DR. WM. P. WESSELHOEFT says: “No more appropriate tribute can be paid to the memory of Dr. Adolphe Lippe than to show his great sagacity in the application of medicine in disease. It was not only his great knowledge of the finer and more subtle indications for remedies, as given in our Materia Medica, or his judicious examination of patients, which made him an acknowledged master of our art, but mainly that freer and wider application of our law which elevated him to the sphere of the true artist.
His readiness and rapidity in getting at the gist of symptoms, even in the most complicated case, could never be called careless or hasty. It reminded me of the work of an eminent artist, who said: The chief difficulty with most painters is that they see too much, and in seeing too much they get confused with endless detail, which leaves their work without character, and they have little to show for their pains.
“He knew the value of our art so well that the common-places of every disease were almost instinctively avoided by him, and he never lost time in noting worthless signs, always looking and finding with unusual rapidity the salient points in the case before him. He heeded and lived up to the greatest thought of the master: The physicians business is only with patients, not with diseases.
“The cure of the following case will demonstrate what I mean by a freer and wider application of our law of cure:”.
We will abbreviate. Dr. Wesselhoeft had treated for more than eighteen months a case of importance, in a man of 45 married ten years, without improvement of the condition. The patient had had no diseases such as might have accounted for it. We will omit details and symptoms, being only concerned with Dr. Lippes method of determining the curative remedy, by taking into account, as Hahnemann taught in his Chronic Diseases, the previous morbid history of the patient, and treating it as part of the disease picture to be matched in the remedy.
Dr. Wesselhoeft continues. “Dr. Lippe wrote me the following letter:.
I find that your patient had diphtheria about ten years ago, and was treated with inappropriate mercurials and gargles by Dr. The character of the attack was that it went from one side to the other and finally back again to the original side. Great weakness, almost paralytic, followed the attack, and he thinks he has never regained his full vigour and usually strength since this illness. His acute cold has always the character of shifting pains and change of location. I have given him a dose of Lac can. cm. which may be required to be followed by a dose of Pulsatilla.
“Suffice it to say that my patient never needed the suggested dose of Pulsatilla.” Allens NOSODES: Lac caninum, p. 52.
The case is interesting, and quoted, in regard to, first, the value of Lac can. as an almost specific for diphtheria (symptoms, agreeing); as such our predecessors regarded it: and secondly, because it bears out our plea for the recognition of what we have ventured to name, chronic measles, chronic diphtheria, chronic scarlet fever, chronic enteric, etc., and the extraordinary curative work that may be done, by treating them with their ancient appropriate remedies.
