2.1 - THE ORGANON

2.1 - THE ORGANON (A Synopsis)

1. The physician's highest and only duty is to restore health to the sick, which is called healing. Healing ought to be accompanied in the most speedy, most gentle and most reliable manner. To do this he must know the ailment of the patient, select the remedy, the dose and its repetition according to each individual case. Sanitation and hygiene Art studies in which every physician must be well versed.

2. Constitution of the patient, his mind and temperament, occupation, mode of living and habits, social and domestic relations, age and sexual functions, etc. give us the individuality of the patient.

3. Deviations from the normal state show themselves by morbid signs or symptoms. The totality of these symptoms, this outwardly rejected image of the inner nature of the diseased state i.e., of suffering dynamic, or living force, is the principal and only condition to be recognized in order that they may be removed and health restored.

4. Life, a dynamic principle animates the material body and this material body passes away as soon as it is bereft of this life force. In health, harmonious vital force becomes deranged by the dynamic influence of some morbific agency inimical to life, hence abnormal functional activity, manifesting itself by morbid sensations and functions, by morbid symptoms.

This morbidly changed life force can only be restored to its normal state by a similarly acting dynamic power of the appropriate remedy, acting on the omnipresent susceptibility of the nerves of the organism. The total removal of all symptoms is health restored, and therefore the totality of symptoms observed in each individual case can be the only indication to guide us in the selection of a remedy. These aberrations from the state of health can only be removed by the curative power inherent in medicine to turn the sensorial condition of the body again into its normal state.

5. Experiments on animals, vivisection (scientific dissection or experiment) and autopsy (post-mortem examination) can never reveal the inherent power of medicine: the healthy human body alone is the fit subject for such experiments, where they excite numerous definite morbid symptoms, and it follows that if drugs act as curative remedies, they exercise this curative power only by virtue of altering bodily feelings through the production of peculiar symptoms, which then they are able to remove from the sick; in other words the remedy must be able to produce an artificial morbid condition similar to that of the natural disease.

6. Experience teaches that all drugs will, without exception, cure diseases the symptoms of which are as similar as possible to those of the drugs, and leave none uncured.

Natural diseases are removed by proper medicines, because the normal state is more readily affected by the right dose of a drug than by natural morbific agencies.

Physical and partly physical terrestrial forces show their greatest power where this life-power is below par, hence they do not affect everybody nor do they do so at all times. We may, therefore, assert that extraneous, noxious agencies possess only a subordinate and conditional power, while drug potencies possess an absolute unconditional power.

Drug disease is substituted for the natural disease, when the drug causes symptoms most similar to that which is to be cured, and it is hardly possible to perform a cure by means of drugs incapable of producing in the organism a diseased condition similar to that which is to be cured.

Palliation of prominent symptoms should be ignored, as it provides only in part for a single symptom, it may bring partial relief but this is soon followed by a perceptible aggravation of the entire disease.