INTRODUCTION TO GROUP REMEDIES

- TESTE A, GROUP REMEDIES,
 - The Homoeopathic Materia Medica differs from the Materia Medica of the Old School, particularly in this, that is susceptible of being constituted as a science, which is, in some respects, independent of the other branches of the healing art ; by which is to be understood, that the Homoeopathic Materia Medica contains, within itself, its primary facts or fundamental principles, its laws of development and practical application, in one word, the reason of its own existence.
 - But, inasmuch as every science necessarily implies the idea of multiple and correlative definitions, or propositions which are methodically developed out of, and therefore depending upon, each other, it is impossible that a science should exist without a system.*
 - Hence, the Homoeopathic Materia Medica cannot become a science, in the true acceptation of this term, except by first being systematised ; otherwise, it would simply be an assemblage of incoherent facts which would exclusively appeal to the memory, and being increased in number from day to day, would necessarily be forgotten after a while, at least in a great measure, and would thus remain a dead letter in the archives of our science.
 - Indeed, at all times physicians have felt the necessity of systematically arranging the elementary facts of therapeutics, and hence it is, that the systematic arrangement of the Materia Medica has always been an object of the efforts of the most eminent practitioners.
 - They, as well as we, understood by systemisation, or systematical arrangement of the Materia Medica, the logical classification of drugs. But previous to the reform, which was introduced by Hahnemann, every classification of this kind was radically impracticable. The principal obstacles to the practical application of these classifications were the following :
 - 1. A vague and even erroneous notion of the drug in general.
 - 2. Ignorance of the law governing the true relation between the drug and the disease ; and, for the same reason,
 - 3. Ignorance of the law which governs the relations of drugs to each other ; and lastly,
 - 4. Blind, absolute and final submission of therapeutics to the abstract speculations of general pathology.
 - This last point alone would have been sufficient to ruin at once, and from its very foundation, every attempt to achieve a systematic arrangement of the Materia Medica. Indeed, how was it possible to conceive a permanent order in the science of therapeutics, when every hypothesis which gave rise to a new system, became for the pathologist a new source of indication ?
 - The complete absence of a fixed point of comparison, which might have served as a basis for a somewhat satisfactory classification of drugs, is clearly manifest in all the works on Material Medica, which have been published from the time of Dioscorides until now. In one treatise, the various properties ; in another, with reference to their physiological properties, although almost entirely unknown ; or even, to their therapeutic properties, concerning which, erroneous notions, only, generally prevailed. At last, as if in despair, their classification as drugs, is entirely discarded, and their medicinal history is given empirically, without any other order being assigned to them, than the kingdom, class, family, species, or, in one word, the category to which they belong in natural history.
 - Let us observe, however, that, howsoever negative, in a therapeutic point of view, at least, this last mode of classification may have been, it was nevertheless, for the very reason that it was such a perfectly negative system, the least deficient that had been followed so far. For the very reason, however, that is was a tacit protestation against the various pathological systems, no school could adopt it without forswearing its principles.
 - This is the reason why, since Murray's * Apparatus medicaminum, which all modern innovators reject as a shapeless compendium of empirical prescriptions, the spirit of classification has again prevailed in the Materia Medica. Indeed, it was impossible that Rasori and Broussais, those modern hippocratists, (although Broussais, especially, by referring every species of disease to one and the same circumstance, an irritation, rejected both pathology and therapeutics,) should not have their respective systems of Materia Medica, as the Galenists, Paracelsus, Stahl, Brown, etc., had had theirs in regular succession.
 - God be praised ! we have every reason to believe that the Materia Medica has been forever freed from these dangerous wanderings in the regions of speculation.
 - A precise and lucid perception of the character of a drug, obtained by observations on the healthy organism, and serving as a guide in the appreciation and observation of the phenomena of disease.
 - Evident and incontestable proofs of the curative virtues of the drug in a given case of disease.
 - Hence the determination of a fixed, unchangeable relation between the phenomena of the disease and the action of the drug.
 - This it is that we owe to the immortal founder of homoeopathy ; these are the great truths which a change of systems will never overthrow, and which will prove permanent acquisitions to the healing art.
