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Untitled Article
" The allopathic mode , reader , is the one hitherto admitted as legitimate and tenable ; the homoaopathic mode is that which first suggested itself to the mind of a German physician , more than thirty years ago , while engaged in the translation of Cullen ' s Materia Medica . Homoeopathy may , for our present purpose , be translated * like loves like , or birds of a feather do well tog-ether ; ' it announces by a term that what creates
disturbance and disease , in all its apparent anomalies and varieties , will , in different proportions and in due adaptations , prove a remedy for that disease ; that poisons , like punishments , are ' mercies in disguise ; ' and that to create a commotion in the frame of a contrary nature to that already established ; to practise , in other words , allopathically , is bungling in design and too often fatal in consequence ; that nosology is nonsense ; that to conceive of disordered conditions as abstract essences , is
downright absurdity ; and that nomenclature , as hitherto constructed , is mere verbiage . "—p . 5-6 . The Doctor adds a generalized illustration of the theory in a note to the foregoing passage : — " I shall be laughed at for intimating that something like this law of
agency may be traced through all circumstance and all being , theological , moral , metaphysical , and physical . ' I / homrne empoisonne avec le fruit de vie , ' says Chateaubriand . c Lust , through certain strainers well refined , is gentle love , ' &c . says the master-poet , at once of good sense and genius . High conceptions , not duly balanced , constitute insanity ; and arsenic , even allopathists allow , is at once a violent poison and an excellent restorative /'—p . 6 .
We commend him for pausing in his extract from Pope ' s libel on women , who even in the sentence as thus partly purified shewed as little " good sense' * as , in our apprehension , he ever did of " genius . " Not that we mean to deny that Pope was an illustration of Homoeopathy . There is no surer cure of a taste for Pope than more Pope . It is as he says .
" Shallow draughts intoxicate the brain , And drinking largely sobers us again . ' * For the best summary of this celebrated theory , " at a very little expense and trouble , " Dr Uwins refers us to a publication on the subject by the Rev . Thomas Everest . His own partial adoption of it , is thus guarded : —
" In the present tract I am not , however , intending anything like a direct advocacy of all this assumption ; I do not mean even to go into the fundamentals of the doctrine of homoeopathy in an argumentative or even illustrative manner . I am disposed , indeed , to think that some of its positions and inferences are open to strong objection , and that a total discarding of allopathy constitutes one of its fallacies . The design of this tract is merely limited to an announcement ( upon the strength of a few recitals ) of the high value the similia in similtbus theory of medicine has proved in imparting a power to the medical practitioner which he never pdtsested before , and in helping to take off that weight from the rtrind of
Untitled Article
580 Critical Notices .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1836, page 580, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2661/page/56/
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