P. P. WELLS, M. D., BROOKLYN, N.Y.

The Homeopathic Physician / 1886

The faculty which apprehends principles, and the innate differences of these, as they are met in practical duties and experiences, is one the student of medicine and surgery should early and earnestly cultivate, and the practitioner never cease endeavors to enlarge and perfect, and especially the practitioner of specific medicine because its exercise is so constantly demanded in his every endeavor to relieve the pains and heal the sicknesses of mankind. His life-work is so largely made up of analysis and comparison of visible and invisible elements, and his success in dealing with these depends so much on his right apprehensions and discriminations of them, that a vigorous and trained faculty for this work is, at the outset and forever after, a sine qua non in his duties.

First. The principles of the philosophy of the relationship of curatives and sicknesses by which health, when lost, is restored. A knowledge of these implies a recognition of the true nature of that which constitutes sickness, and of that in the drug which makes it a curing agent. A wrong understanding of either will assuredly lead the student or the practitioner into the regions of the unknown, where all will be found to lead to a system of therapeutics, uncertain, unreliable, and to disappointing guessing.  It should be remembered that specific medicine demands that each element in the problem it is called to solve shall be known, and this implies that all elements, a knowledge of which is necessary to this solution, are knowable.

Before this faculty, we are about to present practical surgery and specific medicine, with a view to discovering the relationships of the two to each other, if we may. At first sight, it may appear that no two duties can be more unlike than are those of these two departments of professional work. But first sight does not always cover the whole ground of any subject, and it may not of this. It sees on the one side the man or the woman with his or her paraphernalia of knives, scissors, forceps, saws, tubes, needles, etc., in great variety, together with splints, bandages, and pulleys, with whatever else may be necessary to enable him or her to deal in the best manner and with best success in endeavors to repair the damages of accidents, or to relieve of the consequences of morbid processes, as these may be met in various deposits of matter or in destroyed parts, organs, or tissues. So the surgeon appears, and has for centuries, as one equipped for duties altogether mechanical in their nature, and he IS best prepared for these who comes to them with the nerve and skill needful for the performance of the grand operations which mutilate where the operator could not cure; and if life be preserved by these mutilations, let not the operator nor his work be lightly esteemed. Thus viewed, the surgeon is prepared to deal with material elements by use of material agencies. But the work of the true surgeon is not limited to these, as we shall see.

The practitioner of specific medicine, on the other hand, appears with neither instruments nor apparatus other than a few small phials, each containing a few small pellets, each charged with its own power, which relates it to the sick conditions for which it is the specific… read more.