 - And yet, in spite of these lucid, positive and eminently suggestive facts, there still exist homoeopathic physicians, who regard the systemization of our Materia Medica as something impossible. I go farther ; I believe that Hahnemann himself would have rejected all ideas of systematic arrangement of our Materia Medica, as something conflicting with the fundamental axioms of homoeopathy. But such a rejection would simply have been the extreme consequence of his own absolute principles, with which it must be confessed, he find himself, every now and then, in direct antagonism. Let me endeavour to explain this. Hahnemann's doctrine, rests almost entirely upon the following four propositions :-
 - Diseases are dynamic alterations of healthy life-principle.
 - Drugs are likewise dynamic modifiers of the healthy life-principle, and, by reason of the principle subsequently expressed, dynamic modifiers of disease.
 - Likes cure likes, or similia similibus curantur.
 - Every disease is necessarily and rigorously individual.
 - Let us examine these four propositions as briefly as possible.

 - A. Hahnemann, who was a declared spiritualist in philosophy, was a vitalist in physiology, and hence in medicine. That is to say, instead of holding with Descartes and Stahl, to the doctrine of a human dualism, he distinguishes in man, three substantial principles, namely : matter, the soul proper, and another substance, immaterial like the soul, a sort of intermediate principle between the soul and body, to which he refers all diseases, and all our vital functions.
 - The general idea of this hypothetical foree, is, however, not any newer in medicine than it is in philosophy. Hippocrates, and all the vitalists, except Stahl, and his exclusive followers, admit something similar in their doctrines. ``In health,'' says Hahnemann, ``the vital force which dynamically animates the material body, exercises an unlimited power. It preserves every part of the organism in an admirable vital harmony, as regards sensation and action, so that the spirits which resides in us, and which is endowed with reason, is able to freely employ these living and healthy instruments, for the purpose of accomplishing the high end of our existence.''*
 - The vital force, therefore, whose physiological mission is as lucidly as possible expressed in this paragraph, represents very nearly the sentient soul of Buffon and of the spiritualistic opponents of desecrates.*
 - ``In disease,'' adds Hahnemann, ``this spiritual force, which is active in itself, and universally present in the body, is the only one which, at first, perceives the dynamic influence of the agent hostile to life. Having been disturbed by this perception, this force becomes capable of communicating to the organism the disagreeable sensations which it experiences, and of driving it to those unusual actions which we call disease, etc.''* And further on. ``It is only the disturbed vital force that produces diseases, etc. etc."......
 - Whence it follows that every disease which is inaccessible to the mechanical processes of surgery is not, as the allopathists define it, something distinct from the living organism, etc.*
 - Is this theory correct, or is it a specious sophism ? God alone knows. To me it seems, at least, certain, that there exists no doctrine which is a plausible, and which can be as satisfactorily brought to bear upon an explanation of the pathological facts as well as of the most abstract combinations of medical philosophy. Hahnemann, who starts from this irrefutable principle, to which we shall have occasion to revert more than once, that a dynamic force can only be modified by another dynamic force, and vice versa, quotes for the corroboration of his theory, and as a proof of the dynamic character of our diseases ; those which are so often seen resulting from purely moral emotions, a great joy, a chagrin, a fear, etc., all of which are evidently immaterial causes of disease. But in order to show in the most conclusive manner, if not the initial, at least the indispensable part which the vital force acts in all our diseases, is it not sufficient to allude to the complete inertia of all morbid agents in their action upon the dead body, that is to say, upon the body after the vital principle has left it ?
 - It should be mentioned that Hahnemann does not define disease as some independently existing being or state ; and in this he is right, for an absolute definition of disease could only be a sophism or an error.
 - Hahnemann's doctrine is, indeed, a condemnation of all such definitions proposed either before or after him by the system-makers. These theorists deduce their general idea of disease almost invariably from some contingent truth which is falsely taken for the absolute truth. To consider spasm or atony, an excessive  or deficient excitability, hyposthenia or hypersthenia, the irritability or the contractility of the muscular fibre as so many absolute principles of disease, is, in my opinion, as far from the truth, as to define color in this abstract manner : color is the red ; color is the blue ; color is the yellow ; color is the violet, etc. Homoeopathic physicians certainly accept spasm, atony, the various degrees of excitability, hyposthenia or hypersthenia, the irritability and contractility of the muscular fibre, as physiological and pathological facts, but they believe that Hoffmann, Brown, Rasori and Broussais, have each taken some particular and purely contingent manifestation of the vital force for a fundamental principle and the elementary basis of their respective systems. And, in this respect, they maintain, and justly too, that all those systems, which seem more or less specious, if judged with reference to each other and the consistent facts upon which they are primarily based, are nevertheless false in their totality, absurd before the tribunal of the searching reason, and disastrous in the treatment of disease.
