117

To the latter category belong the so-called idiosyncrasies, by which are meant
peculiar corporeal constitutions which, although otherwise healthy, possess a
disposition to be brought into a more or less morbid state by certain things which
seem to produce no impression and no change in many other individuals. (1) But
this inability to make an impression on every one is only apparent. For as two
things are required for the production of these as well as all other morbid
alterations in the health of man - to wit., the inherent power of the influencing
substance, and the capability of the vital force that animates the organism to be
influenced by it - the obvious derangements of health in the so-called
idiosyncrasies cannot be laid to the account of these peculiar constitutions alone,
but they must also be ascribed to these things that produce them, in which must lie
the power of making the same impressions on all human bodies, yet in such a
manner that but a small number of healthy constitutions have a tendency to allow
themselves to be brought into such an obvious morbid condition by them. That
these agents do actually make this impression on every healthy body is shown by
this, that when employed as remedies they render effectual homoeopathic service
(2) to all sick persons for morbid symptoms similar to those they seem to be only
capable of producing in so-called idiosyncratic individuals.
(1) Some few persons are apt to faint from the smell of roses and to fall into many
other morbid, and sometimes dangerous states from partaking of mussels, crabs or
the rose of the barbel, from touching the leaves of some kinds of sumach, ..etc.
(2) Thus the Princess Maria Porphyroghnita restored her brother, the Emperor
Alexius, who suffered from faintings, by sprinkling him with rose water (uo ton
radon sualagma) in the presence of his aunt Eudoxia (Hist. byz. Alexia, lib. xv, p.
503, ed. Posser); and Horstius (Oper., iii, p. 59) saw great benefit from rose
vinegar in cases of syncope.

Teucrium-Suitable after too much medicine has been taken.

* Oversensitiveness.

When too much medicine has produced an over-sensitive condition and remedies
fail to act.
State of irritability, and irascibility, with sensitiveness so great that fatigue is
produced by merely hearing the conversation of others.

119
As certainly as every species of plant differs in its external form, mode of life and
growth, in its taste and smell from every other species and genus of plant, as
certainly as every mineral and salt differs from all others, in its external as well as
its internal physical and chemical properties (which alone should have sufficed to
prevent any confounding of one with another), so certainly do they all differ and
diverge among themselves in their pathogenetic - consequently also in their
therapeutic - effects. (1) Each of these substances produces alterations in the
health of human beings in a peculiar, different, yet determinate manner, so as
to preclude the possibility of confounding one with another. (2)
(1) Anyone who has a thorough knowledge of, and can appreciate the
remarkable difference of effects on the health of man of every single substance
from those of every other, will readily perceive that among them there can be, in a
medical point of view, no equivalent remedies whatever, no surrogates(a substitute).
Only those who do not know the pure, positive effects of the different medicines
can be so foolish as to try to persuade us that one can serve in the stead of the
other, and can in the same disease prove just as serviceable as the other. Thus do
ignorant children confound the most essentially different things, because they
scarcely know their external appearances, far less their real value, their true
importance and their very dissimilar inherent properties.
(2) If this be pure truth, as it undoubtedly is, then no physician who would not be
regarded as devoid of reason, and who would not act contrary to the dictates of his
conscience the sole arbiter of real worth, can employ in the treatment of diseases
any medicinal substance but one with whose real significance he is thoroughly
and perfectly conversant, i.e. , whose positive action on the health of healthy
individuals he has so accurately tested that he knows for certain that it is
capable of producing a very similar morbid state, more similar than any other
medicine with which he is perfectly acquainted, to that presented by the case
of disease he intends to cure by means of it; for, as has been shown above,
neither man, nor mighty Nature herself, can effect a perfect, rapid and permanent
cure otherwise than with a homoeopathic remedy. Henceforth no true physician
can abstain from making such experiment, in order to obtain this most necessary
and only knowledge of the medicines that are essential to cure, this knowledge
which has hitherto been neglected by the physicians in all ages. In all former ages -
posterity will scarcely believe it - physicians have hitherto contented themselves
with blindly prescribing for diseases medicines whose value was unknown, and
which had never been tested relative to their highly important, very various, pure,
dynamic action on the health of man; and, moreover, they mingled several of
these unknown medicines that differed so vastly among each other in one
formula, and left it to chance to determine what effect should thereby be
produced on the patient. This is just as if a madman should force his way into the
workshop of an artisan, seize upon handfuls of very different tools, with the uses of
all of which he is quite unacquainted, in order, as he imagines, to work at the
objects of art he sees around him. I need hardly remark that these would be
destroyed, I may say utterly ruined, by his senseless operations.