contrast is no longer just. Homoeopathy has a well-defined law which has been established [like all laws] empirically and is constantly and properly being subjected to re-verification through careful experiments. We also have at last, after much groping and long years of work obtained a law of therapeutics, a principle of therapeutic effort namely the principle of immunity - natural and acquired, and of the means by which it may be attained, augmented, protected.

To increase the power of the organism to resist disease is the aim of our diet-therapy, our hydrotherapy, our mechanical and surgical therapy, our mind cure, rest cure, and work cure, our climatic and hygienic efforts, and of all the most satisfactory part of our drug-therapy. That this law is as wide as the law of similars, I think you will agree with me, for though it does not cover all our pharmacology it does extend over the other fields of our therapeutics where food, water, light, air, exercise, mind cure and even much of surgery find their place.

Your principle does not yet apply to all cases. Neither does ours. Your principle is empirically built up and empirically verified; so is ours. We are not bound by our principle, nor you by yours, but in both schools the principle guides research and stimulates discovery, which is the true function of a principle.

Our views of the founder of homoeopathy are far less divergent from yours than they were fifty years ago. We recognize now that in his day and generation he stood for a great and beneficent reform in medicine. The "gentle action" of homoeopathic remedies and the "high regard for the unaided powers of nature" which is characteristic of homoeopathy are in refreshing contrast with the violent and obviously harmful methods of Old School practice in Hahnemann's day. Had we lived in that age how fortunate would any one of us have been who fell into Hahnemann's hands and so escaped being bled, purged, puked, sweated and salivated, as was then the custom of our school. All this we now recognize. On the other hand, homœopaths no longer feel bound to defend everything in Hahnemann's system, and generally recognize that in many respects the science of medicine has not stood still since he died.

Do I then think that there is entire agreement between our schools? Not at all. We have come far towards you and you far towards us. Which has gone the further I do not know nor care, but we are still far apart in a portion of our pharmacology, and my purpose in the remainder of this paper is to indicate certain ways by which, I think, we can come nearer still.

First of all, one thing is certain. There must be concessions on both sides - not only on your side, if we are to get together. We must admit that we have been wrong in the past and probably are still wrong in many points. We have certainly been wrong some of us, in our prejudices against homoeopaths, in blaming all homœopaths for the faults of a few. I confessed to you a year ago how much surprised I was to find that there were homoeopaths both honest and intelligent. Well, there are still a good many of our school who have not made the discovery, and it is high time that

they should. I suppose there are also in your body some who find it hard to believe that we of our school are not all arrogant and prejudiced.

VII

SOME OF OUR MISTAKES

We have been wrong in the past in refusing to consult with homœopaths and to join with them in state and national societies. But we have seen and admitted our wrong and are doing our best to get together with you wherever you will meet us now.

We have been wrong and irritating in arrogating to ourselves the term of "regular" as opposed to homoeopathic. You have been kind enough to spare us more and more of late that ridiculous term “allopath," and to call us by the neutral name of "old school." This is by no means a perfect designation for an up-to-date profession which in therapeutics has largely repudiated its past and now agrees with you in everything else. Still, in the interests of harmony I think we should sacrifice something, and no one can help recognizing the arrogance of the term "regular."

We have been wrong in saying and believing, as we often have, that there are no real homoeopathists nowadays, none that really take Hahnemann's doctrine of similars seriously. One of the things that has most impressed me in my friendly and pleasant contact with homoeopaths during the past year has been the studious care with which my friends in your school endeavor to select remedies according to the law of similars, and the unfeigned confidence which (in certain cases) they place in these remedies.

We have been wrong in not admitting more candidly the bearing of certain well-known facts of pharmacology on the issue between your school and ours. The use of digitalis in relatively small doses to relieve symptoms similar to those of its overdose, the partial similarity between the symptoms of scarlet fever and those of belladonna poisoning, the supposed value of ipecac in controlling nausea (still stated in our text-books, though most of us fail to obtain any such effects) the fact that you can produce some (by no means all) of the symptoms of malaria by large doses of quinine and some lesions like those of syphilis by overdosing with mercury, that nitroglycerine will often produce and sometimes cure a headache all these are facts which we should realize and whose significance we should study as far as we can.