 - But, if Hahnemann, in order to avoid an useless bandying of theories, does not stop at defining the nature of disease, he gives us of diseases the correct and happy definition which we have cited as one of the corner-stones of his doctrine. Yes, his simple formula : diseases are dynamic and virtual alterations of health, contained within itself the programme of an immense revolution in the domain of medical philosophy.
 - We have seen what Hahnemann understands by the dynamism of diseases ; we have now to agree about an understanding of the term ``virtuality'' or inherent force.
 - By the virtuality of disease we have evidently to understand the special and totally distinct character of the disturbance which constitutes the malady. Since we have to admit that the symptoms, which are the only perceptible manifestations of diseases, are necessarily subordinate to their inmost nature, that is to say, their virtuality, it follows from this, that every disease necessarily manifests itself to the observer as a particular assemblage of symptoms. But is it not exceedingly probable that every disease, by reason of its inherent force or virtuality, must, in its manifestations or materializations, if we may so express ourselves, affect certain organs or systems in preference to others ? At any rate, it cannot be denied that the observation of pathological facts, and more particularly of epidemic diseases, seems every day to confirm this hypothesis. Albeit a disease no matter howsoever local it may appear, confessedly affects the whole organism, because the vital principle is an indivisible whole, yet I cannot help thinking that a disease, without losing any thing of its dynamic nature, or of its universal presence in the organism, manifests a more or less marked tendency super-induced by its inherent force, to assume a distinct form in one part of the animal economy rather than in another.
 - I trust that no one will do me the injustice to confound this theory with that of the organists ; for the dynamic nature of diseases is certainly not impaired in the least, by attributing to them an elective sphere, not of activity, but of manifestation. We shall soon discover that the same theory is applicable to the effects of drugs, or to what we shall hereafter designate as drug disease. Unless we accept the doctrine of a distributing force, which is inherent in the diseases, as well as the drugs, I confess that the former would seem to me nothing but impalpable myths, and the doctrine of drugs a pure chimera.
 - Most, or, at least, a great many of the substances which we regard as drugs, are susceptible or affecting the animal economy in three different ways, namely :-
 - 1. Mechanically.
 - 2. Chemically.
 - 3. Dynamically.
 - The mechanical action  of a drug, whether applied to the surface of the body, or introduced into the intestinal canal, or any other natural passage, is determined by the same conditions that govern the action of any other inert substance placed in a similar situation, namely : volume, density, weight, shape, or in one word, its physical properties. Drugs can only exercise a mechanical action, when employed in massive doses ; this is so evident, that it seems useless to dwell at length upon this point.
 - The chemical action of drugs consists in the chemical reaction, which they exercise on the material elements of the organism, with which they are brought in contact. Does it not follow from this definition, that the chemical action of drugs is no less than their mechanical action, subordinate to their ponderable quantity ? Wherein, indeed, consists the chemical action of a drug, if not in the atomic displacements and transformations, in other words, in the combinations which take place between the molecules of the material drug, and those of the living tissues, or of those tissues which the chemical agent had succeeded, by its presence, in depriving of their vitality, and decomposing them ? This shows that the molecular affinity operates in this case without the aid of the vital force, or, rather, against it. But who is not acquainted with the existence of the well-established law, that every chemical combination between the atoms of bodies, rests upon definite and invariable numerical relations, so that each quantity of a given re-agent, as regards volume and weight, can only saturate a determinate quantity of the substance with which it is capable of forming a new compound ? Hence it follows, that, in order to effect perceptible chemical modifications in the organism, a drug has to be employed in a corresponding quantity.
 - Nevertheless, it is not always easy to distinguish the chemical action of drugs from their dynamic action, of which we shall speak presently, inasmuch as the massive doses which are indispensable to the production of chemical results, are not always an obstacle to the manifestation of dynamic effects.*
 - It is in the dynamic action of drugs that their inherent force exclusively consists. This action bears only upon the vital force, and manifests itself exclusively in the living organism.
