HAHNEMANNS MATERIA MEDICA PURA.
THE Homoeopathic Publishing Company has just brought out a reprint of this wonderful book, the fundamental volume of the New Art of Healing. Hahnemann was a great genius. Born in poverty he made his way through school and university owing to his iron will-power, intelligence, industry and power of original thought. He became an excellent orthodox doctor, but discovered that the orthodox methods of healing were unsatisfactory.
He abandoned medicine in despair and became an overworked translator of medical and chemical books, making the best use of his vast knowledge of foreign languages. Being interested in medicine and chemistry, he translated many of the most important books into German for a miserable remuneration to keep alive his family of eight children. Then he started experimenting on his own body with medicines and discovered the new art of healing, called homoeopathy.
Orthodox medicine experiments on animals and then on patients, frequently with disastrous results, because animals react differently from men. Hahnemann, seeing the faultiness of this procedure, experimented on himself with complete unselfishness and at the risk of injuring himself. He tested medicine after medicine on himself believing that the full effect of drugs can only be ascertained by using them on healthy human beings in ever increasing doses until unmistakable symptoms appear showing the scope of these medicines and their possibilities.
After a time Hahnemann started treating his large family and patients with the infinitely small doses of homoeopathic drugs of which he had ascertained the effect on his own body. His success attracted pupils and admires who were induced to submit themselves to similar experiments. Thus the foundation of the new Materia Medica was laid and the results of decades of pioneer research were embodied in 1830 in that great classic The Materia Medica Pura.
The Homoeopathic Publishing Company has done a great service to homoeopathy and to medicine in general by bringing out a magnificent reprint of this wonderful work had become very scarce and was almost unobtainable. Every enthusiastic homoeopath, professional or lay, will wish to obtain a copy of this book. It has been issued in two bulky volumes which together run to 1,417 pages. The two volumes are printed in the clearest type on excellent ivory coloured stout paper, are stoutly bound, and are a pleasure to read and to handle.
It should not be thought that Hahnemanns magnum opus, published over a century ago, is only of historical interest and is out of date for practical purposes. Orthodox medicine changes every few years its methods and its views. The treatments of yesterday arouse the derision of the modern doctor, and in a few years orthodox doctors will look with equal derision at the methods taught and practised at this moment.
Homoeopathy is not built on the shifting sands of theory and fashion but on the bed rock of experience. The medicines used by homoeopaths all over the world for exactly the same purpose and they will continue to be used until the end of time. Homoeopathy is not dependent upon “the latest and most scientific” remedies which are often the most unreliable and the most dangerous.
The great work is introduced by a number of chapters, most of which are curiously enough printed in the second volume. In the second volume we find chapters which ought really to be printed in the first volume, such as a note to reviewers, an examination of the sources of the common Materia Medica, a chapter “How can small doses possess great power”, etc. The bulk of the book is occupied by chapters on the most important homoeopathic remedies which are arranged in their alphabetical order. It begins with Aconitum, Ambra grisea, Angustura, and it ends with Thuja, Veratrum and Verbascum.
Under the heading of each remedy we find full details about the action of the medicines discussed. Hahnemann was a genius, a man of wonderful originality, and he was far ahead of his time. For centuries medical men had disdained the use of gold because it was considered to be “insoluble” and “inert”. Quite recently orthodox substances, such as gold, can be made soluble and easily absorbable by the human body if made colloidal. Colloidal chemistry was discovered only yesterday, yet Hahnemann practised colloidal chemistry more than a century ago.
He made gold and other insoluble substances soluble and colloidal by his method of trituration and dilution which has the advantage of the greatest simplicity. The most insoluble substances such as gold, sand, etc., can be made soluble and colloidal by everyone who follows Hahnemanns method and who possesses a mortar, a pestle and a bottle, the whole outfit needed.
