Aphorism 60
§ 60
Aphorism 60 :
Fifth Edition
If these ill-effects are produced, as may very naturally be expected from the antipathic employment of medicines, the ordinary physician imagines he can get over the difficulty by giving, at each renewed aggravation, a stronger dose of the remedy, whereby an equally transient suppression is effected; and as there then is a still greater necessity for giving ever-increasing quantities of the palliative there ensues either another more serious disease or frequently even danger to life and death itself, but never a cure of a disease of considerable or of long standing.
Aphorism 60 :
Sixth Edition
If these ill-effects are produced, as may very naturally be expected from the antipathic employment of medicines, the ordinary physician imagines he can get over the difficulty by giving, at each renewed aggravation, a stronger dose of the remedy, whereby an equally transient suppression1 is effected; and as there then is a still greater necessity for giving ever – increasing quantities of the palliative there ensues either another more serious disease or frequently even danger to life and death itself, but never a cure of a disease of considerable or of long standing.
1 All usual palliatives given for the suffering of the sick have (as is seen here) as after-effects an increase of the same suffering and the older physicians had to repeat them in ever stronger doses in order to achieve a similar modification, which however, was never permanent and never sufficient to prevent an increased recurrence of the ailment. But Brousseau, who twenty-five years before contended against the senseless mixing of different drugs in prescription and thereby ending its reign in France, (for which mankind is grateful to him) introduced his so-called physiological system (without taking note of the homoeopathic method then already established), a method of treatment, while effectively lessening and permanently preventing the return of all the sufferings, was applicable to all diseases of mankind; a thing that the palliatives then in use were not capable of affecting.
Being able to heal disease with mild innocent remedies and thus establish health, Brousseau found the easier way to quiet the sufferings of patients more and more at the cost of their life and at last to extinguish life wholly – a method of treatment that, alas, seemed sufficient to his contemporaries. In the degree that the patient retains his strength will his ailments be apparent and the more intensely will he feel his pains. He moans and groans and cries out and calls for help more and more vociferously so that the physician cannot come any too soon to give relief. Brousseau needed only to depress the vital force, to lessen it more and more and behold, the more frequently the patient was bled, the more leeches and cupping glasses sucked out the vital fluid (for the innocent irreplaceable blood was according to him responsible for almost all ailments). In the same proportion the patient lost strength to feel pain or to express his aggravated condition by violent complaint and gestures. The patient appears more quiet in proportion as he grows weaker, the bystanders rejoice in his apparent improvement, ready to return to the same measures on the renewal of his sufferings – be they spasms, suffocation, fears or pain, for they had so beautifully quieted him before and gave promise of further ease. In disease of long duration and when the patient retained some strength, he was deprived of food, put on a hunger diet, in order to depress life so much more successfully and inhibit the restless states. The debilitated patient feels unable to protest against further similar measures of blood-letting leeches, vesication, warm baths and so forth to refuse their employment. That death must follow such frequently repeated reduction and exhaustion of the vital energy is not noticed by the patient, already robbed of all consciousness, and the relatives, blinded by the improvements even of the last sufferings of the patient by means of blood letting and warm baths, cannot understand and are surprised when the patient quietly slips away.
But God knows the patient on his bed of sickness was not treated with violence, for the prick of a small lancet is not really painful and the gum Arabic solution (Eau de Gourme, almost the only medicine that Brousseau used) was mild in taste and without apparent action – the bite of the leeches insignificant and the blood letting by the physician done quietly while the luke warm baths could only soothe, hence the disease from the very start must have been fatal, so that the patient, notwithstanding all efforts of the physician, had to leave the earth.
In this way the relatives, and especially the heirs of the dear departed, consoled themselves.
The physicians in Europe and elsewhere accepted this convenient treatment of all disease according to a single rule, since it saved them from all further thinking (the most laborious of all work under the sun). They only had to take care to assuage the pangs of conscience and console themselves that they were not the originators of this system and this method of treatment, that all the other thousands of Brousseauists did the same and that possibly everything would cease with death anyway as was taught by their master. In this way many thousand physicians were miserably misled to shed (with cold heart) the warm blood of their patients that were capable of cure and thereby rob millions of men gradually of their life, according to Brousseau’s method, more than fell on Napoleon’s battlefields. Was it perhaps necessary by the disposition of God for that system of Brousseau which destroyed medically the life of curable patients to precede homoeopathy in order to open the eyes of the world to the only true science and art of medicine, homoeopathy, in which curable patients find health and new life when this most difficult of all arts is practised by an indefatigable discriminating physician in a pure and conscientious manner?
