We wish to revert for a short time to the fourth paragraph, in which Hahnemann says:”The physician is likewise a preserver of health if he knows the things that derange health and cause disease, and how to remove them from persons in health.”

The Homoeopathic physician is a failure if he does not discriminate. It seems that among the earliest things he must learn is to “Render unto Caesar the things that are. Caesar’s,” to keep everything in its place, to keep everything in order. This little paragraph might seem to relate to nothing but hygiene.

One of the most superficial things in it so say that persons about to be made sick from bad habits should break off their bad habits, they should move from damp houses they should plug their sewers or have traps put in if they are being poisoned with sewer gas. It is everybody’s duty to do these things, but especially the physician’s, and we might almost let it go with the saying. To prevent coffee drinking, vinegar drinking, etc. is a superficial thing; but in this way he may preserve health.

To discriminate, then, is a most important thing. To illustrate it in a general way we might say that one who is suffering from conscience does not need a surgeon. You mighty say he needs a priest. One who is sick in his vital force needs a physician. He who has a lacerated wound, or a broken bone, or deformities, has need of a surgeon. If his tooth must come out he must have a surgeon dentist.

What would be thought of a man who, on being sent for a surgeon to set an injured man’s bones should go for a carpenter to mend the roof of the man’s house? If the man’s house alone needs mending then he needs a carpenter and not a surgeon. The physician must discriminate between the man and his house, and between the repair of man and the repair of his house.

It is folly to give medicine for a lacerated wound, to attempt to close up a deep wound with a dose of remedy. Injuries from knives, hooks, etc., affect the house the man lives in and must be attended to by the surgeon. When the gross exterior conditions which are brought on from exterior causes complicated with the interior man then medicine is required. If the physician acts also as a surgeon he must know when he is to perform his functions as a surgeon, and when he must keep back as a surgeon. He should sew up a wound, but should not burn out an ulcer with Nitrate of Silver.If he is not able to discriminate, and on every ulcer he plasters his external applications, he is not a preserver of health. When signs and symptoms are present the physician is needed, because these come from the interior to the exterior. But if his condition is brought on only from external causes, the physician must delay action and let the surgeon do his work. Yet we see around us that physicians bombard the house the man lives in and have no idea of treating the man. They are no more than carpenters, they attempt to repair the roof, put on boards and bandages, and yet by their bandaging the man from head to foot they often do an improper thing.

The physician must know the things that derange health and remove them. If a fang of an old tooth causes headache day and night that cause must be removed. To prescribe when a splinter is pressing on a nerve and leave the splinter in would be foolishness and criminal negligence. The aim should be to discriminate and remove external causes and turn into order internal causes.

A man comes for treatment, and he is living on deviled crabs and lobster salad and other trash too rich for the stomach of a dog. If we keep on giving Nux Vomica to that man we are foolish. If a man who has been living viciously stops it he can be helped, but so long as that external cause is not removed the physician is not using discrimination. Vicious habits, bad living, living in damp houses are externals and must be removed. When a man avoids these externals, is cleanly, carefully chooses his food, has a comfortable home, and is still miserable, he must be treated from within.

You know how we are maligned and lied about. You have heard it said about some strict homoeopath, “He tried to set a broken leg with the c.m. potency of Mercury. What a poor fool!” But still outside of such an instance this discrimination is an important matter. You must remember it especially when busy, as at times it will be hard to decide. This kind of diagnosis is important, because it settles between things external and internal. Every physician does not discriminate thus, for if he did there would not be so many poultices and murderous external applications used. Among those who do not discriminate are those who apply medicines externally and give them internally. Now we return to the fifth paragraph, which reads:

Useful to the physician in assisting him to cure are the particulars of the most probable exciting cause of the acute disease, as also the most significant points in the whole history of the chronic disease to enable him to discover its fundamental cause, which is generally due to a chronic miasm. In these investigations the ascertainable physical constitution of the patient (especially when the disease is chronic), his moral and intellectual character, his occupation, mode of living and habits, his social and domestic relations, his age sexual functions, etc., are to be taken into consideration.

Little is known of the real exciting causes. Acute affections are divided into two classes (1) those that are miasmatic, which are true diseases, and (2) those that may be called mimicking sickness. The living in damp houses, grief, bad clothing, etc.; and the causes being latter have no definite cause, are produced by external causes such as removed the patient recovers. But the first, the acute miasms have a distinct course to run. They have a prodromal period, a period of progress and a period of decline, if not so severe as to cause the patient’s death. Measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough, smallpox, etc., are examples of acute miasms.