We have been wrong in experimenting so little as we have with homœopathic remedies. The whole question for us should be, do they work? Not long ago I suggested during a consultation that it would be well to try 1-25 of a grain of calomel in repeated doses for a toxic diarrhoea in an old lady. The attending physician was horror stricken. "Why, that's homoeopathy," he said. "Well," I said, "it was suggested to me by an old school physician, one of the bestknown men in this country, and he learned it from his father who was a homoeopath. Let's try it, anyway.'

So we did try it and excellent were the results.

We ought to be as free in using your remedies as you are in using ours, and in acknowledging publicly the good or the harm that results.

VIII

SOME OF YOUR MISTAKES

Now, after these confessions, I hope I shall not seem arrogant when I venture to suggest certain changes to you, changes that might operate to remove sources of misunderstanding and irritation between our school and yours. I will begin with some trifling matters of nomenclature which yet have their importance as causes of friction.

I think you homoeopaths are somewhat too tenacious in your hold on roots and stems not in the botanical but in the linguistic

sense.

(a) The German word "Prüfung" is a good word, but its proper translation is not "proving" but testing or erperimenting. Proof in ordinary English means something very different from experimentation. When you speak of proving this or that, the impression naturally conveyed is that you are demonstrating what is already true, as one does in geometry, whereas in medicine your effort is an open-minded search to find out what the truth is. The lawyer who can and will prove anything is justly called a liar, but if proof meant only test, the readiness to prove all things (as in the Scriptural usage no longer current) is most praiseworthy.

I should suggest, then, that you no longer hold yourselves aloof from common usage, and translate in future the word "prüfung" as the rest of the world translates it, namely as testing. Thus you will sound more open-minded and less dogmatic.

(b) The Latin word "Cura" is not to be translated as cure, but as care. Of course you all know that as well as I, but I cannot help thinking that misunderstandings have arisen in the past because you have spoken of curing disease with a drug when you have realized as well as we do that nature does the larger part of the work, assisted more or less by our drugs and other remedial measures.

To us, and I think to the public in general, a drug that cures a disease is a specific, yet I take it that Dr. J. H. Clarke properly states your position when he says ("Homœopathy Explained," p. 149) "In homoeopathy we have, as I have shown over and over again, no specific for diseases." You cure diseases as little as the rest of us. You take care of the patient and promote his recovery by drugs and other measures. It sounds arrogant to say as homeopathists sometimes do that the old school palliates while homoeopathy cures. It is, I believe, an over-fondness for stems and roots that has lead to this misunderstanding. Let us use the word "cure" only when we believe that we have a demonstrable specific for a disease, as we think we have in quinine and diphtheria antitoxin.

(c) In naming drugs let us keep as close as we can to current usage outside the profession and cease to hold ourselves aloof. Let us call a spade a spade; let us call corrosive sublimate by its christian name rather than by the stumps of two name like merc. corr. when we mean charcoal, let us not call it carbo; when we mean sulphur and oyster shells, let us say so rather than cling to that curious relic "hepar sulph." When one means lime, why should one say calcarea?

Now, I am quite aware that many of our own school are doing

the same thing when they write their prescriptions in barbarous medieval Latin, or speak of nitroglycerine as glonoin. But it is, I think, a mistake in all cases.

(d) Finally, I think it would conduce to clearness in discussion, if both parties would be careful not to limit therapeutics to drug therapeutics, for that accents unduly the differences between our schools. We agree not only in the diagnosis, prognosis and course of disease, but in the whole of therapeutics outside of drug therapeutics and in a portion of drug therapeutics itself. One of our chief grounds of difference, and one not always appreciated by homœopaths is in the relative importance of drug therapy as compared with other forms of treatment. The best men of our school to-day use far less medicine, I should judge - even in actual bulk-than you do. The chief issue between us is not between homœopathic drugging and old school drugging, but between the old school physician with very little emphasis on drugs and very much on hygiene, dietetics, mechanical, physical and psychic therapy, and the homoeopath who adds to a certain belief in these remedial agents a much larger belief in drugs. I doubt if you gentlemen realize how large a proportion of our patients are treated without any drugs at all, and how little faith we have to-day in the curative power of drugs. I think most men of our school to-day would say that the only diseases really cured by drugs are malaria, diphtheria, myxedema and those due to intestinal parasites.

