07/30/2021
This is how The Father of American Homeopathy rolled.
A wonderful story about Constantine Hering - with lessons worth learning...
When Dr. Arthur Eastman was a student at the Hahnemann Medical College of Philadelphia in the late 1870s, he lived in Dr. Constantine Hering's house and was thus able to observe his mentor closely in the last year of his practice. He wrote, "Dr. Hering retained an old German custom to have a couple of students from the College reside in his family to keep in touch with the work and progress of the College. These places were much sought after, and happy he to whose lot fell the choice. I resided in his family during three courses of lectures, two winter terms and one spring term, from the fall of 1877 to the spring of 1879, and was also a frequent caller on him while I was resident physician in the Homeopathic Hospital of Philadelphia until December 1879.
"How did he [Hering] prescribe medicines? One might answer, very nearly as Hahnemann directed. He said: 'There is an individuality in everything that the Lord has made. You cannot substitute one medicine for another. To mix medicines is a crime. Alternating is the half-way house to mixing. To make poor prescriptions when much driven is excusable, but the questions which must be kept freshly in mind are: What is your aim? What are you striving for? If a homeopathic physician once adopts the too-much-trouble creed, he is lost.' It was certainly not his creed. His rules of practice, 'golden rules,' he called them, were 'Learn to observe; learn to prove; learn to examine the sick; learn to select the remedy; learn how to repeat and how to change remedies; learn how to wait; learn how to profit by experience.'
"His method of examining a patient was an art. He took notes on his cases, full notes, and then would repair to his prescription room, where he could consult his repertories: his Jahr, his Bönninghausen, and then his materia medica. His remedy once selected, he would generally give in a high potency, way up in the thousandths sometimes. He had small envelopes with printed directions on the outside. Each contained six powders of Saccharum lactis, one of them containing some pellets of the indicated remedy and marked with a star. The directions were to dissolve the star powder in water and take a teaspoonful four times or more a day [for one day only], and go on each succeeding day with the other powders. You see, they took the medicine only one day, then placebos the succeeding days for a week, when they would report. If improvement, marked improvement resulted, they would get another envelope of blank powders for another week. If improvement stopped, they would get another powder of the same medicine of a higher potency, and, as he would say, 'High and higher still, to heaven.' If the patient was worse, a new remedy had to be selected, generally a remedy having some relationship to the first. Dr. Hering did not confine himself exclusively to high potencies or single doses. In certain cases, he repeated his remedies frequently. In chronic diseases the interval that elapsed between the doses might be two, four, seven, eleven, or sixteen days. In acute cases, he says, 'The dose might be repeated as often as every hour, or even every five or ten minutes.' He never alternated remedies, but if the symptoms suddenly changed he would often change his remedy. His success was phenomenal. Long-standing, chronic maladies yielded to his treatment. So-called incurable patients were cured by him. Patients came to him from the world over and were improved and cured.
