The effects of modern therapeutic researches on the position of homeopathy / by Byres Moir.

  • Moir, Byres.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The effects of modern therapeutic researches on the position of homeopathy / by Byres Moir. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    considered as the cause, but that the true internal cause is to be found inherent in the internal organisation of man. Just as in all natural processes, without exception, where the disease germs act as liberating impulses and are able to set free only what in the form of a pre¬ disposition towards disease is in some way prefigured both in nature and amount in the human body.”* He also refers, in speaking of the vital phenomena of bacteria, to the interesting discoveries of Naegeli, “ that a mere trace of metallic copper proves fatal to algal protoplasm, such an action being called oligo-dynamic. Similarly he says Miller and Behring have found that metallic gold and copper can arrest the development of bacteria, although no perceptible trace of the metals goes into solution.”! We see in this that Hueppe, arguing from the facts of bacteriology, has arrived at the truth of homoeopathy, and that what holds true of living microbes is equally so of chemical products, that drugs cure a disease by causing the reaction of the tissues against the rightly chosen remedy, and that to bring this about the medicine to act as a stimulus must be given in small doses. It is interesting to notice in how many points Professor Hueppe confirms Hahnemann’s teaching. First of all there is the broad question, that we have not to consider so much the action of the drug, which is in reality only a stimulus, but what is the reaction of the tissues against such a stimulus, and this brings forward the disputed question of vitalism. Hahnemann may not have been right in speaking of vital force, but by neglecting the peculiar properties of living tissues great error has been fallen into. For the greater part of this century it was considered that physiological phenomena were to be explained on the ordinary lines of physics and chemistry. Professor Huxley’s Elementary Physiology, published in 1868, is full of these mechanical theories which late researches have completely upset, and for those who, like myself, were * Page 268. f Page 89.
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