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Aphorism 7

§ 7

 Now, as in a disease, from  which no manifest exciting or  maintaining cause (causa occasionalis)  has to be removed  1, we can perceive nothing but the morbid symptoms, it must (regard being had to the possibility of  a miasm,  and attention paid to the accessory circumstances, § 5) be the symptoms alone  by which the disease demands and points to the remedy suited to relieve it - and, moreover,  the totality of  these its symptoms, of  this outwardly reflected picture of the internal essence of the disease, that is,  of the affection of  the vital force, must be  the  principal, or  the sole means, whereby the disease can make known what remedy it requires - the only thing that can determine the choice of the most appropriate remedy - and thus, in a word, the totality 2  of  the  symptoms  must  be  the principal, indeed the only thing the physician has to take note of in every case of disease and to remove by means of his art, in order  that it shall be  cured  and  transformed into health.


1  It is not necessary to say that every intelligent physician would first remove this where it exists; the indisposition  thereupon generally  ceases spontaneously. He will remove from the room  strong-smelling flowers, which have a tendency to cause syncope and hysterical sufferings; extract from  the cornea the foreign  body that excites inflammation of the eye; loosen the over-tight bandage  on a wounded limb that threatens to cause mortification, and apply a more suitable one; lay bare and put ligature on the  wounded artery that produces fainting; endeavour to promote the expulsion by  vomiting of belladonna berries etc., that may have been swallowed; extract foreign substances that may have got into the orifices of the body (the nose,  gullet, ears, urethra, rectum, vagina); crush the vesical calculus; open the imperforate anus of the newborn infant, etetc

2  In all times, the old school physicians, not knowing how else to give relief, have sought to combat and if possible to suppress by medicines, here and there, a single symptom from  among a number in diseases - a one-sided procedure, which, under the name  of symptomatic treatment, has justly excited universal contempt, because by it, not only was nothing gained, but much  harm  was inflicted.  A single one of the symptoms  present is no more the disease itself than a foot is the  man himself. This  procedure was so much  the more reprehensible, that such a single  symptom was only treated by  an antagonistic remedy (therefore only in an enantiopathic and palliative manner), whereby, after a slight alleviation, it was subsequently only rendered all the worse. 

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