The physician must also be acquainted with the chronic miasms, psora, syphilis and sycosis, which we will study later. These have like the acute, a prodromal period and a period of progress, but unlike the acute they have no period of decline. When the times and circumstances are favourable the chronic miasm becomes quiescent, but adverse times rouse it into activity, and each time it is aroused the condition is worse than it was at the previous exacerbation.

In this paragraph Hahnemann teaches that the chronic miasms are the fundamental cause of the acute miasms, which is to say, if there were no chronic miasms there would be no acute. It is in the very nature of a chronic miasm to predispose man to acute diseases, and the acute diseases are as fuel added to an unquenchable fire.

Acute diseases then exist from specific causes co-operating with susceptibility. We do not recognize measles or scarlet fever except in sick people. Their influence might exist in the atmosphere, but we can not see it. So apart from the subjects that take and develop them we could not know that there were such diseases. If there were no children on the earth susceptible to measles we would have no measles, and if there were no chronic miasms there would be no susceptibility. We will take up the subject of susceptibility later.

Psora is the cause of all contagion. If man had not had psora he would not have had the other two chronic miasms, but psora, the oldest, became the basis of the others. The physician of the present day do not comprehend Hahnemann’s definition of psora, they think it meant an itch vesicle or some sort of tetter. They regard itch as only the result of the action of a bug that crawls in the skin making vesicles, all of which is external. This is quite in keeping with man’s present form of investigation, because he can comprehend only that which he discovers by his senses.

Hahnemann’s idea of psora, as we shall see when we come to study it, is wholly different from these perverted views. Psora corresponds to that state of man in which he has so disordered his economy to the very uttermost that he has become susceptible to every surrounding influence. The other day I used the illustration of civil government, and said if our civil government is evil in its centre it will be in disorder in its uttermost. So if a man is evil in his very interiors, i.e. in his will and understanding, and the result of this evil flows into his life, he is in a state of disorder. Let man exist for thousands of years thinking false theories and bringing them into his life, and his life will become one of disorder.

Later we will be able to show that this disordered condition of the economy is the underlying and fundamental state of the nature of psora which ultimates upon the body in tissue changes. Suppose a man starts out and believes that it is right for him to live upon a certain kind of food that is very distasteful to him; he lives upon that diet until he thinks (from his belief) that he really loves it, and in time his very outermost becomes as morbid as he is himself.

When man is insane in his interior it is only a question of time and his body will take on the results of insanity because the interior of man forms the exterior. If the interior is insane the exterior is distorted, and is only suitable to the kind of insane or disordered life that dwells in it. False in the interior, false in the exterior, so that the body becomes, as it were, false. This is speaking from analogy, but you will come to see that it is actually true.

Each and everything that appears before the eyes is but the representative of its cause, and there is no cause except in the interior. Cause does not flow from the outermost of man to the interior, because man is protected against such a state of affairs. Causes exist in such subtle form that they cannot be seen by the eye. There is no disease that exists of which the cause is known to man by the eye or by the microscope.

Causes are infinitely too fine to be observed by any instrument of precision. They are so immaterial that they correspond to and operate upon the interior nature of man, and they are ultimated in the body in the form of tissue changes that are recognized by the eye. Such tissue changes must be understood as the results of disease only or the physician will never perceive what disease cause is, what disease is, what potentization is, or what the nature of life is. This is what Hahnemann meant when he speaks of the fundamental causes as existing in chronic miasms.

Just as soon as man lives a disorderly life he is susceptible to outside influences, and the more disorderly he lives the more susceptible he becomes to the atmosphere he lives in. When man thinks in a disorderly way he carries out his life in a disorderly way, and makes himself sick by disorderly habits of thinking and living. This deranged mental state Hahnemann most certainly recognizes, for he tells us everywhere in his teaching to pay most attention to the mental state. We must begin with such signs as represent to the mind the beginning of sickness, and this beginning will be found in the mental disorder as represented by signs and symptoms, and as it flows on we have the coarser manifestations of disease. The more that disease ultimates itself in the outward form the coarser it is and the less it points the physician to the remedy. The more mental it is the more signs there are to direct the physician to the remedy.

‘In these investigations the ascertainable physical constitution of the patient, etc., are to be taken into consideration”. This is the second state following the first following the first one disordered. This deals with the outermost, it relates to externals. You have to consider both the internal and external man; that is, you have to consider causes that operate in this disordered innermost, and then the ultimates which constitute the outward appearance, particularly when the affection is chronic. These two things must be considered, the nature or esse of the disease and its appearance.

