Hahnemann´s experiments with 50 millesimal potencies: a further review of his casebooks.
ADLER, U. C., ADLER, M. S.
H omeopathy, 95: 171 - 181, 2006
Background: This research is based on a review of Hahnemann´s clinical records at the Institute for History of Medicine of the Robert Bosch Foundation in Stuttgart. Until the end of his long and productive life, Hahnemann continued to refine his clinical method, based on his series of clinical cases. His “most perfected method” motivated him to write the sixth edition of his principal work, the The Organon of the Healing Art, proposing solutions controlling the side effects he frequently observed with repeated doses of homeopathic medicines. Unfortunately, this was published many years posthumously. The 6th edition of The Organon introduced the pharmaceutical innovation known today as the fifty-millesimal scale because it involves diluting the medicine approximately fifty thousand times at every stage of dynamization. Objectives: To identify the clinical cases treated with fifty-millesimal potencies and analyze Hahnemann’s use of them.
Results: 1836 prescriptions of fifty-millesimal potencies were found, used between 1837 and 1843 in three phases: initially sporadic; later compared regularly to centesimal dynamizations; and finally systematically, as in the instructions of the 6th edition of The Organon. 35 medicines were identified in fifty-millesimal prescriptions, 7 in potencies higher than 10 and only 3 (Sulphur, Mercurius solubilis and Rhus toxicodendron) used up to the 30th degree. This accords with Haehl’s information about the remedies in Hahnemann´s case of fifty-millesimal potencies.
Conclusions: Hahnemann probably decided to write the 6th edition, in 1840, to incorporate his latest experience with the repetition of potentized doses and periodically modified potencies. He must have revised it after February 1842 to include his latest findings with fifty-millesimal potencies in ascending degrees. Hahnemann´s conception about the superiority of the fifty-millesimal in comparison with the centesimal dynamization was based on a significant number of experiments with the two scales.