 - The important and fundamental distinction of the action of drugs on the organism, into mechanical, chemical, and dynamic, is not new in medicine. Strange, it is precisely the materialists, (Rasori, for instance) who have endeavored to establish it. Admitting, however, this distinction, these philosophers have, on the one hand, failed in profiting by it, owing to their inability, from ignorance, to separate the dynamic properties of drugs from their chemical and physical effects ; and, on the other hand, what ideas they had of the dynamic action of drugs, were limited, false and confused. The followers of Rasori, for instance, who affect to prescribe only dynamic remedies, employ, nevertheless, mercury, acids, stibium, etc., in enormous doses, and more than sufficient to give rise, in the organism, to chemical reactions, and even to purely mechanical disorders, the simultaneous effects of which, disturb, alter, and disguise, most frequently, the dynamic phenomena. It is, moreover, known how the inherent medicinal action of drugs is understood by the School of Rasori, It is denied, or nearly so ; that is to say, although allowing to the modifying agents, which it calls dynamic, a special action on such and such tissues or systems, it limits this action to two opposite directions, and classes all drugs under two general heads, as hyposthenisants or hypersthenisants. The fundamental conception of Rasori, would be incompatible with any other mode of viewing the action of drugs.
 - It is then exclusively to the founder of homoeopathy, that belongs the honor, if not of having discovered the dynamic drugs, but, at least, of having taught us the means of distinguishing their morbific force from their mechanical and dynamic properties.
 - B. Hahnemann saw from the first, that there was but one way of attaining this end, the extreme reduction of the doses. He instituted experiments in conformity with this idea, and it may be said, that his success went far beyond his hopes. It is more than probable, indeed, that he was only gradually led to the employment of infinitesimal doses, and that he had not even suspected at first, that the millionth, trillionth, or even decillionth portion of a grain of some substance which was often found to be inert in massive doses, became endowed, when thus reduced quantitatively, with the extraordinary power of which he then found it possessed. Carried away by this discovery, he was led to think that the inherent power or principle of the drug might perhaps be separated from the material envelope ; a hypothesis which, in his judgment, changed all remedial agents to purely dynamic forces.
 - This hypothesis agreed perfectly with his opinions concerning the nature of diseases, and the known causes of several of them. ``The causes of disease cannot possibly be material, since the least foreign substance introduced into the bloodvessels, however mild it may appear to us, is suddenly repulsed by the vital power, as a poison ; or, where this does not take place, death itself ensures. Even when the smallest foreign particle chances to insinuate itself into any of the sensitive parts, the principle of life, which is spread throughout our interior, does not rest until it has procured the expulsion of this body, by pain, fever, suppuration, or gangrene.''*  This is, indeed, in the doctrine of Hippocrates, the general theory of disease, which, according to this great observer, is nothing else than a reaction of the organism against a material foreign principle. Hahnemann says, moreover, ``What nosologist has ever seen one of those morbid principles, of which he speaks with so much confidence, and upon which he presumes to found a plan of medical treatment ? Who has ever been able to exhibit to the view, the principle of gout, or the virus of scrofula ?'' And further on, ``Even when a material substance applied to the skin, or introduced into a wound, has propagated disease by infection, who can prove (what has so often been affirmed in our works on pathogeny,) that the slightest particle of this material substance penetrates into our fluids or becomes absorbed ?'' .... ``How much of this material principle-what quantity in weight, would be requisite, for the fluids to imbibe, in order to produce, in the first instance, syphilis, which will continue during the whole term of life, ect. ?'' Final conclusion of Hahnemann : virus, miasms in one word, most of the causes of our disease, are immaterial, that is to say, purely dynamic agents, like the diseases themselves, and therefore, capable of being perfectly assimilated to the moral causes whence the diseases so frequently result. *Evidently, Hahnemann here goes too far.
