pearls

Dr. Dudley said that he had always been in doubt regarding the significance of the expression, it is the physician's duty to treat his patient and not the disease. He always though that it was his duty to treat the disease and not the patient. If a man has congestion of the brain and we treat him allopathic fashion we give him purges. That is treating the patient, we certainly are not treating the disease, as we miss it by twenty-four inches. Hahnemann intended, by everything he wrote, to impress upon us the unity of the group of symptoms. We find symptoms that appear to be widely at variance, but he contends that all symptoms constitute parts of a single whole. It is our duty to aim our remedy at the unity of the group of symptoms-the totality we call it. The symptoms probably have a similar central origin. They are all links in a continuous chain. We have to deal with symptoms, the outward expression of inward disease. We ought to leave the patient, for the time being, out of sight. 

J. Pemberton Dudley, MD
Proceedings of the Homeopathic Medical Society of Pennsylvania, 1883
(in discussions following Scheme of Provings of Picrate of Zinc)