My summary of the Organon of Medicine, by Hahnemann.
In 1810, twenty years after Hahnemann first began working on his medical system, he published a book to explain the medical system, how to use it and how the body deals with disease. Hahnemann established the truth through a great deal of practical experience and pure experimentation. AFTER THIS, he documented this truth, in his own way, in the Organon of Medicine.
The book begins with a conceptual model he devised incorporating all his findings about disease, its cure, and much more.
The book consists of 291 "Articles" or "Aphorisms", and references to these numbers are included below. Anyone who is really interested in getting to the bottom of the Homeopathy debate should, at least, make an effort to understand this perspective. My objective was to simply find the truth, whatever it is. And, reading and understanding this book was essential to this task.
The words "Symptoms" and "Signs" are synonymous here; every detectable/perceptible manifestation of disease.
-----------------------------------------------------
That disease is an entity specific to each patient.
That the "totality of perceptible signs" represents the entire extent of the sickness. Looking inside the body for explanations/mechanisms is futile, and unnecessary.
(9) The functioning body is not just "chemical".
The living being operates on a "dynamic" principle, called the Vital Principle or Vital Force (VF).
(Kuby, Modern Textbook of Immunology, Second Ed, Overview: "The cells and molecules of the immune system act together in an exquisitely adaptable "dynamic" network whose complexity rivals that of the nervous system.")
(10) Without the VF everywhere present in the body, the "chemical" organism is unable to maintain itself and therefore dies.
(11) When a man falls ill, the VF becomes "untuned" by the "dynamic" influence of the disease agent.
(12) The VF then brings about the disagreeable sensations and abnormal functions called disease accessible to the senses of patient and doctor, and which represent the "whole" disease. Conversely, the disappearance of all perceptible deviations from health, means the VF has recovered its normal integrity.
(13) Disease, excluding surgical cases, is NOT an entity hidden in the interior of the organism, separate from its living totality,
NOR an entity separate from the VF.
(14) There is no curable disease that does not announce itself through subjective and objective symptoms.
(15) The suffering of the untuned VF and the totality of perceptible symptoms that represent the disease are one and the same. The "chemical" organism and VF are inseparable. The doctor has therefore only to eliminate the "totality of symptoms" to simultaneously restore the VF AND eradicate the disease.
(16) Disease agents can only untune the "dynamic" VF in a "dynamic" way. The doctor can only correct the untunement by acting on the VF with medicines which also have "dynamic" actions,
BUT only when the "totality of symptoms" have revealed the disease to the carefully observing and enquiring doctor, so that they can be cured.
(18) The "totality of symptoms" in each individual case is the only indication guiding to the choice of medicine.
Medicines can cure disease only if they possess the power to alter the way a person feels and functions. Indeed, it is ONLY because of this power that they are medicines at all.
The "totality of symptoms" associated with each medicine is first carefully studied in the healthy.
(22) Substances become medicines because they can arouse certain symptoms and signs which can destroy symptoms/signs which exist in the natural disease of the patient, PROVIDED that the two sets of symptoms closely match, established by pure experiment.
Administered properly potentised in small doses, the medicine will rapidly and permanently destroy the totality of symptoms in the patient and therefore the disease.
(26) A natural law of Homeopathy: In living organisms, a weaker dynamic affection is permanently extinguished by a stronger one (in this case, the medicine) which, though different in nature, greatly resembles it in expression.
(31) Disease agents do not have the absolute power to untune our VF. We fall ill ONLY when susceptible, for whatever reason. So, disease agents do not make everybody sick each time.
(32) On the other hand, medicines (conceptually "artificial diseases") affect EVERY person, EVERY time, to bring about its characteristic symptom pattern.
(33) The medicine must be both very similar in symptoms to the natural disease AND stronger than it.
In this situation, the medicine transfers the untunement of the VF caused by the natural disease to an artificial disease condition, but only when very similar in symptoms to the natural one. The natural disease becomes disengaged or taken over, and extinguished. The medicinal artificial disease, when the body realises there is no disease agent, then quickly wanes leaving only health.