Recently injection of colloidal gold has become the fashion and the rage. It will disappear like every medical fashion before long because the orthodox method of using medicines for this or that “disease” is faulty. Besides orthodox medicine uses medicinal substances in such large quantities that they are bound to do harm in many cases. Hahnemann told his contemporaries in 1830 how to use gold for medical purposes, and it took the orthodox profession a century to adopt his teaching. He wrote under the heading Aurum in the Materia Medica:.
Just as superstition, impure observations, and credulous assumptions have been the source of innumerable falsely ascribed remedial virtues of medicines in the Materia Medica; in like manner physicians by their failure to resort to the test of experiment and by their futile theorizing, have quite as unreasonably denied the possession of any medicinal power whatever to many substances that are very powerful, and consequently of great curative virtue; and by so doing they have deprived us of these remedies.
In this place I will only speak of gold, and not of this metal altered by the ordinary chemical processes, consequently not of it dissolved by the action of acids nor precipitated from its solution (fulminating gold), both of which have been declared to be, if not useless, then absolutely noxious, apparently because they cannot be taken without dangerous consequences when given in what is called a justa dosis, or, in other words, in excessive quantity.
No ! I speak of pure gold not altered by chemical manipulations.
Modern physicians have pronounced this to be quite inactive; they have at length expunged it out of all their Materia Medicas, and thereby deprived us of all its mighty curative virtues.
“It is incapable of solution in our gastric juices, hence it must be quite powerless and useless.” This was their theoretical conclusion, and in the medical art, as is well known, such theoretical dicta have always availed more than convincing proof. Because they did not have question experience, the only possible guide in the medical art which is founded on experience alone; because it was easier to make mere assertions, therefore they usually preferred bold dicta, theoretical empty assumptions and arbitrary maxims to solid truth. . . .
At first I allowed myself to be deterred by these deniers from hoping for medicinal properties in pure gold; but as I could not persuade myself to consider any metal whatsoever as destitute of curative powers, I employed it at first in solution. Hence the few symptoms from the solution of gold recorded below.
I then gave, in cases where the symptoms guided me to the homoeopathic employment, the quintillionth or sextillionth of a grain of gold in solution for a dose, and observed curative effects somewhat similar to those I afterwards experienced from pure gold. . . .
But because, as a rule, I do not like, when I can avoid it, to give the metals dissolved in acids (when I cannot avoid doing so, I prefer their solutions in vegetable acids), and least of all in mineral acids, as that detracts from their noble simplicity, for they must assuredly undergo some alteration in their properties when acted on by these acids– as we must perceive on a comparison of the curative effects of corrosive sublimate with those of the black oxide of mercury–I was delighted to find a number of Arabian physicians unanimously testifying to the medicinal powers of gold in a finely pulverized form, particularly in some serious morbid conditions, in some of which the solution of gold had already been of great use to me. This circumstance inspired me with great confidence in the assertions of the Arabians. . . .
I have cured quickly and permanently of melancholia resembling that produced by gold many persons who had serious thoughts of committing suicide, by small doses, which for the whole treatment contained altogether from the 3/100th to 9/100th of a grain of gold; and in like manner I have cured several other severe affections, resembling the symptoms caused by gold. I do not doubt that much higher attenuations of the powder and much smaller doses of gold would amply suffice for the same purpose.
Gold had ever since been used with outstanding success by homoeopaths in countless cases of depression, melancholia and tendency towards suicide, and, of course, for many other troubles as well.
James Ellis Barker wrote a very large number of books, both under the name James Ellis Barker and under his real German name Otto Julius Eltzbacher, The Truth about Homœopathy; Rough Notes on Remedies with William Murray; Chronic Constipation; The Story of My Eyes; Miracles Of Healing and How They are Done; Good Health and Happiness; New Lives for Old: How to Cure the Incurable; My Testament of Healing; Cancer, the Surgeon and the Researcher; Cancer, how it is Caused, how it Can be Prevented with a foreward by William Arbuthnot Lane; Cancer and the Black Man etc.