(From The London Monthly Homoeopathic Review, February, 1862.)

To think is to thing; a thought is a thing; words are the exponent of the thoughts of speech, articulate man. Those who do not know the value of words can have but a very imperfect notion of things. The men, not thinkers, are governed by the words of those who do think; and in most of the quarrels about matters dogmatically treated, the differences result from the misapprehensions of the meaning of words.

A dispute about a dipthong once caused disastrous wars and still influences Theology. *

* * *

Some grand truths are instinctively held, or perceived intuitively as it were; other loom on the mind gradually and are brought nearer and nearer, as the peak of Teneriffe first looks like a cloud as big as a hand, then gradually grows as the voyager approaches.

“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever”

and there is no beauty like that of naked truth, stript of all fig leaves and pigment, simple, sincere, severe in Godlike purity and majesty.

We, Homoeopathists, hold that our law Similia Similibus Curentur is such a truth. The nearer you approach it, the more beautiful it is; touch it, grasp it, cherish it. The mistakes about things from mistakes about the words used to signify those things has been adverted to. The very law of Homoeopathy has been subjected to false and vicious interpretations by substituting one letter, one vowel for another, a for e. Hahnemann was a good though, in the critical sense, not a profound scholar. The old hero knew very well the value of the words he employed. He was incapable of the ridiculous solecism, of the ignorance which is perpetuated on the title page of The British Journal of Homoeopathy. His expression for this law of drug-healing was and is Similia Similibus Curentur not Curantur.

His best beloved friend and his reverend pupil the late Rev. T. R. Everest, told us how much Hahnemann was annoyed at the employment of the word Curantur.

In the medical sense the Latin verb curo means to take care of, to treat, to doctor. Hahnemann was too much of a philosopher to arrogate the cure; he proposed the treatment.

“Let likes he treated by likes,” that is the formula or expression he adopted for the law of drug-healing. In that formula he expresses one of Nature's laws of healing — that is a law of God; the expression foisted on him is an impertinence. Let this formula be adopted,

Similia Similibus Curentur.

___________

In the second edition of The Organon, in Dresden, 1819, the formula is given Similia similibus curentur — Introd., p. 29. In the British translation of the fourth German edition of The Organon, and which was reprinted in New York, 1843, with a preface by Dr. Hering, the same reading is given.

In The British Journal of Homoeopathy, Vol. I, Introd., and subsequently it is written similia similibus curantur.

In The Homoeopathic Examiner, Vol. I, p. 25, it is given by Dr. Hull, similia similibus curantur. Dunham.