At the present day diseases are named in the books from their appearance and not from any idea as to what the nature or esse of sickness is, hence the disease names in our books are misleading, as they do not have reference to the sick man but to ultimates. If the disease has terminated in the liver, numerous names are applied to the liver, if in the kidney or heart, these organs have names applied to them, and such terminations are called diseases. Consumption is a tubercular state of the lungs, which is but the result of an internal disorder which was operating in the interior long before the breakdown of tissue.

The physicians of these days will tell you that they go back to the cause, but they present no cause; they only bring up the superficial conditions that make the consumptive man worse. They will also tell you that a bacillus is the cause of tuberculosis. But if the man had not been susceptible to the bacillus he could not have been affected by it. As a matter of fact, the tubercules come first and the bacillus is secondary. It has never been found prior to the tubercule, but it follows that, comes then as a scavenger. The cause of the tubercular deposit rests with the psora, the chronic miasm. Bacilli are not the cause of disease, they never come until after the disease.

Allopaths are really taking the sequence for the consequence, thus leading to a false theory, the bacteria theory. You may destroy the bacteria and yet not destroy the disease. The susceptibility remains the same, and only those that are susceptible will take the disease. Bacteria have a use, for there is nothing in the whole world that does not have a use, and there is nothing sent on earth to destroy man. The bacteria theory would make it appear that the all-wise Creator has sent these micro-organisms here to make man sick. We see from this paragraph that Hahnemann did not adopt any such theory as bacteriology.

This subject will be taken up in these lectures and fully illustrated, but I might throw out a few hints to set you thinking until we come to it again. We know that a dissecting wound is very serious if the body dissected is recently dead, and this we would suppose to be due to some bacteria of wonderful power capable of establishing such a dreadful erysipelatous poisoning that would go into man’s blood and strike him down with a sort of septicaemia. In truth soon after death we have a ptomaine poison, the dead body poison, which is alkaloidal in character, but we do not yet discover the presence of bacteria. The poison is there, and if a man pricks himself while dissecting that body and does not take care of the wound he may have a serious illness and die. But if after the cadaver has remained some time and become infected with bacteria, the dissector pricks himself the wound is not dangerous.

The more bacteria the less poison. A typhoid stool when it first passes from the bowel has a very scanty allowance of bacteria, and yet it is very poisonous. But let it remain until it becomes black with bacteria and it is comparatively benign. Why does the poison not increase with the bacteria? You can potentize, as I have done, a portion of a tuberculous mass alive with tubercular bacilli, and after potentizing it, after being triturated with sugar of milk and mashed to a pulp, it will continue to manifest its symptoms in the most potent form.

You can precipitate the purulent tubercular fluid in alcohol, precipitate the entire animal life and potentize the supernatant fluid until you have reached the thirtieth potency, and having potentized or attenuated it until no microbe can be found, yet if administered to healthy man, it will establish the nature of the disease in the economy, which is prior to phthisis. Thus we have the cause of phthisis, not in the bacteria, but in the virus, which the bacteria are sent to destroy. Man lives longer with the bacteria than he would without them. If we could succeed today in putting a fluid into the economy that would destroy the bacteria that consumptive would soon die.

The study of disease as to fundamental cause and apparent cause is an important subject. We cannot study cause unless we have first understood government associated with law. Hence recall to your mind that the law directs and experience confirms. Law is nothing but an orderly state of government from centre to circumference, a government in which there is a head. You show me a company that has no captain and you show me a disorderly company. Order exists from the highest to the lowest from centre to circumference.

Now I have led up to the point where you may ask, Is it not disorder for man to settle what is true by the senses? Let us as homoeopaths turn our lives, our thinking abilities and our scientific life into order that we may begin to turn the human race into order. Let us adopt the plan of thinking of things from their beginning and following them in a series to their conclusions. No man is authority, but principle and law are authority.

If this cannot be seen there is no use of proceeding any further with the study of Homoeopathy. If man cannot see this he cannot see the necessity of harmony from centre to circumference, of government which has one head, and hence it would be useless for him to study the human body for the purpose of applying medicine to it. It must be accepted in this form or it will not satisfy man, it will not sustain his expectation, it will not do what he expects it to do; it will only accomplish what Allopathy has accomplished, viz., the establishment of confusion upon the economy.