Aphorism 22 Fifth Edition

But as nothing is to be observed in diseases that must be removed in order to change them into health besides the totality of their signs and symptoms, and likewise medicines can show nothing curative besides their tendency to produce morbid symptoms in healthy persons and to remove them in diseased persons; it follows, on the one hand, that medicines only become remedies and capable of annihilating disease, because the medicinal substance, by exciting certain effects and symptoms, that is to say, by producing a certain artificial morbid state, removes and abrogates the symptoms already present, to wit, the natural morbid state we wish to cure. On the other hand, it follows that, for the totality of the symptoms of the disease to be cured, a medicine must be sought which (according as experience shall prove whether the morbid symptoms are most readily, certainly, and permanently removed and changed into health by similar or opposite medicinal symptoms1) has a tendency to produce similar or opposite symptoms.

1 The other possible mode of employing medicines for diseases besides these two is the allopathic method, in which medicines are given, whose symptoms have no direct pathological relation to the morbid state, neither similar nor opposite, but quite heterogeneous to the symptoms of the disease, is, as shown above, in the introduction (Review of the therapeutics, allopathy and palliative treatment that have hitherto been practiced in the old school of medicine), merely instinctive vital force, which, when made ill by noxious agents, strives to save itself at whatever sacrifice by the production and continuance of morbid irritation in the organism - an imitation, consequently, of the crude vital force which was implanted in our organism in order to preserve our life in health, in the most beautiful harmony; but when deranged by disease, was so constituted as to admit of being again changed to health (homoeopathically) by the intelligent physician, but not to cure itself, for which the little power it possesses is so far from being a pattern to be copied, that all the changes and symptoms it produces in the (morbidly deranged) organism are just the disease itself. But this injudicious system of therapeutics of the old school of medicine can no more be passed by unnoticed that can history omit to record the thousands of years of opposition to which mankind has been subjected under the irrational, despotic Governments.