I have nothing original to offer you, but I have a great many quotations, some of them very pregnant. Most of my quotations are not from medical works. Let me begin with a quotation from Benjamin Disraeli: “Never apologize, never explain.” That may be a good maxim for politicians, but I have always had the deepest contempt for that advice.
Therefore I am going to begin by committing two cardinal sins. First I want to apologize to Dr. Moncrieff because I was very rude to her when she rang me up and asked me to fill a gap to-day. She said that something on the lines of my “Drug Portrait Gallery” would be very welcome, and I turned that down flat.
Now for the second cardinal sin! Let me explain. When I collected that Portrait Gallery of sulphur patients I put a good deal of work into it, but the point I wanted that paper to make was contained in one much too sententious phrase. I said, “The spirit cannot live by science alone.” Let me be sententious again to-day and say, “Mankind cannot subsist by art alone.”
A further explanation: in all the time I have been connected with this Faculty and the British Homoeopathic Society I have been vexed by two things chiefly. Discussions crop up, not fruitfully but very frequently, on the questions: “Is Homoeopathy an art or a science?” and that perpetual silly wrangle about low potencies versus high.
To-day I am going to be scientific, but to make amends for my rudeness I want you all to help me and present this discussion in another art form, in the art form of the theatre. Following on one item in the business part of to-days agenda, let us give it the character of an examination.
Dramatis personae: You yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, acting as candidates in this examination.
Costumes: Your own choice. We have no coupons, but candidates are not required to appear in white robes, nor to display their wounds.
Scenery: As you see it.
Candidates will mount this rostrum when summoned by our President (this makes him a call boy, but we shall ask him also to be a censor). At the rostrum candidates will be asked to answer three question all, any, or none giving the reasons for their answer, and if necessary drawing a diagram. The blackboard is the only stage property we are providing. We have no orchestra. Sound effects, if any, will be supplied by Hitler, Goring, and company, and, let us hope, will be limited to a minimum. The questions are:.
(1) In speaking about the action of internal medicines what distinction do you draw between power and potency?.
(2) What do you mean by the terms “low potency” and “high potency”?.
(3) On what indications do you select (a) a low potency and (b) a high potency?.
Now I retire to the wings and ring up the curtain.
The President said that Dr. Rorke had his own way of doing things, but he was rather expecting that he was going to help him out.
Dr. Rorke said that he was quite willing to proffer himself as the first “candidate.” He went on:.
As candidate, most of what I am going to say is again, to quote other peoples words. I shall begin by quoting a patient. He had had no training in medicine at all, but he was a science graduate of London University, a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, a member of the Institution of Mining Engineers, and all his life he had been engaged in scientific mining, prospecting, etc.
He had been so employed in Britain, in Russia, in Turkey, in Africa, north, south, east, and west, in Australia, and in South America. While he was working in West Africa he contracted a tropical ulcer. That was many years ago. It was treated at home here by many different kinds of treatment, and in the end the ulcer was healed. But it left, as is common, a big patch of dry chronic non-irritant eczema.
Every spring and autumn that eczema “blew up” into what looked like, and to him felt like, an erysipelas. He had much treatment for that too, but in the end he consulted a homoeopathic physician, and it cleared up very rapidly, not only the erysipelas but the eczema.
That is a man of scientific mind, and he wanted to know something about homoeopathic medicine, so he was lent a Life Hahnemann, and he read it carefully and with great interest. His chief comment after reading it was this: “It is very surprising to find that as long ago as the end of the eighteenth century Hahnemann realized how power could be developed by the extension of surface.” I said that was known a long time before Hahnemanns day.
Physicians all knew that a nugget of solid sulphur weighing a dram did not do much, but a dram of flowers of sulphur had a great deal of power. Hahnemann went a long way further than that. I told him how Hahnemann right from the beginning of his researches had insisted that these very extreme dilutions did contain something, and that that something held the characteristics of the original drug. He very rightly said, “You have only got to try it and see.” But a good many physicians, homoeopathic and other, could not be satisfied with that and wanted an explanation.
About 1890 the Swedish chemist Arrhenius tackled the question and evolved the theory of dissociation. He said that when a very small quantity, say, of common salt, was put into a very large bulk of distilled water, undoubtedly the whole bulk contained something of that common salt, and he evolved the theory that in solution the atoms of the molecule were dissociated and dispersed. But that did not account for it, he had to go further and say that these atoms were dissociated into ions. That was the beginning of the electronic theory of which so much is said still.
However, a homoeopathic physician I think a German , but he might have been an American consulted Arrhenius and asked him if his theory would explain that a high potency dose of, say, common salt carried in it all the characteristics of sodium chloride. Arrhenius thought it over and said quite definitely “No”. What then, is in a dose of say, 10m of sodium chloride? There is something, as we all know, and we all know that it is the same thing.
Now for another quotation, this time from the report of the very first experiments conducted in homoeopathic medicine. Hahnemann wrote this: “When cinchona bark is accurately indicated as a remedy, and when the patient is seriously and intensely affected by a disease that China is capable of removing, I find that one drop of a diluted tincture of cinchona bark, which contains a quadrillionth (1-1000000,000000,000000, 000000th) of a grain of china powder, is a strong (often a too strong) dose, which can accomplish and cure all that China is capable of doing in the case before us, generally without its being necessary to repeat the dose in order to effect a cure; a second dose being rarely, very rarely, required.” That is one quadrillionth. If you care to work that out you will find that, regarded as dilution, it is the 12th c. That was the very first remedy with which he experimented.
What did he mean by saying that it was sometimes too strong a dose? The use modern medical cant, where a sick person presents the symptoms calling for China very fully, that patient is “hypersensitive” to China, he has an “idiosyncrasy” to China, he is “allergic” to China. I have hunted through Hahnemanns work, which is the most thorough record of experimental work in Homoeopathy to this day.
It has been enriched by many others, but Hahnemanns Materia Medica Pura is the finest register, the fullest record of experimental medicine that was ever published. I have hunted through it all, and I cannot find a single instance where he used a lower potency than that. When he published that he did not talk about potency, but Aconite and Belladonna were probably experimented with quite soon in the series we have no record of the dates and in both cases he says that the most effective and the least disturbing dose of Aconite and Belladonna was what he calls the decillionth which is equivalent to the 30th c.
The most hardworking and conscientious experimenter in Homoeopathy never used the decimal attenuations, never wanted them, and although he found that this 30th c. was good enough for him, he very frequently said that further potentizing might be helpful. Dr. Tyler always maintained that there was record of his having used 200th c. She was never able to find the passage to satisfy me, but here is another quotation: “With a thousandth part of a drop of the decillionth so far as I remember this is from the introduction to Belladonna “it is seldom that a second dose is required.” and he gives directions for making this thousandth part of a drop preparation. The directions are to use small globules of such a size that 300 go to one dram.
It was when he was dealing with Belladonna that he first used the word “potency”. He describes the making of the decillionth dilution by thirty successive dilutions with succussion. He called that decillionth development of power a “potency” and he gave it the make x.
Somewhere else he talks about the decillionth development of drug power: “10x”. My next quotation is this. At one of the meetings of the British Homoeopathic Society a very eloquent and very enthusiastic speaker, after declaring that he was convinced that the future of Homoeopathy lay with the higher and even the highest potencies, went on to tell us that he was having potencies made by succussion by one of those road drills you all know too well, and he said, “I hope that these potencies will prove to have devastating effects.”
