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§ 211
This holds good to such an extent, that the state of the disposition
of the patient often chiefly determines the selection of the homoeopathic
remedy, as being a decidedly characteristic symptom which can least
of all remain concealed from the accurately observing physician.
§ 212
The Creator of therapeutic agents has also had particular regard
to this main feature of all diseases, the altered state of the disposition
and mind, for there is no powerful medicinal substance in the world
which does not very notably alter the state of the disposition and
mind in the healthy individual who tests it, and every medicine
does so in a different manner.
§ 213
We shall, therefore, never be able to cure conformably to nature
- that is to say, homoeopathically - if we do not, in every case
of disease, even in such as are acute, observe, along with the other
symptoms, those relating to the changes in the state of the mind
and disposition, and if we do not select, for the patient’s relief,
from among the medicines a disease-force which, in addition to the
similarity of its other symptoms to those of the disease, is also
capable of producing a similar state of the disposition and mind.1
1 Thus aconite will seldom or never effect a rapid or
permanent cure in a patient of a quiet, calm, equable disposition;
and just as little will nux vomica be serviceable where the disposition
is mild and phlegmatic, pulsatilla where it is happy, gay and obstinate,
or ignatia where it is imperturbable and disposed neither to be
frightened nor vexed.
§ 214
The instructions I have to give relative to the cure of mental
diseases may be confined to a very few remarks, as they are to be
cured in the same way as all other diseases, namely, by a remedy
which shows, by the symptoms it causes in the body and mind of a
healthy individual, a power of producing a morbid state as similar
as possible to the case of disease before us, and in no other way
can they be cured.
§ 215
Almost all the so-called mental and emotional diseases are nothing
more than corporeal diseases in which the symptom of derangement
of the mind and disposition peculiar to each of them is increased,
while the corporeal symptoms decline (more or less rapidly), till
it a length attains the most striking one-sidedness, almost as though
it were a local disease in the invisible subtle organ of the mind
or disposition.
§ 216
The cases are not rare in which a so-called corporeal disease that
threatens to be fatal - a suppuration of the lungs, or the deterioration
of some other important viscus, or some other disease of acute character,
e.g., in childbed, etc. - becomes transformed into insanity, into
a kind of melancholia or into mania by a rapid increase of the psychical
symptoms that were previously present, whereupon the corporeal symptoms
lose all their danger; these latter improve almost to perfect health,
or rather they decrease to such a degree that their obscured presence
can only be detected by the observation of a physician gifted with
perseverance and penetration. In this manner they become transformed
into a one-sided and, as it were, a local disease, in which the
symptom of the mental disturbance, which was at first but slight,
increases so as to be the chief symptom, and in a great measure
occupies the place of the other (corporeal) symptoms, whose intensity
it subdues in a palliative manner, so that, in short, the affections
of the grosser corporeal organs become, as it were, transferred
and conducted to the almost spiritual, mental and emotional organs,
which the anatomist has never yet and never will reach with his
scalpel.
§ 217
In these diseases we must be very careful to make ourselves acquainted
with the whole of the phenomena, both those belonging to the corporeal
symptoms, and also, and indeed particularly, those appertaining
to the accurate apprehension of the precise character of the chief
symptom, of the peculiar and always predominating state of the mind
and disposition, in order to discover, for the purpose of extinguishing
the entire disease, among the remedies whose pure effects are known,
a homoeopathic medicinal pathogenetic force - that is to say, a
remedy which in its list of symptoms displays, with the greatest
possible similarity, not only the corporeal morbid symptoms present
in the case of disease before us, but also especially this mental
and emotional state.
§ 218
To this collection of symptoms belongs in the first place to accurate
description of all the phenomena of the previous so-called corporeal
disease, before it degenerated into a one-sided increase of the
physical symptom, and became a disease of the mind and disposition.
This may be learned from the report of the patient’s friends.
§ 219
A comparison of these previous symptoms of the corporeal disease
with the traces of them that still remain, though they have become
less perceptible (but which even now sometimes become prominent,
when a lucid interval and a transient alleviation of the psychical
disease occurs), will serve to prove them to be still present, though
obscured.
§ 220
By adding to this the state of the mind and disposition accurately
observed by the patient’s friends and by the physician himself,
we have thus constructed the complete picture of the disease, for
which in order to effect the homoeopathic cure of the disease, a
medicine capable of producing strikingly similar symptoms, and especially
an analogous disorder of the mind, must be sought for among the
antipsoric remedies, if the physical disease have already lasted
some time.
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