Vol. 21 No. 2 April 2001

Samuel Hahnemann had publicly vowed that he would not stoop to respond to criticism of himself or his system of medicine, but in 1810 Professor August Friederich Hecker, a doctor who published a medical journal, fired a 109-page broadside at Hahnemann that he could not ignore.

What to do? He resorted to subterfuge. He wrote a long impassioned response which he connived with his publisher to attribute to his 24-year-old son, Friedrich, a medical student.

For fear of reprisal the work was not published till Friedrich had graduated (from Leipzig) in mid 1811. The work is entitled “Friedrich Hahnemann’s, the son, Refutation of Hecker’s Attacks on The Organon of Rational Medicine: An Explanatory Commentary on the Homœopathic Medical Doctrine” and was translated by Robert Dudgeon in the late 1800s.

The work is interesting because Hecker’s points are much the same as those made by some critics of homœopathy today.

Hecker’s objections are given here in liberal paraphrase, but Hahnemann’s responses are word-for-word from Dudgeon’s translation, though an ellipsis like this (. ..) shows where the material that seemed an aside has been left out.

• Hecker says (page 15 of Dudgeon): I don’t see how all the symptoms you have gathered up to form provings can be reliable because people react to medicinal substances in many very individual ways influenced by their gender, way of life and degree of susceptibility to the weather and the like – the way current and past illnesses have had an effect on them is very important, too. Indeed the reaction of people to medicines is so individual the same thing can act in quite the opposite way on two different people. And, importantly, your books do not always say the dose your trial subjects were given.

• Hahnemann replies: Hecker wonders why I give the peculiar effects of medicinal substances without mentioning the dose in which each was given. Just as if quality could be altered by quantity, just as if the faculty of a medicinal substance to act dynamically or spiritually could be changed by mere aggregation or subdivision!

The dose in experiments of this sort may be very various, and this was so in my trials; and yet the resulting effects were the same in kind and even in degree, according as the constitutions of the subjects were more or less excitable and susceptible to the medicine. To fix the dose in each case beforehand would have been a useless procedure. But that the doses in trials of this sort must not be too small, and how large they must be as a rule, this is plainly enough said in the Organon in Article 103. This directs that the proper dose to be taken in the proving of medicines is what is usually given in ordinary medicine in diseases. [He repeats this paragraph in the three following editions; but in the fifth edition he recommends (Article 128) as best for proving purposes globules of the 30th dilution.]

If medicines cannot possibly have any positive, reliable effects, even on healthy persons, but only variable, diverse and even opposite effects, does not the wisdom of Doctor and Professor Hecker perceive how undecided and unreliable must be the effects of medicines in diseases whose number and whose perturbing effects on the body are so enormously large? In diseases which, unlike the multifarious influences of daily life that leave the person well, are, on the contrary, wont to make him ill.

If medicines are universally addicted to show nothing but undecided, always diverse, unreliable effects on human beings, even healthy ones, then it must be impossible to trust to the effects of medicines in diseases!

Patients besides being exposed to most of the external influences Hecker thinks so much of, to which the healthy also are subject, are, according to him, liable to many more alterations than the healthy. Consequently the effects of medicines on patients must naturally be much less precise and reliable, indeed so undeterminable, so unreliable and perverse, that it were impossible to imagine an intentional cure of diseases by medicines! So farewell to the whole lot of books on materia medica, goodbye to the numerous treatises on therapeutics and practical medicine of all sorts which have hitherto been founded on the reliability of medicines!

What use is there now for professors of therapeutics and clinical medicine? For there is no longer a possibility of an art of medicine!

Bent on confuting me, Hecker does not see what a blow he gives to the cracked gothic building of his patched-up medical system by this lovely demonstration of his, by which he only meant to show up the fallacy of the observations of medicinal symptoms recorded in my books!

Capital! By insisting on the deceitful character of all medicinal effects on the healthy and diseased body, Hecker clearly demonstrates the impossibility of any medical art and reduces the medical profession to utter nullity.

