But that every cure ever performed by medicine should have been founded
upon this principle, although without the knowledge of a physician; that
the Homoeopathic axiom is, as Hahnemann asserts, "the sole law of nature
in therapeutics," a law of which nothing more than a transient glimpse
ever presented itself to the innumerable host of medical observers, is a
dogma of such sweeping extent, and pregnant novelty, that it demands a
corresponding breadth and depth of unquestionable facts to cover its vast
pretensions.
So much ridicule has been thrown upon the pretended powers of the minute
doses that I shall only touch upon this point for the purpose of
conveying, by illustrations, some shadow of ideas far transcending the
powers of the imagination to realize. It must be remembered that these
comparisons are not matters susceptible of dispute, being founded on
simple arithmetical computations, level to the capacity of any
intelligent schoolboy. A person who once wrote a very small pamphlet
made some show of objecting to calculations of thus kind, on the ground
that the highest dilutions could easily be made with a few ounces of
alcohol. But he should have remembered that at every successive dilution
he lays aside or throws away ninety-nine hundredths of the fluid on which
he is operating, and that, although he begins with a drop, he only
prepares a millionth, billionth, trillionth, and similar fractions of it,
all of which, added together, would constitute but a vastly minute
portion of the drop with which he began.
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