Organon of Medicine

Review

This book review is reprinted with the permission of the National Center for Homeopathy

Reviewed by Julian Winston

This translation of the Organon, first released in 1982, has been out of print for a few years. Greg Cooper, who runs The Minimum Price Books, has done us a great service by re-publishing it.

Until this edition was released ten years ago, the only translation of the Organon available was the Dudgeon translation of the 5th edition with the additions from the 6th edition added by William Boericke in 1921.

A careful comparison of the above translations with this new one, can give many insights into the meaning of the 291 aphorisms.

The book also includes an index which is extremely useful when trying to find a specific word or idea within the text of the book.

For scholarly work, I'd still prefer the combined 5th and 6th edition that is published in India-through which you can see the changes that Hahnemann made to each aphorism and footnote through the varying editions.

Even so, I still keep a 1982 copy of this present translation nearby to compare with the earlier translations.

My only complaint about this edition (and of the earlier one too) is that Hahnemann's long introduction is missing from it. The introduction serves to place the book into the historical context of medicine, and outlines not only the medicine of Hahnemann's day, but gives, in his own words, the practices which led him to write the Organon in the first place.

Aside from that shortcoming (which is why I have and use the earlier editions alongside this one), the Kunzli, Naude, Pendelton translation provides a clear and thought provoking translation of this seminal work in homeopathy.

HOMEOPATHY TODAY FEBRUARY 1994

This book review is reprinted with the permission of the American Institute of Homeopathy

Reviewed by Daniel Cook, MD

The sixth edition of the Organon has had a clouded history. Hahnemann published the fifth edition in 1833, which was translated into English by Dudgeon in 1849, six years after Hahnemann's death. This was the last edition of Hahnemann's work available in any part of the world until 1921. Hahnemann's closest associates knew through personal correspondence that he was working on a 6th edition at the end of his life. Initially written in French, it remained unpublished, and subsequently disappeared without a trace. He then wrote a sixth edition in German, but did not publish it. His widow admitted to possessing it and getting it ready for publication, but she kept it unpublished for unknown reasons, and it passed to the Boenninghausen family at her death.

The Boenninghausens guarded it "almost as a sacred relic" and would let no one even see it, according to Dr. Richard Haehl, a German homeopath and biographer of Hahnemann. In this way the homeopathic world was denied any knowledge of the sixth edition for nearly 80 years after its writing. On a visit to Haehl in 1891, Dr. James Ward and Dr. William Boericke, having read allusions to Hahnemann's later correspondence of his being at work on a 6th edition, inquired about the work, and when Haehl told them of its possession by the Boenninghausens, they offered to purchase it.

Twenty-nine years later the Boenninghausens, ruined by World War 1, accepted their offer and in 1920 gave up the manuscript to Haehl, acting as intermediary. Haehl apparently kept if for some time, then had it delivered to Dr. Boericke. The manuscript, which is now in the library of University of California San Francisco, is a printed German fifth edition with handwritten additions and corrections neatly placed in the margins.

Haehl published the German sixth edition in 1921. Boericke, using a Dudgeon fifth edition translation as the main body of the work, amended the Dudgeon text wherever there were handwritten changes in the German text. This he published as the translated sixth edition in 1922. After Dr. Pierre Schmidt translated the German sixth edition into French, he realized that the Boericke edition contained not only all the unevenness and in exactness of an amended translation from two different authors of different centuries, but contained also serious errors of translation which could not be tolerated in such an important work. Schmidt expressed his concerns to one of this new edition's translators (Mr. Naude), who with Dr. Kunzli and Mr. Pendleton translated the Hahnemann manuscript integrally and correctly into English for the first time in 1982. This translation, never reviewed in the JAIH, is being reissued by Cooper publishers after being out of print for a number of years. The Organon of Medicine is the most important book in homeopathy. The translation by Kunzli, Naude, Lind Pendleton is the only integral English translation of the final edition of' this work. It is brilliantly translated. This book is indispensable. Hahnemann's noble and beautiful 19th Century German has been put into noble and beautiful 20th Century English, thus preserving the book's grace and tone, which would have been lost in his long sentences, cumbersome and arduous to the modern ear, had not been carefully divided. All the errors of the Boericke edition have been corrected. There may be some disagreement about the precise rendering of a few words, but never is Hahnemann's teaching altered thereby. Important clarifications of weights and measures are given. A comprehensive and extremely useful index is added for the first time in any English translation.

