Volume 1

Organon of medicine ... / by Samuel Hahnemann.

  • Samuel Hahnemann
Date:
1922
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Organon of medicine ... / by Samuel Hahnemann. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and more especially all their varieties of blood-lettings,* * * * * * * 8 their main remedy in inflammations, which they now, following the example of a well-known bloodthirsty Parisian physician (as a flock of sheep follow the bell¬ wether even into the butcher’s slaughter-house), imagine to encounter in almost every morbidly affected part of supposed superabundance of this vital fluid; the palpable evil con¬ sequences of which procedure, however, such as prostration of the strength, and the tendency, or actual transition, to the typhoid state they ascribe to the malignancy of the disease, which they are then often unable to overcome—in fine, they imagine, even when the patient does not recover, that their treatment has been in conformity with their axiom, causam tolle, and that, according to their mode of speaking, they have done everything in their power for the patient, let the result be what it may. 8 Although there probably never was a drop of blood too much in the living human body, yet the old-school practitioners consider an imaginary excess of blood as the main material cause of all hemorrhages and inflammations, which they must re¬ move and drain off by venesections, cupping and leeches. This they hold to be a rational mode of treatment, causal medication. In general inflammatory fevers, in acute pleurisy, they even re¬ gard the coagulable lymph in the blood—the buffy coat, as it is termed—as the materia peccans, which they endeavor to get rid of, if possible, by repeated venesections, notwithstanding that this coat often becomes more consistent and thicker at every repeti¬ tion of the bloodletting. They thus often bleed the patient nearly to death, when the inflammatory fever will not subside, in order to remove this buffy coat or the imaginary plethora, without suspecting that the inflammatory blood is only the product of the acute fever, of the morbid, immaterial (dynamic) inflamma¬ tory irritation, and that the latter is the sole cause of the great disturbance in the vascular system, and may be removed by the smallest dose of a homogeneous (homoeopathic) medicine, as,
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