O. Leeser

Constitution and constitutional treatment

Homeopathy, 2011, 100 (1), 21-26

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MR. PRESIDENT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,

let me begin by telling you that I highly appreciate the opportunity to speak in this famous centre of British homoeopathy, and my thanks are due to the Council of the British Homoeopathic Societyfor their kind invitation.The subject matter I have chosen, “Constitution and Constitutional Treatment,â€? certainly is a most important one for our medical art. For the constitutional treatment must be considered the highest aim of all internal medicine. One might well put the question, however: Is it not entirely superfluous to speak about constitutional therapeutics to homoeopathic physicians, seeing that all homoeopathic therapeutics are constitutional treatment? Indeed I should like to put this thesis at the head of my remarks. As a matter of principle and method homoeopathy means constitutional treatment. We are proud of the fact that the homoeopathic method enables us consciously to practise constitutional therapy with drugs; to realize this by other methods appears a scarcely attainable ideal, but in this circle, as it were intra muros, I need not point out the advantages of homoeopathic methods, rather do I wish to ventilate detailed problems of this kind which might determine our practice. A correct understanding of the relations between homoeopathy and constitutional therapy can, for instance, facilitate our decision in individual cases whether we might or should make the local and acute manifestations of disease the object of treatment, or whether the individual constitutional disposition has to take priority. Perhaps I may partially anticipate the answer to this question. Constitutional therapy is never a matter of something absolute, it is rather a matter of degree, of the extent to which the constitution can be diagnosed and treated. What I purpose to attempt to-day is mainly to elucidate the various degrees and stages into which medical treatment can delve.

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