The duties of physicians in relation to popular medical delusions : an address delivered before the Covington and Newport Medical Society, June 14, 1859 / by Charles S. Tripler.

  • Tripler, Chas. S. (Charles Stuart), 1806-1866.
Date:
1859
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The duties of physicians in relation to popular medical delusions : an address delivered before the Covington and Newport Medical Society, June 14, 1859 / by Charles S. Tripler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    case, to guide us in the choice of a remedy. ... As diseases are nothing more than changes in the general state of the human economy which declare themselves by symptoms, etc. . . . Plain experience, an infallible oracle in the art of healing, proves to us, in every careful experiment, that the particular medicine whose action upon persons in health produces the greatest number of symptoms resembling those of the disease which it is intended to cure, possesses also in reality (when administered in convenient doses) the power of suppressing, in a radical, prompt and perma- nent manuer, the totality of the morbid symptoms—that is to say, the whole of the existing disease ; it also teaches us that all med- icines cure the diseases whose symptoms approach nearest to their own, and that among the latter none admit of exception. . . . This phenomenon is founded in the natural law of Homoeopathy, a law unknown until the present time, although it has on all oc- casions formed the basis of every visible cure—that is to say, a dynamic disease in the living economy of man, is extinguished in a permanent manner by another that is more powerful, when the latter [without being of the same species) bears a strong resem- blance to it in its mode of manifesting itself. . . . The physi- cian has nothing more to do than destroy the totality of the symptoms, in order to effect a simultaneous removal of the inter- nal change—that is, to annihilate the disease itself. Divested of their subtlety and unintelligible display of wis- dom, these remarks express the following propositions, viz.: 1st. That diseases are known only by their symptoms—a self- evident truth ; 2d. That the totality of the symptoms constitutes the disease ; and this totality is all the physician has to cure ; 3d. That the only method of curing a disease is to induce another more powerful, not of the same species, but bearing a strong resem- blance to it in its mode of manifesting itself—that is, in its symp- toms. This is tersely expressed by the words similia similibus curanter. Now, I wish these propositions to be borne in mind, while we recur to our first quotations relative to the means by which Hahnemann divined his great truth. It is there stated that while in health he took bark, and it produced all the total- ity of the symptoms of intermittent fever—that he was struck with the identity, not similarity, of the two diseases. In the pro- gress of his experiments he found that remedies produced the same symptoms they are said to cure in the sick. If, then, he had all