Similarities Between Hahnemann and
Paracelsus
By Robert Ellis DUDGEON
Presented by Peter MorrellExtracted from his Lectures
On the Theory and Practice of Homeopathy, 1853, pp.9-18The next name of importance as an authority
in the medical art whom we find distinctly enunciating the principle of homeopathy, is the
author who wrote under the pseudonyme of Basil Valentine, a Benedictine monk it is believed,
who lived about the year 1410, in the convent of St. Peter at Erfurt. His words are
“Likes must be cured by means of their likes, and not by their contraries, as heat by
heat. Cold by cold, shooting by shooting; for one heat attracts the other to itself, one
cold the other, as the magnet does the iron. Hence, prickly simples can remove diseases
whose characteristic is prickly pains; and poisonous minerals can cure and destroy symptoms
of poisoning when they are brought to bear upon them. And although sometimes a chill may be
removed and suppressed, still I say, as a philosopher and one experienced in nature’s ways,
that the similar must be fitted with its similar, whereby it will be removed radically and
thoroughly, if I am a proper physician and understand medicine. He who does not attend to
this is no true physician, and cannot boast of his knowledge of medicine, because he is
unable to distinguish betwixt cold and warm, betwixt dry and humid, for knowledge and
experience, together with a fundamental observation of nature, constitute the perfect
physician.” (De Microcosmo.)
Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus
Von HOHENHEIM PARACELSUS
(1493-1541)
Theophrastus von Hohenheim, commonly known
by the name of Paracelsus who flourished in the sixteenth century, was a reformer of much
the same character as Hahnemann, and though his doctrines never obtained for him the same
number of followers as Hahnemann has, and though the school he founded soon perished and
disappeared, and his name was only remembered as that of a great charlatan, this was not
owing to the unsoundness of the therapeutic doctrines he enunciated, which scarcely differed
from many of those of Hahnemann; but the ephemeral character of his school was owing to the
want of an express foundation for his therapeutic maxims in that great and signal merit of
his modern rival, pure experimentation, or the proving of medicines on the healthy. I say an
express foundation; for though, as I shall presently show, Paracelsus alludes to, he
scarcely insists on the necessity of, pure physiological experimentation, giving no
directions how it is to be carried out, and leaving its necessity rather to be inferred than
enjoined. With a vigour equal to that of Hahnemann, he attacked the absurd methods of
treatment prevalent in his time, for he saw as clearly as Hahnemann the defects of the
ancient system, which, however, his assaults failed to overthrow; for the accusations he
brings against the physicians of his age might be repeated of those of the present day, and
were in fact re-echoed by our modern reformer. I may give a specimen of the mode in which he
ridiculed the practice of the day, whereby you may judge of the resemblance betwixt his
writings and those of Hahnemann.“Suppose,” says he, “the
case of a patient sick of a fever, which ran a course of twelve weeks and then ended; there
are two kinds of physicians to treat it, the false and the true. The false one deliberately,
and at his ease, sets about physicking; he dawdles away much time with his syrups and his
laxatives, his purgatives and gruel, his barley-water, his juleps, and such-like rubbish. He
goes to work slowly – takes his time to it – gives an occasional clyster to pass the time
pleasantly, and creeps along at his ease, and cajoles the patient with his soft words until
the disease has reached its termination, and then he attributes the spontaneous cessation of
the fever to the influence of his art. But the true physician proceeds to work in a
different manner. The natural course of the disease he divides into twelve parts, and his
work is limited to one part and a half.”“That man is a physician,” he
goes on to say, “who knows how to render aid, and to drive out the disease by force;
for as certainly as the axe applied to the trunk of the tree fells it to the ground, so
certainly does the medicine overcome the disease. If I am unable to do this, then I
acknowledge readily that in this case I am no more a physician than you are.”Some of his contemporaries, however, were
not so ready to admit themselves to be no physicians, though they could not cure; for an
amusing anecdote is related of Sylvius, who, having an epidemic fever to treat, was so
unsuccessful, that two-thirds of the respectable people of the town died. But this worthy
was far from acknowledging that he was no physician in this instance; on the contrary, he
wrote a very long and learned treatise on the disease, in which he alleges that his art was
of the very best, and his remedies the most appropriate, but that God had denied his
blessing to them, in order to punish the ladies and gentlemen of the place for their sins. A
most pious and satisfactory reason for the great mortality, we all must admit.Hahnemann, we know, classified all the
methods of treatment under three heads, enantiopathic, allopathic, and homeopathic.
