HOMOEOPATHY AND THE PUBLIC HEALTH


The public health is the counterpart of the commonwealth. That a system of medicine which has sustained itself independently and grown in a compound ratio for a hundred years; which has its own literature and its schools, its clinics, societies, and hospitals, as well as its pupils and practitioners in every civilized community, is closely related to the health of the people is self-evident. To doubt this proposition would be like questioning whether Protestantism is related to Christianity, charity to benevolence, or the sunlight to the evolution of plants and flowers.


CONGRESS.

The public health is the counterpart of the commonwealth. That a system of medicine which has sustained itself independently and grown in a compound ratio for a hundred years; which has its own literature and its schools, its clinics, societies, and hospitals, as well as its pupils and practitioners in every civilized community, is closely related to the health of the people is self-evident. To doubt this proposition would be like questioning whether Protestantism is related to Christianity, charity to benevolence, or the sunlight to the evolution of plants and flowers. If its recognition were commensurate with its deserts, and if its representatives had not been the victims of a class-bias that so far as possible has excluded them from the army and the navy, the hospital and the institutions of this and of other lands, I should have a more grater theme and a better prospect of pleasing you in what I have to on this occasion.

Toleration has been defined as “the dogma of the weaker party.” If the reformer did not insist upon it, he would never have a hearing. When he comes to be tolerated within certain galling limits, he has already gained a foothold. From that time forward his success will depend upon the merit of his cause, his own and his comrades’ tact and persistency, and the conduct of its followers when its claims have received the popular endorsement.

I shall speak upon this latter point, for the “incomputable perils of success,” as Lowell styles them, are not the least among those which beset our school of medicine at the present time. Our cause was a good one; there was used for a change in the harsh and harmful methods of treatment that were in vogue in Hahnemann’s time. He was a man of science, as science went in those days, but, what was infinitely more important, he was imbued with the spirit of scientific doubt. He saw the defects of the ancient system, and set to work to remedy them. To gain a hearing he must be aggressive. He characterized certain therapeutical abuses in such a way that some of his phrases fit and stick like the nicknames that schoolboys give each other.

He had the faith and firmness which are moral weapons of an invincible sort. With a just and benevolent cause, he felt it no crime to be a dissenter from the established church in medicine. He knew that “while the animosities are mortal the humanities are eternal,” and so, though a terrible opposition, he went forward in his chosen work. The merit of his cause is conceded and confirmed by thousands of physicians and by millions of patients in our day. If “the sweetest happiness that we ever know, the very wine of human life, comes from sacrifice,-from the effort to make others happy,” what shall we not say for our hero who, greater than Columbus, opened up a new world in therapeutics.

“Necessity,” says Herder, “is the clock-weight that keeps all the wheels in motion.” The early followers of Hahnemann were forced to be on the alert to defend their cause, and at the same time to develop its resources. Its great qualities and small defects had to be looked after as one would take care of a legacy. It was a legacy, but not for an individual, or even for a family. It was a bequest for the benefit of humanity at large, and for the public health and welfare. The abuse poured upon the early Homoeopathists, like that which showered upon the early ovariotomists, is fast becoming ancient history. It is so much easier to accuse than to excuse them that the fashion is to revive the old bitterness whenever their methods or their writings are mentioned.

We forget that, being placed on a frontier posts of medical knowledge, they must hold their ground, and, if need be, fight in its defence. Beset by furious and unscrupulous critics, they were forced to change their ink with gunpowder. In those days the controversial papers and the professional intercourse of parties on both sides abounded in brotherly throat-cutting. Almost every doctor, regular, irregular, and defective, insisted upon giving his neighbor “a piece of his mind,” not with standing the fact that nobody had any peace of mind. Old doctors and medical students especially looked at Homoeopathy through the prism of their own prejudices. The medical journals became, like Punch, “a refuge for destitute wit,” and almost every Old-School medical society took up the contemptible business of running a partisan search-light for the detection and discipline of heretics.

Under these circumstances, when their belief had to be kept up as a police force, it is no marvel that our brethren did and said some very unwise things. Like the lower brain centres that never sleep, they had always to be vigilant, even at the expense of being sometimes vindictive. And some one has said that everybody has a little speak of fight underneath his peace and good-will which he keeps for revolutions and great emergencies. In such a medical upheaval one must either fight for the supremacy of a faction or for a principle, and in this case it was not merely a matter of medical labels and liveries, but of deciding so important a question as the best means of relieving human suffering and of curing disease.

How well our predecessors did their work; what kind of fibre was in their faith, and how they defended it; how, as time went on, they were emancipated from controversy and left to cultivate their views and their peculiar resources; how the medical world, or the best part of it, has learned to treat them with a decent spirit of prejudice, are matters of common knowledge in our day.

As their antagonisms faded their resources were economized; as the radical and uncompromising spirit was torn down, the clinical quality took its place in their affections, their teachings, and their practice. After the enthusiasm with which each discovery is received come the difficulties of applications, doubts, and reactions. It is a fact philosophy which thinks more of methods than of results, as it is a spurious Christianity which puts a creed concerning the insoluble matters of faith above the mutual duties and interests of mankind.

I think it was Goethe who said that “whatever emancipates our minds without giving us the mastery of ourselves is destructive.” We are no longer engaged in an uncertain contest. Faith and works, and fighting and waiting, have secured us a hearing, an opportunity, position, and popularity. But there is the rub. Considering what the outcome of all sorts of antagonisms, moral and medical, has been; that those who gain power and influence almost always become intolerant and thereby cripple their cause and compromise their position; and considering that doctors are subject to the same infirmities as statesmen, soldiers, and politicians; that, in this instance especially, the interests at stake are of vital consequence to the welfare of mankind, why should we not cultivate a larger measure of professional toleration? Surely we are unfit for such an endowment if we fail to appreciate the responsibility that it brings, or to make the best possible use of it toward keeping our place in the line of the liberal professions.

In the far-away Northwest they sometimes have hail-storms that thresh the grain in the field just before the harvest. There are some over-zealous disciples who act like a Dakota “twister” when it comes a few days too soon for the unlucky farmer.

They have a passion for a label that amounts to an infirmity. LIke a vulgar relation in good society, they invariably say the right thing at the wrong time; fancy that they are still living in a debatable and not in a progressive age; are always looking for the routes and resorts of an enemy; and cannot understand why the asperities of medicine should yield to the mellowing influence of time more rapidly than those of theology have done. You remember the old saying that “an honest man who lacks judgment is more dangerous that a thief who has discretion;” for so long as you watch the discreet wretch he cannot injure you, while there is no escape from the fool friend.

In the glorious emergency in which we are placed, there are duties that draw like the invisible chains of gravitation. These duties puritan to our fitness and qualification as physicians, and to our tolerate of those whose professional views and opinions differ from often. The greatly improved facilities for obtaining a sound and through medical education are filling the first of these requirements in a most satisfactory manner; while the dissipation of the fog and mist of distance and Pharisaism among the fraternity is doing the rest.

It is true that in certain quarters we still are the victims of class bias and of class-legislation. For there are those who continue to regard the representatives of the New School of practice with muffed animosity against which our only shelter is the satisfaction of being in the right. But what concerns us and those that believe with us, is of such exquisite importance and interest that whatever the provocation we cannot afford to quarrel with them any longer merely for the theoretical defense of our faith.

R Ludlam