04/28/2020
Open to possibilities
A story worth reading...
Dr. Benjamin Franklin Joslin Sr. graduated in medicine in 1826 from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City and, aside from practicing medicine, held the chair of mathematics and natural sciences, and lectured on anatomy and physiology at Union College, and later at the University of the City of New York. He published regularly in scientific and philosophical journals, and was known as a man of science.
In 1839, he dissolved his partnership with his colleague Dr. B. F. Bowers when this one adopted homeopathy, as Joslin was prejudiced against it.
Soon afterwards, Joslin was asked to write an attack against homeopathy. Unwilling to publish an opinion not founded on knowledge, he relinquished the request and instead determined to give homeopathy a trial.
He wrote, “I took the third attenuation of a medicine, and avoiding the study of its alleged symptoms as recorded in books, I made a record of all the new symptoms which I experienced.”
“When this record was completed, I examined a printed list of symptoms, and was surprised to find a remarkable coincidence between them and those I had experienced. I at first thought it probably an accidental coincidence.
I repeated the medicine, and again found a coincidence equally striking. Another medicine was then tried, with similar precautions and similar results. There was a new set of symptoms, very different from the former, but generally corresponding with the printed symptoms of the last medicine taken.
Thus the evidence accumulated from week to week, until I became thoroughly convinced that such a number of coincidences could not, on the theory of probabilities, be accidental.
There were thousands of chances to one against such a supposition. I knew that the attenuated medicines were efficient, and the homeopathic
materia medica, so far as I had tested it, substantially true.
The incredibility of the power of the small doses and of the attenuations had been my greatest stumbling block. This being removed by actual and direct experiment, I felt confidence in Hahnemann, and justified in making therapeutic experiments to test his grand law of healing.
The result was equally satisfactory, and gave me a firm confidence—which every year’s practice has tended to strengthen—in the exact truth and inestimable value of the homeopathic law, and the superiority of the homeopathic method of practice over every other system and combination of systems.”