Paracelsus divided doctors into five classes, under the names of naturales, Specifici,
Characterales, Spirituales, and Fideles. The first class corresponded to Hahnemann’s
enantiopathic, the second more closely resembled the homeopathic; but Paracelsus differed
from Hahnemann in this, that whereas the latter denies that the enantiopathic and allopathic
cure at all, Paracelsus says that each sect is capable of curing all diseases, and an
educated physician may choose whichever he likes.With the apothecaries Paracelsus was, like
Hahnemann, on very bad terms. As in the case of the modern reformer, Paracelsus was first
attacked by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, and he returned their persecution by
withering sarcasm and contemptuous depreciation. The great ground of complaint on the part
of the worthy fraternity was, that Paracelsus did not write long and complex prescriptions,
but contented himself chiefly with simples, which brought no grist to the apothecaries’
mill.“So shamefully do they make up the
medicines,” he exclaims, “that it is only by a special interposition of Providence
that they do not do more harm; and at the same time so extravagantly do they charge for
them, and so much do they cry up their trash, that I do not believe any persons can be met
with who are greater adepts in lying.”That the apothecaries of our own country were not much better about that
period, or a little later, is evident from the expression of Walter Charleton, physician to
King Charles II, who says of them, “Perfida ingratissimaque impostorum gens,
aegrorurn pernicies, rei medicae calamitas et Libitinae presides.”“The apothecaries,” continues
Paracelsus, “are so false and dishonest, that they lead the know-nothing doctors by the
nose. If they say, ‘This is so and so,’ Dr. Wiseacre says, ‘Yes, Master Apothecary, that is
true.’ Thus one fool cheats the other: Apothecary quid-pro-quo gives Dr. Wiseacre merdam
pro balsamo; God help the poor patients that come under their hands!”Hahnemann himself had not a greater horror
of hypothesis in medicine than Paracelsus.“The physician,” he says,
“should be educated in the school of nature, not in that of speculation. Nature is wise
(sichtig), but speculation is invisible. The seen makes the physician, the unseen makes
none; the seen gives the truth, the unseen nought.”To the theorising adherents of Galen, he
cries: “You are poets, and you carry your poetry into your I medicine.” He calls
those authors who indulge in their subtle theorising; “doctors of writing, but not of
the healing art.” He ridicules the idea of learning diseases or their treatment in
books. “That physician,” he says, “is but a poor creature, who would look to
paper books alone for aid.”Paracelsus rails in good set terms at the
compounding of several medicines in one prescription, and he exposes the folly of composite
recipes with a vigour, logic, and satirical humour not inferior to that displayed by
Hahnemann.Like Hahnemann, he laughs at the notion of
attempting to reduce all diseases to a certain number of classes and genera. “You
imagine you have invented receipts for all the different fevers. You limit the number of
fevers to seventy and wot not that there are five times seventy.” how like Hahnemann,
who says (Organon, §73, note), “the old school has fixed on a certain number of names
of fever, beyond which mighty nature dare not produce any others, so that they may treat
those diseases according to some fixed method.”How like the commencement of Hahnemann’s
Introduction to Arsenic is this passage of Paracelsus: “What is there of God’s creation
that is not furnished with some great quality that may tend to the weal of mankind?”
And yet he truly remarks, many things, if used rightly, are beneficial; if the reverse,
poisonous. “Where is a purgative, in all your books that is not a poison, that will not
cause death or injury, if attention be not paid to the dose in which it is given. You know
that quicksilver is nothing but a poison, and daily experience proves it to be so; and yet
it is your custom to smear your patients with it thicker than the cobbler smears his leather
with grease. You fumigate with its cinnabar, you wash with its sublimate; and you are
displeased that it should be said it is a poison, which it is; and this poison you throw
into human beings alleging all good; that it is corrected by white bad, as though it were no
poison.”The Galenic maxim, contraria contrariis,
finds no favour with Paracelsus. “A contrariis curantur”,” he says,
“that is, hot removes cold and so forth – that is false and was never true in medicine;
but arcanum and disease, these are contraria. Arcanum is health, and disease is the opposite
of health: these two drive away one another; these are the contraries that remove one
another.”In another place, he says something
similar: “Contraria non curantur contrariis“; like belongs to like, not
cold against heat, not heat against cold. That were indeed a wild arrangement if we had to
seek our safety in opposites.
