"And such deep thoughts would o'er me pass, "'Twas when the sun had left his ray And I had glided far away Down the pure stream with happy eye. "I heard upon the silver lake The murmur of a distant song A sound as if a spirit spake To me, as I was borne along. "Trembling with fear, but still impelled By that bewildering voice and tone, I swept the wave, as firm I held The sail that on its bosom shone. "No spirit there!-but by the shore Reclined a form of mortal grace, Such as I ne'er had seen before, But often in my dreams could trace "And from that moment I became My home--my race-their very name, "Still as the fading sunlight threw "To gaze but for an instant where Reposed the form I loved in sleep; To feel, to breathe, the very air That sometimes o'er his brow would creep: "For this I left my dreary home Far in the valley's gloomy shade, And through the flowery woods would come, "It could not last-there came the cry-- That issued from our warriors slain "And he had fallen-I saw them lead The Christian captive firmly bound; I saw them drag with fearful speed Their victim to the torture-ground! "He dies! The fatal words were borne What hand should rend those chords apart! "Once to the fight they rushed again 'Twas but a spring to set him free: One effort and I burst the chain! 'Twas done! he lived, but not for me! "It mattered not I felt his breath Come to my fevered cheek and brow; It mattered not-the doom-the death, That might await the deed e'en now, "We parted-and the night was o'er; Paler and paler grew each star; "And now it seems that spirit's voice Calls me across the deep blue lake- Hushed were the words that floated low Nor left a sound, a trace behind. The soft gray morning lit the waves, A form beneath, in darkness slept. Far down among the rocks, they found C. R. Da Ponta THE HOMEOPATHIC THEORY. ORGANON de l'Art de Guerir. Par le Dr. SAMUEL HAHNEMANN. LETTER to the Physicians of France, on Homœopathy. By the COUNT DES GUIDI: Translated by WILLIAM CHANNING, M. D., New-York. CONCISE View of the Rise and Progress of Homoeopathy. By CONSTANTIN HENRY, M. D. From the German. By C. F. MATLACK, M. D., Philadelphia. Ir is a common error to suppose that the professional man alone is interested in the improvement of professional knowledge and professional systems; yet no one whose fortune lies at stake in the hands of a court consisting of legal advocates, (i. e. lawyers,) and legal arbiters, (judges,) but would entertain a desire that the provisions of the law, to which he has appealed, were less mysteriously hidden from the comprehension of the uninitiated, "that he who runs might read." What unfortunate sufferer from fever, dropsy, gout, rheumatism, or even a vulgar tooth-ache, but would wish that, if he could not apprehend himself the nature of the remedies proposed to him, he might at least feel a moderate assurance that the practitioner possessed sufficient knowledge of his art to elucidate the modus operandi of his curatives. Yet such is surely not the case; nor is there ground for a reasonable hope that ever it will be, while the pride of profession, though not indeed its true and legitimate interests, resists so vigorously all attempts to interfere with the awful sanctity of professional mysteries. We, however, not having the fear of the Doctor (a reasonable fear, it certainly is,) before our eyes, shall venture to remove, in part, the veil; or rather, while we secure impunity for ourselves in the preservation of our incognito, to put forward, in this perilous undertaking, a more daring innovator in the healing art—an art scarcely less honorable, and certainly not much less salutary, than the noble art of war-videlicit, the art of killing. By the way, of this same art, how many generations of articulate speaking men have passed away since its perfecting in the application of nitre, charcoal, and sulphur, to the purposes of war! What a still greater lapse and loss of time since the introduction of the art itself, by him who did the first murder," till the happy era of Roger Bacon, the philosopher-or shall we call him the magician-the philanthropist-in a word, the inventor of Gunpowder! How many rival arts since then have arisen for the admiration of mankind! How have their votaries sunk into oblivion before the fame of those who have been successful in the more lordly exercise of arms! Next, indeed, but at a distance immeasurably humble, stands the profession of the healing art, which, however it may have been slighted by the clamorous many who find it easier to kill than cure, requires more, far more, "Of meditation deep and thought profound," if we may assume as a criterion the length of time which has been required to bring it to perfection. Achilles and Chiron, Hippocrates and Pericles, are well enough; yet these were vulgar heroes at the best!mere retailers of the inventions of some greater minds, whose fame, as inventors and benefactors of mankind, long years and envious fate had buried in darkness, even at a period so remote. Kings and demi-gods had taught the art of war before, and Esculapius had discovered, it may be, the virtues of cathartics in cholic, and camphor in cholera. The Macedonian Phalanx and the Roman Legion, however, bear witness that all invention had not been exhausted by those elder worthies of the mysteries first brought by Cain to man, though all fell short of that great archetype, until we reach the glorious era to which we have already referred-the era of the first of English philosophers. And whom shall we place against Roger Bacon, in order to vindicate for the heroes of the lancet and the leech, the glory of as high a name? As Americans, we regret that we cannot even hope for it among our much-loved countrymen; patriotism, of course, forbids our looking for it in England-but with Germany we have no rivalry-to Germany we may freely grant not only all she asks, but something more-to Hahnemann, the boast of having perfected the healing art-of offering a cure to all whose destiny it is to be cured. Homœopathy! armed with this potent spell, the physician ventures boldly to the bed of sickness, and all the ghastly crew all fly at his approach, and yield their anticipated victim to the magic of his art! The reader may be curious to learn in what consists the secret of this strange innovation. He shall hear it; but if already a neophyte in this new faith, let him not be repulsed, however startling be the initiatory dogma: "Similia similibus curentur," anglice To make the sick man well, first make the sick man worse; and bye and bye, to find out how to make the sick man well, first make the well man sick. Here ends, however, all