Page 6 - Spring 25

Healing, curing, and the single dose By Mark Carpenter, Germany
“The physicians highest and only calling is to make the sick healthy, to cure, as it is called.”
“Des Arztes höchster und einziger Beruf ist, kranke Menschen gesund zu machen, was man Heilen nennt.”
“The highest ideal of cure is the rapid, gentle and permanent restoration of health; that is, the lifting and annihilation of the disease in its entire extent in the shortest, most reliable, and least disadvantageous way, according to clearly realisable [in-seeable] principles.”
“Das höchste Ideal der heilung ist schnelle, sanfte und dauerhafte Wiederstellung der Gesundheit, oder Hebung und Vernichtung der Krankheit in ihrem ganzen Umfange auf dem kürzesten, unnachtheiligsten wege, nach deutlich einzusehenden Gründen.”
So opens the main text of Samuel Hahnemann’s Organon of the Medical Art (Organon der Heilkunst) – after a somewhat lengthy, albeit interesting, preface! I write it in the original language, as well as in English, because there are some occasions in the Organon where translation loses the meaning or subtlety of expression; hence I am showing the text in both English and German, and the potential diversion of understanding, where existent, will be discussed. I should say that I am not a native German speaker, though am now moderately proficient, so I am very happy to receive feedback from my German
colleagues if any of my interpretations are inappropriate.
In aphorism 1, we can already see such a subtlety which may be significant. “Heilen” is correctly translated as “cure”, but is this all that the word means? What did Samuel Hahnemann mean by “cure”? Later on, in later aphorisms, he gives us an insight as to just what he considers “healing/cure” (heilen) to involve; for example, in Aphorism 9 he talks about the ability of our “indwelling, rational spirit” to “freely avail itself of this living, healthy instrument [the body] for the higher purposes of life” when in the healthy state – my favourite aphorism in the Organon!
The noun “Heil” in German means well-being, not health (Gesundheit) or cure (Heilung); the adjective “heilig” means sacred, as in, for example, Heiligabend, which is German for Christmas Eve, or Heiliger Geist, the Holy Spirit. From this it can be suggested that, in using the expression “heilen”, Hahnemann opens the idea that genuine healing goes beyond the simple removal of symptoms and is concerned with the deeper well-being of the truly healthy.
The word “cure” has the same origins as the word “care” (Latin Cura – care, concern); it became to also encompass medical cure in the late 14th century. The German word has been in use for some 300 to 400 years longer (from around the year 1000) , and means “heil machen”, so to make whole, or to make uninjured; heil implies intact (“ist es noch heil?” – “is it still intact?” or “have you broken it?”). I labour this point because my feeling that the translation of the word to the very restricted “cure” misses a lot of what was intended by Samuel Hahnemann. This goes to
the core of the essential question, what do we mean when we talk of healing, and how do we achieve it? If we cannot be clear on this question, how can we recognise when our intervention has started to catalyse an appropriate response?
Hahnemann makes clear his recognition that the “highest ideal of cure...” is to remove symptoms “in its [their] entire extent...” from the physical body. He clarifies the real goal of this process, as mentioned, in aphorism 9. There are, however, many occasions when the chronicity of the pathology is clearly not going to be amenable to their
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