Paracelsus’s writingsAgain: “This,” says he, “is
true, that he who will employ cold for heat, moisture for dryness, does not understand the
nature of disease.” (Paramirum, p.68)The homeopathic principle is still more
completely set forth in his treatise, Von der Astronomey. He there says: “The
nature of the arcana is, that they shall go directly against the properties or the enemy, as
one combatant goes against another. Nature wills it that in the combat stratagem shall be
employed agonist stratagem, etc., and this is the natural case with all things on earth; in
medicine also, the same rule prevails. The physician should let this be an example to him,
As two foes go out to the combat, who are both cold or both hot, and who attack one another
both with the same weapon: as the victory is, so also is it in the human body; the two
combatants seek their aid from the same mother, that is, from the same power.”Still more distinctly, he enunciates our
principle in these words: “What makes jaundice that also cures jaundice and all its
species. In like manner, the medicine that shall cure paralysis must proceed from that which
causes it; and in this way we practise according to the method of cure by arcana.”
(Archidoxis, vol iii, pt.v. p.18)Paracelsus’s system, as far as we can learn
it from his works, was a rude homeopathy, an attempt to discover specifics for the various
diseases to which man is liable but it was not equal in value to Hahnemann’s system, for an
uncertainty almost as great as that of the old system attended it. He believed that in
nature there existed a remedy for every disease. The physician, from the external Symptoms,
was to judge of the organ diseased, and for the cure of the disease he has to select that
medicine which experience had shown him exerted a specific influence on the organ affected.
He would not have us speak of rheumatism, catarrh, coryza, etc., but of morbus
terebinthinus, morbus Sileris montani, morbus heleborinus, etc; according as the malady
presented the character of one or other of these medicines, that is to say, affected the
organs one of them had an affinity for.This is, as I said, a rude homeopathy, but
a homeopathy that did not sufficiently consider the character, but only the seat of the
affection; and moreover a homeopathy that wanted the sure foundation of experiment on the
healthy as the means of ascertaining the sphere of action of the remedies, but that trusted
almost entirely to a laborious and empirical testing of the medicines on the sick – a source
of Materia Medica which Hahnemann has shown to be sufficiently untrustworthy. Still, I would
not say that Paracelsus was destitute of all knowledge of the pathogenetic effects of
medicines, or that he entirely neglected this source for ascertaining the virtues of drugs;
for some passages of his works would go far to prove the contrary to be the case. Thus the
passage I have just quoted, “what makes jaundice that cures jaundice,” presupposes
an acquaintance with what will cause the disease; and we find more evidence of this in other
parts of his works. Thus he writes: “When antimony is ingested it causes a dry cough
much shooting pain in the sides and headache, great hardness of the stools, much ulceration
of the spleen hot blood, it makes roughness and itching, dries up and increases the
jaundice.” Alkali causes oppression of the breathing, and foetid smell from the mouth,
causes much koder. [whatever that may be] to be ejected, causes much heartburn, griping, and
tearing in the bowels, dries up, renders the urine acrid, produces pollutions, also blood
from the anus,” etc. Such pathogenetic knowledge, however, is too vague and indefinite
to have been of much use in practice; but it shows that Paracelsus was in the right
direction, though he wanted the courage or perseverance to subject all his agents to the
test of pure physiological experiment, and generally trusted to ascertaining their
properties by trying them on the sick; a source be it remarked, en passant, which Hahnemann
largely availed himself of, though, as I have just stated, he himself exposed its
fallaciousness. Paracelsus resembles Hahnemann in still another point, that he recognised
the primary and secondary actions of medicines.Speaking of vitriol, he says:
“As surely as it relaxes in its first
period, so surely does it constrict in its second period,” etc.Paracelsus’s system was eminently a system
of specific medicine, and in many points his therapeutic rule resembles that of Hahnemann,
and occasionally he makes use of a truly homeopathic phrase. Thus he says, “likes must
be driven out (or cured) by likes;” but the meaning of this, in the Paracelsian sense,
generally comes to this, that the disease of the brain, the heart, the liver, etc., must be
expelled by that medicine which represents the brain, the heart, or the liver, in
consequence of its specific action on one of these organs.Thus he says: “Heart to heart, lung to
lung, spleen to spleen – not cow’s spleen, not swine’s brain to man’s brain, but the brain
that is external brain to man’s internal brain.”The next sentence I have to quote explains
