Organon §160

Since the dose of a homeopathic remedy can hardly ever be prepared so small that it could not improve, over-tune, indeed fully cure and annihilate the recently arisen, unspoiled, natural disease that is analogous to it (see footnotes to §249), it therefore becomes understandable why a fitting homeopathic medicine that is not in the smallest possible dose brings to pass in the first hour after ingestion a noticeable, homeopathic aggravation of this kind. 171

Comment

171 This heightening of the medicinal symptoms over the disease symptoms analogous to them, which is similar to an aggravation, has also been observed by other physicians when a homeopathic remedy played into their hands by chance. When the itch diathesis patient complains about increased eruption after the ingestion of sulphur, his physician (not aware of the cause of this) consoles him with the assurance that the itch diathesis must come out more than ever before it can heal up. He is not aware that this is a sulphur eruption that only assumes the appearance of an increase in the itch diathesis. "The facial eruption that was cured by Viola tricolor was, at first, aggravated by it," assures Leroy (Heilkunde fьr Mьtter [Medical Art for Mothers], p. 406). Leroy was not aware that the apparent aggravation stemmed from a too-large dose of the pansy which was to some extent homeopathic here. Lysons states, "Elm bark most certainly cures those cutaneous eruptions which it increases at the beginning of its use." (Medical Transactions, London, 1772, vol. II). If he had not administered the bark in enormous doses (as is usual in the allopathic medicinal art) but in quite small doses as must be done when it is used homeopathically (i.e. , by symptom-similarity of the medicine) he would have cured without, or almost without, seeing this apparent disease heightening (the homeopathic aggravation).