EDITORIAL


Hahnemann always tells us that mental symptoms, if marked and true and definite, are especially to be considered in prescribing. These are pretty constant in chronic disease, but most marked, where changed by acute disease. Changed mentality, owing to disease, is the most important Pointer we can get to a drug or drugs. As when . . . The self-reliant man loses his never, and exhibits strange weaknesses and distresses.


No two people are exactly alike, physically or mentally. One may do better or less well than the other, but they will not do absolutely equally well in any office, employment, or emergency. At the best, it is bound to be a matter of “next best”.

So with remedies. The remedy that matches the case is the only one that will do unbelievable, phenomenal work. The next best may be helpful, may prove palliative: the patient will improve in some particulars, i.e. at the points where drug and patient coincided. It is only where sickness and drug-sickness coincide that spectacular results can be obtained, or even expected. . . And are we not all, in much of our work, apt to be content with something less than the best ?- the best being, too often, with difficulty obtainable.

And have we not excuse ? Alas, yes ? The handy, enticing, plausible chemist, with his delightful, considered preparations, on which he dogmatizes so learnedly: with his charming cosmetics, and dentifrices; his laxatives and purgative; his bath-salts; his analgesics and hypnotics, re-appearing always under different jaw-cracking names, any or all of these many so change the individual disease-picture, as to make its recognition extremely difficult, if not, at times, impossible.

People love “taking things”, smelling things, inhaling things. Many people seem to feed on aspirin-as if it were as harmless as bread and butter. In one all of the big, manufacturing and advertising chemists shops, with all their enticements so artistically displayed, one realized that the present day “apothecary” is as great a menace, and as bad, or a worse enemy to Homoeopathy than his predecessor of Hahnemanns day. The medicaments is that now obtain are less bulky, less gross, but infinitely more insidious than those of a hundred years ago. .

Hahnemann always tells us that mental symptoms, if marked and true and definite, are especially to be considered in prescribing. These are pretty constant in chronic disease, but most marked, where changed by acute disease. Changed mentality, owing to disease, is the most important Pointer we can get to a drug or drugs. As when . . . The self-reliant man loses his never, and exhibits strange weaknesses and distresses. The child that would roam about fearlessly in the dark, develops anxiety, and shadows her mother, and cries for a light when in bed. The tender-hearted women becomes indifferent and careless of others.

The light-hearted lose joy: the studious, application and ambition, and becomes lost and dull. Such mental perversions must agree in drug and patient. Drugs have determined in their provers, every form of mental weakness and violence; have evoked cowardice, indifference, incivility, cruelty, irritability, and passion, almost murderous: even form of despair and terror-every to terror of knives-of water-of poison-of men, of women, of children-of ghosts and devils: here matching, in the most amazing way, the miseries of mankind, mental as well as physical.

“Canst thou administer to a mind diseased ?-. Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow ? . . . “.

Homoeopathy answers Yes: because drugs can; i.e., when applied, each to its like abnormality.

So, in further effort to be helpful, and make homoeopathic prescribing easier and more successful, we are now republishing, in POINTER from, the mental drugs we have been from time to time bringing out, rounding them off with some drugs of a FEARS and ANXIETIES, with their DREAMS. They are delightfully interesting. Some of them will be frequent useful, some only very occasionally: but when, a particular drug is needed, no other drug will entirely take its place.

Much writing has gone to show the undeniable resemblances and “scientificness” of HOMOEOPATHY. In these pages it has been our aim to make its practice easier for the many, and to that end, rather than to disquisitions, we have devoted our energies, and these pages.

One was thinking again, only the other day, Oh ! if one had only had, in early days, a little of the help one is now able to extend to other-what a difference it would have made in the amount of work one had to put in, and its results !.

Margaret Lucy Tyler
Margaret Lucy Tyler, 1875 – 1943, was an English homeopath who was a student of James Tyler Kent. She qualified in medicine in 1903 at the age of 44 and served on the staff of the London Homeopathic Hospital until her death forty years later. Margaret Tyler became one of the most influential homeopaths of all time. Margaret Tyler wrote - How Not to Practice Homeopathy, Homeopathic Drug Pictures, Repertorising with Sir John Weir, Pointers to some Hayfever remedies, Pointers to Common Remedies.