Gentlemen, we want the truth, all of it that we can get hold of. So do you. Two ships that steer for the same port are sure to come together sooner or later, no matter how far apart they may be on the ocean: If we keep ourselves in this mind, if we are fair and honest and not uncharitable, we shall pool our knowledge some day and abolish sectarianism in medicine. I hope and pray that this consummation may come in our life time. Whether it does or not depends largely upon us our earnestness, our honesty and our good will.

THE QUESTION OF A COMMON GROUND IN THERAPEUTICS

BY WALTER wesselhoeft, M.D., PROfessor of CLINICAL MEDICINE BOSTON UNIVERSITY.

In seeking a point of departure from which to proceed to the adjustment of differences a century old, it must be remembered at the outset that the common ground of which we are in quest is to be sought in two directions, the direction of theory and that of practice. They cannot be strictly consistent with each other until we are in possession of much more positive knowledge than we now command. Our theories may be logical and scientifically correct, but the exigencies of practice too often demand expedients to make it possible to adhere undeviatingly to the soundest principles. We shall therefore dismiss at once all reference to an exclusive dogma or any similar man of straw such as has too often figured in our polemics. For

the followers of Hahnemann there has never been a reasonable doubt as to the existence of a common ground on which to meet easily those with whom they have been forced by reason and experience to differ on points of principles of practice. But they have refused to admit that this ground could properly be of their opponents' choosing. These latter, on the other hand, have declared until now that the only ground on which to meet must be that occupied by themselves. It now appears that time has softened in a measure the asperities arising out of this antagonism, and that convictions are gaining ground in many quarters that an approach towards harmony is among the possibilities of the present day.

From the side of the homoeopaths, at least, the neutral ground of which they have never wholly lost sight, despite many obscuring influences and misdirected wanderings, is more plainly in view than ever, in consequence of the later developments in medical thought and the resulting changes in practice, on the part of the profession at large, changes which need to be carried but a few steps further to bring fully into view that form of agreement which alone can obtain among those dealing with problems partially or wholly unsolved. It cannot, in the nature of things, be a perfect agreement; but in order to reach an understanding it cannot be difficult, with good will, to proceed from the points on which we already agree as rational physicians to those on which a more perfect agreement is possible.

We may leave behind us as no longer in debate all the more positive knowledge of the profession concerning the structure and functions of the human organism in their more observable aspects. There is no homoeopathic anatomy or physiology, nor is there a homoeopathic pathology so far as concerns the observable structural and functional departures from the normal. The body of inferences and speculations from these departures, however, may show wide differences in many respects. Hence there is no homoeopathie surgery, ophthalmology, laryngology or other specialty, as the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal erroneously supposes, nor is there any longer a homoeopathic hygiene or sanitary science distinct from that of the dominant school. In all these fields constituting so large a part of medicine there can be no wider divergencies of opinion and practice between the two parties in issue than those existing between individuals of either side. Here we are on ground so unreservedly accepted by both sides that their differences in practice are of vanishing importance. The main obstacle to a more perfect agreement lies in the narrow field of pharmacc-therapeutics alone, out of which all the errors, all the dissensions and all the endless confusion have arisen from the beginning.

To bring something like order out of this confusion an expedient. way presents itself in the discussion of the principles, methods and general resources of modern therapeutics formulated in a recent address of Professor Goldscheider of Berlin on "Natural Therapeuties," or, to translate more correctly, on "Therapeutics in Conformity with Nature." To the majority of homoeopaths this brief review

*

Deutsche Med Wochenschrift, March 8, 1906.