Why is this book still an essential textbook for homeopaths today? Unlike every other medical system in the West, which owing to poor results undergoes continual modification and revision (euphemistically called "development") so that its texts and practices are discredited and replaced every few decades, the laws and methods discovered by Hahnemann are as true today as when he first wrote them. The degree of completeness to which Hahnemann brought Homeopathy in the span of one lifetime is illustrated by the astonishing fact that Hahnemann's personal medical kit contained in 1840 the same medicines, given for the same indications, that homeopathic physicians carry in such kits today! It is difficult to find anything comparable to this in the history of human endeavor. Did Isaac Newton, after discovering the laws of mechanics, develop dozens of machines still manufactured today? The Organon, in which Hahnemann defined the system of medicine we call homeopathy, established in virtual completeness nearly all the principles and procedures that a homeopath Must adhere to today. They are unchanging laws of nature, and they must be known and rigorously followed. Is there anyone better to study them from than the greatest genius in the history of homeopathy?

One asks oneself many questions about this sixth edition. It is the last edition, but is it the final conclusion of Hahnemann's thought? Unlikely. Hahnemann was constantly experimenting until the end of his life. Had he lived longer, there would certainly have been a 7th, 8th, 9th edition. What notable differences do we find between the 5th and 6th editions? The main difference between the 6th edition and all the previous editions is Hahnemann's introduction of the quinquagintamillesimal potencies (named variously LM or Q potencies). This is much more than a different way of potentising remedies. Hahnemann was seeking a convenient procedure of making higher potencies that would act more forcefully yet without aggravations, so that the patient would be cured more quickly. His ceaseless experiences in this direction led him to publish no less than five different methods of preparing remedies in the last ten years of his life: smelling remedies; taking them dissolved in water; giving each ascending potency ten succussions, later two succussions, later 20 to 50 succussions; triturating on the centesimal scale; triturating on the quinquagintamillesimal Scale. (footnote 3). Each of these methods was published with Hahnemann's full conviction, only to be criticized by him a few years later when he introduced its successor. His experiments with the quinquagintamillesimal potencies took place in the last few years of his life. His last casebooks show that he used them only infrequently. Since Hahnemann wrote the Organon only after more than 10 years of continuous investigation, and since similarly more than 10 years of study preceded his writing of the Chronic Diseases, it seems odd that the LM potencies were included in the Organon 6th edition with such little prior study and experience.

Today, 70 years after their public introduction in 1921, the LM potencies have not been adopted. Dr. Kunzli, who investigated them extensively and intended to champion their use, ultimately found only a very limited and conditional place for them in his practice. The reasons for this are clear. The great development of' homeopathy in America in the late 19th Century, based as it was on the 5th Edition, saw the investigation and establishment of an immense range of centesimal potencies produced easily by machine, plus an accurate knowledge of the forcefulness and duration of these potencies (the so-called Kentian scale) up to CM and beyond. This development fulfilled all aims that Hahnemann was trying to achieve with his LM potencies, with none of the pitfalls of over frequent dosing. The fact is, the homeopathy of Hering, Lippe, Nash, H. C. Allen, Kent, Gladwin, Weir, Tyler, and Pierre Schmidt is the homeopathy of the 5th edition of the Organon. The conclusion and extension of Hahnemann's thought and its systematization into the cohesive whole which we call Kentian or classical homeopathy - this body of knowledge proceeds entirely from the 5th edition.

Lastly there is the question of the authenticity of the UCSF manuscript. Dr. Josef Schmidt has made a study of the handwriting in the 6th edition manuscript, and it seems it is not all Hahnemann's. Apparently among the succession of people who held the manuscript during its 80 years of secrecy, not one but several of them could not keep their pens off it. Haehl appears to be one of the main offenders. But whatever questions may arise about the authenticity of the German text, the fact remains that this is Hahnemann's Iast edition of the Organon, and this is the only text we have of it. Therefore a correct English translation of it is absolutely indispensable, and this one is it. Even if we reject the 6th edition in favor of the 5th edition, it is essential that we know what we are rejecting and why. For this additional reason this translation is indispensable.

References

1 Ward, James W., MD. Principles and Scope of Homeopathy, San Francisco, 1925, p. 15-16. Ibid.
2 Haehl, Richard, MD. Samuel Hahnemann: His Life and Word, Vol 1, Indian edition, Jain, 1992, p. 180 ff., p. 316-330. [N.B. Many of the original sources, such as Hahnemann's introductions to the individual volumes of the are not generally available in English.]

