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Dear subscriber,
priding ourselves as Hahnemannian homeopaths, we felt the need to publish Hahnemann's Organon online on our web site for quite some time and finally it is here. We are happy to be able to present it in this precise electronic form, which is eminently suitable for this specific book – so important to homeopathy and at the same time, sadly, so neglected.
Pondering upon the reasons why students of homeopathy and practitioners alike steer clear from the Organon, we have identified two potential issues (beside ordinary laziness):
- extremely long and quite boring Introduction
- intolerable length and aggravating frequency of use of footnotes
The Introduction to the Organon deals primarily with the methods of the then-prevalent school of medicine, which contains many interesting information, although things have progressed somewhat since those times and therefore certain points are no longer pertinent to the current state of western medicine. As of TODAY, the Introduction is not yet published (due to time constraints), but when it will be, it would be placed on a separate page from the rest of the text. This allows the reader to dive into Hahnemann's paragraphs directly, without the need to bite through the longish intro.
In order to resolve the issue with the footnotes, we have put the advanced references system of our web site to a good use. As a result, the footnotes no longer break the main text of the paragraphs, but rather contain numbered references which will display the full footnote text when you move the mouse cursor over the reference number (such as at the end of § 1). You can also click the reference number to go back and forth between the main text and footnote text. This makes studying the Organon a much more pleasant experience – compared to any printed version of the book we have seen.
The version of the Organon published on our web site contains the 5th Edition translated by Dudgeon and 6th Edition translated by Boericke – combined. These two versions are quite compatible, so it was possible to only include one version of a specific paragraph, when no changes were made from the 5th to the 6th Edition (such as in § 11) and also to highlight the exact differences, where the changes were made (such as in § 18).
While doing this work, we have also consulted the original German text when the English translation did not make much sense and made some clarifying corrections, which were marked as such (for example, see reference 105 in § 117). But these are rather rare.
As is the case of most of the texts published on our web site, each sentence of the text is preceded by an anchor (visible when you click to Edit the text) allowing you to easily link directly to a specific sentence of the text (rather than to a whole paragraph). For example, to link directly to sentence beginning with "The local affection, however, is never anything else than a part of the general disease...", in § 201 (6th Ed.), you would use the link http://www.legatum.sk/en:hahnemann:organon:start#s1676, where s1676 is the label of the anchor.
We hope this new and better form of this foundation text of homeopathy will entice you to study it, refer to it, think about it and apply its principles in your homeopathic practice.
If you wish to see the original Hahnemann's handwritten revisions for the 6th edition of the Organon, they are scanned and available for viewing here, at UCSF Medical School Library web site.
If you have any comments, questions etc., feel free to contact us.
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Question for André Saine
Q: What are the most common mistakes the practitioners make when taking a case?
A: See the answer in this Youtube video.
Please also note a video that improves upon the answer to a previous question on posology.
Do you have a question of your own? You can submit it here.
Recommended article – Characteric symptoms
A great article by professor Hoppe, diving into the CORE of the provings, describing what the characteristic symptoms are and how we should observe and utlize them. This is exactly in tune with what we had in mind when referring to the principle of similarity being not well understood, in one of the recent issues of our newsletter.
Read the article here. »
The newsletter archive of Legatum Homeopathicum can be found here.
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