[ Presidential address at the Geneva 1931 Congress of the International Homoeopathic League].
PRESIDENT OF THE INTERNATIONAL HOMOEOPATHIC LEAGUE.
“When we are dealing with a science which is concerned with the saving of life, it is a crime to neglect its study.”.
We, born and coming from different lands, trained in different schools of medicine, whose opinions vary as much as our professors, moulded in practice which is more or less rational, more or less empirical, according to the circles in which we find ourselves, we each have come to the work with thoughts, customs and prejudices, which are different, and few are the men who can entirely abandon prejudices and preconceived ideas.
Only a few are they who know when they must observe, verify or reproduce a fact to put themselves in a state of perfect poise and abstraction to say to themselves: Here I am, presenting myself with my sole faculty of seeing and comparing. Until this moment I have recognized nothing within myself, I have seen nothing, I have heard nothing, I know nothing; I am a child facing the east reaching out for all things and longing to accept and to perceive the thoughts that my faculties and sensations can perceive and suggest to me.
This difficulty of stripping oneself of the old man and of being born in the morning of all new things, worthy without hesitation and procrastination, was always one of the principal stumbling and procrastination, was always one of the principal stumbling blocks of new truths, discoveries and highest attainments. The rewards for our forbears were terrible persecutions for the truths they tried to advance.
In this bright morning of the 20th century, things are different, we are at liberty to think and free to promulgate those truths, framed in laws that are eternal and blessed. Nevertheless, the influence of preconceived ideas, and prejudices, I regret to state, is far from being destroyed even in our day.
With Dufresne, the pioneer of homoeopathy in Switzerland, the unequaled President of the former Gallican Homoeopathic Society, we can repeat that we must have the same spirit in our Congress, we must equal this spirit of homoeopathy. It must be a spirit of kindness, conciliation, perfect understanding.
It must be a spirit of exact observation, a faithful exposition of facts, but not a spirit of sophism, unkindness and hair-splitting over unknown causes impossible to determine; it must be a spirit of constant study and humility before the immensity of the art and the facts, but not a spirit of arrogance, of contemptuousness with which we whip others by science to satisfy our selfish selves and thus neglect the true and unique purpose of our high calling, that is to cure; it must be spirit of wisdom, probity and rigorous impartiality in the examination or control of facts advanced by others, not the spirit of remoteness, disdain and negation by others, not the spirit of remoteness, disdain and negation the formerly the corporations have opposed to all who have not been of their making.
Ladies and gentlemen, the spirit of our Congress must be a spirit of benevolence, of reciprocity and mutual teaching. A science built only on facts. The man who can best instruct others finds many precious and useful lessons in the conversations and practical communications of his confreres. Assembled here in good faith and frank cordiality, all physicians must feel like saying: I am grateful for the many things you have given me.
Let us strive to be supermen of his 20th century. If details, nevertheless, please do not criticise those who do not think just as you think, but expose your point of view and motive by an impeccable logic through precise facts which are laws. We shall avid absolutely at this Congress the frequent danger of having controversies without purpose, and our purpose should be to show facts in all simplicity, justifying the procedures which have conducted us to obtain, to provoke or to modify them. It is only in this spirit of reciprocal esteem that we will make our work excellent, useful, choice, complete.
But it is not only in a Congress, that one can make homoeopathy prosper. There is a stronger way than this one, the only one able to show all its value, the only one ready to gain the entire confidence of the public and to attract the consideration of physicians who practise it. It is to never wander from the road that homoeopathy outlines, it is to never apply any remedy except according to the principles of homoeopathy.
These principles being deducted from a fixed and immutable law as are all those of nature, one could not abandon them without being compromised, without showing that one is without confidence, as well as without medical probity, because to make the application of homoeopathy on a certain number of pathological cases and to neglect it in others, is to put oneself in opposition with himself, it is to show an absolute incapacity of knowledge of the action of medicaments, it is to show at the same time indifference and ignorance in the exercise of an art touching directly the life of others. Pathology is the result of disease not the cause, why not treat the characteristic symptoms, the cause, the man himself. But one can say, it is a transition time for those who wish to conquer homoeopathy.