(35) Medicines which are not homeopathic will never cure any disease.
(38) Two dissimilar diseases meeting in a person will compete such that the stronger will temporarily suppress and suspend the milder one until the stronger disease has run its course. Then, the milder disease reappears, uncured, to express its symptoms.
(42) Two similar natural diseases cannot ward off or suspend each other such that one comes back after the disappearance of the most recent. Neither can they coexist in the same organism if they are similar in symptoms and effects. The stronger DESTROYS the weaker.
The VF can only become "untuned" by ONE disease at any one time. In this case, the weaker disease is completely extinguished by the stronger...the weaker was only a "dynamic" affection anyway.
(54) Allopathy (Convention Medicine, in Hahnemann's time):
(A). Allopathy generally uses speculation and scholastic arguments instead of observation of natural phenomena and experimentation.
(B). "Cure" in disease means a material to be expelled.
(C). Uses mixed drugs and crude (large) doses.
(D). Maintains its credibility through palliative relief.
(63) Every medicine that acts to alter the VF, brings about modifications to health called the PRIMARY ACTION.
The primary action is a product of both the medicine and the VF, but mainly the former. The VF is initially passive, and accepts the medicine's action.
But later, the VF tends to oppose the influence by the medicine, and this is called the SECONDARY ACTION. And this opposite action usually matches the strength of the medicine's primary action.
(66) But small Homeopathic doses produce a primary action which is barely perceptible at all, and the VF's opposite secondary action is the same.
(68) The medicine may introduce a slight medicinal disease ALONE in the body, but it is fleeting and mild, and so the VF can easily act on this small disturbance to restore complete cure.
(69) Palliative medicines: Exactly the opposite happens in palliative procedures. The doctor chooses medicine with the opposite symptom to the patient's complaining symptom. But, this only hides the patient's symptom from the VF for a while. Palliative medicine cannot supplant the pathologically untuned VF in the organism - it only makes the VF insensible to it by producing a condition completely different from the untunement. And the effects of the palliative soon disappear leaving the natural disease intact.
The secondary action of the VF to the palliative worsens the disease symptom it temporarily alleviated. The larger the dose of palliative, the worse this opposite aggravation.
(70) Summary of the preceding aphorisms.
(71) Summary of the following aphorisms: Human diseases are nothing but groups of symptoms which are destroyed/changed into health by medicinal substances that artificially produce similar disease symptoms. There are THREE questions to the task of curing disease:
Q1: How does the doctor ascertain what needs to be known about diseases in order to cure them?
Q2: How does he investigate the curative nature of Homeopathic medicines?
Q3: How does he apply Homeopathic medicines most effectively to cure diseases?
Q1: Aphorisms 72-104: Ascertaining what needs to be known about diseases:
Diseases are ACUTE or CHRONIC. Acute diseases are rapid disease processes/untunements of the VF which run their course and end quickly. Chronic diseases, enigmatic initially, dynamically untune the living organism from health gradually in their own characteristic way. The VF can only imperfectly resist. As disease progresses, the VF becomes ever more untuned, until death. These diseases are inherited, i.e., genetic in origin, but are still considered, in nature, to be "dynamic" contagions.
(73) Acute diseases are brought on by harmful influences, but are mostly "flare-ups" of a latent chronic disease, which then returns to a dormant state if the flare-up is not too severe, nor long acting.
(74) Chronic: Must include all the diseases artificially created by Allopathy, which relentlessly weaken the VF. For example, true local inflammations are cured by Homeopathic medicines that dynamically remove the underlying arterial irritations, yet the Allopathic solution may even result in death.
(77) Persistent diseases resulting from avoidable noxious influences that are not chronic, go away on their own when living conditions are improved.
(78) True chronic diseases arise from inherited factors, and continue to worsen until death, even in those with robust constitutions and in ideal living conditions. A young person may appear to be healthy, but a chronic disease may be present which remains hidden for years, only to emerge later after stressful events.
