The ‘Introduction’ to the Organon: Hahnemann’s visions and revisions

by homeopath Luise Kunkle MA

Even on cursory perusal of the 6th edition of Hahnemann’s Organon, the Introduction conveys quite a different impression from that of the main body of the text, i.e. the aphorisms. While it is not surprising that the tenor is different, since Hahnemann carried over his Introduction from the earlier editions, there is more to it than that. In the earlier editions, e.g. the 5th, the Introduction and the aphorisms combine to a much greater degree to convey an impression of unity, compared with the 6th.

The Introduction consists mainly of Hahnemann’s statements concerning the methods of non-homeopathic therapies commonly practised in his time; they are described and attacked in much detail and at great length. The description and explanation of homeopathy is quite brief, and is mostly limited to the way it contrasts in a positive manner to the other methods. Further, the Introduction consists of expositions of basic differences in the concepts of illness, which result in different approaches to therapy: in the case of the ‘old school’ a materialistic concept, which Hahnemann also expounds at some length. The homeopathic non-material concept of the ‘life force’ or ‘life principle’ is introduced and explained in great detail, but neither very consistently nor clearly. Again, it mainly seems to serve the purpose of setting homeopathy off against the other methods, by providing a different basic concept of illness. The first 75 paragraphs of the Introduction consist of virtually nothing but the above-mentioned expositions.

In the aphorisms of the 5th Organon these topics are not taken up again in much detail. Where they are taken up at all, it is but briefly or by reference to the Introduction. This means there is a relative harmony of interrelation between the main part and the Introduction, in a way that might be expected in any textbook.

Things are quite different in the 6th edition.

This is very distinctly brought to the attention of the reader in the German ‘text-critical edition’ of the 6th Organon prepared by Josef M. Schmidt (Hahnemann 1992) In this edition the additions and changes from the 5th to the 6th Organon are clearly marked by the use of different appearance of the text, and italics for the additions. Parts struck out by Hahnemann are marked by ellipses (…), and those parts and any alterations are referenced to the appendix, where the text, as it appeared in the 5th edition, is fully quoted under those references.

Comparing the first 75 paragraphs of the Introduction with the body, one finds that in the 6th edition the topics discussed in those 75 paragraphs have been taken up again in substantial length and detail in the aphorisms, i.e. Hahnemann added much text to the aphorisms in the 6th edition the topic of which had already been treated in the Introduction.

In some instances this is virtually copied from the Introduction (§§ 60, 74, footnotes), some more concise (§§ 22, 52–56). The topic of the life force has been very much extended and made consistent, in many instances contradicting the rather variegated ideas of the Introduction.

Thus in the 6th edition those topics were treated doubly at great length – i.e. both in the Introduction and the aphorisms. Further, Hahnemann’s statements in the aphorisms about the life force and the nature of disease are often not consistent with and even contradictory to those in the Introduction. It seems that between the 5th and the 6th edition of the Organon, Hahnemann really gave this topic a lot of thought and a lot more weight and importance than before. In the 6th edition this can be considered the core of the work.

This 6th edition was very important to Hahnemann. As he wrote on 20 February 1842 in a letter to his new publisher, Schaub of Düsseldorf, he did not care about remuneration but just wanted the last edition to be memorable:

Just now I have completed, after 18 months of work, the 6th edition of my Organon, which is now as perfect as at all possible … I would like the whitest paper and the newest type for its production since it will probably be my last. If it pleases you to take on such a fine edition you yourself decide the fee either for the whole or by number of sheets – as you want it – but it should do us proud.

For this to matter so much, for him to want this edition published, it seems reasonable to suppose that it was meant to be a fitting crown to his life’s work. And it is equally logical to suppose that the reason he put so much work – which ate into the little leisure time he had – into those changes was that he considered them to be very important. It is evident that he did put much time into the reconsiderations leading to those changes, since he worked on the revision for 18 months. Only the very last months of this time can reasonably be supposed to have been spent on the description of the LM potencies, since before that he was still experimenting with them, and as he wrote in his Chronic Diseases, ‘[I did not talk about it] since it is not fitting, yea even harmful to talk or write about things that are not matured.’

