THE New Year finds Homoeopathy definitely on the up-grade. First and foremost there is a considerable addition to the number of qualified homoeopathic doctors. The lists of the British Homoeopathic Society have been lengthening during the year; especially in the last two or three months have applications for membership increased.
Further, the admission of homoeopathic physicians to other learned Medical Societies no longer evokes even a shrug of the shoulders; the inclusion of standard homoeopathic volumes in the great medical libraries, from that of the Royal College of Physicians onward, evokes no wonderment; and invitations to prominent homoeopaths to lecture to medical students are of repeated occurrence.
Next in the homoeopathic service come the Homoeopathic Chemists – a scientific body to whose skill and devotion the refined potencies of the homoeopathic armamentum are due. To these we owe the semi-miraculous results that are daily produced in homoeopathic treatment – creative results that to non-homoeopaths seem incredible.
The post-war slump in the numerous establishments of Homoeopathic Chemistry has not yet been recovered. Some of the shortage is doubtless due to the newer type of prescribing which has tended to eliminate much of the “nursery medicine chest” work, formerly so common, and so useful. As this recovers its former ride of place in the treatment of infants and children, so will the call for Homoeopathic chemistry increase and multiply, and the “box of explosives” and the “book of words” – so happily phrased by Dr. Skinner – will once again come into their own.
The Homoeopathic Hospitals constitute a not unimportant part of the “Voluntary Hospital System” of which this country has reason to be proud. Most of the larger towns in England, and chiefly those south of the Trent – London, Liverpool, Bristol – have Homoeopathic Hospitals of dimension, and other towns less populous, such as Tunbridge Wells, Hastings, Eastbourne, Bourne- mouth, Bromley, have their Homoeopathic Hospitals dating back from fifty to seventy-five years. Scotland has such a Hospital and Hospital Service in Glasgow, whose utility and vitality are notable.
Since the war, some Homoeopathic Hospitals, such as those at Southport, Leicester, Birmingham, Plymouth, have been eclipsed, but let us hope for their re-wakening.
Duties of a less imposing kind, attended to by a number of dispensaries, confined to what are termed “ambulatory cases”, have proved a heaven-sent blessing in minor maladies – and some major. Actually, every such institution is of service in national Homoeopathic practice, and functionates as does the out- patients department of a Hospital where this is non-existent. In provincial areas these dispensaries have done much to bring about close connection between Homoeopathic patient and Homoeopathic physician.
Homoeopathic magazine literature, such as “HEAL THYSELF” and Homoeopathy, historical and informative literature, such as Mrs. Hobhouses Life of Hahnemann, guide books to the treatment of disease, such as Ruddocks Vade Mecum, help the seeker after Homoeopathic knowledge.
Homoeopathy is a living human interest as well as a science, a vital cause as well as a method of treatment. It closely affects the communal as well as the individual well-being, and it is this wider Homoeopathy that has been the inspiring spirit of such notables as Drs. Compton Burnett, J.H. Clarke, R.T. Cooper, Drysdale, Dudgeon and Byres-Moir, men who placed their generation under unending obligations.
Contemporaneous with these have been such eminent laymen as the Lords Ebury, and Cawdor and Donoughmore; Sir Henry Tyler, Sir George Truscott and Sir Robert Perks; R.H. Caird, Major Vaughan Morgan, Edward Clifton Brown and others equally creative. These were great men in those days. Let history repeat itself.