Our homoeopathic initiation submits the same periods as our proper development. First, it is the period of infancy, when we open our senses to all the wonderments of the new method, desiring ardently to know, but also it is the period when we criticise severely. Then follows the period of puberty, which is one of doubt. Here our individuality allows, after the first observation, the examination of the observed facts. Now comes the adult period when intelligent and impartial judgment develops itself to enable us to comprehend, and then comes the last phase, that of maturity, when we can enjoy the accomplished efforts, it is the period of ripe conviction.
In the first phase, we mix allopathy and homoeopathy, give remedies in tinctures, without strict rules or according to the principles of our traditional studies, then in the second phase, we refine already and abandon the coercitive allopathic doses, engaging ourselves in the 3d, 6th and sometimes hazarding a 12th dilution. At this period, the mixture seems to us ideal. Then after some failures but also some encouraging results, we try timidly the 30th dilutions. Not yet convinced we make alternating or complex homoeopathy, applying the homoeopathic remedy according to the principle learned in our studies of regular medicine, all the indications being based essentially upon pathological and diagnostic manifestations, on the results and end products of disease.
Such a remedy for the heart, such a one for the lungs, others for liver or some other part of the body. So we find Bryonia and Phosphorus for pneumonia, Silica for leaf joint disease, Arsenicum for asystolia, Belladonna or Bufo for epilepsy, Sulphur and Graphites for eczema. “That is not homoeopathy. It is a travesty upon homoeopathy,” writes Kent in his remarkable 10th lecture upon the vital force. Some never pass over this phase, because the results, that this way of doing brings, are already superior to those of the usual allopathic practice. Some others may never surpass the 30th dilution, further dilutions appearing to them a fantasy and illusion of the imagination.
But science has not limitation and no matter how paradoxical or strange the results or procedure may appear, it can only count upon the facts, upon the facts that can be repeated.
Kent wrote in his 11th Lecture on Homoeopathic philosophy. [ Memorial edition, 1919, pp. 105-106].
I remember when I first read from Hahnemann that potentized medicines would cure the sick that it seemed to me a mystery. I had no knowledge upon which to found belief in such things. I began to practise with the lower potencies and with crude drugs in attempting to carry out the law, but with these means i was able to cure only superficial complaints. My work was far from satisfactory, yet it was somewhat better than the old things; it was milder than physicking and purging and emesis. Of course I rested upon my opinions and beliefs for my knowledge; everyone does that.
Later, I resolved to test the 30th potency to se if there was not yet medicine in it, and I prepared with my own hands the 30th potency of podophyllum with water on the centesimal scale, after the fashion of Hahnemann having been told that water was as good as alcohol. This was during an epidemic of diarrhoea that looked like Podophyllum, but I had no courage to give the 30th and still continued to use my stronger medicines.
One day a child was brought into my office in the mothers arms. She brought it in hastily, and it did not seem as if it could live long. It was an infant, and while it lay in her arms a thin yellowish faecal stool ran all over my carpet. The odor struck me as like that I had been reading about as the odor of the Podophyllum stool; it was horribly offensive, stinking, and the stool was so copious that the mother made the remark that she did not know where it all came from.
Dr. Schmidt was introduced to the results of homeopathic treatment during the 1918 flu epidemic while living in London. There he met both J. H. Clarke and John Weir.
In 1922 he came to the United States and began his studies with Alonzo Austin and Frederica Gladwin, who had been a pupil of Kent's. He became the first graduate of the American Foundation for Homeopathy course for doctors. Returning to his native land he set up practice in Geneva, Switzerland. He was responsible for reintroducing classical homeopathy into Europe, teaching several generations of physicians, including Elizabeth Wright Hubbard.
Dr. Schmidt helped edit the "Final General Repertory" of Kent, and translated the Organon into French. In 1925, he was one of the main founders of the Liga Medicorum Homoeopathic Internationalis (LIGA).