Homeopathy & John H. Clarke M.D.
The Revolution in Medicine
Dr. John Henry Clarke (1853-1931)
‘‘Dr. John Henry Clarke passed on to the Great Beyond on Tuesday, November 24, 1931, after a life of extraordinary devotion and usefulness to Homoeopathy.
His memory will live on imperishable in every quarter of the globe through his written words.
Anyone who had met Clarke but a few times, even only once, must have been impressed with the feeling of an exceptional human being, a forceful personality, a man apart.
He was literally a man apart, as he took his work and his mission so seriously that he gave himself very little time to mix with others.
Perhaps, also, there were very few with whom he felt in harmony.
He was a prodigious worker, as his published works testify, to say nothing of the hosts of private patients from all parts of the world.
He was editor of The Homoeopathic World for altogether twenty-nine years.
He was indeed an outstanding character, and if one can compare him with another, it is with him who was probably the greatest homoeopath that the United States has produced Dr. James Tyler Kent.
They had the same forcible way of expressing themselves combined with an inherent retiring nature, the same intolerance of anything second-rate, especially as relating to their beloved system of therapeutics, the same scorn and contempt for time-servers.
And each gave to the world of Homeopathy the greatest and most valuable book that their respective countries have produced, indeed, in our opinion, the two most indispensable works written since the days of Hahnemann - the Dictionary of Materia Medica and the Repertory of Materia Medica.
Clarke is not dead. How can a man whose work is, and always will be, a continual source of inspiration to thousands-how can such a man ever die?’’1
Two people in particular formed the important bridge linking nineteenth-century homeopathy with the homeopathy of the new century.
These were Drs. John Henry Clarke in Britain and James Tyler Kent in the USA.2
The Revolution in Medicine
Being the seventh Hahnemannian oration delivered October 5th 1886, at the London Homeopathic Hospital
by John H. Clarke M.D.
Physician to the London Homeopathic Hospital; Lecturer on Materia Medica to the L.L.H Medical School. 3
I. Darkness and Dawn
Night
1786
A Reformer not a Destroyer
In the Valley of the Shadow
Dawn
II. The Three-Fold Work
III. The Revolution and the Man
IV. Our Inheritance
I. DARKNESS AND DAWN
NIGHT
Ladies and Gentleman,
One hundred years ago the Art of Medicine still lay wrapped in Cimmerian night.
The power of the Dark Ages, which the Protestant revolution had rolled away two hundred years before from other pursuits and avocations of men, unfettering the intellect in science and the conscience in the moral world, still lingered like a trailing, inky cloud after a storm over all that concerned the treatment of sick humanity.
No ray of reason pierced the impenetrable fog of theory and conjecture in which the ministers of Healing moved, blindly led by blind Tradition, and blindly worshipping the fetich, Authority.
Now and again the bolder spirits had ventured, like Paracelsus, to rise in revolt against the ruling powers of darkness; but in their attempts to break the rusted and corroding chains of Authority-chains, which to the generality were a glory instead of a shame-they had succeeded in breaking only themselves.
Systems of treatment based on fanciful theories of diseases had risen, had had their day, and had sunk into their native night.
Discoveries in anatomy and physiology has been made-and had left, the practice of medicine no better than before.
A century and a half had passed since Harvey wrote the treatise which contained his grand induction of the circulation of the blood -an induction, be it here remarked, honestly made from anatomical observations, and not, as is commonly alleged, from the observation of vivisected animals,-thus completing the work of Servetus, Realdus and Cesalpinus, who had been before him in the field and had paved his way.
But Harvey did not dream of saying a word against the prevalent custom of bleeding for almost every disease or, indeed, of suggesting any improvement in the Healing Art.
So absolutely without effect on practice had Harvey's great discovery proved to be, that in the succeeding generation the physician in ordinary to the son of Harvey's master, the second Charles, published a work* on "mummiall quintessences," among which a quintescence to be distilled "in the month of June or July" out of a" great quantity of overgrown old toads" was one the least objectionable.
1786
In the year of our Lord, 1786, when the Old Regime in France was rapidly approaching its tragic end, and when the man who was destined to master the wild forces of the impending revolution, and to lead them through the length and breath of Europe, overturning thrones and dynasties and shaking to their foundation the social and political institutions of the western world, was a young lieutenant of Artillery in his nineteenth year,-in this year a man who was born to inaugurate a very different revolution-to put an end to the reign of Darkness in the world of Medicine,-already twelve years the great soldier's senior, was a general medical practitioner in the town of Dresden, dreaming as little as the other of the great part in the world's history he was to be called upon to play.
