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AUGUST KARL GUSTAV BIER, ORGANON & HOMOEOPATHY: A GREAT STORY NEVER TOLD Gyandas G.

Wadhwani MD (Hom) Chief Medical Officer (Homoeopathy), Directorate of ISM& Homoeopathy; Senior Lecturer (Organon of Medicine & Homoeopathic Philosophy), Dr B. R. Sur Homoeopathic Medical College, Hospital & Research Centre, Govt. of NCT of Delhi.

It is possible to find in organon, the highest wisdom or folly as per the natural tendency of the reader. August Karl Gustav Bier (1861-1949) German surgeon, pioneer of spinal anaesthesia & sustainable forests Abstract In the evening of 29th June, 1925, Professor August Bier, a celebrated german surgeon, organised a lecture in Berlin, which was attended by most of the five thousand doctors of the capital, on the topic, What is to be our attitude towards homoeopathy? This is one of the greatest story that has never been told! Keywords August Karl Gustav Bier, homoeopathy In the evening, the Luisenstrasse in Berlin would ordinarily be as lonely and deserted as a village alley. Gone would be the procession of trucks that all day had carried crates to the freight station, the clattering streetcars that had brought passengers in from the suburbs to the heart of the city, the streams of students and patients continually passing through the many entrances of the Charite into the vast enclosure that was like a town in itself. Yet there would be some evenings when both sides of the street, from the Karlsplatz to the Neues Tor, could be seen lined with the cars of doctors who were foregathering in the building devoted to Berlins medical society, the Langenteck Virchow House. The passer-by could note the high powered limousines of surgeons and gynaecologists, and the little Dixi and Opel cars of assistants and general practitioners; as for the older generation and theoriticians, they arrived on foot. The 29th of June, 1925, was a great day for the Luisentrasse. On a summer evening after a hard days work no one particularly relishes a trip down this street, with its huge tenement buildings, but a majority of the capitals five thousand doctors made the trip eagerly tonight. They deposited their hats hurriedly in the cloakroom and climbed the broad stairway to the great lecture hall. The seats of this amphitheatre faced a wall that was imposingly decorated with enormous tablets and the portraits of bearded authorities of long ago; in front of it, now, the long committee table was crowded with the bearded authorities of the present day. In the auditorium, ensconced in their regular seats which no unauthorized person dared occupy, were the professors, whose faces, names and views were known to everyone present. On the right of the lectures desk, at a table lighted with green shaded lamps, the reporters of the medical press sat ready with sharpened pencils. And the narrow gallery, empty on other occasions, was closely

packed, as were the stairs leading to it, with students and late-comers. Every now and then the aged attendant the St. Peter of this holy place would come marching through the hall, bearing aloft like a banner a black board mounted on a long pole , on which messages were chalked : Dr. Schulte , ring up Olivia 6489, urgent! Medical officer Muller, of Pankow, ring up your home at once! And as if at a word of military command a doctor would rise and hasten away to the case that awaited him. The chairman, Privy Councillor His, raised his small head, looked out over the crowded hall through his horn rimmed spectacles, and opened the meeting: tonight the Internal Medicine association has assembled for a discussion of the curative methods of Homoeopathy. Is this a heresy trial? A few weeks before, the respected Munchener Medizinische Wochenschrift had published an article by the famous surgeon, Professor August Bier, Director of the university clinic, on the question, What is to be our attitude toward Homoeopathy? Biers word counted. Every medical man, in town or country, knew his skill at the operating table and the lucidity of the thoughts which were expressed by his pen. His colleagues respect for him was soundly based on his achievements - new methods of deadening pain, treating inflammations, reconstructing perished tissues. When Bier laid the knife aside, he consulted the dusty and well-worn books of his medical predecessors. Too late, alas, I have noted the grievous defects of my medical training, he had now written, since I have given my attention to the elder, classic practitioners of medicine and have realized that they observed and studied many things much better, and far more thoroughly, than the doctors of today. Thus I have received a lesson in modesty; for which I have come to realize that much which I regarded as my own mental property had already been discovered by others. Having since 1920 studied the works of original homoeopathists, I am now compelled to state that I should have saved myself many errors , detours, and degressions if I had taken up these studies thirty years earlier. So, Bier stated his recognition of the fact that a number of the most important , and newly discovered methods of treatment, which were at this time being discussed at length in the pages of scientific journals, had been anticipated in the works of Hahnemann, the founder of homoeopathy, and adapted to his medical doctrines .The socalled treatment by irritant substances, treatment with human and animal blood , preventive and curative bacterial inoculations, inflammations induced by artificial stoppage of the bloods circulation, the treatment of allergies by the introduction of similar material, the fundamentals of colloidal research, the diagnosis of odours, and the physiological effects of mercaptan in a dilution to a 460,000,000th of a milligram- all these appeared to professor Bier as proofs in favour of the Hahnemann doctrine and its fundamental rule of Similia similibus (curing like by like). Bier made his own experiments. He perceived that sulphur, which is an irritant to the skin, could if applied in homoeopathic doses, cure skin complaints which had failed to respond to any other treatment. He saw that iodine, which causes the symptoms of a cold, could cure and prevent colds if administered in small doses. He tested either in minute quantities (and apparently with good results) as a protection against bronchitis, that dangerous consequent manifestation of narcosis. After the most careful

