John Henry Clarke and His Remedies
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Lectures on Homeopathy: John Henry Clarke's Remedies
One of the higher callings is to make sick people healthy - [With Samuel Hahnemann]
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| John Henry Clarke |
The British Dr. John Henry Clarke (1853-1921) Clarke was an editor and consulting physician to the London Homeopathic Hospital, and one of the most active homeopaths in England. He collected much information by others in his three-volumed A Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica. (3 Vols. London: The Homeopathic Publishing Co., 1900 (Vol 1), and 1902 (vols 2 and 3)). He culled content from Dr. Timothy F. Allen's (1837-1902) Encyclopedia of Pure Materia Medica in 12 volumes; Dr. Constantine Hering's (1800-80) Guiding Symptoms (completed by Calvin B. Knerr, MD); and Dr. Edwin M. Hale's (1829-99) The Characteristics of the New Remedies in his Dictionary.
Clarke says in his preface, "If some are inclined to object that I have included too many, I reply that my work is a Dictionary, and I have never yet found a Dictionary that explained too many words." Well, for practical handling a slender book of reliable top information really works much better.
About a thousand preparations are shown in Dr. Clarke's work, which is still sold throughout the world.
About John H. Clarke
Dr. Clarke was one of the most well-known homoeopaths of England, with his own clinic in London.
The very busy doctor was a consulting physician to the London Homoeopathic Hospital, and the editor of the 'Homoeopathic World' for twenty-nine years. He published many books too. The Prescriber - A Dictionary of the New Therapeutics . . . with an essay on "How to Practice Homoeopathy." That book's indications of remedies are based on personal experiences of a number of homoeopaths.
A Clinical Repertory to the Dictionary of Materia Medica was specifically designed by Dr. Clarke for the study of his bulky Dictionary of Homoeopathic Materia Medica, a work that Robert Séror considers "the most authoratative of our discipline." But is the information reliable? How far is it reliable, then? Under what conditions, in case? Are its listings documented according to standard procedures of scientific research? I suggest you think twice.
Symptoms Revealed
Instead of trusting sillily in writings, learn to inspect.
Can you trust all the remedy information that Dr. Clarke brings? What sort of evidence do we have that it is fit, conclusive, undistorted, the best information, and so on? Well, consider this before you decide in the matter: The scarce amount of information about some Clarke remedies makes the pieces or scraps of information about them little conclusive, of course. Central information of untested remedies and too little tested remedies, could be vital to homeopathy also. This means that a remedy that has got many guiding symptoms listed, may not necessarily work better, deeper or cover an broader range of symptoms than other remedies that are mentioned only briefly in our books, and not mentioned at all.
Conclusion: The work of homeopathy depends on remedies that are made from a seemingly wide range of "things" - a few thousand such remedies have entered the field of homeopathy. But there are several millions of plants and plant components to convert to homeopathic remedies.
Dr. Clarke tends not to weigh the symptoms he presents; he does not tell which symptoms he considers the most reliable or "best" guides to choosing remedies. Other homeopaths, like Drs. William Boericke and James T. Kent, uses grading of symptoms in their works to present their remedies by.
The sheer mass of information in Dr. Clarke's remedy descriptions makes it difficult to select the remedy that could help the most if you are not well acquainted with his work, and works of other homeopaths. Few people take the time to study them all.
There are disagreements among homeopaths as to which guiding symptoms are to be listed under different remedies or remedy headings. Further, they disagree about which symptoms they think weigh the most when a remedy is to be selected. There are different tales told in different books, that is. There is no unison agreement among leading homeopaths about remedy descriptions.
All of the remedies that Clarke mentions, have not been extensively tested by controlled, systematic or scientific procedures. Some remedies are just "clinically tested". There are many sources of error behind the often used remedy descriptions - theoretically some errors could even be huge.
First, general mechanisms of the organism against general poisoning effects - or the organism being overloaded - could have crept into the remedy descriptions. That may be one of the reason why purely physical symptoms many not always be good guiding symptoms to those in search of a homeopathic remedy. It is also a curious thing that the standard procedure of preparing homeopathic remedies potentizes water and/or alcohol along with each remedy. Thus, you really get homeopathic ethanol and water "for free" with a lot of remedies. No one so far seems to have taken this fact into account, and that is strange. It suggests that if you react adversely to ethanol, there may be hundreds of homeopathic remedies against it, and no one seems to care to tell it . . . Odd, isn't it? It is one of the weaknesses.
The obvious fact of inconclusive provings (tests) means that many, many remedies listed might very well have more and other qualities than those hitherto described. This means that a great many current homoeopathic remedies are far from fully "mapped" (understood), even today, and a cure depends on choosing the best possible remedy, the one that appears to match the symptoms you go to the doctor with etc.
All the remedies used and sold today, are not described by Dr. Clarke in his Dictionary from the very early 1900s, but some of the common ones are.
So you see, homeopathy has its frontier fields to venture into. Dr. Clarke does not include all the remedies that are used today, and just a fraction of all possible, future remedies. The inconclusive testings of many (or most or all) of them may be a source of bias and of confounding people. Inconclusive provings (testings) contain accuracies, or sources of error.
Finally, Dr Clarke states that he has deliberately chosen to have no grading of symptoms by differences in [asserted character] type, since he has so often found his indications in symptoms not distinguished by type. And some homeopaths think differently, as does Dr Andrew Lockie.
Scheme
There is a basic presentation scheme that is used by Dr Clarke in his three-volumed set. The items and their order go back to a scheme made by Samuel Hahnemann.
Listings into such schemes include:
- Preparation symptoms said to be reached by the remedies if conditions are more or less fit.
- Grading of symptoms. Unlike Boericke, Clarke chose not to grade the symptoms, since he had so often found his symptom indications were not according to it.
- Clarke also informs whether the homeopathic drugs hae been subjected to so-called provings or not.
Clarke introduced the following new homeopathic preparations to the Homeopathic Materia Medica: Pertussin, Carcinosinum, Epihysterinum, Baccillinum Testicum, Morbillinum, Parotidinum, Scarletinum, and Scirrhinum.
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References
Ad: Clarke, John Henry: A Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica. 3 vols. The Homeopathic Publishing Company. London, 1900 (vol 1) and 1902 (vols 2 and 3).
Mab: Boericke, William and Oscar. Homoeopathic Materia Medica. 9th ed. Philadelphia: Boericke and
Runyon, 1927.
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