In recent years, surgery has been the subject of vigorous discussion in and outside our organizations. Probably the marvelous achievements of modern surgery, the legitimate offspring of the two World in one generation, have created the noteworthy interest in our ranks. But, if we look back and search for guidance in the life and works of our past masters, much of the could may disperse and things may be seen in their proper light.
To declare that surgery is beyond the scope of Homoeopathy is sheer ignorance of facts and distortion of the principles enunciated by Hahnemann. Hahnemann himself, besides being a great linguist, a chemist, an able physician and an untiring researcher, was an eminent surgeon in his day.
Those who are acquainted with Bradfords or Haehls Life and Letters of Hahnemann know that Hahnemann used to scrape and dry-dress d carious bones. Practically, he was the originator of dry- dressing, for which an impartial medical history will give him due credit. A whole section (Sec. 186) of the Organon has been devoted to the cause of surgery. The place of surgery has been carefully determined here my Master Hahnemann, and except for some such items that may be added with advantage to the list of surgical cases given by him, there is little scope for improvement, to say little of alterations.
In the said section, Hahnemann clearly indicated, more than a hundred years ago, instances where surgery should wisely intervene: bring together the lips of wounds, by mechanical pressure to still the flow of blood from open arteries, by the extraction of foreign bodies that have penetrated into the living parts, by making an opening into a cavity of the boy in order to remove an irritating substance, or to procure the evacuation of effusions or collection of fluids, by bringing into apposition the broken extremities of a fractured bone and retaining them in exact contact by an appropriate bandage, etc.
What is meant by this pretty small list is the traumatic, or in other words casualty, cases should be manipulated and met of effusions or collection of fluids” creates some confusion. Some may go so far as to recommend aspiration in cases of pleuritic effusions, emphysema, hydrothorax, hydrocephalus, hydrothorax hydrocephalus, hydrocephalus, hydrocele, ascites, etc.
But the context in which the whole is said leaves no loophole for any confusions, as it refers only to the “local maladies injuries accruing to the body from without” (sec. 186. Organon). So, the terms “effusions” and “collection of fluids” should indicate such conditions as are consequent upon local injuries, but which, instead of being removed by the natural processes of absorption and elimination, continue to be a source or maintaining cause of some physical, or mental symptoms. Besides, neither our literature nor our individual practices are so poor as to lack positive proofs of the curability of such cases of natural diseases, e.g. emphysema, empyaema, ascites, hydrothorax, hydrocephalus, hydrocele, etc., in our therapy.
Rightly speaking, section 186 is a continuation and elaboration of sec. 7, which reads: “Now, as in a disease, from which no manifest exciting or maintaining cause (cause occasionalis) has to be removed.” A suggestion is dropped here for the first time in the Organon that what is removable in some ailments is a local cause, an exciting or maintaining one, after the removal of which the ailment spontaneously terminates in health.
Hence, the relevant place f surgery and its utility as a therapy is recognized. In the long not following, Hahnemann writes” “It is not necessary to say that every intelligent physician would first remove this where it exists; the indisposition thereupon generally cases spontaneously,.” Now, he gives a pretty long list of cases where either dexterous manipulation or operative surgery is a sheet anchor:
He will remove from the room strong smelling flowers, which have a tendency to cause syncope and hysterical sufferings; extract from the cornea the foreign body that excites inflammation of the eye; loosen the over-tight bandage on a wounded limb that threatens to cause mortification, and apply a more suitable one; lay bare and put a ligature on the wounded artery that produces fainting; endeavour to promote the expulsion by vomiting of belladonna berries, etc., that may have been swallowed; extract foreign substances that may have got into the orifices of the body (the nose, gullet, ears, urethra, rectum, vagina); crush the vesical Calculus; open the imperforate onus of the newborn infant, etc.
The “etc.” is there, and Hahnemann leaves all such cases not mentioned here to the discretion of the “intelligent physician.” But, “intelligence” is a distinctly wide term and comprises strong common sense, keen insight, and suitable clinical experience.
So, by this method of intelligent approach to the problem, we may extend the etcetera and thus go on adding considerably to this list: to remove a matured lens cataract; to extract an illset and pointed tooth that pricks inside the cheek and causes ulcer; to remove the decapitation or craniotomy the giant head or heads of single or double monsters; to perforate the membrane in placenta praevia; to caesareanize when the passage in short or the foetal position is most unfavorable obstetrically; to resort to laparotomy when the pregnancy is tubal; to manipulate and aid the quick delivery of the torn placental; to close the lacerated, torn perineum by stitches, and so on: the central idea being to resort to surgery in cases which instead of representing diseased states are instances of obstetrical and other accidents.
We may further add to this list cases in which strong common sense coupled with clinical experience demands that, because of a gross pathology representing cause occasionalis, and a critical condition of the patient, surgery must intervene immediately or the patient dies in a short time, i.e., cases in which it is imperative to remove a matured appendix threatening to rupture or is already ruptured; to set right a strangulated hernia and intestinal obstruction ( not of the spasmodic type) threatening gangrene, to remove a too large biliary calculus entangled in a too narrow bileduct threatening to be ruptured; and so on.
Hahnemann has carefully drawn a fine line between surgery and medicine. Traumatic and other pathological cases (imperforate anus, effusions, etc.), along with the case that require the dexterous manipulation of a surgeon (e.g. a vesical calculus that has to be crushed, a tight bandage that has to be replaced, etc.), are beyond the scope of medicine.
But when in such injuries the whole living organism requires, as it always does, active dynamic aid to put in a position to accomplish the work of healing, e.g. when the violent fever resulting from extensive contusions, lacerated muscles, tendons, and blood-vessels, requires to be removed by medicine given internally, or when the external pain of scalded or burnt parts needs to be homoeopathically subdued, then the services of the dynamic physician and his helpful homoeopathy come into requisition, (sec. 186., Organon)
Besides, all the so-called surgical cases, that are so termed solely owing to a misconception of their true character, e.g., abscesses carbuncles, cellulitis, felons, erysipelas, gangrene, prostatitis, tumors, sepsis, tonsillitis, etc., are never surgical, properly speaking (except, of course, in cleansing method). They belong most surely to the province of the physician, since very little reflection will suffice to convince us that no external malady (not occasioned by some important injury from without) can arise, persist or even grow worse without the co- operation of the whole organism, which must consequently be in a diseased state….. No eruption on the lips, no whitlow can occur without previous and simultaneous internal ill health. (sec. 189, Organon. 6th Ed.).
Hence, the surgeon and the physician who are different persons in modern medicine are to live side by in perfectly co operative harmony with each other, without ever attempting to usurp one anothers position.
The aforesaid revolutionary radicalism in medical thought left in its train many new and changed concepts of disease and its sequelae. Time and again since 1827 Hahnemann demonstrated the folly of considering itch, syphilis and gonorrhoea as topical or surgical diseases. The sole basis of his immortal work, The Chronic Diseases, is the wholesome conception of those three diseases as internal and constitutional ones, needing internal and constitutional remedies alone.
Medical thought of the old school has at last seen the folly and falsehood of its own past method of treating those three ailments and, willy nilly, is embracing the doctrine of Master Hahnemann, changing its topical black-wash (Iodoform-Mercury) recipe to the hypodermic application of Arsenic-Bismuth-cum Penicillin. But, with regard to cancer, regular medicine is betraying the same senseless ignorance of facts and principles, as if showed till fifty years ago with regard to syphilis and gonorrhoea.
