not, while he is recommending its
employment in the most critical and threatening diseases?
I think that, from what I have shown of the character of Hahnemann's
experiments, it would be a satisfaction to any candid inquirer to know
whether other persons, to whose assertions he could look with confidence,
confirm these pretended facts. Now there are many individuals, long and
well known to the scientific world, who have tried these experiments upon
healthy subjects, and utterly deny that their effects have at all
corresponded to Hahnemann's assertions.
I will take, for instance, the statements of Andral (and I am not
referring to his well-known public experiments in his hospital) as to the
result of his own trials. This distinguished physician is Professor of
Medicine in the School of Paris, and one of the most widely known and
valued authors upon practical and theoretical subjects the profession can
claim in any country. He is a man of great kindness of character, a most
liberal eclectic by nature and habit, of unquestioned integrity, and is
called, in the leading article of the first number of the "Homoepathic
Examiner," "an eminent and very enlightened allopathist." Assisted by a
number of other persons in good health, he experimented on the effects of
cinchona, aconite, sulphur, arnica, and the other most highly extolled
remedies. His experiments lasted a year, and he stated publicly to the
Academy of Medicine that they never produced the slightest appearance of
the symptoms attributed to them. The results of a man like this, so
extensively known as one of the most philosophical and candid, as well as
brilliant of instructors, and whose admirable abilities and signal
liberality are generally conceded, ought to be of great weight in
deciding the question.
M. Double, a well-known medical writer and a physician of high standing
in Paris, had occasion so long ago as 1801, before he had heard of
Homoeopathy, to make experiments upon Cinchona, or Peruvian bark. He and
several others took the drug in every kind of dose for four months, and
the fever it is pretended by Hahnemann to excite never was produced.
M. Bonnet, President of the Royal Society of Medicine of Bordeaux, had
occasion to observe many soldiers during the Peninsular War, who made use
of Cinchona as a preservative against different diseases, but he never
found it to produce the pretended paroxysms.
If any objection were made to evidence of this kind
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