• Hecker asks (page 21): How is it that Hahnemann has observed from Chamomilla wonderful symptoms resembling those of the most powerful poisonous plants, but no one else has seen such symptoms – indeed chamomile is drunk as a herbal tea by countless people?

• Hahnemann says: In order to say something against me, Hecker goes beyond his previous assertions and transgresses the canons of honest controversy when he says symptoms like those of the most powerful vegetable poisons are ascribed to Chamomilla.

But the most powerful so-called vegetable poisons kill in large doses. Have I ever said that of Chamomilla? His exaggerations thus become untruths.

Who can fail to perceive that people have become so habituated to these medicinal substances by their daily use as ordinary domestic remedies, that they are almost incapable of exciting any striking effects? Must that appear strange to any man whose business it ought to be to reflect?

[Today, in defending homœopathy, we can point out how some people are affected by foods, medicines, inhaled things, and things on their skin that are harmless, even beneficial, to millions of people – peanuts can kill some people, bananas can cause diarrhœa with terrible gut pain, penicillin can kill, housedust mite in the air can cause near-fatal asthma, some people can not wear silver jewellery. Homœopathic provings sometimes produce effects like this in people who showed no such reactions to the things used to make the potentised substances when taken, or exposed to them, in their crude form.- Editor]

• Hecker says (page 62): Many burning, acrid things beside the clematis plant cause eruptions (and yet cure none); but on the other hand many eruptions are cured by things that have never been known to cause eruptions.

• Hahnemann responds: If the welfare of mankind can be promoted by unfounded assertions, then we must confess that the salvation of the world depends on Hecker. But God be praised! it depends on quite the opposite. Where are the many burning acrid things, whose internal use (for it is only a question of this) causes eruptions without their being able to cure such? Let Hecker tell us their names if he would avoid the imputation of making mendacious allegations! And again, what are the things which heal eruptions quickly and permanently by being administered internally (for there is no questions here of their external employment; that may be left to routinists unconcerned about the consequences of their treatment), but which never cause such eruptions? What does the reader think of such an irrational style of argument?

It remains eternally true that medicinal substances which are capable of producing certain eruptions (for their number is enormous) by their internal administration, can and must cure similar eruptions when given only internally. More than this is not needed to establish the truth of the homœopathic law of cure according to nature. What only smarts and erodes the skin when applied externally is quite another thing, and does not belong to the present subject.

• Hecker retorts (pages 100-101): As long as the world has existed mercury has never caused syphilis, nor sulphur itch, but millions have been cured of these conditions with these remedies. And has any young woman taking iron supplements become iron-deficient anæmic? How can this, according to your theory, be so?

• Hahnemann says: Though Hecker has said many of the symptoms could not possibly have occurred, of several medicines it is said that they cause rheumatic or arthritic pains, but rheumatism and arthritis are definite, peculiar forms of disease, which certainly cannot be caused by any medicine in the world . . . But who ever said that the provers had the ordinary rheumatism of the nosological works, or common gout, or even, that they had anything of the sort? They only likened the pains they felt to the rheumatic and gouty kinds of pain; it would not have been right for the author to substitute other words than those they had used to express their sensations.

Hecker writes as if anæmia (chlorosis) is invariably treated successfully with iron tonics, therefore too much would cause it. How often do you give iron in chlorosis without benefit!

Because you know not the reasons for its employment and cannot judge whether the symptoms of the chlorosis under your care, which you neglect to investigate as beneath your dignity, can or cannot be homœopathically covered by the symptoms of iron, which you also think yourself too grand to investigate. Were you guided by the teaching of nature, you could never (as you so often do) prescribe iron in one of the chloroses (they vary greatly) without the desired result. But, as things are, your single symptom treatment remains vain, irrational practice.