(79) Three categories of chronic diseases:
1. Syphilis, 2. Gonorrhoea (sycosis) are chronic diseases which persist until death if not treated.
(80) The third kind is called PSORA, the underlying cause of immeasurable chronic diseases, which I spent 12 years studying. My new medicines, along with those pre-existing, treat all these conditions.
(81) Concerns about Allopaths' wrongful naming of diseases, and failure to distinguish between many of them.
(82) In chronic disease, as in acute, the doctor must gather all symptoms and signs in each individual case by the same means. This symptom gathering is far more difficult than in acute diseases, as the chronic ones subtly evolve over years.
(84-99) The detailed procedure and guidelines for taking the case (to obtain all manifestations of the patient's illness).
(100-103) Additional procedure for epidemics.
(104) Monitoring of the case.
Q2: Aphorisms 105-145: How does the doctor investigate the curative nature of Homeopathic medicines, the tools of Homeopathic cure?
Must know the entire pathogenetic action of as many medicines as possible in the healthy so as to increase the choice of satisfactorily matching to natural diseases.
(108) Moderate doses of medicines are given experimentally to the healthy to ascertain all manifestations both physically and in the psyche (called a "proving"). Ref. "Force of medicines observed in the healthy human body", 1805. I was the first person to do this, though others have accidentally 'proved' substances, e.g., poisons. This extensive work was a reflection of my faith in the Homeopathic method, the only way to completely cure human disease.
(111) These provings convince me that medicinal substances pathologically alter human healthy human bodies ACCORDING TO DEFINITE ETERNAL NATURAL LAWS and that by virtue of these laws, EACH SUBSTANCE CAN PRODUCE THESE SPECIFIC FIXED RELIABLE DISEASE SYMPTOMS THAT ARE CHARACTERISTIC OF IT.
(112) Medicines taken immoderately can have very serious or fatal consequences. This does not occur at the beginning but at the end, with completely opposite symptoms, and is the SECONDARY ACTION or COUNTERACTION by the VF. In controlled doses of H. medicines the secondary actions are barely noticeable, just enough to re-establish the healthy state.
(113) Narcotics seem to be an exception though in pure experimentation the secondary action is detectable.
(115) Alternating action.
(116) In medicine provings, some symptoms are seen in many people, and other symptoms much less frequently. This is related to the physical disposition of a few 'sensitive' people. But these symptoms only appear not to be affecting the less sensitive people, because these medicinal symptoms, when associated with a homeopathically chosen medicine, act on ALL sick people with that symptom presentation.
118) Every medicine has a unique total pattern of effects, and this must be fully investigated, by pure experiment ("Proving").
(121) Medicines have a range of strengths. The stronger are effective in small doses. The milder must be given in larger doses. The weakest ones only reveal their actions when tested on delicate/sensitive healthy people.
(124) Each medicine must be taken completely alone on the day it is administered.
(126) Provers must be trustworthy and conscientious.
(128) Crude medicinal substances do not express all their symptoms nearly as well as when potentised, e.g., to 30c. With these potencies, their virtues are developed to an unbelievable degree.
(129) There is remarkable variation in the sensitivity of people to doses. The robust require MUCH larger doses to present symptoms. But, must START with low doses, because you cannot predict who will be robust and who sensitive to this particular medicine.
(135) All symptoms associated with a medicine do not appear in all provers... need multiple persons of both sexes for a complete proving.
(137) Sensitive persons are the best for obtaining the primary actions (i.e., symptoms) of the medicine before they become clouded by the secondary counteractions of the VF.
(143) After many detailed provings, the medicines' characteristics are fully listed in "Materia Medicae".
(145) There is a need for more than the 99 available medicines to better treat all chronic diseases, though it is possible to manage with this relatively small number.
Q3: Aphorisms 146+: Most effective employment of the Homeopathic medicines for the cure of natural diseases.
