Organon §56

This palliative (antipathic, enantiopathic) method was introduced seventeen centuries ago, following Galen's teaching of contraria contrariis. By this method, physicians could still most certainly hope to win the trust of patients by deceiving them with almost instantaneous improvement. How fundamentally unhelpful and detrimental this mode of treatment is (in diseases not running a rapid course) we shall see from the following. It is certainly the only one of the allopaths' modes of treatment that has any manifest relation to a part of the symptoms of the natural disease, but what relation! Truly only an inverted one which should be avoided if we do not want to deceive or to mock the chronically ill patient. 122

Comment

122 There are those who would like to create a third application of medicines against disease, through isopathy as it is called, namely, the cure of a present disease with the same miasm. But even granted that one could do this (since the miasm administered to the patient would be highly potentized and consequently changed) isopathy would nevertheless only produce a cure through a simillimum opposed to the simillimo. But this wanting to cure through the an entirely identical disease potence (per idem) contradicts all healthy common sense, and therefore also all experience. Those who first broached the subject of so-called isopathy presumably had hovering before them the benefit which humanity received through cowpox inoculation. Those who were inoculated remained free from all future smallpox infection and were cured of the disease in advance, as it were. But cowpox and smallpox are only very similar; they are in no way entirely the same disease. They differ from one another in many respects, namely in that cowpox has a more rapid course and is gentler, and especially in that cowpox never infects the human being through proximity. Widespread inoculation with cowpox so effectively put an end to all epidemics of the deadly, terrible smallpox that the present generation has no vivid conception of that former horrible smallpox-plague. In this way, to be sure, certain other animal diseases will present us with medicinal and curative potences for very similar, important human diseases, happily supplementing our stock of homeopathic medicines. But wanting to cure a human disease (e.g. , the itch diathesis or maladies arisen therefrom) with an identical human disease matter (e.g. , with a psoricum taken from the itch diathesis) is going too far! Nothing results from it but calamity and aggravation of the disease.