So, in the months before the matter of the LM potencies had matured he must have been working on the revision of the other parts, which mostly are: the concept of dynamis (§§ 11, 269), the life force (§§ 22, 29, 34, 45), the nature of disease (§ 148), other kinds of therapies (§§ 22, 52–56, 60, 74) – all of which are topics that are also treated in the Introduction – and are, to repeat, often inconsistent with or contradictory to his expositions in the aphorisms. The only other topics that have aphorisms newly written, added-to or revised to any appreciable extent are ‘Nature and Therapy of Chronic Diseases’ (§§ 78, 204, 282, 284) and, of course, all the things connected with the LM potencies.

So it seems clear that at the end of his life he could well have endeavoured to tie up loose ends – and his Introduction over the decades had been full of them – by thinking about the issues again, shaping them into a consistency they never had before and integrating them into the aphorisms. And by doing that he caused this 6th edition, his crowning work, to convey an inconsistency, a sort of a patchwork effect, when considered as a whole, that none of the earlier editions had to the same extent.

Did Hahnemann want this, or would he have been unaware of it?

It should be remembered that all the issues of the first 75 paragraphs of the Introduction had now been incorporated into the main part in a different way that often contradicted the statements of the Introduction and had all been reconsidered. Had not this revision made those paragraphs superfluous and even detract from the quality of the Organon?

Which then brings up the question of whether Hahnemann did indeed intend to publish once again this same Introduction, which had been published so often before. Again, it should be remembered that the Introduction had been changed little since the first editions of the Organon, and not at all between the 5th and 6th editions!

Reading Schmidt’s text-critical edition of the 6th Organon, the great extent of the changes and additions, both in the aphorisms and in the preface, can be appreciated, even by just leafing through the book – italics and ellipses just jump at the reader. The difference between the 5th and the 6th Organon is quite appreciable, to employ the British tendency to understatement. There are, e.g. 46 changes in only two-and-a-half pages of the foreword; in the aphorisms themselves they are proportionatelyy many, e.g. in the four-and-a-half pages of §§ 1–10 there are 23 changes, of which 16 could be considered to be ‘creative’ – i.e. of the kind that in a greater or lesser degree change or extend what had been said in the previous edition.

In the light of all this effort on the preface and the body, is it reasonable to suppose that Hahnemann left his Introduction completely unaltered, just neglected it altogether – in spite of the fact that much of it was either copied to the main text or is inconsistent with it? It cannot be said that he did not consider it at all – that it just slipped his mind. He did make some changes, 13 of them in the 47 pages of the Introduction, none of them of the creative kind – just orthographical, grammatical or semantic corrections. They show, however, that Hahnemann did give some attention to the Introduction, and the question is why he did not put any effort into revising it. It seems to me there are only two possible alternatives: either he considered the Introduction perfect or he decided to drop the Introduction altogether and instead integrate the topics discussed therein into the body of the text, i.e. the aphorisms.

While there is no way to find out whether the first possibility might be the answer, there are ways however to find out whether the latter possibility might be probable.

The first question that comes to mind on determining this probability is, of course: could it be that the Introduction was included in the first edition of the 6th Organon by mistake? And the answer is: yes, it could. The manuscript of the 6th edition that has come to us and on which Haehl based his publication in 1921 was Hahnemann’s own work copy. It is a printed copy of the 5th edition, in which he made his alterations: striking out and adding. There is no ‘final copy’ (or it has not yet been found) of the manuscript as it was sent to his publisher.

It has been brought to my attention, as a counter argument, that Hahnemann always did his revisions this way, i.e. pencilled his changes into the printed copies of the previous editions, and that subsequently he took these work copies to the publishers himself or had them taken there. This, however, was certainly not true of the 6th edition. At that time he was living in Paris, which in those days was very far away indeed from the centre of Germany, where his publisher was. To my knowledge he did not travel to Germany himself. And to part with his only copy, give it to someone to take on such a long journey, which was never free of risks, would seem rather improbable in view of the fact that in Paris he could well afford to hire scribes to copy the text.

Had he done so, it would also be reasonable to suppose that he did not scratch out page by page the entire first 35 pages of the Introduction, which were the ones he no longer wanted (for as I shall show later, he did want the last 12 paragraphs - 9 pages - to be included in the 6th edition). Instead he might have put a mark at the place from where he wanted the Introduction copied. Finding such a mark would therefore strengthen the argument.

