IV. Conclusion

The above quotations must suffice for the present as examples of the matter and style of this monumental work, though many other points of interests might have been brought out. Hahnemann, for instance, was not among the vulgar crowd who reviled mesmerism when it first came out, and left to their lineal descendants in another generation to accept it under another name. He recognised the good of it, and assigned it its place. And Hahnemann would not have been surprised by the Tuberculin treatment of consumption. In a footnote to Aphorism lvi., he says : "A fourth mode of employing medicines in diseases has been attempted to be created by means of Isopathy, as it is called-that it to say, a method of curing a given disease by the same contagious principle that produces it. But even granting this could be done, which would certainly be a most valuable discovery, yet, after all, seeing that the miasm is given to the patient highly dynamised, and thereby, consequently, to a certain degree in an altered condition the cure is effected only by opposing a simillimum to a simillimum."

In concluding this brief and necessarily very inadequate account of Hahnemann's wonderful book, I cannot do better than quote the words of its English translator.

In the preface to the 1849 edition Dr. Dudgeon thus fitly sums up his estimate of the Organon : "Perfect and complete in itself, it leaves no point to doctrine unexplained, no technical detail untouched, no adverse argument unanswered".