Editor's preface.

Whatever estimate Science may finally place upon the discoveries and doctrines of Hahnemann, and whatever measure of confidence in his therapeutic belief Posterity may accord or withhold, his personality and work have achieved a position which must render them perpetually historic. His teachings have been so interwoven with the entire fabric of medical progress during the last hundred years, and are so interlaced with the formative development of the incoming century, that neither the wear and tear of time nor the dissections of criticism will ever be able to dissociate them. They are destined, inevitably, to run through the texture of every page in the future annals of medicine.

In the development of therapeutic art Hahnemann's position is more than merely transitional. He proclaims both an epoch and an era ; he represents both discovery and progress. To-day, as a hundred years ago, he holds in one hand the past, in the other the future of medical achievement. The future historian, crossing the chasm between the medicine of speculative hypothesis and that based on observation of clinical and pharmaco-dynamic phenomena, will unfailingly recognize Hahnemann's agency in bringing about that remarkable transformation in medical thought and practice. And no exposition of Hahnemann's tenets, no rendition of his literary works, which fails to note and consider their historical relations and the historic individuality of their author, can be either adequate or just.

In the task of setting forth in the English tongue the works of Hahnemann, it thus becomes necessary not merely to note carefully the doctrines promulgated and the facts presented, but to exhibit also, so far as his recorded words express, and the resources of our own language enable us, the depth of the impression which his observations and discoveries must have produced upon his own mind, as well as the intensity of conviction, the earnestness of feeling, and the energy of demonstration, which characterize all his controversial writings. Long after his lineaments shall have faded from the canvas, his intellectual personality will survive in his literary creations and constitute an important feature of the medical chronicles of his time. To modify or disguise his modes of thought and expression, or to suppress the peculiarities of his literary style, would be an unpardonable distortion of the most pre-eminent figure in all medical history.

In that portion of this work in which Hahnemann considers the Nature and the Treatment of Chronic Diseases in general, and of Psora in particular, the reader will discover several peculiarities of style, some of which are not at all common to our English polemical literature. Among these we may mention : (1), his long, and often involved, sentences ; (2), his exceedingly frequent employment of parenthetical clauses and sentences, and his not infrequent use of the parenthesis within a parenthesis ; (3), his multiplicity of iterations and reiterations -occurring twice or thrice in a single paragraph ; sometimes twice in the same sentence- ; (4), his frequent interjection of words and phrases expressing anew some minor feature of the subject under discussion, but forming no part of the discussion itself ; (5), his introduction of qualifying words and phrases in certain peculiar and unusual connections, likely to escape the notice of the casual or careless reader, but evidently intended by the author to be taken at their full significance and importance and to constitute an essential element of the discussion. It may be said, in passing, that the failure to note this last-mentioned characteristic of Hahnemann's method has occasioned much misunderstanding of his doctrines.

PEMBERTON DUDLEY, M. D.

PHILADELPHIA, 1896.