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, I would refer to the
express experiments on many of the Homoeopathic substances, which were
given to healthy persons with every precaution as to diet and regimen, by
M. Louis Fleury, without being followed by the slightest of the pretended
consequences. And let me mention as a curious fact, that the same
quantity of arsenic given to one animal in the common form of the
unprepared powder, and to another after having been rubbed up into six
hundred globules, offered no particular difference of activity in the two
cases.
This is a strange contradiction to the doctrine of the development of
what they call dynamic power, by means of friction and subdivision.
In 1835 a public challenge was offered to the best known Homoeopathic
physician in Paris to select any ten substances asserted to produce the
most striking effects; to prepare them himself; to choose one by lot
without knowing which of them he had taken, and try it upon himself or
any intelligent and devoted Homoeopathist, and, waiting his own time, to
come forward and tell what substance had been employed.
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