investigation, Dr. Bier reached the conclusion which he summed up by declaring that there is something in homoeopathy, after all. It would be presumptuous for me to attempt to decide how much there is in it, he added,because I lack sufficient experience. But I believe I am entitled to assert that there is a great deal in it, and that it would be no longer be right for school medicine to ignore it in silence or treat it with contempt. I know that in making these remarks I am stirring up a wasps nest. But I beg my professional colleagues to make their own tests before carrying out on me as a flagrant traitor to science. Instead of making tests, when they read his article, Dr. Biers professional colleagues hastily summoned a council. Seldom, in fact, had any medical treatise so moved and excited the medical fraternity. Two great men of international fame a specialist in internal diseases and a pharmacologist were called in to pass sentence of death on this dangerous doctrine which had troubled physicians and patients for a hundred and thirty years, and which had an inconvenient habit of resurrection whenever its death was announced. It is impossible to recount the details of that mighty dispute without losing oneself utterly in the demonic labyrinth of science , where the walls are lined with thousands of mirrors in which everyone sees only his own image. The essence of the dispute was the rejection of the minuteness of homoeopathic doses: the effectiveness of doses reduced to quantities lower than molecules was unintelligible. The success of homoeopathy seemed to the disputants to be nothing but the result of suggestion exerted on the credulous patients mind. Each of the mandarins of medicine came forward and made his profession of faith: a profession embellished with figures, formulae, experimental data, and clinical experience, but invariably ending in avowal of the hypothetical nature of homoeopathy. There were mild voices, there were irreconcilable voices, but there was not one which spoke from the realization that Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of this doctrine which was now in the dock, represented in his person the extreme, ultimate consequences of that conflict between professional duty and individual conscience which no thinking doctor can evade. These Berlin medical men in 1925 hardly knew Hahnemanns name. No one of them was aware that a doctor had stood once at a lonely outpost, to rebel with all his soul against the misguided science known as school medicine, long before the great discoveries of the nineteenth century won the victory of progress. Hahnemanns fate is the fate of medical science, in its purity and ambiguity, its almost divine greatness and its very human weakness. While many of Dr. Biers confreres used gentle means, to try to lead the misguided scholar back to the right path, a most furious thunderbolt was launched against him by a celebrated professor of internal medicine, who said: After all, I maintain that there is nothing in homoeopathy and that we can learn nothing from it. We have no need to kill it by our science, because it is already dead. Biers efforts have failed to resuscitate it. We do not look down on it with contempt, because we regard its doctrines as a historical curiosity.there is a sharp contrast between scientific thought and homoeopathy; anyone who professes himself as a disciple of Hahnemanns fantastic notions has put a barrier between himself and the supporters of scientific medicine.

Bier stood alone, like a medical Luther. Only a frenzied trampling of feet the academic symbol of enthusiasm showed that some of the younger generation, in the great auditorium, were on his side. Yet his robust head- like a healthy peasants was almost jovial as it towered above the beards and spectacles below him. Later during the year, August Bier was censured by the Berlin medical profession for attempting to rehabilitate Hahnemanns reputation. Biers researches into homeopathy led him to propose three fundamental points, the single remedy, the similar remedy and the minimum dose. He also recommended following books: Biography of Hahnemann by Richard Haehl, Essays by Hugo Paul Friedrich Schulz, Homoeopathic Materia Medica by Stauffer, Edwin Awdas Neatby & Thomas John Stonham, Homoeopathy Explained by John Henry Clarke and The Case for Homoeopathy by Charles Edwin Wheeler. August Bier also wrote, What Should be our Attitude Towards Homeopathy? and Homoeopathy and Harmonious Order of the Medicine (in German, with Oswald Schlegel). Some of his famous quotes are: Microbes are of secondary importance in disease; a healthy individual does not become infected. Above all, I am of the opinion that no one should judge homoeopathy, who has not tried homoeopathic remedies or who has failed by reading to familiarize himself with the theory of homoeopathy. I advise my colleagues who want to do the latter, not to start with Samuel Hahnemanns writings, but first to study the excellent work by Richard Haehl, and at least a few works by Hugo Paul Friedrich Schulz. Bibliography 1. Gumpert, M. Hahnemann: The Adventurous Career of a Medical Rebel. L. B. Fischer, New York, 1945. 2. http://sueyounghistories.com/archives/2007/08/30/august-karl-gustav-bier-andhomeopathy/ as accessed on 4-4-13

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