 - Now can we admit, with him, that a foreign substance, even the mildest, cannot penetrate into the blood-vessels, without being immediately expelled by suppuration or gangrene at the risk of life, when we see madder (which is a foreign principle, not very hurtful, it is true, still not assimilable,) penetrate so far into the tissues of animals which had been fed on this root, that its presence can even be discovered in the bones to which it imparts a red color ? But this is trifling. Who does not know that, in many cases of poisoning with arsenic, the poison has been discovered by Marsh's test, not only in the intestinal canal, the liver, spleen, bladder, & c., but also in the blood, the muscular tissue ? In all such cases, the poison had passed through all the ramifications of the vascular apparatus without occasioning either suppuration or gangrene, or even immediate death. I have seen a gilder who had left his shop for upwards of six months, and who had, of course, ceased to be exposed to the vapors of mercury,  but whose body was still impregnated with this poison to such an extent that every time he took a hot vapour bath, the mercurial emanations which this bath occasioned, literally whitened a gold ring which this patient carried on his finger, A perceptible quantity of mercury must, therefore, have been absorbed, and must have remained, for six months, at least, in the body of this unfortunate workman, without occasioning either gangrene, suppuration, or any other febrile phenomenon ; for the symptoms of my patient presented the following group : nocturnal bone-pains, alternate anorexia and canine hunger ; irregular periodical paroxysms of neuralgia in the left half of the cranium and face ; trembling of the limbs ; slight swelling at the left elbow ; general emaciation, (not very considerable) and lastly, every now and then, involuntary jactitation of the lower limbs, in different directions, and of a more or less peculiar and odd character. We are compelled to admit that, if this observation does not altogether invalidate the doctrine of a complete disengaging of the inherent toxical forces from their material agents, it shows, at least, beyond a doubt, that these latter are absorbed. Facts similar to those which we have quoted, abound in the annals of medicine, as is well known.
 - Upon what grounds, in fact, is the immateriality of viruses, miasms, and of the causes of disease in general, based ? Upon facts which are more than doubtful, and which, so far from proving the conclusions which are drawn from them, simply exhibit the imperfection of our senses, and of our artificial means of investigation. Who has seen exclaims Hahnemann, who has touched, weighed, the syphilitic virus, the marsh miasm, etc. ? Nobody, assuredly. But who sees, by a bright sky, the watery vapor, of which the atmosphere consists in a great measure ? Who suspected, before Lavoisier, that the air had weight ? Who suspected, previous to the decisive experiments of modern chemists, that particles of copper, iron, sulphur, phosphorus, etc., etc., although invisible, impalpable, imponderable, are constantly floating in the air we breathe ? In support of Hahnemann's dynamism, which is a sort of universal pneumatism, existing independently of the material element, the fact in often cited that a grain of musk may for ten years, without losing an atom of its weight, give out its penetrating and distressing emanations, causing dizziness, sick headaches, spasms and other unpleasant accidents in thousands of individuals ; whence the conclusion is derived that the odor of musk is a purely dynamic substance. Such a proof, however, to men who, like us, are used to prescribe day after day, as efficacious agents, the millionth, trillionth, decillionth, portion of grain, seems really puerile. Admitting that a grain of musk loses every day a decillionth, or, if you please, a thousand decillionth portion of its weight, that is to say, a thousand medium homoeopathic doses, must it not be evident to every one who has some idea of numbers, that the total loss which this grain of musk would undergo in the course of a thousand years, would still remain inappreciable by the most delicate of our instrument of weight ?
 - As regards homoeopathic attenuations, which, for want of a better term, we have agreed to call dynamisations, nor matter to what an extent they may be continued, even the highest must still contain some material portion of the original drug, unless we assume that matter ceases to be divisible beyond a certain point. I assert even that there exists an undeniable relation between the dynamic activity of a drug and its material quantity. If this were not so, we should have to admit, which we happily need not, that a poison which, like arsenious acid, for instance, is capable of causing death dynamically,* when given in small quantities of the crude substance, would be just as deleterious in the thousandth attenuation as it was before undergoing the process of dynamisation.*
 - But if the dynamic activity of drug depends, in a measure, upon the number of its material atoms, it depends still much more upon the degree of attenuation to which the atoms have been reduced. We do not yet know, and we may probably never know, the relation which exists between the progressive diminution of the dynamic power of a drug consequent upon the quantitative reduction of its volume, and the equally progressive augmentation of the same power occasioned by the atomic attenuation of the drug from dilution of dilution. What is certain is, that, if the effects of these two opposite causes do not reciprocally counter-balance each other, (if they did, a poison, as we said before, would be just as dangerous in dilution as in the mother0tincture, or in massive doses of the crude substance ) the diminution of the drug action by quantitative reduction, becomes the less perceptible, the more the mechanical operations by which the diminution is effected, are multiplied. there are even physicians, and I am one of them, who pretend to have observed, in certain patients and certain maladies, that the dynamic power of the highest attenuations manifests itself more promptly, and, therefore, more efficaciously, than that of the lower.
