XIX. Typical Cases of Illness

In this chapter we shall describe a number of cases from the practice of the Clinical and Therapeutic Institute at Arlesheim. They will show how, with the help of a knowledge of spiritual man, it is possible to achieve such a thorough picture of the disease that diagnosis directly teaches us the remedy which should be used. Fundamental to this is a view which recognizes the process of illness and of healing as one complete cycle. The illness begins with an irregularity in the composition of the human organism with respect to its parts, which have been described in this book. It has already reached a certain stage when the patient is received for treatment. Our object must now be to bring about a reversal of all the processes which have taken place in the organism since the beginning of the illness, so that we arrive at length at the previous state of health of the organism. A process of this kind, reversing on itself, cannot be accomplished without the organism as a whole undergoing some loss in the forces of growth, which are equivalent to those forces which the human organism - needs during childhood in order to increase in size. The therapeutic substances must therefore be so composed as not only to bring the diseased process back to its starting-point, but also to support the reduced vitality again. To some extent this latter effect must be left to dietary treatment. But as a general rule, in the more serious cases of illness, the organism is not in a condition to evolve sufficient vitality in the assimilation of its food. Therefore the actual treatment will also have to be constituted so as to give the organism the necessary support in this respect. In the typical remedies supplied by our clinical/therapeutic institutes, this provision has been made throughout. Hence it will only be realized on closer inspection, why a given preparation contains particular constituents. In estimating the course of the disease, not only the localized pathological process, but the changes suffered by the organism as a whole must be considered and included in the reversing process. How this is to be conceived in detail will be shown by the individual cases we shall now describe. We shall then continue the more general considerations.