At this date Hahnemann was innocent of homoeopathy.
HAHNEMANN
I must not trench too much on the ground so ably occupied by my predecessors in this place, who have spoken of Hahnemann, the Man and the Physician, Hahnemann as a Medical Philosopher, as the Founder of Scientific Therapeutics, and of Hahnemann and his Works, but it will not be possible for me to avoid it altogether.
And though some of the ground may be old, the recent publication in English of the great work by the lamented Dr. Ameke, of Berlin, Homoeopathy: its Origin and its Conflicts, translated by Dr. Drysdale, of Cannes, and edited by Dr. Dudgeon, opens up much that is both valuable and new.
Who, it may be asked, was Hahnemann, that he should set himself to revolutionize the most conservative of arts, the profession in which the worship of ancestors was observed with a piety more than Chinese?
Samuel Hahnemann was the eldest of a family of ten born to a painter on porcelain, of Meissen, in Saxony.
His father, whose means were none too ample, destined the boy to follow the same trade as himself.
But when God has special work for a man in this world He does not leave his upbringing entirely in the hands of his parents.
As a child. Hahnemann shewed an intense passion and a wonderful aptitude for learning.
When his father removed him from school (as he did for long periods together) with the aid of a clay lamp of his own construction the child continued his studies in his chamber at night after the less congenial labours of the day.
But his teachers would not part with such a scholar without making great efforts to retain him.
At last they prevailed on the father to allow the boy-whose health had given way under the combined effects of hard manual labour and chagrin-to follow his bent, they offering to forego all fees for his instruction.
Such was the confidence he inspired that when only in his twelfth year Herr Miiller, the principal of the Meissen School-of whom Hahnemann always speaks with the greatest veneration and affection commissioned him to teach to others the elements of Greek.
At the age of twenty he removed to Leipzig to begin the study of medicine, his last school essay being entitled "The Wonderful Construction of the Human Hand." As showing his appreciation of his father's treatment of him, much as he had been thwarted and opposed, a note of Hahnemann's written years afterwards, may be quoted here:
"In Easter, 1775, my father sent me to Leipzig, with the sum of twenty thalers-the last money that I ever received from him. He had to bring up several children on his limited income, and this sufficiently excuses the best of fathers."
Thus the struggle with adverse circumstances began in Hahnemann's childhood; and there can be no doubt that this early lesson in enduring hardness formed one of the most important elements in the training for his after life.
At Leipzig the struggle continued.
Hahnemann supported himself by teaching and by translating for publishers whilst he diligently attended the medical classes of the University.
Here his fees were remitted by virtue of a kind of Government foundation instituted for the benefit of poor and deserving students.
After two years spent at Leipzig he removed to Vienna in order to study medicine practically, since Leipzig possessed no hospital.
At Vienna he attended the Hospital of the Brothers of Charity, in the Leopoldstadt, under Quarin, the physician in Ordinary to the Emperor.
Like most of his preceptors, Quarin conceived a great liking for the young Hahnemann, for whom he showed his partiality by taking him with him on his visits to private patients.
"He singled me out," says Hahnemann, "loved and taught me as if I were his sole pupil in Vienna, and even more than that, and all without expecting any remuneration from me." To the genuine teacher a pupil of Hahnemann's kind is himself a sufficient reward.
It is to Quarin's lasting honour that he discovered Hahnemann's worth; and the love and the care he bestowed on his pupil were seeds sown in a fertile soil.
A post of resident physician and library custodian to the Governor of Transylvania, obtained at Quarin's recommendation, enabled Hahnemann to replenish his scanty resources, and at the same time to pursue his practice and his studies.
In 1779 he took his M.D., degree at Erlangen, where the graduation fee was lower than at Leipzig; thence he returned to his home, and after a short residence at Dessau removed to Gommern in 1781.
Two years later he married Henrietta Kuchler who shared with him for nearly fifty years the storms, the labours the trials of his life.
He now removed to Dresden, where we have already seen him, and where he remained for about six years practising his profession as best he might, and making good use of the electoral library.
A REFORMER NOT A DESTROYER
If a men would inaugurate a new and better era in any department of human affairs, it is first of all necessary that he should master what there is of good in the old.
He comes not to destroy but to fulfil.
So Hahnemann, long before he commenced the work by which he is now almost exclusively known, had made himself in all the branches of his Art, and even in those which are now regarded as subsidiary branches, not merely proficient, but one of the first authorities of his time.