END OF PART 1 of 2
In 1810, twenty years after Hahnemann first began working on his medical system, he published a book to explain the medical system, how to use it and how the body deals with disease. Hahnemann established the truth through a great deal of practical experience and pure experimentation. AFTER THIS, he documented this truth, in his own way, in the Organon of Medicine.
The book begins with a conceptual model he devised incorporating all his findings about disease, its cure, and much more.
The book consists of 291 "Articles" or "Aphorisms", and references to these numbers are included below. Anyone who is really interested in getting to the bottom of the Homeopathy debate should, at least, make an effort to understand this perspective. My objective was to simply find the truth, whatever it is. And, reading and understanding this book was essential to this task.
The words "Symptoms" and "Signs" are synonymous here; every detectable/perceptible manifestation of disease.
-----------------------------------------------------
That disease is an entity specific to each patient.
That the "totality of perceptible signs" represents the entire extent of the sickness. Looking inside the body for explanations/mechanisms is futile, and unnecessary.
(9) The functioning body is not just "chemical".
The living being operates on a "dynamic" principle, called the Vital Principle or Vital Force (VF).
(Kuby, Modern Textbook of Immunology, Second Ed, Overview: "The cells and molecules of the immune system act together in an exquisitely adaptable "dynamic" network whose complexity rivals that of the nervous system.")
(10) Without the VF everywhere present in the body, the "chemical" organism is unable to maintain itself and therefore dies.
(11) When a man falls ill, the VF becomes "untuned" by the "dynamic" influence of the disease agent.
(12) The VF then brings about the disagreeable sensations and abnormal functions called disease accessible to the senses of patient and doctor, and which represent the "whole" disease. Conversely, the disappearance of all perceptible deviations from health, means the VF has recovered its normal integrity.
(13) Disease, excluding surgical cases, is NOT an entity hidden in the interior of the organism, separate from its living totality,
NOR an entity separate from the VF.
(14) There is no curable disease that does not announce itself through subjective and objective symptoms.
(15) The suffering of the untuned VF and the totality of perceptible symptoms that represent the disease are one and the same. The "chemical" organism and VF are inseparable. The doctor has therefore only to eliminate the "totality of symptoms" to simultaneously restore the VF AND eradicate the disease.
(16) Disease agents can only untune the "dynamic" VF in a "dynamic" way. The doctor can only correct the untunement by acting on the VF with medicines which also have "dynamic" actions,
BUT only when the "totality of symptoms" have revealed the disease to the carefully observing and enquiring doctor, so that they can be cured.
(18) The "totality of symptoms" in each individual case is the only indication guiding to the choice of medicine.
Medicines can cure disease only if they possess the power to alter the way a person feels and functions. Indeed, it is ONLY because of this power that they are medicines at all.
The "totality of symptoms" associated with each medicine is first carefully studied in the healthy.
(22) Substances become medicines because they can arouse certain symptoms and signs which can destroy symptoms/signs which exist in the natural disease of the patient, PROVIDED that the two sets of symptoms closely match, established by pure experiment.
Administered properly potentised in small doses, the medicine will rapidly and permanently destroy the totality of symptoms in the patient and therefore the disease.
(26) A natural law of Homeopathy: In living organisms, a weaker dynamic affection is permanently extinguished by a stronger one (in this case, the medicine) which, though different in nature, greatly resembles it in expression.
(31) Disease agents do not have the absolute power to untune our VF. We fall ill ONLY when susceptible, for whatever reason. So, disease agents do not make everybody sick each time.
(32) On the other hand, medicines (conceptually "artificial diseases") affect EVERY person, EVERY time, to bring about its characteristic symptom pattern.
(33) The medicine must be both very similar in symptoms to the natural disease AND stronger than it.
In this situation, the medicine transfers the untunement of the VF caused by the natural disease to an artificial disease condition, but only when very similar in symptoms to the natural one. The natural disease becomes disengaged or taken over, and extinguished. The medicinal artificial disease, when the body realises there is no disease agent, then quickly wanes leaving only health.
