There are two ways of getting ideas, one way is from objects; the other from the description of objects. This distinction is at least as old as Comenius, the great Middle Age reformer in things educational. Old as it is, and important as it is, it has been lost sight of entirely and re-discovered several times during the last three hundred years.
It involves the plain distinction that exists between a thing and the verbal description of a thing-a distinction that is very often confused in the minds of students and even in the minds of teachers. The same idea is involved in the difference between a science and an art. The very best verbal description of a thing may and usually does, convey a section of the thing itself.
For instance, what can be more minute and painstaking in verbal detail that the description of the tabernacle, the ark, the curtains, the fifty loops and fifty taches of brass and all the furnishing of the alter in the Herbrew scripture? Yet no two artists of the dozens who have tried to paint them from that description have agreed in their ideas concerning them. Yet each painting answers fully to the verbal description.
When the arch of Titus was discovered and the actual appearances of the arch, with its seven candlesticks was revealed, sculptured by men who had seen it- beheld, it was unlike any painting that had been made of it, and it too fulfilled the verbal description.
The same things may be illustrated in the study of Anatomy; in order to know an anatomical part, such a muscle or a bone, one should derive his ideas from the bone or muscles itself; he should see the muscle, observe its form and osseous attachments, perceive its action and note its relation to other parts.
He then knows that anatomical part; the ideas that he entertains concerning it, are true ones, derived from actual inspection and observation. This is a far different thing from the knowledge that is obtained from memorizing the verbal description of the part and it makes little difference how accurate and concise that description may be.
In the first case, he knows it; in the second case, he knows about it. By a similar error thousands of people in the last fifty years have thought they were studying a language, when as a matter of fact they were only studying the grammar or science of the language.
It is interesting, in connection with the subject of Homoeopathy, to see how much of this very thing there has been about it. The science of Homoeopathy has been much studied, but the art has been neglected, or rather it has been taken granted that if the science were well taught, the art of using or putting it into practice would follow easily, if not inevitably.
My personal experience and my observation of others proves that such is not the case. I had one hundred and thirty-one class mates when I granduated; we were taught the principles of Homoeopathy very slightly and indifferently, but much time and attention was given to the memorizing of the symptoms of the materia medica. With the aid of the so-called materia medica cards we endeavored to perform prodigious feats in memorizing the arbitrary and artificially arranged symptoms of drugs.
Almost every student in the class carried a pocketful of these cards wherever he went, and all his spare time, on street-cars, while waiting for trains, in the intervals lectures, in fact whenever he was not doing something else, was spent at this impossible take.
The practical, indispensable art of finding the remedy in a given complicated case-the crux of the whole matter-was left entirely untouched.
One hundred and thirty-one doctors were thus and then turned loose upon the public; we had studied Hamlet for two years Hamlet left out. We had not been taught Homoeopathy which is the art of curing sick people, we had been instructed as to the instruments and what was to be done with them but not how to use them. We had only been told a great deal about it.
We were like men who, having been given various kinds of cutting, boring and planting tools and a cord of wood, were pronounced to be carpenters or like men who having been instructed in the various shapes and names of chessmen, the nature and character of chess boards and the moves proper to each, were pronounced chess players and told to go forth and beat the experts.
The result in my own case and in all my classmates that I have been able to follow was that we practiced a ram-shackle, knock-kneed, erratic, accidental, hap-hazard, strabismic, astigmatic, myopic, ineffectual, despairing, lame, important, pigeon-toed, confused and unscientific Homoeopathy. Its inherent tendency was to deteriorate. It carried in its bosom the seeds of its own degradation and death.
There were thousands like us; men homoeopathic diplomas, on their wall, homoeopathic books in their libraries, and homoeopathic medicines in their cases, men who called themselves homoeopathic physicians, and were in the habit of boasting about the efficacy of Homoeopathy; men who perhaps lectured in homoeopathic colleges, and yet they only knew about Homoeopathy; they did not know how to practice the art of it, which is to find the remedy for a given sick person. They were near homoeopathy, above it, below it, before it, behind it, all around it, but never just at it.
There is abundant, even a superfluity of evidence in our journals, in our societies, in our colleges and in our results to show that the majority of practitioners depend upon a meager assortment of leading symptoms of the polychrests, and perhaps one or two striking symptoms of another dozen remedies and thus accounted with materia medica knowledge they go forth to practice. My class had an average of, perhaps, eighty-five in materia medica and quite a number of them reached the one hundred mark of perfection and blushingly received the congratulations of friends.
