After practicing medicine more than fifty years, I feel almost qualified to make public my impressions of the two schools.
My first thought is to examine the mental attitude of the opposing practitioners-the unconscious, or sub-conscious cerebrations that dominate the individual.
First the homoeopath is an optimist. It shows up daily and constantly in his face, his approach and presence in the sick room: in the aura or atmosphere which surrounds him. He is hopeful, he is filled with courage, a courage which is infectious, in fact he knows what he can do with the indicated remedy.
He has, or will get and study the comparative picture between symptoms presented, and those of the proven remedy. Thus he has a road map in his mind showing where the highway of health runs. He is able to read the signboards, and thus avoid many of the muddy and tortuous detours, to sidetrack the unsurmountable hills and dangerous bridges, the treacherous swamps and fatal quicksands, the deceitful fox-fires and lying short-cuts, which so often lead to cemetery hill.
The homoeopath has laws of cure by which, if he is familiar with them, he is armed for successful conflict. He goes to the bedside not cringing with doubt, but bravely and with confidence. He is grounded in principles which are in accord with God-given forces for good. He is equipped not with poisonous compounds as remedies, but with delicate pharmaceuticals, potentized drugs from which all save the curative elements have been eliminated. In this way are set free wonderful forces designed to assist the wavering vital spark to resume its restorative function.
We are all endowed at birth with something supposed to keep our machinery in more or less healthy action for a certain fixed period of time; something that will combat much faulty living, and many errors due to a vast wealth of ignorance; a vital force sufficient to neutralize many ills of inheritance.
Our wonderful blood currents are a composite of many generations of forbears. The Time Locks of our ancestors have ticked the ins and outs of many things both good and bad, some of which, indeed many of which, had they not been neutralized by new blood, the reactions of human chemistry, elements given out by hundreds of thousands of matings in which all the races on earth have participated, it would have been impossible for us to have had even our initial viability.
There is nothing in the whole scheme of creation so wonderfully, delicately, mysteriously constituted as the human being of today. “Fearfully and Wonderfully made” is none too strong a statement to even faultily express the wonders shown in mankind.
Can we weigh the soul-the spirit; can we analyze hate, love, cupidity and avarice, grief or fear? What is man after all but a composite of all these things, doomed to go about encased in an envelope of carnal flesh, which as soon as the spirit we call soul has fled, becomes naught but rottenness?.
And now I ask you to look upon homoeopathy with its pure, potentized soul of drugs from which all gross crudeness has been eliminated and see that with which you can surely combat disease.
Man is in reality a spirit. If that is admitted and if, as I firmly believe, a man is what he thinks he is, our province as healers is to prescribe is such manner as to change diseased thoughts to those of peace and comfort, for the brain is the fountain head after all-.
The brain, not the heart, or the stomach, or the liver, for they simply play second fiddles in the orchestra of human well being.
The control rests in that knob at the top of the spine where so many hang their hats over emptiness. No matter what we prescribe, the brain directs the results. If in our ignorance we paralyze the stomach, destroy the function of the liver, congest the kidneys and shock the entire nervous system with strange chemicals and lethal drugs, Nature can but throw up her hands in helpless protest and allow the unctuous undertaker to purchase a few more Liberty Bonds.
(The undertakers motto, unlike that of Patrick Henry, reads “GIVE ME DEATH and Ill take care of the Liberty”).
Did you ever stop and consider what incomparable remedies the studious homoeopath has with which to combat, disease? Granting that the nervous system is the citadel of trouble, think what siege guns we have in the Kalis, Aconite, Arsenicum, Belladonna and at least fifty other more or less prominent medicines well known to the doctor who keeps in touch with homoeopathic materia medica.
And now what of the other picture, that of the poor allopath, the pessimist, “the man without a country” so to speak? Cannot you visualize him? If he is an intelligent physician, no one knows better than he the paucity of his medical resources.
He can physic and sweat his patients, he can sink them into temporary and frequently permanent unconsciousness, and also with his little needle book he can serumize them into short cuts to Eternity.
He can talk learnedly, or at least plausibly to his anxious and grief-stricken patients about blood pressures and toxins, about all the wonderful microscopic he-bears, and she-bears, that hunt with sabre toothed tigers at the root of every tooth, that lurk behind every tonsil, that infest the adenoids, that fill the intestinal canal with uncountable millions of bugs so fierce that even their names must never be mentioned with less than fifteen syllables.
And of course the Grand Lodge for these little gyascuticusses is quite properly the appendix. The appendix has been their habitat ever since Adam exchanged a worthless rib for the only thing on the earth today worth having and working for. (“O woman in her hours of tease,” etc.) And what does all his knowledge of these things amount to after all? Nothing, except to block the way to life, liberty, health and happiness.
And now you have it up for comparison: One a school with a fixed and proven knowledge of a healing principle in Nature and of health restoring potencies. The other with a crippling, life- destroying set of blood-corrupting serums and poisonous drugs and no knowledge of the law of cure.
God bless and care for the soul of Samuel Hahnemann, and advance the doctor who is unafraid to study and practice according to his teachings. And all praise for “The Symptom Chaser”.