(35) Medicines which are not homeopathic will never cure any disease.
(38) Two dissimilar diseases meeting in a person will compete such that the stronger will temporarily suppress and suspend the milder one until the stronger disease has run its course. Then, the milder disease reappears, uncured, to express its symptoms.
(42) Two similar natural diseases cannot ward off or suspend each other such that one comes back after the disappearance of the most recent. Neither can they coexist in the same organism if they are similar in symptoms and effects. The stronger DESTROYS the weaker.
The VF can only become "untuned" by ONE disease at any one time. In this case, the weaker disease is completely extinguished by the stronger...the weaker was only a "dynamic" affection anyway.
(54) Allopathy (Convention Medicine, in Hahnemann's time):
(A). Allopathy generally uses speculation and scholastic arguments instead of observation of natural phenomena and experimentation.
(B). "Cure" in disease means a material to be expelled.
(C). Uses mixed drugs and crude (large) doses.
(D). Maintains its credibility through palliative relief.
(63) Every medicine that acts to alter the VF, brings about modifications to health called the PRIMARY ACTION.
The primary action is a product of both the medicine and the VF, but mainly the former. The VF is initially passive, and accepts the medicine's action.
But later, the VF tends to oppose the influence by the medicine, and this is called the SECONDARY ACTION. And this opposite action usually matches the strength of the medicine's primary action.
(66) But small Homeopathic doses produce a primary action which is barely perceptible at all, and the VF's opposite secondary action is the same.
(68) The medicine may introduce a slight medicinal disease ALONE in the body, but it is fleeting and mild, and so the VF can easily act on this small disturbance to restore complete cure.
(69) Palliative medicines: Exactly the opposite happens in palliative procedures. The doctor chooses medicine with the opposite symptom to the patient's complaining symptom. But, this only hides the patient's symptom from the VF for a while. Palliative medicine cannot supplant the pathologically untuned VF in the organism - it only makes the VF insensible to it by producing a condition completely different from the untunement. And the effects of the palliative soon disappear leaving the natural disease intact.
The secondary action of the VF to the palliative worsens the disease symptom it temporarily alleviated. The larger the dose of palliative, the worse this opposite aggravation.
(70) Summary of the preceding aphorisms.
(71) Summary of the following aphorisms: Human diseases are nothing but groups of symptoms which are destroyed/changed into health by medicinal substances that artificially produce similar disease symptoms. There are THREE questions to the task of curing disease:
Q1: How does the doctor ascertain what needs to be known about diseases in order to cure them?
Q2: How does he investigate the curative nature of Homeopathic medicines?
Q3: How does he apply Homeopathic medicines most effectively to cure diseases?
Q1: Aphorisms 72-104: Ascertaining what needs to be known about diseases:
Diseases are ACUTE or CHRONIC. Acute diseases are rapid disease processes/untunements of the VF which run their course and end quickly. Chronic diseases, enigmatic initially, dynamically untune the living organism from health gradually in their own characteristic way. The VF can only imperfectly resist. As disease progresses, the VF becomes ever more untuned, until death. These diseases are inherited, i.e., genetic in origin, but are still considered, in nature, to be "dynamic" contagions.
(73) Acute diseases are brought on by harmful influences, but are mostly "flare-ups" of a latent chronic disease, which then returns to a dormant state if the flare-up is not too severe, nor long acting.
(74) Chronic: Must include all the diseases artificially created by Allopathy, which relentlessly weaken the VF. For example, true local inflammations are cured by Homeopathic medicines that dynamically remove the underlying arterial irritations, yet the Allopathic solution may even result in death.
(77) Persistent diseases resulting from avoidable noxious influences that are not chronic, go away on their own when living conditions are improved.
(78) True chronic diseases arise from inherited factors, and continue to worsen until death, even in those with robust constitutions and in ideal living conditions. A young person may appear to be healthy, but a chronic disease may be present which remains hidden for years, only to emerge later after stressful events.
