By Eli G. Jones M.D., Burlington, N. J., Author
“Definite Medication”
An Answer To Dr. Bedford
In the March number of your journal I read “A Defence of Vaccination and Antitoxine.” No doubt every reader of this Journal is well aware of the fact that the fathers of Homeopathy in America made their reputations largely by their splendid success in the treatment of diphtheria in ’58, ’60 and ’66. In the latter epidemic of the disease I was personally interested, and I know it to be a fact that the old school of physicians used to burn out the throat of their cases of diphtheria with nitrate of silver and lost about every case. The homoeopathic physicians cured about every case. Please mark the difference. Personally I had the disease as bad as any in the town during the epidemic, and my life was saved by a Homoeopath, Dr. Francis A. Roberts, one of the best doctors of that school of medicine in maine.
In 1865 “Marcy & Hunt’s Homeopathic Practice” was published. On page 763. Vol. 1, “They report 200 cases of diphtheria treated, and including many of the malignant type, with a mortality of not one per cent.” In united States Medical Investigator, 11-18, Dr. Neidhard reports 300 cases of diphtheria and two deaths. Now let me ask the reader if the disease was curable by Homoeopathy over forty years ago why is it that it is not curable by Homoeopathic remedies today?
I am not a Homoeopathic physician, Neither do I hold a brief for that school of medicine, yet from a careful study of the Materia Medica of that school of practice, and from seeing the effects of their remedies in this disease it is my candid opinion that when a doctor of that school confesses that he can’t cure diphtheria without antitoxine, he simply don’t know his Materia Medica.
The regulars have lost faith in their remedies and now resort to serums to heal the sick. By doing this they confess their weakness before the public, and their inability to cope with diseased conditions.
Now it remains to be seen whether the Homoeopaths will follow suint. It seems to me with such a splendid record as they have made in every epidemic that has swept over our country that they can’t afford at this late hour to have to confess to the public that they can’t cure diphtheria without injecting a filthy horse serum into the body of an innocent child. In my own practice I have met with diphtheria in its worst forms in New Jersey, in northern New England, around the lakes in ohio, and the mortality under any treatment has not been over one per cent. Before I would be guilty of injecting the filthy horse serum into the body of an innocent child to poison its blood for a few paltry dollars I would get out of the profession and leave it for men that want to do that kind of business. To my Homoeopathic friends I want to say that your Materia Medica is rich in remedies for the cure of diphtheria. Don’t go back on them and resort to the practice of the old school. Let them stick to the serum treatment; it is only one of many other foolish blunders they have made that will only hasten their end. Antitoxine is not a cure for diphtheria, as can be proved when the truth is published about the deaths from diphtheria. In that Registrar General’s office in London, England, we learn that “the deaths from diphtheria have increased 40 per cent. Within the past, fourteen years since, since Antitoxine has been used.” That don’t look as if antitoxine was a cure for diphtheria. If you as a school of medicine want to retain your individuality, if you want to still hold the confidence of your patrons as your fathers before you did, you must cut loose from the unholy fads of the old school, or else go down to destruction with them.
