Under this view, that the disease has a cen tral morbific cause, it is impossible, that homceo pathists can accept the opinion that the malady can be cured by the mere lopping off of one or a few of its principal symptoms, or of its prominent pathological processes or conditions. How, then, do homoeopathists explain their ability to reach with their remedies the per petuating or "maintaining* cause of disease, conceding, as they do, their inability to deter mine its nature, or even its location? Starting out with the accepted principle that 'like causes operating under like conditions produce like effects,* the homoeopathist assumes the con verse of the proposition to be likewise true; namely, that like results appearing under like conditions and circumstances indicate the op eration of like causes. When two patients to similar conditions of health manifest similar morbid symptoms, the phenomenon is, by all pathologists, considered as indicating the operation of causes in corresponding portions of the two organisms, and acting in a similar manner. This view is not peculiar to any med ical school, but is held by all physicians alike. To this doctrine the homoeopathist adds the belief that it also applies to the effects of drugs, as well as to those of ordinary disease. Therefore, when similar morbid manifestations result, in one case from disease and in the other from the effects of a drug, the symptom complex indicates a physiological or (patho logical) cause operating in a similar part or parts of the organisms involved, and operating in a similar manner in both.
So much as to the locality of the cause,— the °seat of the disease,* upon which the °similar* drug acts. What of the manner in which it acts? It was long ago shown by Hahnemann and others that the effects of almost any drug upon the human body are of two kinds, primary and secondary, di rect action and reaction; and that these two actions are, in a measure, the opposite, one of the other. This view has been advocated by numerous physicians, not always of the homoeopathic school. Of late years the phe nomenon has attracted more attention from medical writers than formerly, and is generally spoken of as °the dual action of drugs.* To illustrate: a drug may first stimulate and after ward depress a certam organ or function. An other may first depress and then stimulate, and the symptoms will, of course, take their char acter from the action or reaction of the drug. Some homoeopathists are of the opinion that this dual quality of drug action is the proper explanation of the curative potency of the similimum. Others, Hahnemann included, ex plain it on other grounds. Others consider it likely that the different effects of large and small doses—a fact observed by many prac titioners —may account for the cures made by the similar remedy. All homoeopathists agree, however, that the question turns upon the curative fact, and not upon its explanation, and hold that one and all of these explanations may yet prove to be erroneous, yet firmly convinced that the main fact will remain unaffected through all changes in theory and doctrine.
Homoeopathy, like any other principle or art, has its own particular field of application and operation. Thus it does not cure directly a mechanical injury to the tissues, or any im pairment wrought by chemical means; though it does cure the functional diseases and dis orders caused by the irritation of such in juries. The homoeopathic remedy acts directly only upon function. It never alters a structure except by first modifying a function. Nor does a drug ever act homoeopathically upon a func tion unless that function be disordered. When a drug acts on a healthy function, or when it causes disorder in a function, such action is never homoeopathic, whatever may he the mode of the selection of the drug and whatever the form or quantity in which it is administered. Such, in brief, is an exposition of homoeopathic belief and practice, and of its underlying prin ciples and doctrines as taught by Hahnemann and held by the profession as a body. The small dose used by homoeopathic prescribers is considered in another part of this article.
Homoeopathy as a mode of medical practice is usually said to have originated in 1796, when Dr. Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann published in Hufeland's Journal, at Jena, an (Essay on a New Principle for Ascertaining the Curative Powers of Drugs.' In this essay he criticizes the state of the medical art, and especially urges that the chemical properties and powers of drugs are not adapted to the work of curing disease, but that cures must be accomplished by an entirely different property resident in medicinal substances. Having read of cures in medical literature and observed, in his own patients, recoveries occurring under the evident influence of the °similar* remedy, he offers the following theory of the phe nomenon: (Every powerful medicinal sub stance produces in the human body a kind of peculiar disease; the more powerful the med icine, the more peculiar, marked and violent the disease. We should imitate nature, which some times cures a chronic disease by superadding another, and employ in the (especially chronic) disease we wish to cure, that medicine which is able to produce another very similar artificial disease, and the former will be cured; sintilia similibus.* Hahnemann further explains his conception of a hoinCeopathic cure in his (Organon,' section 26, in the following lan guage: °A weaker dynamic affection is per manently extinguished in the living organism by a stronger one, if the latter (while differing in kind) is very similar to the former in its manifestation.* This action he designates the ihoniceopathic law of nature.* The term °homoeopathy* or °similar disease,* as repre senting the new medical practice, may have been suggested, not atone by the fact of cures produced by the similar drug, but also by Hahnemann 's theoretical explanation of the phenomenon.