IHA Transactions, 1905 page 93
by B. Fincke
In my criticism on Dr. Kunkel's essay on "Kraft and Stoff" where the efficiency of the inert waters in the watering places of Gasten Weldbad, etc. was attributed to the vibrations of the Ether in answer to a suggestion putting it on the atmospheric pressure, I ventured to say, that it was owing to natural potentiation by fluxion in as much as the waters running underground over stones and over other substances take up the medicinal forces with which they are endowed and hence when coming to the light of day prove so efficacious for healing.
It was on the 20th of May,1863 while making the 9000th potency of Thuja occ. with a machine on the Korsakoffian plan that the first idea of fluxion potentiation came to me. I find in my notes the following remark: "The thought came to me, that nature accomplishes such potentiations only by fluxion and the finer potentiations are effected by finer fluxion which when it is only continued steadily as I have observed at Lake George also produces lasting formations."
This was written forty-two years ago. The action of the high potencies on this plan has justified the truth of this idea. How much was I suprised when I found recently in an essay by Dr. E. Schlegel, read before the German Homceopathischen Central Verein in Salsburg and published in Dr. Pollers' Archiv fur Homeopathy in 1898, on Paracelsus studies the very idea just mentioned which was ex- pressed by that great physician and natural pailosopher In the first decades of the sixteenth century in the following words:
"He [Paracelsus] gives a very good geognostic description of the origin of the different healing springs and of the manner by which the waters derive forces in their course through rocks and ripe and unripe ores." The following is the identical quotation from the works of Paracelsus in the second tract on natural springs: "Where many mineralia are lying and chalk and a hidden water course which tends to come to the light of day would have to run through such regions, it must unite with their mineral use and must receive the heat (Hitz meaning the life force) and nature of the same, therefore come to the light of day and keep also its heat (Hitz, life force) which it has received internally."
This shows, that Paracelsus who was the forerunner of the Hahnemannian idea af the dynamicity of diseases and medicines was also the forerunner of his idea of potentiation. Not that Hahnemann had stolen his discovery of Homeopathy from the great medieval reformer of medicine as ill advised physicians have maintained, for Paracelsus was in Hahnemann's time only known as a charlatan and to Hahnemann alone, who himself repudiated the base insinuation with indignation, belongs the honor and the right of having brought the homeopathic healing art and science into the world by his own experiments and observation. Nor could the production of fluxion potencies which was established forty-two years ago here in the United States of America be laid to his credit. But it is certainly remarkable, how a correct idea will never die and even after centuries of obstacles will be brought to the light of day, like the bidden underground water courses running along incessantly to form and increase the small and great rivers and the innumerable springs for the benefit of humanity.
The coincidence of the ideas of the two great reformers of medicine resound to their immortal glory and at the 150th year celebration of Hahnemann's birthday we should not forget that of the older physician, since both of these in spite of all opposition, conquered in introducing their imperishable ideas to an unbelieving old school of regular physicians.
Twenty five years have passed since the International Hahnemannian Association was founded on the rock of Hahnemannian Homeopathic principles which it has never forsaken and its annals are the living proofs of it and of its beneficent work in the service of homeopathic art and science and universal human progress. This testimony promises in the future a continuation of its praiseworthy exertions for the best of the human race all over the world.