(79) Three categories of chronic diseases:
1. Syphilis, 2. Gonorrhoea (sycosis) are chronic diseases which persist until death if not treated.
(80) The third kind is called PSORA, the underlying cause of immeasurable chronic diseases, which I spent 12 years studying. My new medicines, along with those pre-existing, treat all these conditions.
(81) Concerns about Allopaths' wrongful naming of diseases, and failure to distinguish between many of them.
(82) In chronic disease, as in acute, the doctor must gather all symptoms and signs in each individual case by the same means. This symptom gathering is far more difficult than in acute diseases, as the chronic ones subtly evolve over years.
(84-99) The detailed procedure and guidelines for taking the case (to obtain all manifestations of the patient's illness).
(100-103) Additional procedure for epidemics.
(104) Monitoring of the case.
Q2: Aphorisms 105-145: How does the doctor investigate the curative nature of Homeopathic medicines, the tools of Homeopathic cure?
Must know the entire pathogenetic action of as many medicines as possible in the healthy so as to increase the choice of satisfactorily matching to natural diseases.
(108) Moderate doses of medicines are given experimentally to the healthy to ascertain all manifestations both physically and in the psyche (called a "proving"). Ref. "Force of medicines observed in the healthy human body", 1805. I was the first person to do this, though others have accidentally 'proved' substances, e.g., poisons. This extensive work was a reflection of my faith in the Homeopathic method, the only way to completely cure human disease.
(111) These provings convince me that medicinal substances pathologically alter human healthy human bodies ACCORDING TO DEFINITE ETERNAL NATURAL LAWS and that by virtue of these laws, EACH SUBSTANCE CAN PRODUCE THESE SPECIFIC FIXED RELIABLE DISEASE SYMPTOMS THAT ARE CHARACTERISTIC OF IT.
(112) Medicines taken immoderately can have very serious or fatal consequences. This does not occur at the beginning but at the end, with completely opposite symptoms, and is the SECONDARY ACTION or COUNTERACTION by the VF. In controlled doses of H. medicines the secondary actions are barely noticeable, just enough to re-establish the healthy state.
(113) Narcotics seem to be an exception though in pure experimentation the secondary action is detectable.
(115) Alternating action.
(116) In medicine provings, some symptoms are seen in many people, and other symptoms much less frequently. This is related to the physical disposition of a few 'sensitive' people. But these symptoms only appear not to be affecting the less sensitive people, because these medicinal symptoms, when associated with a homeopathically chosen medicine, act on ALL sick people with that symptom presentation.
118) Every medicine has a unique total pattern of effects, and this must be fully investigated, by pure experiment ("Proving").
(121) Medicines have a range of strengths. The stronger are effective in small doses. The milder must be given in larger doses. The weakest ones only reveal their actions when tested on delicate/sensitive healthy people.
(124) Each medicine must be taken completely alone on the day it is administered.
(126) Provers must be trustworthy and conscientious.
(128) Crude medicinal substances do not express all their symptoms nearly as well as when potentised, e.g., to 30c. With these potencies, their virtues are developed to an unbelievable degree.
(129) There is remarkable variation in the sensitivity of people to doses. The robust require MUCH larger doses to present symptoms. But, must START with low doses, because you cannot predict who will be robust and who sensitive to this particular medicine.
(135) All symptoms associated with a medicine do not appear in all provers... need multiple persons of both sexes for a complete proving.
(137) Sensitive persons are the best for obtaining the primary actions (i.e., symptoms) of the medicine before they become clouded by the secondary counteractions of the VF.
(143) After many detailed provings, the medicines' characteristics are fully listed in "Materia Medicae".
(145) There is a need for more than the 99 available medicines to better treat all chronic diseases, though it is possible to manage with this relatively small number.
Q3: Aphorisms 146+: Most effective employment of the Homeopathic medicines for the cure of natural diseases.
END OF PART 1 of 2
