THROUGH THE MAGIC DOOR


THROUGH THE MAGIC DOOR. The marble structure of mathematics is also yielding new knowledge: old postulates are either replaced or made to bear new meanings. What a wonder! Two and two do not always make four! Length, breadth and thickness have added to them a fourth dimension of “time.” Ours is a changing, flowing world of ideas.


1) The present is a complicated step towards the prospective future, rich in the colourful potentialities, hopes and aspirations that the four-dimensional human existence can create and recreate. But the past is no less conjuring. The spirits that had been and that could not be seen through the magic door of memory breathe a twilight perspective of immense susceptibilities. So, the spirits from the date of Dr. Samuel Hahnemannian down until and our own had bee for a positive development of the scientific art of Homoeopathy. The present

also would yield a fruitful harvest for the future. Still, a sense of gloom, a note of discontent benumb us. Hahnemann, wouldst thou wert amongst us!.

2) There are among us the Hahnemannians, the Kentians, the followers of Boenninghausen and so forth. But the living import of the science, the art and the philosophy that was the body and soul of the by-gone masters, is no longer with us. What we have mostly is the mere prosaic regurgitation and effervescence of the past. We do not eagerly graze on the green but merely chew the cud. But what was with Hahnemann? Every “to-day” was a new step further to him from every “yesterday.”

Imagine the tremendous changes in the texts of the six editions of the Organon. The divine law of similars remained, of course, unaltered,but the working postulates varied considerably. You can not identify Samuel Hahnemann of about 1810, scribbling his first medical philosophy, with the Master Hahnemann of 1841, emending the fifth edition of the Organon for his latest and best, the sixth.

3) Fortunately for mankind a luminous sun is on the horizon, and we are not to welcome a new drawn. It is an age of newer and newer discoveries in all the branches of science. Physics, chemistry, and biochemistry present us with a new thing, a new meaning every day-break.

The marble structure of mathematics is also yielding new knowledge: old postulates are either replaced or made to bear new meanings. What a wonder! Two and two do not always make four! Length, breadth and thickness have added to them a fourth dimension of “time.” Ours is a changing, flowing world of ideas.

In this age of newness and proneness, if Homoeopathy has to retain its social values, it must be re-fitted in the proper perspective. If it is to survive it must stand face to face, eye to eye with the latest developments of modern science. Probably the law of similars is a divine law, a inimitably eternal as the law of gravitation, or the laws of the tides. Yet, its soundness has to stand any new test, and hold its own in bold contrast to the fallacies of any human theory.

4) There are signs of newer developments in Homoeopathy, too. The efficacy of Homoeopathy is going to be proved by other methods than the old one of clinical success. Dr. Boyd and his group’s discoveries of low frequency waves in human body, the diastase capability of homoeopathic potencies, the electromagnetic and emanometer grouping of drugs; Dr. Patterson’s valuable researches on the bowel flora; and the theory of polarity and vibratory rates in drugs and disease; all these indicate a new stir, a new life, a new alertness and a new approach to the good old law of similars. We are much ahead of our times, we have gained much by analysis. But what is yet to come is a new synthesis, a new harmony within the fold of Homoeopathy.

5) There are three unexplored corners in the mighty Gothic structure of Homoeopathy. First, the proving of new drugs and reproving of old ones in different environments, ages and nationals at the same time. Secondly, the relation of the potency to the individual. Thirdly, the relation of Homoeopathy to biochemistry and bacteriology. Concerning the last two, opinions are poles apart from each other, and whereas a collective approach is essential in these two, we have handled them only singly and disconnectedly.

6) Frankly speaking, excepting the nosodes, we seldom travel outside of Hahnemann’s polychrest group in clinical applications. But Mother Earth has not been depleted in her treasure of drugs all these years. Have we extended our search for them? Have we tried to harness more of Nature’s wealth for the aid of ailing humanity? And the fragmentary re-provings undertaken recently by certain institutions are far below the mark. Renovate Homoeopathy or it is a dead science not many years hence. Air liners and other revolutionized means of communication are at our command, and we can prove or re-prove drugs jointly all the world over, to ascertain their true pathogenesis irrespective of age, environment, climate and nationality.