this meaning more thoroughly. “The medicinal herbs are organs; this is a heart, that a
liver, this other a spleen. That every heart is visible to the eye as a heart I will not
say, but it is a power and a virtue equivalent to the heart.”Another point of resemblance betwixt
Paracelsus and Hahnemann is observable in the great partiality shown by both for extremely
minute doses. In his book On the Causes and Origin of Lues Gallica (lib. v. p.11),
Paracelsus compares the medicinal power of the drug to fire.” As a single spark can
ignite a great heap of wood, indeed, can set a whole forest in flames, in like manner can a
very small dose of medicine overpower a great disease. And,” he proceeds, “just as
this spark has no weight, so the medicine given, however small may be its weight, should
suffice to effect its action.” How like this is to Hahnemann: “The dose of the
homeopathically selected remedy can never be prepared so small that it shall not be stronger
than the natural disease, that it shall not suffice to cure it.” (Organon, § cclxxix.)The following passage shows that Paracelsus
anticipated Hahnemann in the employment of medicines by olfaction. Speaking of specifics, he
says: ” They have many rare powers, and they are very numerous; there is, for instance,
the Specificum odoriferum, which cures diseases when the patients are unable to swallow the
medicine, as in apoplexy and epilepsy.” (Parac. Op., vol. iii. pt. vi. p.70. Basel,
1589)I shall close my quotations from Paracelsus
by a passage, which shows that, like Hahnemann, he considered the medicinal power as
something spiritual, and inseparable from the material medicine – in idea, at least, if not
in fact: the medicine lies in the spirit and not in the substance (or body), for body and
spirit are two different things.”I have – said enough to show you the great
analogy, the very striking resemblance betwixt Hahnemann’s and Paracelsus’s doctrines. I
could not quote to you all the passages that are strikingly analogous to many in Hahnemann’s
works, but what I have adduced will have enabled you to judge of this great likeness for
yourselves. It is impossible at this moment to say if Hahnemann was acquainted with
Paracelsus’s writings. From his extensive familiarity with the writings of medical authors,
both ancient and modern, I should hardly suppose that he had not read the works of one so
world-renowned as Paracelsus; but then not a syllable occurs in all his works regarding this
wonderful and most original writer and thinker. The resemblance of some passages in the
Organon and in the minor writings of Hahnemann, to some parts of Paracelsus’s works is so
very striking, that it is difficult to believe that Hahnemann did not take them from
Paracelsus; and yet had he done so, would he not have acknowledged the fact? It may be,
after all, that the resemblance is purely accidental; and that his ideas that seem borrowed
are just those that must necessarily occur to one who, like Paracelsus, had shaken himself
free from the trammels of an antiquated and false system, and had set himself to study
nature with his own eyes, unblinded by the distorting spectacles of the schools.
Oswald Croll’s
Basilica chymica (1609)One of the immediate followers of
Paracelsus, Oswald Croll, who has been accepted by Sprengel and others as a good exponent of
Paracelsus’s system, seems to have but ill understood his master’s maxims when he says,
“Cerebrum suillum phreniticis prodest; ideo etiam ii, qui memoriam amiserant, cum
juvamento miscuntur cerebro poreitio cuin myristica et cinnamomo aromatisato” for, as I
showed you just now, Paracelsus distinctly says, “not swine’s brain to man’s brain.”
The idea of Croll, however, is a further proof of the notion of a necessary analogy between
disease and remedy.Johannes Agricola, who flourished shortly
after Paracelsus, after accusing his contemporaries of their inability to cure cancer,
lupus, fistula, or leprosy, says:
Johannes Agricola Palatinus
(1589-1643)But if the subject be viewed in the proper
light, it must be confessed that a concealed poison is at the root of such disease, and thus
poison must be of an arsenical character; this poison must therefore be expelled by means of
the same or a similar poison.” He used arsenic for the cure of these diseases. Here,
then, is another testimony to the homeopathic principle; for I do not imagine Agricola, in
stating that the poison on which Cancer, lupus, etc., depended was of an arsenical in
character, meant to say that it was actually arsenic, but only that it was analogous to
arsenic in its effects, and, on the homeopathic principle, arsenic was its proper curative
agent. He goes on to observe, “If a realgar disease is present, it must be cured with a
realgaric remedy, and with none other.” That is to say; as I conceive it if we have a
case of disease before us resembling the pathogenetic effects of realgar, we must treat it
with that substance, and with none other, – a distinct declaration of the homeopathic
principle.Robert Ellis DUDGEON
Copyright © Peter
Morrell 2000
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