● ● ● made known to one who had not any such previous knowledge, as would enable him to ascertain them à priori. . . . The communication of this kind of knowledge is most usually, and most strictly called information; we gain it from observation, and from testimony. . . . The other class of Discoveries is of a very different nature. That which may be elicited by Reasoning, and consequently is implied in that which we already know, we assent to on that ground, and not from observation or testimony. . . . To all practical purposes, indeed, a Truth of this description may be as completely unknown to a man as the other; but as soon as it is set before him, and the argument by which it is connected with his previous notions is made clear to him, he recognizes it as something conformable to, and contained in, his former belief.62
Mrs. Patterson had time both to observe new facts and to reason on them. Among the questions which loomed large in her life at this time none was more pressing than the problem of health, and the particular field of her investigation and reasoning was homeopathy. This system of medicine had been growing tremendously in favor during the past decade or two, and her own favorable results with it in 1853 had started her off on a long series of experiments, and had also led Daniel Patterson to practice homeopathy as a sideline to his dentistry.
In her possession was a copy of Jahr’s New Manual of Homeopathic Practice, edited by A. Gerald Hull and popularly known as Hull’s Jahr. Myra Smith told of Mrs. Patterson’s devotion to this huge volume which, next to the Bible, probably constituted her chief reading matter at that time. The blind girl also told how some of the neighbors would come to Mrs. Patterson for medicine: and her own later accounts of her experiences with these rustic patients show the immense importance homeopathy had in the development of her thought.
The feature of it which appealed to her especially was not its basic medical theory that “like cures like” but its emphasis on the attenuation of drugs to the point where they all but disappeared from the remedy.
62 [Richard Whately, Elements of Logic (London: J. Mawman, 1826), pp. 219–221.] See Mary Baker Eddy, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany (Boston: Christian Science Board of Directors, 1941), p. 304. See also p. 75.