7) The revolutionizing biological, biochemical and other discoveries of the present day may open up new avenues to the approach of the homoeopathic doctrine and art. The recent researches in hormones, enzymes, nuclear physics and atomic energies may serve to furnish fruitful clues to the power of homoeopathic potencies, until recently the stumbling block to the average educated mind. And the more qualified scientists enter the homoeopathic fold, the more honourable and useful for us.

We can not wait until the outside scientists would furnish postulates for us to utilise for own peculiar needs, and meekly follow their lead. We are confident, if Einstein or other scientists remained in the homoeopathic fold or acted in keen collaboration with the homoeopathic doctrine, the atom bomb or the hydrogen bomb would have been many years older than at present. Really, the discovery of the power of homoeopathic potencies may serve to enlighten the world in a new physics, new biochemistry and new biology.

8) “High or low” is the other question of prime importance in the use of potencies. The enigma of the potencies, high or low, must be solved by our collective efforts and in a scientific manner. Dr. Kent’s theory of conformity between the planes of vital affection and the penetrativeness of potency is purely conceptual and we have to invent other tangible measures of test if we can.

9) The findings of bacteriology have been a stumbling block to the Kentian homoeopaths in the same manner as the homoeopathic potency is to the Allopath. The works of Allen, Gregg, Kent and their followers and co-workers abound in such maxims “Bacteria are the result, not the cause of disease.” Dr. Kent has devoted a considerable portion of a chapter of his Homoeopathic Philosophy to this end. He was a great commentator, a grand propagandist of the principles enunciated by Hahnemann.

His assiduous work on the Repertory, his unique shifting of the chaff from the wheat of the Materia Medica, his wonderful delineation from the wheat of the Materia Medica, his wonderful delineation of drug pictures, and above all his metaphysical approach to the science and art of Homoeopathy, have made a large number of disciples among homoeopaths all over the world, including the present writer himself. This Kentian approach is not an isolated development in the stream of Homoeopathy. It is a correlated wave in the current of homoeopathic thought since the eighties of the last century.

But the Father of Homoeopathy, Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, conceived of disease as the derangement of the living organism, produced by a “dynamic morbific agent inimical to life,” (Organon, sixth, Section 11). It is a spirit-like dynamic derangement of the vital principle, “caused by the external inimical forces that disturb the harmonious play of life,” (Organon, sixth. Sec. 16). To Hahnemann the material as well as the spirit-like dynamic character of disease were equally prominent.

What Hahnemann knew is that syphilis and gonorrhea are contracted by no other means that contact; that measles, small-pox are propagated through “nearness,” and cholera is definitely propagated by the “excessively minute living creatures” carried with infested water. Many other instances of Hahnemann’s bacteriological conception of disease may be cited. (Vide Psora–the real crux in Homoeopathy, Recorder, June 1949). Actually, Hahnemann was the pioneer bacteriologist much in advance of Pasteur. It is only his generalisations that are being worked out in minutest details by the bacteriologist, after a lapse of about a century.

What Hahnemann knew is, of course, that the bacterium can not infect living organism unconditionally. It affects persons in whom a proneness, a susceptibility, is already present and the vital resistance is lowered; and being invisible to the naked eye, it is spirit-like in form. It is also dynamic in character as the symptoms are nothing but the action-cum- reaction of the bacterium upon the living organism and of the vital principle against it. Therefore, to Hahnemann the bacterium, the vital principle and the dynamic, as opposed to the static, derangements were equally formidable truths. He saw them all the ignored none.

But unfortunately for us all. Dr. Kent and his co-workers laid special stress on the susceptibility, proneness and vital principle, or in other words on the soil alone, ignoring the bacterium, the seed, outright. To them the living organism was diseased first of all by psora, syphilis, sycosis, or other things, and next, the bacterium came as the scavenger to clean the system of morbid tissues and poisonous toxins. But are not psora, syphilis and sycosis produced by bacterial contents?

S M Bhattacherjee
S.M. BHATTACHERJEE, M.A., P.R.S.M.. BERHAMPORE.