CLARKE JH, Homoeopathy Explained - Classical Homeopathy Online

was the system for me. And with all due modesty be it spoken, homoeopathy has been
doing this kind of work for me ever since – for a period, that is, of some thirty years.
Now I will leave personal matters and go on to my subject proper.
Homoeopathy, allopathy and enantiopathy : three ways of utilizing drug action.
Why the allopathic section of the profession should be so wrathful with Hahnemann is
not a little surprising. For not only did Hahnemann discover homoeopathy, he discovered
allopathy as well. Allopathy existed before his time, just as homoeopathy did in a way,
but it was unconscious of its own existence. The profession had been resisting allopathy
all its life – as M. Jourdain had been talking prose – without knowing it. It was
Hahnemann who gave it its name; and if he is the father of homeopathy he is at least the
godfather of allopathy as well, and on that account deserves to have his bust in the
medical schools of both sections.
Hahnemann pointed out there were three principal ways of using drugs – the
homoeopathic, the allopathic, and the antipathic or enantiopathic. The homoeopathic is
the like-to-like method, in which a medicine is given to a sick person because it is
capable of producing a similar state when given to a healthy one – similia similibus. The
allopathic (or heteropathic) method is that in which the drug given, being “without any
pathological relation to what is naturally diseased in the body, attacks the part most
exempt from the disease.” The enantiopathic is the opposite of the homeopathic, and is
treatment by contraries. This treatment is palliative merely. When a large dos of opium is
given to overcome sleeplessness; or when an astringent is given to arrest diarrhoea, or a
purgative is given to remove constipation – these are examples of antipathic treatment.
But many diseases, such as inflammations, for example, have no “opposites” except
health, and these cannot be treated by this method, and must be treated, if at all, in one of
the other two ways.
When an emetic is given to relieve a cold on the chest, an action is produced different in
place and kind from the condition treated, and this is allopathic. Again, when a patient
treats himself for headache by taking an aperient, he practises allopathy; and again, when
a medical man puts a blister behind a patient’s ear to cure inflammation of his eye, the
treatment is allopathic. When on the other hand, in a case of headache we give a drug like
Belladonna or Glonoin (nitro-glycerine), both of which produce a variety of headaches of
great intensity when taken by the healthy, then we are practising homoeopathy.
It is true that the majority of the medical profession scorn the idea of there being any rule
to guide them in practice, and for this reason, I suppose, on the lucus a non lucendo
principle, insist on being called nothing else but “regular”. If they did not scorn logic as
well as rule, these practitioners would call themselves medical anarchists.
The principle of cure by medicines revealed by hahnemann.
The late Sir Andrew Clark was one of those who boldly proclaimed the reign of medical
anarchy. In a lecture published shortly after his death, Sir Andrew said, in reference to a
disease about which he was lecturing, “There are no fixed principles for the treatment of
the disease”; and he immediately added, “Medicine is the most unprincipled of Sciences.”
A statement of this kind, though true enough of the medicine he knew on Hahnemann
and his work that it calls for strenuous repudiation. Less than a hundred years ago it
might have been said truly enough; but ever since the consciousness of a want of
principle in medicine was impressed with crushing force upon the mind of Hahnemann,
and impelled him to the gigantic labours by which he brought order out of chaos, the