Em 1870 Carroll Dunham
era presidente do AIH e, contrariando a ala dos homeopatas
estritos, clamou pela liberação da entrada de
‘meio-homeopatas’ na associação. A idéia de Dunham
era que a convivência com os mais eruditos faria com que os
menos estudados chegassem a ser homeopatas.
Em 1874 foi retirada do termo de filiação a palavra
‘Homoeopathy’ como pré requisito, assim qualquer um
podia se filiar.
Os anos mostraram que ele estava enganado. Os trabalhos do
instituto passaram a versar cada vez mais sobre a associação
com alopatia e posteriormente muito pouco lembravam a Homeopatia.
Mas isso veio com o tempo... antes, em 1880, houve o cisma do AIH
dando origem à International Hahnemannian Association que
teve como marco o discurso de E. W. Berridge (texto completo em http://www.oocities.org/eczoby/berridge.html).
Abaixo vai a transcrição de partes do discurso de Dunham, não
o tenho todo, copiado de J. WINSTON (The Faces of
Homoeopathy. Tawa: Great Auk, 1999. p. 77-8).
Carroll Dunham, discurso presidencial ao American Institute of Homoeopathy, 1870.
Freedom
of Medical Opinion and Action:
a Vital
Necessity and a Great Responsibility
We have adopted a code of medical ethics which defines with considerable minuteness the duties, as we understand them, of physicians to each other and the public... But we have, besides, a standard which the other school dos not possess - a fundamental therapeutic law, which is, to some extent, of the nature of a creed, adhesion to which would seem to be essential to membership in the Institute; and without which it would appear that no physician could entertain views in common with us, or any desire to unite with us...
But as the new practice became popular, men took the name of homoeopathic physician who did not accept the homoeopathic law as of universal application in therapeutics, or who did not accept the peculiar modes of practice generally known as homoeopathic: the single remedy, for instance, and the minimum dose...
Some will say it is vexatious to meet fellow members who are homoeopathists only in name, really ignorant, and giving out their crude assumptions as the science today. It may be equally to some vexatious to meet the stricter Homoeopathists. Probably the vexation is not in meeting these men, but rather in fact their exist and practice and talk as they do. Well, if we expel them will they not still exist and talk and practice? If we expel them, we deprive ourselves of every chance to teach them better ways; and there is not an earnest man of them who would not gladly learn!
Let us bear with these trials as it may well be others are patiently bearing with our own short-comings. Let the Institute be an open forum, in which truth shall be so distinctly proclaims, and so persuasively enforced that error shall have no chance...
And there are among those who call themselves Homoeopathists, some who are impostors; men without knowledge and without conscience, who play upon the credulity of mankind... That such men, professing to be of our school, should be regarded by the community as belonging to it... is certainly a misfortune. Yet, that there are so many of them, is, in one sense, a testimony in favor of Homoeopathy! For who ever heard of a patent being infringed which was good for nothing? Who ever heard of impostors claiming heirship to an insolvent estate? Should we probably meet with uneducated or knavish persons claiming to be homoeopathic physicians, were not the success and consideration which attach to that position something desirable? In some sort, the number of impostors and parasites may be taken as a measure of the value and vitality of that on which they cling! ...