Chemistry at this day owes to Hahnemann's genius, among other things, the discovery of the best test for metals in solution; and the apothecaries, who were destined to be the first to cast the legal stone at him, possessed in his Pharmaceutical Dictionary-a work of immense labour, learning and research, which took him years to complete-their most valuable and most indispensable friend.
His early writings prove him to have been far in advance of the men of his day.
The practices of "fashionable physicians" he freely criticised and in place of their violent measures he praised the virtues of cold water and fresh air in a way that would surprise modern sanitarians who imagine that hygiene is a discovery of the latter half of the nineteenth century.
His, learning in all that concerned his Art was unrivalled.
No writer of eminence, living or dead, escaped his wide reading and scholarship, whilst his wonderful memory retained for his use almost everything that he read.
IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW
But before Hahnemann was ready to enter on the external conflict he must first feel the power of the Darkness in his own soul and conquer it there.
In spite of his great powers and high intelligence-nay, rather by very reason of them-the seemingly never-ending night of Medicine oppressed him to the dust.
Where smaller and less sensitive natures could live and move without discomfort a Hahnemann could not breathe.
At last he could bear it no longer; he had reached, he thought, the "Everlasting No" of Medicine, and he gave up the practice in despair.
Removing from Dresden in 1789, he came again to Leipzig, and there supported himself and his family by working as a literary hack, enduring the hardships of extreme poverty rather than continue to kill his fellow creatures-as he felt he was doing-in accordance with the rules of his art.
But illness in his own family recalled him to himself.
He felt, as he believed in the goodness of God, that there must be a real Healing Art, if only it could be found.
DAWN
This was the darkest hour before the dawn.
Just then Hahnemann was engaged in translating Cullen's work on Materia Medica from English into German; and when he came to that part of the work which deals with Peruvian Bark, he was dissatisfied with the attempt Cullen made to explain the curative action of the drug in ague.
It occurred to Hahnemann that if he were to try the effect of the drug on himself in health, he might obtain some information as to its action in disease.
He therefore took an ordinary dose of the powdered bark.
Within a short time he was seized with an attack of chills and fever indistinguishable from a fit of ague.
Thinking this might possibly be a genuine attack of ague and not the result of the dose, after a little delay, he repeated the experiment, and again the same result followed.
He had now no no longer any doubt; and the exactness of his observation has since been confirmed by numberless similar experiences.
Bark cured ague; and bark could also cause the very counterpart of ague in the healthy.
This was the first ray of light which heralded the coming dawn.
Further experiments on himself with bark and other drugs proved that this was no isolated experience, but an instance of a general rule that there was a definite relation between the action of a drug on the healthy and its action on the sick, and that by knowing the one the other might with certainty be predicted.
With the breaking in of light upon his own mind Hahnemann was restored to hope and life.
But unlike certain modern discovers who are eager to rush before the public with every idea that comes into their minds lest another should come before them and claim the priority (which is really not worth the claiming) Hahnemann took care to make sure his ground before he made any definite announcement.
His translation of Cullen was published in 1790.
For six long years he worked at the subject before he published his famous Essay "On a New Principle for ascertaining the Curative Properties of Drugs," in which the homoeopathic principle was first clearly made known to the world.
The essay was published in the leading medical periodical of the day, Hufeland's Journal, and it bears to the practice of medicine much the same relation that Harvey's essay on the Motion of the Heart bears to physiology.
The essay excited much comment at the time of its appearance, as it was bound to do, but no one suspected it then of being heretical, whilst its great originality and power were acknowledged on all hands.
It was not until he had laboured still three-and-twenty years in developing his system, had collected around him an enthusiastic band of disciples, and had won the confidence of a large circle of patients, that his medical brethren-and especially the apothecaries-became alive to the dangerous nature of his teachings and practice, and put in operation against him the favourite engine of the Dark Ages-persecution.
The new light which had dawned in this way upon Hahnemann's mind shed its rays before and after; illuminating and explaining much of the experience of the past, as well as indicating the path by which advance was to be made in the future.
In numbers of the cases of cure recorded in ancient writings, as Hahnemann showed, the drugs which had been given had removed conditions the like of which they were capable of causing when administered to those in health.
In his Essay on a New Principle Hahnemann formulates his conclusion thus:
"Every powerful medicinal substance produces in the human body a peculiar kind of disease, the more powerful the medicine, the more peculiar, marked and violent the disease."