And such a mark does indeed exist. There is a pencilled ‘X’ before § 76 and before § 80.

In § 76 the topic of the Introduction changes from the previous discussion of the ‘inferior methods’ of the old schools. Hahnemann states the basic tenet of homeopathy: ‘In order to heal gently, quickly, certainly and durably choose in any case of illness a remedy that can itself give rise to a similar illness to the one it is to heal’, and continues that, while he was the first to teach and practise it by design, and alhough the principle had never been recognized as such, traces of its effectiveness can nevertheless be found through the ages:

All through the ages, sick people who really have been healed, quickly, lastingly and visibly by some remedy … have been healed only by a (homeopathic) remedy (but without the doctor knowing this) … (§ 77)

§§ 78 and 79 extend this theme. § 80 adds:

… where the common doctors had been given into their hands … the specific (homeopathic) remedy from the … experience of the ordinary man …

and the last 16 paragraphs consist mostly of evidence to back up the previous statements.

It can be seen from these paragraphs that those pencilled Xs very likely had some meaning, since at both places important statements were made to which the rest was corroboration. Moreover, these topics were not taken up again in the aphorisms, and it would be logical to suppose that they should remain in the Introduction, since there was no reason to leave them out of the edition, as nothing had changed in the meantime to make them seem faulty or irrelevant. Since the basic tenet quoted above had remained just that without any modification and been strengthened as such, there would not have been any reason for changes in the text. The same holds true for the subsequent paragraphs: since they consisted of supporting evidence, i.e. references and so on, there was no reason to alter them either.

As an interesting sidelight, it’s been pointed out by a historian of medicine – which I am not – that this part of the Introduction was the original Introduction to the first Organon of 1810, where it spread over 50 pages, devoted to historical examples of ‘unconscious homeopathy’ (Dean 2001). This, in turn, was a reprint of an article by Hahnemann of 1807. In the 2nd, 3rd and 4th editions there were two introductions: the original one was preceded by the later one which tries to show up the ‘old school’ methods as ineffective and harmful. In the 5th edition, Hahnemann combined the 2 introductions into one, shortening the older of the two to merely 12 pages.

It’s quite fascinating that he held on to this early work of his, this article of 1807, and carried it through all his editions of the Organon, right up to the one that he declared, ‘It will be my last.’

The confirmation for the above assertions is given in the contents:

In the 6th edition they read as follows:

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Examples of accidental homoeopathic cures. Non-medical persons have also found the treatment on the principle of similarity of action to be the only efficacious mode. Even some physicians of an earlier period suspected that this was the most excellent mode of treatment.

TEXT OF THE ORGANON.

All the topics listed above are part of the last 12 paragraphs of the Introduction, i.e. from § 76 onward, as can be easily verified.

To demonstrate that Hahnemann would also have listed the topics of the first 75 paragraphs of the Introduction, had he intended to keep them, compare below the contents of the 5th Organon (translated from the German by the author – so the actual wording may differ somewhat from the English editions):

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Regarding the hitherto existing treatments, allopathy and palliative cures of the hitherto existing old schools of medicine. Non-medical persons also found the cures by similarity to be the only helpful ones.

Addendum: Isopathy

Even doctors of olden days had presentiments that this is the most excellent kind of healing.

TEXT OF THE ORGANON.

The most conclusive evidence, however, Hahnemann gives us himself by a change of wording in the preface to the 6th edition compared to the 5th. In the 5th Organon, paragraph 4 of the preface reads:

This non-healing art … this allopathy I shall now illuminate a little more closely, before I teach in detail its total contrast, the newly found, true healing art

For the 6th edition Hahnemann changed this to:

This non-healing-art … this allopathy I more closely illuminated in the introduction to the previous editions of this book. Now I shall only talk about its total contrast, the true healing art, discovered by me and now somewhat more perfected.

References

Dean M.E. (2001). [Review of] ‘Organon-Synopse: Die 6 Auflagen von 1810–1842 im Überblick’ ed. Luft, B. & Wischner, M. Heidelburg, Haug (2000). Homeopathy in Practice (November): 54.

Hahnemann S (1992) Organon der Heilkunst: Textkritische Ausgabe der von Samuel Hahnemann für die sechste Auflage vorgesehenen Fassung. Revised, edited and with a foreword by Josef M. Schmidt. Heidelburg, Haug.