The clinical guide, or, pocket-repertory for the treatment of acute and chronic diseases / by G.H.G. Jahr ; translated by Charles J. Hempel ... enriched by the addition of the new remedies, by Samuel Lilienthal.

  • George Heinrich Gottlieb Jahr
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The clinical guide, or, pocket-repertory for the treatment of acute and chronic diseases / by G.H.G. Jahr ; translated by Charles J. Hempel ... enriched by the addition of the new remedies, by Samuel Lilienthal. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

    17/650 (page 7)
    concussions render the remedies stronger or more penetrat- ing : for my own experience has shown me, that either one acts variously on different persons. But we may take this for an axiom and past all doubt, that we have not as yet found the limits up to which dilutions can he carried^ and it may he^ that the one^ who gives for example^ the eight- thousandth^ gives apotence as surely curative, as the one who uses the first or third; we leave out, of course, those excep- tional cases, which require only the low dilutions. § 17. Although in relation to their absolute efficacy no dif- ference could as yet be set up between the high and low dilutions; yet the difference in the mode of their efficacy will yet be made out. That excellent and ingenious physician. Dr. Hering, has already drawn in several places the attention to such a difference, that the higher dilutions have as secon- dary effects, what the lower have as primary effects : Thus Opium in large doses produces sleep, but in small ones, i. e., higher dilutions sleeplessness; or Natrum-muriaticum in low dilutions thirst, in the higher dilutions, thirstlessness. Should this be found true, as my experience teaches me, that it will, it would be well to ponder over it in all remedies, which are rich on reciprocal actions; then plumbum, nux- vomica, opium in lower dilutions would be truly homoeo- pathic to constipation, but in higher dilutions to diarrhoea. But even such a rule would have many exceptions, as the known and successful application of Nux-vom. and Plumb, in the highest dilutions and in the smallest doses for constipation, so that for the moment it still remains an open question, to be decided by further experience. § 18. But there is another, more essential difference, for which I have already claimed attention (m 1851) and which has since been duly acknowledged by several of my colleagues. This does not consist in the larger or smaller efficacy af the dilutions, i. e., not in its strength or weakness, but in the development of the peculiarities of the remedy, furthered per- haps by percussion, so that, the higher we ascend, we find more clearly the special and peculiar character of the re- medy. Let us imagine one or more concentric circles, as the figure of the next paragraph will show, whereof each radius signifies a remedy in its different stages of dilution, according to its distance from the centre. In the first dilution, that is, in the innermost circle, where the radii still lie close together, similar or related remedies, as Merc, Bel]., Lach. have yet a great many symptoms in common: but the more they pro*