Dr. Margaret Lucy Tyler (1857-1943) qualified in medicine aged 44, and specialized in the treatment of mentally challenged children at the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital for forty years.
Dr. M. L. Tyler, an enthusiast of Dr. Samuel Hahnemann whom she referred to as the fountain-head, often stated the practice of homeopathy was moving far away from its original ideal and memorialized her father with the Sir Henry Tyler Scholarship fund which sent doctors to Chicago to study under Dr. James T. Kent, a Hahnemannian.1
The following are excerpts from taken from the prodigious writings of Dr. M. L. Tyler (available online!2) - one of the most influential homeopaths of all time.
Pointers to the Common Remedies3
There is law behind cure; and if we desire to evoke power, we must conform to its conditions. The only known law of healing is Hahnemann’s similia similibus curentur.
In acute work if you can get exact correspondence between the symptoms of the person and the symptoms evoked in the healthy by the same drug it is a mathematical certainty that you will cure - because of the law of similars - without correspondence it is equally certain you will not cure - because of the law of similars.
Law does not fail. It is we who fail in our attempts to put it in action. We may do bad work and call it homeopathy, discrediting it in the person’s eyes and in our own: only it did not happen to be homeopathy!
When an airplane crashes no-one says ‘The laws of gravitation -motion-physics-have failed in this case!’ the fault is sought in faulty adaptation. Law is inexorable.
Truth is great, and has a way of prevailing in the long run.4
No great work has ever been done without great effort and great self sacrifice. Homoeopathy is no art for the lazy and the dullard.
Hahnemann speaks - and we are apt to talk glibly of the TOTALITY OF THE SYMPTOMS. What do we mean by this? Does it mean that every little symptom, and every symptom dependent on some gross pathological lesion has to be covered? Endless work with poor results.
You do not recognize your friends by counting up their fingers and toes, but by things personal to themselves only of all mankind. Their totality, as it appeals to you, lies in sex, stature, colouring, voice, expression, mind; not in what is common to men, but in what differentiates.
Homeopathy Introductory Lectures5
You will love your remedies, when you come to know and trust them. The Romance of Homoeopathy is positively fascinating.
You see, it is not the name of the medicine, or the fact that it is peculiar to our vast homoeopathic Materia Medica - or even that it is prepared and sold by a homoeopathic chemist, or prescribed by a homoeopathic doctor, that makes it homoeopathic. It is only homoeopathic if its salient and characteristic symptoms correspond with those we are seeking to cure.
Some of our very great remedies - Gelsemium, Baptisia, Caulophyllum, Cimicifuga have been learnt by homoeopathic doctors from the North American Indians. God resisted the proud and gave the grace to the humble. We have no monopoly of knowledge. In company with the great Newton, we are just children, picking up, here and there, a pebble beside the ocean of Truth.
A broadminded homoeopath has the freedom of the universe. He has got at first principles, and can apply them. He works by Law - a pretty useful ally !
Repertorising6
Success in Repertorising depends on ability to deal with symptoms; and this has to be taught: it is not innate. People all the world over are wasting their lives, working out cases at enormous expenditure of time and minutest care, for comparatively poor results: and all for want of a little initial help.
The key to the enigma, which they lack, is the GRADING OF SYMPTOMS. The grading of symptoms is to economise labour without compromising results: and, in the cases where all the more-or-less indicated remedies lack some symptom or other of the totality, to know which symptoms are of vital importance to the correct prescription and which are of less importance, and may therefore probably be neglected and also which may be safely used as eliminating symptoms, to throw out remedies by the dozen from the very start and which cannot be safely used to throw out any remedies at all, on pain of perhaps losing the very drug one is in search of the curative simillimum.
If you are to be a good prescriber, by the way, your drugs have got to be people for you, with whims, fancies and terrors; with tempers and idiosyncracies and characteristics: you have got to see them stalking about the world, speaking and moving and halting, with the bodies-minds-souls of men.