 - Be this as it may, I am fully convinced that the dynamic power of drugs (which I desire to be distinguished from the morbific force inherent in each drug respectively) is strictly subordinate to the spontaneously or artificially developed attenuation of their molecules. This is the reason why all naturally inert substances, or substances of a doubtful activity, such as marble, charcoal, lycopodium, etc,, are fixed, insoluble, tasteless and inodorous, whereas substances that we naturally medicinal, such as arsenic, phosphorus, ambra, moschus, most of the acids and poisonous plants, have, generally speaking, a taste and odor, and are more or less volatiel.* Whence I do not hesitate to infer, that it is simply by breaking the cohesion of insert substances, and by attenuating more and more their atoms, that the hahnemannihan dynamisation transforms these substances into therapeutic agents. Miasms, those subtle emanations, which Hahnemann represents as purely dynamic forces, are, probably, nothing else than the material effluvia of organic substances in a state of decay, dynamized by nature, and floating though the atmosphere which becomes their vehicle, together with the gases produced by the putrid fermentation that gives rise to the effluvia.
 - In may opinion, therefore, there is no radical difference between miasms and drugs, Both are germs, or in order to avoid a dubious metaphor which might be taken literally, causes of diseases, the legitimate effects of which can be compared amongst each other. In one word, I regard a dynamic drug, as a fixed miasm, or, if you choose, a virus, which a physician makes use of in case of need, in order to produce a malady which shall be capable of neutralizing another one, precisely as he would use for a similar end, the typhus, small-pox, cholera-miasm, if he could seize and handle it according to his own pleasure.
 - Nevertheless, Hahnemann protests against this assimilation of drug diseases to miasmatic diseases. But the difference which he establishes between these two classes, seems to me without any real foundation.
 - ``The physical and moral powers, which are called morbific agents, do not possess the faculty of changing the state of health unconditionally ; we do not fall sick beneath their influence, before the economy is sufficiently disposed and laid open to the attack of morbific causes, and will allow itself to be placed by them in a state where the sensations which they undergo, and the actions which they perform, are different from those which belong to it in the normal state. These powers, therefore, do not excite disease in all men, nor are they at all times the cause of it in the same individual .
 - ``But it is quite otherwise with the artificial morbific powers which we call medicines. Every real medicine will at all times, and under every circumstance, work upon every living individual, and excite in him the symptoms that are peculiar to it, (so as to be clearly manifest to the senses, when the dose is powerful enough,) to such a degree, that the whole of the system is always (unconditionally,) attacked, and, in a manner, infected by the medicinal disease, which, as I have before said, is not at all the case in natural diseases.
 - ``It is, therefore, fully proved by every experiment, and observation, that the state of health is far more susceptible of derangement for the effects of medicinal powers, than from the influence of morbific principles and contagious miasms ; or, what is the same thing, the ordinary morbific principles have only a conditional, and often very subordinate influence, whole the medicinal powers exercise one that is absolute, direct, and greatly superior to that of the former.''*
 - These remarks, as is easily seen, proceed rather from a preconceived idea, than from actual observation. Hahnemann, supposing that drugs effected their cures, by substituting for the natural maladies, artificial, which were at the same time more intense and less permanent than the former, found himself obliged to admit, in order to justify  his theory, that the medicinal forces possessed an activity far superior to that of the natural morbific agents. But, on the one hand, this pretended substitution of drug disease for a natural malady, does not bear a moment's examination, as everybody knows now-a-days, except the Allopaths, who, by a strange singularity of reasoning, having appropriated to themselves the only error which Hahnemann has probably committed.* And, on the other hand, experience has, long since, refuted the facts upon which the three paragraphs of the Organon which I have quoted, are based.
 - 1. If it be true, according to Hahnemann, that the morbific agents do not posses an absolute power of altering the healthy functions, and that they make us sick, only in so far as the organism is predisposed for the reception of  their disturbing influence ; it is likewise true, according to all careful observers, that, when some violent epidemic, like the cholera, for instance, manifests, itself, all those who by reason of some pre-existing, generally chronic, ``affection, or in consequence of extraordinary physiological or hygienic measures, do not possess a sort of immunity against the prevailing disease, are, more or less, at extremely various degrees, it is true, affected by the epidemic.
