CLARKE JH, Homoeopathy Explained - Classical Homeopathy Online

the sheep) has produced alarming symptoms in many patients, and in the hands of
homeopaths has been used successfully in cases presenting similar symptoms.
Homoeopaths are free to use anything, - just as free as allopaths; only they have this
advantage : knowing the doublesidedness of drug action – that a drug can cure conditions
like those it can produce in the healthy – they have a much more intimate knowledge of
any drug that is brought forward than an allopath can have. The latter has to blunder on in
the dark, and learn from his mistakes can never teach him so much as they teach a
homoeopath.
But, really, there is no comparison between the system of homeopathy and the no-system
of allopathy. There is reason, light, and orderly progress in the one; there is nothing but
chaotic fragments in the other. Homoeopathy no more trammels its adherents than the
laws of Nature trammel the mechanician.
Homoeopathy is too harmless to be of any use
It is quite true that homoeopathy is of no use for poisoning vermin or for killing patients.
If patients must die, it prefers that they shall die a natural death. It is also true that the
homoeopathic preparations of deadly poisons may be used with perfect safety in
household practice. But it does not follow that because a preparation cannot kill,
therefore it cannot cure.
I may here mention incidentally another objection that has been raised : - “If
homoeopathy is true”, it is said, “a drug must cure in the same dose as that in which it has
caused the symptoms for which it is given.” But the objector in this case leaves out of
account the difference in the sensitiveness of the human organism under the different
conditions of health and disease. Homoeopathy simply demands that there shall be a
correspondence between the disease symptoms and the drug symptoms. The rest is a
matter of experience, and experience shows that in a normal healthy state the organism
requires a larger dose of a drug to disturb it than it does to restore it when similarly
disturbed by disease. The difference in the sensitiveness of an organ in health and disease
may be seen any time. Take an inflamed eye and compare that with a normal eye in its
reaction to light. A normal eye can bear a very strong light which to an inflamed eye
would cause exquisite pain.
This fact supplies the answer to the objection to homeopathic medicines, on the score of
their harmlessness. Remarking, by the way, that it would be well for the world it all drugs
were equally harmless, I may add that the sensitiveness of the diseased human organism
to the homoeopathically indicated drug is intensified beyond conception. It is impossible
to get the dose too small if attenuated in the graduated manner directed by Hahnemann.
And even in certain individuals when not diseased there is a peculiar sensitiveness to
certain drugs infinitely transcending the sensitiveness of Drosera to phosphate of
ammonia, which gave Darwin such a fright. Some persons cannot be in the attic of a
house whilst a few grains of Ipecacuanha are being powdered in the basement without
being powerfully affected thereby. In the Homeopathic World on July, 1885, I quoted the
report of a case from the British Medical Journal of February 7, of the same year, in
which a medical man tells how he nearly killed a patient by simply applying a linseed
poultice, though the patient protested that every time such a poultice had been applied she
had had an intense attack of asthma. The doctor pooh-poohed her statement, insisted on
the poultices being applied to her leg (which was ulcerated), with the result that three
hours later he was “summoned to see her, as her sister thought she was dying”. And he