A Magickal Herball Compleat.pdf - Magicka School

For several centuries, a whole range of causes, which I could not begin to enumerate, have led to
the downgrading of that divine science, clinical medicine, to the level of a wretched, money-grubbing
exercise in the whitewashing of symptoms and a demeaning traffic in prescriptions, in fact, God
forgive us, to a more mechanical trade in which Hippocrates is lost to sight amidst a rabble of
charlatans. [3]
The medicine of his age did not impress Samuel then, and by 1784 he had given
up his practice in favour of writing and translating. It was while working on
William Cullen's A Treatise on Materia Medica [4] that he came across an interesting
fact that was to change his life.
In this book it was claimed that a liquid made from the finely ground bark of
cinchona, a Peruvian tree, would make an effective cure for malaria [5]. The
curative properties of this bark were already well known in Europe and had been
used to treat both Louis XIV of France and Charles II of England [6].
Hahnemann took issue with the claim that its potency was caused by the fact that
it was an astringent -after all, other astringents had no effect on malaria [7]- and
decided to test this claim for himself. Over a period of days he took high doses of
cinchona and found that the bark produced symptoms that he claimed were
reminiscent of malaria:
I took for several days, as an experiment, four drachms of good china (cinchona) daily. My feet
and finger tips, etc., at first became cold; I became languid and drowsy; my pulse became hard
and quick; an intolerable anxiety and trembling (but without a rigor); trembling in all the limbs;
then pulsation in the head, redness in the cheeks, thirst; briefly, all those symptoms which to me
are typical of intermittent fever, such as the stupefaction of the senses, a kind of rigidity of all
joints, but above all the numb, disagreeable sensation which seems to have its seat in the
periosteum over all the bones of the body - all made their appearance. This paroxysm lasted for
two or three hours every time, and recurred when I repeated the dose and not otherwise. I
discontinued the medicine and I was once more in good health. [8]
Later he would create similar experiments with digitalis (foxglove) and belladonna
[9]. As a direct result of these he was able to begin to formulate the idea "that which
can produce a set of symptoms in a healthy individual, can treat a sick individual who is
manifesting a similar set of symptoms" [10] and write that:
Every effective drug provokes in the human body a sort of disease of its own, and the stronger the
drug the more characteristic, and the more marked and more violent the disease. We should
imitate nature, which sometimes cures a chronic affliction with another supervening disease, and
prescribe for the illness we wish to cure, especially if chronic, a drug with power to provoke
another, artificial disease, as similar as possible, and the former disease will be cured: fight like
with like. [11]
Hahnemann published his results in Hufeland's journal in 1796 under the title
Experiment on a New Principle to Find Out the Healing Power of Medicinal Substances and
importantly stated that “similia similibus curentur” or like could be cured by like.
In his Organon der Heilkunst or Medical Primer he stated that:
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