathist has the utmost confidence in the power of the similimum to cure all curable disease, the ordinary surgeon holds the opposite view. Both rely upon experience, but the kinds of experience differ radically.

The law of similia has been fully proven, the power of dynamisation amply demonstrated and the ability of the potentised drug to relieve, to cure and prolong the span of life placed beyond cavil, and yet the body politic of medicine dings to its idols with feet of day, is only alive in parts, slumberous in others and acutely decadent in the main. The almost superphysical glimpse opened up by our own Madam Curie has not yet penetrated its inner consciousness and to it this approach to the power of intangibles necessarily remains a closed book. It still thinks in terms of brute force, hence acts the same way and gets correspondingly stunning results. Those who reason from the standpoint of forcible measures must always remain bunglers, because reason cannot, by any imagination, supplant natural law. Their violent efforts only result in repressions, that do just that much toward making the curable incurable. The man who essays to practise homeopathy after this fashion is doubly reprehensible. It is disgraceful and unworthy of us to stand aloof from the organization from which we filch the very things that both harm and disarm our patients beyond belief. Mixed methods are of all the most self defeating, and mean that the prescriber has lost his sense of direction and is stumbling along in a haphazard way.

The student of today is drilled to the point of mental exhaustion in the material side of things, hence becomes blind to all that may possibly lie beyond his dulled senses. He cannot realise that leaving out intangibles leaves out the life of things, whose nuances are the only real guides to success. Education strives to inculcate pure 'method, well knowing a certain falling away is inevitable. What then can be said for the instruction which is of itself of uncertain tenor and tainted with half baked ideas, under the guise of liberty of action. These are the things which undermine us, breed uncertainty and bring about the sort of inefficiency that finally resorts to destructive palliation. True homeopathy only teaches medicine in its fullness, all other methods are largely unmitigated delusions that pander to ignorance.

Every student has the inherent right to obtain a good working knowledge of the law of action and reaction as exemplified in the vital economy, and by implication its homeopathic bearing, in order that he may attain proficiency in applied therapeutics. In earlier times when instruction in the Organon and materia medica were part of almost every day's college work, the student learned more of the really worth while things in two years than he does now in the four slave driven ones, filled with the things that give him a false slant on the nature of disease and impair his future usefulness. The colleges lead him far away from nature, doubtless, in other that he may find his own way back again. The crowding of minutiae upon the immature destroys all sense of the proportion of things and leaves their exhausted minds an easy prey to the absurd fallacies of internship, where treatment is copied after mass production and standardisation methods. Here it may be pointed out how difficult it is to find the man who knows how to take a lucid and enlightening case history, therefore cannot know how to go about finding the correct remedy.

The homeopathist should know his tools thoroughly and avoid such as are not suited to his purpose. This means access to and ability to use sound homeopathic books, materia medicas, repertories and card indices. The latter are the latest and best aids to accurate prescribing, provided they are used to point out particular groups of remedies, amongst which the similimum is almost certain to be found, by finally consulting the materia medica text itself.

Our graduates seem to be distressingly helpless, even in the presence of a good reference library; first of all because they seem to have only the most hazy ideas of symptom values and know but little about systematically consulting the proper books. The whole aspect of medical education looks too much like a grotesque travesty bordering closely on a ghastly tragedy for the invalid. As for scientific medicine itself, it comes perilously near being a stupid kind of manslaughter; its all saving discoveries of today are thrown into the discard tomorrow, the general public having paid the price in lives for the experiment. This is called progress and is of the kind which took us through the era of blood letting, then the period of a saturating mercurialization, followed by that of cinchonism and now with finer ingenuity poisons the younger generation with serums made from the blood of a lower order of animals. It is all a wild orgy of rampant materialism run to seed, through mental obfuscation. If, "As ye think so are ye" still be true it is indeed a sad commentary on the position of medicine today and conclusively proves that thinking along exclusively materialistic lines results in acts of the same stamp. Such minds naturally look with suspicion upon what they can but faintly grasp and are copper riveted against everything but the very lowest concepts of matter. They rise with the greatest difficulty toward anything on a higher plane. The present scheme of school instruction tends to aggravate such tendencies and closes the mind to the higher concepts of life. This is one side of a dreadful picture.

Nature does not yield her secrets for the asking, nor does she reveal them in their fullness to the grovellers who are entranced by the mirages of disintegrating matter; the very things which lead to mental blindness and loss of idealism. An alloeopath is a natural opportunist, while the real homeopath is just as inevitably a vitalist, who recognises that the soul of things struggles upward and not down-ward, except when travelling toward extinction.

Homoeopathy in its essence portrays the unfoldment of power; power to see the springs of disease, power evolved and liberated from its latent state in crude matter, wherewith it becomes the powerful tool which stabilise disturbed vitality, the socalled human dynamis, that it may again emanate power in a normal manner.

You will say, how can we learn about all this. First by holding in abeyance all preconceived ideas and opinions, then by sitting at the feet of nature and observing how she proceeds and where she needs help; how she acts from within outward and from the thought to the deed; how she exteriorises everything, building up the whole picture for our observance in order that we may find its curative likeness. We can do this by diligent search, careful observation and great effort, whereby we will be able to see into the depths of sickness and by the same token visualise the genius of the needed healing agent.

PARKERSBURG, W· VA·