 - 2. It is likewise an established fact, at least, for every physician who has devoted himself with more or less systematic perseverance to the proving of drugs with infinitesimal doses, that these drugs do not affect all provers, either in the same manner, or with the same degree of intensity ; and that it frequently happens that persons are completely insensible to the action of the drug, apparently, at least.* Hence, we are obliged to conclude, that the influence of drugs, as well as that of any other morbific cause, is only perceived on condition that a sort of peculiar receptivity should pre-exist, or, in other words, that the organism should be endowed with a certain aptitude, to be impressed by the action of the drug.
 - It may, therefore, be doubted whether the human organism is, as Hahnemann believes, possessed of a greater degree of willingness to be disturbed by medicinal, than by natural morbific agents, such as contagious miasms.
 - Lastly, as regards the preponderance which Hahnemann attributes to the action of the drugs over that of the natural morbific causes, this portion of his doctrine of substitutions, is undoubtedly, that which bears less than any  other, the double criticisms of reason and experience. What ! because belladonna prevents scarlatina, shall we therefore infer that this drug acts with more certainty or energy, than the scarlatina virus ? ``In order that drugs should be able to preserve the organism from an epidemic malady, their power to modify the vital force, must be superior to that of the epidemic.''*
 - Not in the least. The drug and the contagious miasm are two principles which neutralize each other ; for, if belladonna prevents the effects  of the scarlatina-virus, the virus, in its turn, opposes the development of the symptoms inherent in the belladonna,* which would only manifest themselves in case the virus should not yet have bee absorbed. Does the vaccine, which is a preventive against small-pox, possess in a higher degree than the disease, the power of modifying the vital force ? Nobody believes this. A single objection is sufficient to reject this erroneous hypothesis ; if the vaccine pr4vents the development of small-pox does not, on the other hand, the small-pox miasm prevent the development of the vaccine virus, ?it is not then from the relative superiority of their dynamic power, that the natural or artificial morbific agents derive their efficacity against diseases similar to those which they themselves would produce, if allowed to act alone, without being irresistibly opposed in the development of their natural effects, by the presence of these very maladies.
 - We consider it, therefore, and established fact, that there is no essential difference between the dynamic drug and the contagious miasm, no essential difference between the drug disease and the natural malady. Accordingly, nature itself sometimes employs one disease in order to blot out a pre-existing analogous malady ; so that the former becomes, with reference to the latter, a real drug disease, in other words, one of those salutary infections, of which our drugs constitute the viruses. Hereafter, I shall have occasion, more than one, to return to this doctrine concerning the assimilation of drug diseases with natural maladies ; for this is one of the fundamental facts upon which my systematic arrangement is founded.
 - C. Similia similibus curantur.-``There have been physicians from time to time,'' says Hahnemann, in his Organon, p. 100, who have suspected that drugs cured diseases by virtue of the power with which they were endowed of producing analogous morbid symptoms. ``The term suspected does not express the exact truth. The law of similia has been clearly expressed : first, by Hippocrates, or, if you choose, by one of the authors of the Hippocratic collection ; secondly, by Paracelsus ; thirdly, by Stahl.* But, although the application of this law, which is the most general and the best proven in medicine, has bee, on several occasions, crowned with success in the hands of Old School practitioners, the law had, nevertheless, a very limited bearing, owing to the paucity of their observations concerning the physiological properties of drugs, on which account the law became fruitless in the immense majority of cases. Indeed, with the exception of certain specific virtues which were attributed rightly or wrongly to a small number of therapeutic substances, whose mode of action on the animal economy was totally unknown, all that was known of the properties of drugs was, that some caused vomiting, others a diarhoea, some acted on the urine, others caused sweat, etc. It was, moreover, known, it is true, that vomiting had been seen arrested by emetics, a diarhoea by purgatives, an excessive secretion of urine or sweat by diuretics or diaphoretics. But, after all, vomiting, diarrhoea, diuresis, or sweating, are symptoms which are common to a great many diseases, and could only, in very few cases, be looked upon as idiopathic maladies. The manufactures of system even, who, in their theories, endeavored to refer the numberless diseases to which man is subject, to one or two fundamental elements, were obliged to admit that these diseases, in spite of the pretended sameness of their natures, nevertheless, manifested themselves in forms that were as numerous as diversified, and whose similars were as unknown in therapeutics, as their contraries were unknown in pathology. The similia similibus, as well as the contraria contrariis, was frequently without any meaning to a practitioner who had occasion to apply it. It is by pursuing a steady course of experimentations for thirty years, that Hahnemann succeeded in organizing a complete Materia Medica, and fecondating a law, which others, as he himself admits, had undoubtedly divined before him, but which had remained until then, an empty and unmeaning formula.
