Homoeopathy and its principles explained / [John Epps].

  • John Epps
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Homoeopathy and its principles explained / [John Epps]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    36/350 (page 14)
    ANTIPATHY UNSCIENTIFIC. CIIAP. II. An examination of this system will show its unscientific character, its absurdity, its futility. The individual cases may be examined. A sick person is sleepless. He prays for something to cause him to sleep. The wish is natural, and the physician ought to be able to aid him. The antipathic physician seeks to aid him by giving him an opiate. In so doing he acts empirically with- out science. Why is the patient sleepless ? Sleep is the natural condition of man for certain hours of the twenty-four. If this natural condition does not occur, there must exist some cause to prevent its occurrence. In other words, in order that sleep should take place, it is necessary that the nervous system should be in an undisturbed, quiescent condition. But the nervous system cannot be in this quiescent condition if any injurious cause is acting upon the system. The nervous system is thereby of necessity disturbed, and the want of sleep is the consequence of this disturbance. And this disturbance of the nervous system causing the absence of sleep, is one of the greatest benefits which it confers on the possessor, for it is by this restlessness that the individual is warned of the existence of some injurious cause acting on his constitution. In fact, this sleeplessness is an effect of the nervous system doing its duty. The scientific, the homoeopathic practitioner, devises means by which the injurious cause and its effects are removed, and then sleep comes of nature’s wont. What, on the other hand, does the antipathic practitioner ? He prescribes opium, that is a means by which the natural, the proper, the warning-giving sensitiveness of the nervous system is deadened, and thus he forces sleep, not bv diminishing the power of the injurious agent, nor by altering the conditions which the injurious agency has induced in the living fabric, but by deadening the power of perception of the nervous system. He acts like the man, who attempted to extinguish the fire, by gagging the watchman, who cried out fire. But note the sleep produced by the opium. Is it a refreshing sleep ? It is not, indeed, a sleep ; it is a stupefaction. Contrast that stupefaction-sleep with the sleep, which occurs when the diseased state is in process of cure, in other words, when the irregular state of the diseased organ or organs is in process of reduction to regularity.