the difficulty, if not all the danger. Once past this point of faith, the patient may meet his doctor without a fear. The grim array of potions, blisters, boluses, and pills, have no more terrors for his mind! The Hahnemannist draws from his vest a little box of sweets; takes from it, smaller than an emmet's egg, a pellet of honied snow; concealed in a thousand times its own weight of sugar, the patient takes a quantity of medicine, infinitely small, and fancies that he has taken but a dew-drop in his mouth. "So the fond mother her sick infant blinds; With sweetest nectar; pleased with what he finds Drinks the delusive draught, and thus deluded, lives." Hahnemann was born at Meisen, in Saxony, in the year 1775, of extremely indigent parents; but his extraordinary talents, manifested at a very early age, obtained for him the countenance of those who were both willing and able to bestow on him an education calculated to develope his singular genius. In 1779, he was authorized by the University of Erlangen to assume the title and exercise the profession of an M. D.,— the profession in which he was destined afterwards to make so conspicuous and so eccentric a figure. After eleven years of practice, which only served to dissatisfy him with all the schools of medicine, which, without benefit to mankind, had superseded each other, he chanced to be struck with the whimsical thought of trying on himself, in health, the effects of one of the medicines then greatly in vogue. This first experiment was made with Cinchona, the "sovereignest thing on earth," for intermittents. But what was the surprise of the experimenter, on finding this remedy a producer of the disease it was believed to cure! Yet even so it was. The Doctor went to bed with a raging intermittent, and lo, the origin of Homœopathy! "Hahnemann discovered," says Des Guidi, "in thus experimenting upon himself, that the Cinchona has the power of creating an intermittent fever, analogous to that form of it which it cures most perfectly. This unforeseen result forced upon him the recollection that the sovereign antisyphilitic has also the property of producing syphiloid symptoms; and that a kind of itch is caused by sulphur, itself a powerful antipsoric. "This approximation under the same law, of three substances, and those the very articles whose salutary action has given to medicine its most uniform and most certain results, ought it to rest here? Would you yourselves be contented with it? And could Hahnemann dispense with rallying to these three primary facts, the numerous other facts we have mentioned, all of which, in the same manner as the Cinchona, the Sulphur, and the Mercury, display the marvellous exhibition of a curative virtue existing in a power analogous to that of the disease itself? Could he forget how striking was the resemblance of the vaccine disease to the variola which it displaces? Could he forget that the vis medicatrix naturæ— the conservative instinct of organized beings-manifests itself ordinarily by an augmentation of the disorder, and that in the maladies cured by nature alone, it is precisely when the disease has reached its height that the cure commences? "So many data imposed upon the observer, as an imperative duty, the investigation of the general question, whether substances capable of producing diseases, were not also adequate to the cure of similar diseases; and accordingly the clinical observation of Hahnemann and of his friends, went to establish, that in fact Copper, for example, which causes bloody stools and convulsions, is all powerful against such diseases; that Colocynth, Rhubarb, Veratrum, cure many species of dysentery and diarrhea; that atoms of Cantharides extinguish inflammations of the bladder, &c., &c. It was in the course of these experiments, so new, so beautiful, so necessary to our shapeless Materia Medica, that Hahnemann himself, recognizing a confirmation of past observations, in a property of Belladonna to excite in the healthy man symptoms similar to those of Scarlet Fever, conceived the hope, and was soon enabled to establish by thousands of cases, that the Belladonna was sovereign against Scarlatina, not only as a remedy, but even as a preventive. This discovery, adopted a long time past in Germany by practitioners in all the schools, and which alone would suffice to immortalize him, appears but a by-play amidst the astonishing labors and multiplied discoveries of this wonderful man.” Let us see now what were his deductions from these facts, and in what manner he thought fit to present them to his brethren of the faculty: "The first and sole duty of the physician is, to restore health to the sick. This is the true art of healing. "The perfection of a cure consists in restoring health in a prompt, mild, and permanent manner; in removing and annihilating disease by the shortest, safest, and most certain means, upon principles that are at once plain and intelligible." "It may be easily conceived that every malady pre-supposes some change in the interior of the human economy; but our understandings only permit us to form a vague and dark conception of this change, from a view of the morbid symptoms, which are the sole guide we have to rely upon, except in cases that are purely surgical. The immediate essence of this internal and concealed change is undiscoverable, nor have we any certain means of arriving at it. "The symptoms are the only part of the disease accessible to the physician. "From this incontrovertible truth, that beyond the totality of symptoms there is nothing discoverable in diseases by which they could make known the nature of the medicines they stand in need of, we ought naturally to conclude that there can be no other indication whatever than the ensemble of the symptoms in each individual case to guide us in the choice of a remedy." "But, as we can discover nothing to remove in disease in order to change it into health, except the ensemble of the symptoms; as we also perceive nothing curative in medicines but their faculty of producing morbid symptoms in persons who are healthy, and of removing them from those who are diseased, it very naturally follows that medicines assume the character of remedies, and become capable of annihilating disease in no other manner than by exciting particular appearances and symptoms; or, to express it more clearly, a certain artificial disease which destroys the previous symptoms-that is to say, the natural disease which they are intended to cure. On the other hand, if we wish to destroy the entire symptoms of a disease, we ought to choose a medicine which has a tendency to excite similar or opposite symptoms." |