"We should imitate nature which sometimes cures a chronic disease by super adding another, and employ in the (especially chronic) disease we wish to cure, that medicine which is able to produce another very similar artificial disease, and the former will be cured; similia similibus."
This proposition has never been shaken.
Denied it has frequently been; misrepresented it still is; disproved it cannot be.
Hahnemann had now his foot upon the solid ground of fact.
The weakness of all previous systems of treatment that had been proposed lay in their having been founded on the quick sands of theory.
If Hahnemann had first sought to find some supposed explanation of the fact made plain to him, and if he had then sought to build up a system upon the explanation instead of upon the fact, his system would have fared no better than the others.
Facts are durable things; explanations are always changing.
On his own body Hahnemann "proved" a large number of drugs; that is to say, he took them in substantial doses when in health, and observed the effects that followed.
These he noted as they occurred and made no attempt to explain them, simply labelling them what they were, "positive effects." Drugs, like human beings are apt to be at times a little inconsistent in their actions.
For instance, belladonna will cause some persons to perspire profusely, and will make the skin of other persons dry.
Like a sensible man, Hahnemann, instead of trying to reconcile these inconsistencies, or to find an ingenious explanation of them, preferring, as smaller men are wont to do, his own explanation to the facts, simply set down both as "positive effects." An observer of the old school seeing one of these effects would immediately dub the medicine a "sudorific," and another seeing the opposite effect would be equally certain to dub it "anti-sudorific," and each would go away satisfied that he possessed a scientific understanding of the drug's action, and for ever after use it according to the name he had given it, ignoring as exceptional all contradictory experiences.
So it has been; and so it is to this day among those who reject Hahnemann; and hence the confusion that prevails in the works of orthodox writers on Materia Medica, to the distraction of the unhappy student who is compelled to learn their contents-for examination.
Hahnemann swept away all these delusive names, embodying at the best only partial experiences, and suffered the much abused drug to write out its own character in the symptoms and changes it produced in his healthy body; he performing the simple clerical duty of writing, so to speak, to the drug's dictation.
By so doing, Hahnemann has made it possible for us to know the actual powers, the very characters in fact, of hundreds of substances now in daily use in homoeopathic-and allopathic!-practice.
At the time when his essay was published Hahnemann was a physician of the highest standing and repute (which no one then thought of questioning), and in the forty-second year of his age.
A physician who knows nothing but drugs is, properly speaking, no physician at all but a physician who does not know how to use drugs is a man without his right hand Hahnemann was no one-sided enthusiast-he was an accomplished physician in all other matters apart from his knowledge of drugs and his skill in the use of them; and he was thus in every way qualified to lead the reform in the most important of all that divisions of the Doctor's Art-the treatment of the sick by the drugs.
For the question of drug-action barred the way of all progress; and so long as the practice of drug administration remained unreformed so long as the absurd theories and the high-sounding, delusive terms in which they were embodied held dominion over the physicians minds, the inauguration of a better era was impossible.
But now that the light had come to him, Hahnemann was fully equipped and ready to enter on his life's great work, for which all before had been a preparation.
He was not alone in bewailing the state of the practice of his time, nor was he alone in his discernment of the curative powers of drugs; others, like Von Stoerk, had possessed on insight of a limited kind into the properties of drugs, and saw the necessity of giving them singly, before Hahnemann.
But there was none who saw a way out of the darkness until he came; there was none who was able to gather up the good and shew how it might be recognised and distinguished from the mass of the bad.
He alone possessed the genius, the talent, the learning, the faith and the fortitude that were needed to withstand all the powers arrayed against him, to lead all those who would follow him into a region of light, and to compel all those who refused to follow, to cease at least to do evil, if they would not learn to do well.
To be continued…
Woods F. The Homoeopathic World, January 1932. Available from: http://homeoint.org/seror/biograph/clarke.htm
Morrell P, 2000. British homeopathy during two centuries. Available from: http://www.homeoint.org/morrell/british/clarke.htm
Clarke J, 1886. The Revolution in Medicine. London; Keene and Ashwell. University of Michigan, Homeopathic Library. Available from: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002088509
Fascinating! I'm so glad you did trench on the ground... about Hahnemann!! There is much here in your overview of Hahnemann's early life I didn't know (or had forgotten) so THANK YOU for this. And of course for the intro to Clarke as well.
So many great people to be proud of in the homœopathic tradition... 💗🙏
Thank you for this educational post! Great content!