This issue has a good many pages that do not make easy reading; I promise that the next few issues will be more easily digested.Dr Ghosh’s Rare Nosodes continues with an account of his experiences with potentised insulin. As you can read he found it to be a remedy with a huge range of uses, and not conspicuously associated with diabetes; indeed prescribing it for diabetes in a routine fashion has brought disappointing results compared with, say, Datisca.
In a future issue Homœopathica will reprint observations and provings that have been made using the remedies Ghosh has written about. People well-educated in homœopathy will have noticed, I hope, that though Ghosh calls his remedies nosodes, they are, in fact, sarcodes - since they are made from healthy tissue.
Starting on page 10 is an excerpt from a great work Bönninghausen composed in 1862. He made an original translation from the Greek of Hippocrates, then commented on each aphorism as a homœopath, passing on many valuable hints and observations.
The English translation from the German was made in the 19th century by an American known today only by his (or her) initials, S.W.S. I have a book reproducing the original German, which I am prepared to copy for anyone seriously interested in the work. The translation by S.W.S. may be found on the internet at http://julianwinston.com/archives/periodicals/vb_aphorisms.php
The hardest-to-read of the weighty works in this issue is the extract from Fincke’s translation of the 5th edition of Hahnemann’s Organon, or as Fincke calls it, The Organon of the Healing Art. It is important to remember that this book is more than a work on how to do homœopathy, but claims to be a guide to the rational practice of medicine - which Article 1 defines as making sick people well. This statement inspired me to say, whenever possible, that homœopathy is a branch of medicine.
I use the word article to identify each numbered section of the Organon; this is a translation close to the old German meaning of the word “paragraph”. It is a great mistake to call these articles aphorisms; an aphorism is a short, pithy statement (which quite obviously Hahnemann’s long, convoluted passages are not) such as written by Hippocrates - in fact the word aphorism had its origin with his work, known as The Aphorisms of Hippocrates.
Fincke’s translation brings out starkly the belief Hahenmann had that illnesses arise from a “mistuned” vital force. It is my strong conviction that today’s homœopathy is harmed by the view that an essential part of homœopathy is belief in the reality of the vital force as a super-sensible energy within the body - the ghost in the machine, as some would say. This, to me, is no more than Hahnemann’s attempt to provide an explanation for phenomena that can be explained today. It is absolutely unnecessary to preserve this idea as something every homœopath must believe, as some homœopathic teaching institutions would have it.
In the journal The Organon, subtitled “A quarterly Anglo-American Journal of Homœopathic Medicine and progressive collateral science”, Adolph von Lippe wrote in 1878, as commentary on the opening articles of Hahnemann’s Organon: “We find here three distinct propositions:-
- The inner process of life is not known to us; it was, and will ever remain, a hypothesis.
- The origin of diseases in the invisible interior of the human economy is not known to us; it was, and will ever remain, a hypothesis.
- The phenomena of diseases, or their proximate cause (prima causa morbi) is not known to us; it was, and will ever remain, a hypothesis.”
Is this true today? This is a question all homœopaths should consider carefully. In Hahnemann’s day the cause of disease in, say, 95% of cases could only be conjectured; today the odds are reversed, maybe as little as 5% of diseases are totally baffling in their origins. Should this not be a significant consideration when reading the Organon?
On pages 14 and 15 is found an addition to Clarke’s A Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica, usually called Clarke’s Dictionary, prepared by Clarke himself but not incorporated into revised editions of his work. It was printed in The Homœopathic World, January 1929. Clarke died on 24 November 1931.
I believe it to be worth photocopying and putting between the pages of your Dictionary.
It is a perennial lament of the editors of homœopathic journals that they get very few contributions of material - either as articles, brief accounts of cures, reports on seminars, or simply letters to the editor. Homœopathica is no exception to this situaion, despite our policy of paying for material which shows its author has expended time and thought on its production.
An unfortunate effect of the dearth of contributions is that the editor’s ideas get prominence, and some readers get the impression this is the “official” line and anything else will be rejected or jeered at. This is not so, any material offered for publication will be considered with an open mind.
Similarly, comments made in Homœopathica’s editorials are open to challenge and discussion; in fact, in the interests of balance, these criticisms are expecially welcome.
Bruce Barwell