Editorial - The homeopathic Recorder (1943).7
The Homoeopathic Recorder is very sorry, however, to learn that Homoeopathy has been discontinued. We considered Homoeopathy as one of the best journals of pure homoeopathy published and it is certainly a real loss to homoeopathy to have it discontinued. Homoeopathy has been very ably and successfully published during the past eleven years by one of the grandest, greatest and most beloved homoeopathic teachers and writers of the present day, Dr. Margaret L. Tyler.
Sue Young states that ‘‘in the hands of Dr. Tyler and her colleagues, homeopathy gave up any pretense of being scientific and became, for better or worse, more like an art form… the writings of Dr. Tyler and her colleagues made homeopathy accessible to people who lacked a medical background - hence their continuing popularity today…’’8
Obituary to Dr. Margaret Lucy Tyler (1857-1943) by Sir John Weir9
With the passing of Dr. Margaret L. Tyler, Homoeopathy loses one of its outstanding personalities, whose missionary work in writing and teaching has disseminated its knowledge far and wide.
Tributes to her have come in from every side, well deserved, prompted by love, gratitude and appreciation. Many of the present generation of homoeopathic physicians in this country owe much to Dr. Tyler’s interest in post-graduate study of the subject, and there is a deep sense of loss amongst the profession, and a feeling of gratitude to this selfless woman.
Dr. Tyler took up the study of medicine in order to be able to help others by the practice of the treatment she knew, through the experience of her family and herself, to be of such value to suffering humanity.
Her work for over forty years at the London Homoeopathic Hospital has borne much fruit. Her greatest joy was in the Out Patients Department, amongst her friends, as she termed the patients. There she was truly happy, and her name will live on in the Tyler Wing, which her father, Sir Henry Tyler, gave to the Hospital.
Perhaps the greatest scope for her missionary work in Homoeopathy has been through her editorship of the journal Homoeopathy which she ran for eleven years, and which has been described in a contemporary as “one of the best journals of pure homoeopathy published.” Her correspondence course and her Drug Pictures are two valuable pieces of work which have helped, and will continue to be useful to doctors the world over, and will remain as lasting monuments to her memory.
In a recent number of the Homoeopathic Recorder (U.S.A), Dr. Tyler is described as “one of the grandest, greatest and most beloved teachers and writers of the present day,” an epitaph which will universally be endorsed by her friends and colleagues.
Despite failing health, she worked to the very end, and died in service. It is typical that almost her last quotation was:
“At the end of life we shall not be asked how much pleasure we have had in it, but how much of service we gave in it; not how full of success, but how full of sacrifice; not how happy we were, but how helpful we were”.
Dr. Tyler’s memory and influence will live in the hearts of many she died on the 21st of June, 1943, having “served her generation, by the will of God”.
https://www.sueyounghistories.com/2008-06-27-margaret-lucy-tyler-and-homeopathy/
https://homeopathybooks.in/author/mltyler/
Tyler, M.L. 1998. Pointers to the Common Remedies. B.Jain Publishers Ltd. New Delhi. (Originally published 1934)
Tyler. Different ways of find the remedy; Truth is great, and has a way of prevailing in the long run. Miccant, 2015. Isis Vision [computer program]. Nottingham.
Tyler. Homeopathy Introductory Lectures. Miccant, 2015. Isis Vision [computer program]. Nottingham.
Tyler. Repertorising - with Sir John Weir. Miccant, 2015. Isis Vision [computer program]. Nottingham.
Underhill, E. 1943. The Homoeopathic Recorder. Sep Vol LIX No 3. Available from: https://homeopathybooks.in/the-homoeopathic-recorder-1943-sep-vol-lix-no-3/editorial-78/
https://www.sueyounghistories.com/2008-06-27-margaret-lucy-tyler-and-homeopathy/
Weir, Sir John, 1943, Obituary To Margaret Tyler, BHJ 32, pp.92-93. Available from: https://homeopathybooks.in/the-homoeopathic-recorder-1943-sep-vol-lix-no-3/dr-margaret-l-tyler-a-memoir/