CLARKE JH, Homoeopathy Explained - Classical Homeopathy Online

and fragmentary theories of disease current in his own and in our day. Hahnemann’s
pathology goes hand in hand with treatment, and is thus checked at every step by the test
of practice.
The infinitesimal dose
In an early chapter I mentioned that the infinitesimal dose has become in the popular
mind the most characteristic feature of homoeopathy, though the world “Homeopathy”
itself in no way includes “infinitesimal” in its meaning. Its use arose in this way. When
Hahnemann began to employ drugs with the precision his method required, he found that
the ordinary doses acted much too powerfully, and caused great aggravation of symptoms
before the cure took place. He then by degrees reduced his doses until he found he could
get the curative effect without aggravating. In some instances he found that the
attenuating process actually developed and increased the curative powers of the medicine.
The method he adopted was to dilute tinctures in the proportion of 1 to 99 of rectified
spirit, and to grind insoluble substances with sugar of milk in the same proportions. For
the higher attenuations the process was repeated, the same proportions being observed at
each step.
The importance of the invention of this method of preparing drugs is very great, scarcely
second, in my opinion, to that of the discovery of the law of similars itself. It is highly
probable that but for the question of the infinitesimal dose, homoeopathy would have
been recognised by the profession at large long ago. But homoeopathy (though it may be
practised by those who never use anything but material doses) never can be dissociated
from a knowledge of the power of the infinitesimal, and never could have been developed
to anything like the perfection and power in which Hahnemann left it, apart from the use
of infinitesimals. Hence the popular association of the two ideas of homeopathy and
infinitesimals is fundamentally true, though it may be etymologically faulty.
It will be seen that in Hahnemann’s centesimal scale, each step of the process divides the
original quantity by 100, and hence each higher number represents a higher degree of
attenuation. But the attenuation is so graduated that, no matter to what high figure it is
carried, something of the original substances must remain, though it may be far beyond
the power of chemistry to detect its presence.
Homoeopaths have also used a decimal scale of attenuation. This makes each remove a
divisor of ten. This is noted by the letter “x”, 1x being 1/10th, 2x being 1/100th, 3x being
1/1000th, and so on. Graduated attenuation is the essence of the method, and the result is
development of power.
The researches of Faraday, Tyndall, Helmholtz, Crookes, and, later, of the Curies and
other investigators of the phenomena of radio-activity, have made it easier to conceive of
infinitesimal quantities and their powers, and the infinitesimals of homoeopathy should
not therefore prove such stumbling-blocks to its friends and foes as they have done
heretofore. When we find Helmotz saying that at the period when our planetary system
consisted of a sphere of nebulous matter reaching to the path of the outermost planet, it
would require “several millions of cubic miles of such matter to weigh a single grain”;
and when Faraday tells us that “each atom extends, so to say, throughout the whole of the
solar system”, it is plain that the everyday conceptions of matter and its possibilities will
have to be revolutionised. There is nothing more worthy of investigations by masters of
physical science than the facts connected with the action of homoeopathic infinitesimals.
The human body is a much more sensitive reagent than anything known to natural