Volume 1

Materia medica pura / by Samuel Hahnemann, translated from the latest German editions by R.E. Dudgeon, with annotations by Richard Hughes.

  • Samuel Hahnemann
Date:
1880-1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Materia medica pura / by Samuel Hahnemann, translated from the latest German editions by R.E. Dudgeon, with annotations by Richard Hughes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    19/742
    I am not going to write a criticism of the ordinary Materia Medica, else I would lay before the reader a detailed account of the futile endeavours hitherto made to determine the powers of medicines from their colour, taste, and smell. I would show how chemistry has been applied to, in order by wet and dry distillation to extract from medicinal substances phlegma, ethereal oils, empyreumatic acids and oils, volatile salts, and from the residuary caput mortuum fixed salts and earths (all nearly Identical with one another). I would set forth the methods adopted by the latest chemical science of obtaining extracts to be afterwards inspissated by dissolving their soluble parts in various fluids. I would describe the mode of separating from them resin, gum, gluten, starch, wax, albumen, salts and earths, acids and alkaloids, by means of various reagents ; and I would tell how to convert them into gases. It is well known that not a single one of the innumerable medicinal sub- stances, in spite of all these technical torturings, could be brought to reveal what sort of healing power it was possessed of. Certainly the material substances extracted from them were not the spirit animating every single substance which enables it to cure certain morbid states. This spirit cannot be laid hold of by the hands; it can only be recog- nised by its effects on the living body. The day of the true knowledge of medicines and of the true healing art will dawn when men cease to act so unnaturally as to give drugs to which some purely imaginary virtues have been ascribed, or which have been merely vaguely recommended, and of whose real qualities they are utterly ignorant; and which they give mixed up together in all sorts of combinations. With these delectable mixtures * a hap-hazard treatment is pursued, not of cases of disease that have been carefully investigated as to their special signs and symptoms, but of purely artificial forms and names of diseases invented by pathology. By this method no experience whatever can be gained of the helpful or hurtful # The ordinary medical world, as long as they know no better, may go on sending their multiform complex prescriptions to be made up at the chemist’s. In order to do this they do not require to know anything about the sphere of action or the special properties of each ingredient. Moreover, even should we know perfectly the powers of drugs when given singly, we can have no idea what they will do when given mixed up together. This they call treating [curiren], and they may well continue to call it so until a 1 From vol. i, 3rd edit., 1830.
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