 - To discover in the physiological and dynamic effects of drugs, representations of the diseases, or, in other words, series of symptoms which corresponded to the perceptible manifestations of the natural diseases, this was the thought which guided natural diseases, this was the thought which guided Hahnemann in his work. The conviction which had induced him to impose upon himself this immense task, reposed upon innumerable facts which, although due to dance, were not the less conclusive for all that. unfortunately, the method which he pursued, in collecting and arranging the results of his provings, was, in my opinion, essentially defective. This method evidently emanated from the paradoxical distinction, which, as I have shown above, he supposed existed between the drugs and the miasms, or the natural morbific agents. Hence it followed, that Hahnemann, unwilling to recognise every drug as the principle of some essential affection, in the same sense as the miasms of variola, whooping-cough, marsh, fevers, etc., constituted each the principle of some other essential affection, did not care, as he certainly should have, to give us a picture of his drug diseases in their unitary completeness. His provings are nothing more than mere lists of symptoms. But a mere list of symptoms, were it ever so complete or numerous, is not the image of a disease. We shall return to this important subject bye and bye.
 - Be this, however, as it may, it having been shown by Hahnemann, that the law of similitude was the basis of the specific action of drugs, which had remained unexplained until the, it necessarily happened that a portion of his disciples forsook the principle of an absolute individualization of diseases, which will be examined hereafter, and looked upon the proving of drugs simply as a means of realizing the old utopia of Sauvages, and of the nosologists of his School, namely, to place after the name of every malady, the name of its specific remedy. *
 - In conformity with this notion, the followers of the Homoeopathic specific system, not perceiving that all attempts at founding therapeutics upon the constantly varying data of pathology, led them back into the erroneous fancies of the past, and resulted in building upon sand, conceived the project of doing, by means of the physiological proving of drugs, for each malady, considered as a concrete and definite being, what, three centuries ago, chance, in their opinion, had done for syphilis, and what, since the, the same chance (in spite of many contradictory facts,)  had done for chlorosis and the marsh fevers. ``Let stomatitis, gastritis, enteritis, ascites, coryza, pulmonary catarrh, pneumonia, pleuritis, articular rheumatism, sciatica, etc., have each their specific remedy, as syphilis has its, and medicine will, hereafter, be the most positive of all sciences.'' We may as well admit that there is perhaps, not one among us, who, when first commencing to practise homeopathy, did not, for some weeks at least, hg this chimera, natural fruit of the prejudices which had been inculcated by our former teacher. Unhappily, when, at a later period, enlightened by meditation and a more though study of things, we again examined with a calm judgment, this doctrine which had seemed to us so simple, so correct and comprehensive, we soon discovered, that insurmountable obstacles opposed its realization.
 - When I mention the terms gastritis, enteritis, bronchitis, ascites, catarrh, rheumatism, etc., I feel very well that I use a deficient language, which is constantly rendered unintelligible by the almost unlimited multiplicity of acceptations belonging to each of these technicalities. It is useless to state in proof of the constant identity of this or that disease, to which I give the name which the school has sanctioned, that the pathologists of every age and period have given of every malady a similar description, it does not require a long experience to perceived that all pathologists may have been misled by the same illusion. At least, I have become satisfied by positive proofs, that a morbid condition, which is called alike, requires, in many cases, a different treatment.
 - And what intelligent homeopath, after having practised his art for two or three years, feels disposed to admit, for example, that there exists a specific remedy for rheumatism, for bronchial catarrh, for diarrhoea ? Do we not know from our Materia Medica, that almost all our drugs produce conditions which are so nearly alike, that if our pathologists had to give them a name, the same name would have to be chosen for all of them ? and has not every physician on the other hand, had many opportunities of convincing himself at the sick-bed, that each of their drugs cured only, at least, in a prompt and certain manner, a particular shade ; a purely individual symptoms of these pretended maladies ?
 - All this, however, is only the weak side of the specific doctrine ; for it has also a specious truth in its favour ; let us examine the doctrine in its favorable aspects, in order to do it full justice.