Who was Sir William Osler (”the father of modern conventional medicine”), referred to in the last editorial?
Sir William Osler (1849-1919) was a Canadian-born British physician and prominent teacher, a revered professor of medicine whose greatest contribution to medicine was to insist that students learned from seeing and talking to patients. He once said he hoped his tombstone would say, “He brought medical students into the wards for bedside teaching.”
On a number of occasions he declared that “no one individual had done more good to the medical profession than Samuel Hahnemann.” Another quote of his was, “Fortunately for medicine, some hundred and fifty years ago Hahnemann appeared.” Also, “I fear that we may return to the state of polypharmacy, the emancipation from which has been the ‘sole’ gift of Hahnemann and his followers.”
While he had praise for Hahnemann he was never comfortable with the theory of homœopathy, but often counselled his students to be tolerant. In the 1880s he enjoined new medical graduates to show equanimity and to “restrain your indignation when you find your pet parson has triturates of the 1000th potentiality in his waistcoat pocket. Don’t shout at the parson, but the theory is fair game.”
Later he was quoted as saying, “Our homeopathic brothers pursue very seriously the scientific study of disease.” Also, “The original grievous mistake was ours - to quarrel with our brothers over infinitesimals was a most unwise and stupid thing to do.”
Throughout, his admiration for principles expressed in Hahnemann’s Organon was clearly evident in his teachings.
• The individual, not the disease, is the entity. There are no diseases . . . only sick people.
• It is much more important to know what sort of patient has a disease than what sort of disease a patient has.
• The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.
• Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike.
• No two individuals react and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.
• The physician must listen attentively, patiently, and with sympathetic interest to all the patient has to say and must observe how he expresses himself, not only in words but in his overall behaviour in speech and gesture.
• There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.
• Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell.If the physician fails to bear these precepts in mind, he may well miss valuable and sometimes invaluable clues to the selection of the appropriate medicine which can mean the difference between ultimate success or failure of treatment.
As homœopaths we still follow these tenets in the successful practice of homœopathic medicine. Can we say the same of the allopathic doctors?
Monty Firmin