This book review is reprinted from the British Homoeopathic Journal Volume 73, Number 1, January 1984, with permission from Peter Fisher, Editor.

London: Victor Gollancz, 1983.

This is a new translation of the 6th edition of the Organon. The writers explain that they have gone back to the original manuscripts and produced a fresh translation in English.

The book is particularly well set out, each of the paragraphs is clearly numbered. The foot-notes appropriate to each one are written in a type similar to, and immediately after, the text of the paragraph itself. They are slightly inset to distinguish them. The whole presentation makes for easy reading, both of the main paragraphs and the foot-notes. In the past it has been all too easy for the foot-notes to be obscured. As these contain many important expansions of Hahnemann's thoughts, they are an important part of the work. It is therefore good to see them given adequate prominence in this type of presentation.

The 6th edition of the Organon is thought by many people to represent a climax in Hahnemann's expression of his understanding of the philosophy relating to homoeopathy. This presentation of it is therefore an important and welcome edition to homoeopathic literature.

Hopefully, it will give new impetus to the attempts to understand what Hahnemann really taught.

ANNE CLOVER

It is a great pleasure to read Hahnemann's Organon again. It surely ranks as one of the finest medical treatises in existence and deserves much wider attention than it receives at present. Hahnemann was a complex character who comes over in the Organon as an inspired researcher and scientist, a compassionate healer, and as a man who certainly did not suffer fools gladly.

There are many translations of the various editions of the Organon in English from I-V, but this new book is apparently unique in being a direct English translation of the VIth edition which was completed by Hahnemann in 1842, the year before he died aged 88. It was not published until 1921. The standard English version has been the Vth edition with additions from the VIth, but this work has been translated directly from the original text of the VIth edition which is in the possession of the School of Medicine of the University of California in San Francisco.

The most apparent changes between the Vth and VIth editions are the incorporation into the VIth edition of material from the introduction to the Vth on the "Review of Medication until the present time". In places this is further expanded on, e.g. paragraphs 60(f) and 74(f) where he steps up the intensity of his tirade against the hapless Broussais!

Arguably the most important difference between the Vth and VIth edition is the simplification of the whole process of preparation of potencies and the manner of their repetition (Paragraphs 246 et. seq.).

There are, in addition, two particular points where Hahnemann develops his ideas on the nature of the action of pathogenic forces and healing potencies, and their relation to the vital force (paragraphs 11(f), 269(ff). The footnote to paragraph 11 especially is commendable for the almost poetic insight shown by Hahnemann into the nature of the forces of gravity and magnetism, which gives the reader a better understanding of how he arrived at his conclusions regarding the invisible origins of disease, conclusions which, to me, are still valid today, despite the undoubted advances in biochemistry, immunology, infectious diseases etc.

As to the book itself, the type is clear and of good size. The English translation is certainly far more readable than earlier translations of the Vth edition and yet appears to be a very accurate and scholarly piece of work, as can be testified by the inclusion of Know Thyself in Greek in the footnote to paragraph 141 - which was the subject of an interesting paper by Dr Hehr in a recent issue of this Journal.1 The index is comprehensive and refers to page numbers and not paragraphs. There is no listing of paragraph abstracts at the front of the book, as in most Vth editions, which I missed, and although a fair amount of material from the introduction to the Vth edition is incorporated into the VIth edition, there is still some left out which gives a very good background to the medical practices extant at the time in which Hahnemann lived and worked, against which his writings gain a clearer perspective. Whether Hahnemann himself dropped this introduction when he wrote the VIth edition, I do not know.

These are, however, minor points and in general I would recommend this new translation of the VIth edition to all students of homoeopathy, whether just beginning or well advanced in its practice. It occupies a position in its own right, adding meaning and depth to the Vth editions whether they be in the older translations, e.g. Dr Dudgeon,2 or more recent ones, e.g. Dr Hamlyn,3 both of which I have compared to this new translation.

It only remains for me to commend Gollancz for publishing this new translation and to hope that it reaches those parts that previous editions have failed to!

ANDREW H. LOCKIE

REFERENCES
1 Hehr GS. Self awareness and homoeopathy. Br Hom J 1983; 72: 90.
2 Dudgeon RE. Organon of Medicine by Samuel Hahnemann. London: W. Headland, 1849.
3 Hamlyn E. The Healing Art of Homoeopathy. Beaconsfield, 1979.

British Homoeopathic Journal
Volume 73, Number 1, January 1984

JAIH Winter 1993-94, Vol. 86, No. 4