What is Brousseanic / Broussais method of treatment?

Brousseau’s physiological system is one of the examples of the violent, no sensual treatments practiced by the dominant medicinal school in the pure Hahnemannian and Hahnemannian times. This was introduced by a French physician called Brousseau.

Initially, Brousseau fought against the senseless mixing of large quantities of different palliative medicines, but he introduced later the more violent system of practice called Brousseau’s physiological system. This system debilitates the vital force because the followers of this system believed that the quantity and nature of bad blood in the system is the cause for all the suffering of the patient. So the only solution is to remove the bad blood from the system.

Example: 1. Brousseau’s physiological system includes issues, setons, leeches application, cupping, gum arabic solutions, venesections, warm baths, and vesications, etc. By such procedures, the patient’s blood was made to flow freely from his body.

2. In the name of the “hunger diet” the patient was kept on fasting. This practice made the patient weaker.

Further, drainage of blood and vital fluids made the vital force further depressed and made the disease incurable. Hahnemann comments, “For the innocent irreplaceable blood was according to him responsible for almost all ailments”.

The more blood he lost, the same proportion of strength the patient lost. The patient appeared more quite in proportion as he grew weaker, but the followers of this system considered in the wrong deduction, that the patient had actually improved. In fact, the condition of the patient worsened in the latter days because of the loss of blood. The frequently repeated reduction and exhaustion in the vital energy was neither noticeable to the patient nor to the physician. The relatives of the patients were blinded by the acts that something greater is being done to the patient, but ultimately the patient passed away as he lost the most vital fluid called blood.

Hahnemann further criticizes, “In this way many thousand physicians were miserably mislead to shed (with cold heart) the warm blood of their patients that were capable of cure and thereby rob millions of men gradually of their life according to Brousseau’s method, more than fell on Napoleon’s battle fields”.

Stuart Close in his Genius of Homoeopathy comments, “Bloodletting, the outgrowth of one of these false theories, affords a goods example. The celebrated Bouvard, the physician to Louis XIII, ordered his royal patient forty-seven bleedings, two hundred and fifteen emetics or purgatives, and three hundred and twelve clysters during the period of one year!

During the extremes to which the so-called “physiological medicine” was carried more than six million leeches were used, and more than two hundred thousand pounds of blood was spilled in the hospitals of Paris in one year. The mortality was appalling.

In Hahnemann’s time (1799), the death of our own George Washington was undoubtedly caused by the repeated bloodlettings to which he was subjected. He was almost completely exsanguinated.” Thus, Brousseau’s physiological system instead of providing betterment to the patient made more harm to him by depressing the more vital part called the vital force. It is remarkable to know that Brousseau in his later years of life, supported Hahnemannian principles.

Want to learn more about different modes of treatment than must read: Alternative Modes of Treatment