In teaching the young idea how to shoot, the question naturally arises, can anyone teach a subject intelligently, effectively and satisfactorily if he or she is not thoroughly conversant with that subject?.
As a prelude to this diatribe, let us first listen to a few lines from Pope which seem to cover both our subject and present status, then to a word of warning from Dr. Frederick Rand Rogers, of New York.
Pope said:
“Let such teach others who themselves excel,
And censure freely who have written well.
Be sure yourself and your own reach to know,
How far your genius, taste and learning go;
Launch not beyond your depths, but be discreet,
And mark that point where sense and dullness meet.
The lines, thou touched but faintly, are drawn right,
But as the slightest sketch, if justly traced,
Is by ill coloring but the more disgraced.
By doctors bill to play the doctors part,
Prescribe, apply, and call their masters fools.
Medicine resembles poetry, in each.
Are nameless graces which no methods teach,
And which a masters hand alone can reach.
Moderns, then, beware! or if you must offend.
Against the precept, neer transgress the End.
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring,
Survey the whole nor seek slight faults to find.
When Nature moves, and rapture warms the mind.
Most critics, fond of some subservient art,
Still make the whole depend upon a single part:
They talk of principles, but notions prize,
And all to one loved Folly sacrifice.
Doctors like painters, thus unskilled to trace.
The Naked Nature and the living grace,
With gold and jewels cover every part,
And hide the ornaments their want of art”.
Dr. Frederick Rand Rogers of New York, in addressing 5,000 Utah educators, is reported to have said: “Colleges worship marks, grades are a disgrace to scientific education; the highest grades, as a general rule, go to the student who is the best ape, to the one who can best imitate his teacher”.
We can take it from this, then, that a college education does not mean anything; that the college has fallen wide of both its mission and its opportunity, the opportunity to teach the student, not only how to think, but how to think for himself, in other words, the most important part of any beings education.
The editorial Pathological Prescribing, p. 660, the September issue of the Recorder, furnishes a beautiful theme for a sermon, and is full of rich food for much deep and mature thought, for it affects homoeopathy vitally, and shows how varied, and from how different angles a simple, straightforward principle may be viewed.
We neither worship nor idolize Hahnemann for Kent, we have not had personal contact with either one, and while they may be back numbers as compared to the “more enlightened” modern doctor living in this “enlightened” age who feel themselves far in advance of those two immortals, yet, we ask you, in spite of this, to hark back and read and reread their words of wisdom and weigh them thoroughly before we decide to palace them in the discard and replace them with pathological verbiage. “Hahnemann”, according to Dunham, “declared the pathology of his day to be unsafe as a basis of medical treatment, and proved that therapeutics could never be based on pathology, because pathology is a science of hypothesis respecting the nature and processes of morbid action, and must always be speculative and uncertain”. the pathological leopard has not changed his spots to date that nay one knows of. Kent said, “All that is knowledge of disease is expressed in symptoms”. If these two men are right, and no one has ever yet been able to prove them wrong, then pathological prescribing is entirely foreign to homoeopathy.
Hahnemann, wise beyond all other medical men, was apparently not wise enough to realize that his approval of vaccination, unconsciously, laid the plot that would eventually defeat the ultimate acceptance of homoeopathy. This fatal slip has been taken advantage of by allopaths and modern homoeopaths alike and used against homoeopathy in defense of the use of not only vaccine virus, sera, etc., but of every other irregular method of practice, pointing back to this error as Hahnemannian authority.
If Hahnemann was right about vaccination, he certainly was wrong about homoeopathy. If vaccination is right, so, then, is all other external and hypodermic therapy, and, by that decision, homoeopathy is absolutely wrong. This error led to much of the matter contained in Dr. Metzgers Presidential Address at Montreal.
Dr. Irvin Metzger said in the address, among other things, “IT is no longer sufficient to be able to recognize maladies and deal with them effectively, but we must be able to foresee and foretell them by anticipating their incidence”. Who made that”no longer sufficient” if not those incapable of coping with disease, the real reason for the existence of medical profession? “The physicians high and only mission is to restore the sick to health”. We shall soon, then, expect the fireman to appear, after the doctors have gotten so wise, who can foretell and forestall all fires before they happen, and thus a fire will be a disgrace. The policeman will next appear who can foretell and forestall all crime before it happens and crime will like wise become a disgrace. These are just as possible and logical as the other. Page the millennium! Perhaps Dr. Metzger can teach us how to lift the veil to enable us to glimpse the future. Had not “the cobbler better stick to his last”? What is going to happen no one knows, nor ever will. No epidemic has ever been prevented by medical means. Homoeopathy alone has ever been able to mitigate one. The medical “guardian of public health”, the allopathic health officer, is a myth and a fraud, a meddler and a pest. We seem to have forgotten that there is but one method of real disease prevention in man, and that is to destroy his dispositions; to so right his internal relations that they can readily adjust themselves to the external relations, which simply means cure his existing troubles and he will then be immune to all diseases. Then let us teach our students how to care for those things that have happened; that is all that medicine can take in honestly, and its sole reason for existence. Leave the quackery and faking to those who know no better. Had Hahnemann and all his followers stuck to their lasts and taught and practised strict homoeopathy and condoned nothing outside, things would have been far different with us today.
Next to Hahnemanns fatal mistake in approving vaccination, the next greatest blow to homoeopathy and one which looks as if it would bring about its ultimate burial alive, was the acknowledgment by homoeopathys adherents that it is a part of modern medicine.
When we stop o take an inventory of ourselves, as homoeopathic physicians, what right have we to condemn the allopath for his refusal to change his course and give up his allopathy for merely modified from of his own method? Pathological and morphological teaching and prescribing must surely make him think so, And, since he, himself, is a master in the art of pathological prescribing, and more expert than we at it, he has a right to stop and ask himself: Why change and follow someone who is merely stealing my own thunder, and what valid reason for the existence of that brand of so-called homoeopathy? Yes! Echo answers why? On the contrary, is not Hahnemannian homoeopathy the very system that we are leasing him to believe that we are going to teach and that he expects to learn, a separate and distinct principle, far distant from, and something entirely foreign to allopathy? Is this, then, not the rankest kin of deception?.
Is it possible to teach student an allopathized form of hybrid, so-called homoeopathy, or homoeopathy in allopathic language and have that student emerge a strict Hahnemannian homoeopath? If so, can you produce one as an example? If not, then, is homoeopathy not better off without such?.
Homoeopathy seeks the origin of disease, condones strict individualization only, knows how to proceed, knows beforehand, and in time, and is in strict accord with nature. On the other hand allopathy seeks the end product, condones only standardization and is directly opposed to nature and must, consequently, of necessity fail. How can we honestly attempt to teach those two opposites? If they could be successfully taught you would have eclipsed the greatest miracle ever performed. Because real Hahnemannian homoeopaths will not consent to this deception they are dubbed prejudiced.
Our determination to know is commendable in a way and has been much stressed. But if a remedy cures which has not been known to have produced a similar condition to that which it cured, would the knowledge that it had or did produce a similar condition make that cure any more complete or permanent?.
Would the knowledge have changed the ultimate result in any way? Was Hahnemanns case of sycosis cured with Chamomilla purely a myth? Or Boenninghausens case of tuberculosis cured with Pulsatilla a fraud? Or my own case of syphilis cured with Calcarea carb. purely a delusion? Have we a record of those drugs producing their respective conditions? Should such cases be compelled to remain without relief until such pathological conditions had been produced by them? If we are compelled to wait to believe anything until it is a ll scientifically demonstrable before we can accept it you can positively be assured you will die in waiting.