• Hecker asks (page 112): According to the teachings of the Organon diseases differ so much in character when they manifest in an individual it is as if they occur only once in the whole world in that exact form, so treatments can not be imitated. What is the use of a system of medicine that cannot come up with a range of powerful and almost-invariably-applicable remedies that may be used on such indications as measles, chickenpox, etc, but instead involves a lot of time-consuming rigmarole?

• Hahnemann replies: Treatments certainly should not be imitated without consideration, nor could they be . . . A report of cures ought only to teach us that other physicians effected cures in conformity with the symptom-similarity of the remedies employed, but they are not put forward for imitation as models of treatment. A rational physician must, when treating every new case, be guided by the totality of the symptoms present, in order that a perfect and rational cure (i.e. precisely in accordance with observable circumstances) may be obtained.

According to . . . unalterable law, according to which a disease must result from its producing causes, the definite symptoms of a medicine on the healthy body must make their appearance, and, in virtue of these its peculiar definite symptoms, it cures the disease consisting of similar symptoms.

“There are,” Hecker perorates, “in nature no perfectly homœopathic medicines which cause the forms of disease which they are to cure, quite exactly, with perfect completeness of the symptoms, which they, as Hahnemann says, quite cover, as two equal triangles must cover one another.” Hecker here seeks to delude the reader with the idea that I had insisted on this perfect covering of disease to detect this want of completeness. A cunning device! But see, the opposite of this is the truth; Hecker has not the slightest experience of all those things. In the Organon (Articles 162, 163, 164) I distinctly stated this want of perfect homœopathy (like the imperfections of all, even the best human inventions), and in precisely the same words as Hecker, in a dishonest manner, pretends are his own idea: “It is next to impossible that medicine and disease should cover one another symptomatically as exactly as two triangles with equal sides and equal angles.” Those are my words (Article 56) and he seeks to overthrow me with this very statement, just as though he were the first to discover this imperfection. What does the reader think of Hecker’s conduct?

How perfect or imperfect homœopathic medicines may be is not a subject that Hecker knows anything about, for he has never occupied himself with it. No one could know more about it than myself, and I had the candour to confess it. The acknowledgement of the defects of human things, in other respects very perfect, does credit to him who makes it.

It is the fate of mortal man to remain imperfect here below, and his works share this imperfection, however nearly they may approach perfection. Such is the will of the all-wise creator. It is honourable in man to admit this. In our case, these small imperfections detract nothing from the value of the homœopathic treatment, as they are inherent in the thing itself, because homœopathy can only make use of a similarity of the symptoms, but not of complete concordance and identity.

Hecker and his friends always seek to refer the disease under treatment to some general compartment of their pathological system – such is their favourite method of generalising – without taking much pains to ascertain the symptoms. But in the treatment itself, where none of the little known so-called specific remedies discovered by accident and directed towards a single symptom, such as cinchona in intermittent fever, iron in chlorosis, cinnamon in uterine hæmorrhages, etc, are applicable, and no palliative, like opium for pains and sleeplessness, purgatives in constipation, etc, can be administered, they fall back on their favourite general method. This favourite “general method” (as Hecker himself confesses in his book On Nervous Fever, 1808) “can only promote a cure by removing all injurious influences and by bringing the powers and functions of the body to, and maintaining them at, such a height that the disease can, under favourable circumstances of the patient and his surroundings – which, however, are no way dependent on us – take at least a favourable course. Here we add and subtract” (is that nothing of a partial character?) “in whole and part, and calmly await the good or evil issue.”

This is what Hecker himself says of his treatment. Can we consider the treatment of all diseases devised on one identical plan, and according to general indications, never susceptible of even tolerable certainty, in which good luck contributes most to any favourable result, as other than an extremely unsatisfactory, inefficient proceeding, consisting solely in trying, which blindly goes for diseases (of unknown nature and never specially considered in all their manifestations) with medicines (with whose special actions the practitioner is unacquainted, and which are often mixed together in one prescription), and calmly awaits the good or evil issue? What conscientious man could remain calm while rendering such a negation of help that has no better support than good luck and his own importance and ignorance.