Traditional medical astrology. Oscar Hoffman.

PREFACE.
In twenty06, I was invited to speak at an astrological conference held at the Medical Faculty of the University of Cape Town. The university did not participate in this event - its organizers rented the university hall for the weekend. During the conference, Rod Suskin, the star of the first magnitude in the astrological firmament of South Africa, told me that he was once invited by a medical institute to give a course of lectures on medical astrology.
Excited by the prospect, Rod took it for granted that when speaking to a medical audience, he would not have to waste time explaining Galen's theory, and would quickly move on to further topics. However, seeing that every mention of humor and temperament causes confused and bewildered expressions on the faces of the listeners, he was forced to quickly abandon this intention. Asking if the medical students knew anything about Galen, Rod discovered that they knew nothing except that "all of his theories are worth a damn." This bleak example of the deep gulf separating traditional and modern knowledge will not surprise anyone with even the slightest knowledge of the history of science. Modern science seems to exist without any reliance on its own history and philosophy, akin to juggling balls held in space “by themselves”. As a result, in order to gain credibility and trust, she has no choice but to denigrate the past - "all the scientific achievements made until the day before yesterday are nonsense and nonsense, and those who did this were either fools or charlatans."
Looking at their ingenuous predecessors, who received the same label (take, for example, Galileo and Kepler), astrologers, it would seem, should have understood this. However, they too, with great zeal, took the side of the modern scientific world. One of the typical postulates of modern astrologers is that "we cannot predict death based on a birth chart, because the achievements of modern medicine have increased life expectancy."
From this statement follows the gratifying conclusion that at some point in life each of us is able to transcend the limits of our destiny and tie ourselves in marriage with Johnny Depp or Halle Berry (choose the correct one), and with weekly lottery winnings to boot. But this also logically follows another, already completely delusional conclusion that before the advent of the modern era, medicine was not able to prolong life. That is, even such an elementary medical intervention as stopping the bleeding from a wound never saved anyone.

Modern science, in so far as it honors its predecessors at all, presents them in an exclusively caricatured form: the sailors of Columbus trembling with horror in anticipation of an impending fall from the edge of a flat Earth; a doctor who bleeds a patient, wielding a machete, in the hope that he will give up the ends no sooner than he pays the fee due to the doctor ... There are a great many such myths around the medicine of the past, as well as around the idea that our ancestors considered the Earth to be flat.

One of these myths is that there were no painkillers in the past. The court physicians of Marcus Aurelius dosed daily the painkiller opium, depending on how clear the mind of the emperor should have been that day. Receiving a delegation from Athens? Caesar will have to suffer. A crowd of drunken Teutons? He can afford to be in a happy dope.

In an effort to gain universal confidence in their ability to master the unattainable skill of restoring health, our medical contemporaries carelessly obscure and belittle not only the ancient doctors, but also their patients, who firmly believed that the charlatan remedies of their doctors could heal the disease. Our ancestors were incredibly stupid. Like, for example, the great Saladin, whose court physician was Maimonides[one]. From the fact that the latter cannot be accused of either stupidity or charlatanism, it can be concluded that the enlightened sultan was too gullible.

Stupidity and ignorance have existed at all times, but when our contemporaries present traditional medicine as stupid and ignorant, we might wonder what modern medicine looks like from the point of view of a person who has read a weekly copy of a daily newspaper about medical scandals. The picture of traditional medicine presented to us is based, as a rule, on the oneeightth century - the worst time for the sick: traditional knowledge has already been abandoned, and the resulting vacuum has not yet been filled by the "miraculous cures" of our day. Means that undoubtedly give a quick result, but at the same time - which is also hard to disagree with - miraculously relieve acute symptoms in the present, replacing them with a chronic illness in the future. The reason for this is rooted in the refusal of modern medicine to penetrate into the deep essence of the disease.

This approach favors drug shareholders more than society as a whole.

Of course, we should in every possible way refrain from myth-making, which paints a rosy picture of past centuries: omnipotent healers standing guard over their healthy and happy people. In the past, access to quality healthcare was no easier than today. But this circumstance belongs to the organizational part of medical care and should not close our eyes to the virtues of traditional medicine, which perceives the patient in all his integrity and complexity, and not as a set of disparate symptoms caused by foreign invaders.

In his excellent book The Social Transformation of American Medicine, Paul Starr[2] says that in the pursuit of increasing and strengthening their incomes and social status, doctors deliberately and cohesively veiled medical knowledge from "ordinary people", turning the language of medicine into a lasso, which only professionals can decipher. In one example, Starr talks about Daniel Webster Cathell's "Book On The Physician Himself And Things That Concern His Reputation And Success", a widely read and often republished guide for medical practitioners.. Among others, Cathell gives doctors the following recommendation: “Using an ac. phenicum for phenol, secale comutum for ergot, kalium for potassium, natrum for sodium, chinin for quinine, and so on, you block the average patient from understanding your prescriptions.... For more disguise, you can also swap the terms.”

The idea that a gang of foreign invaders - bacteria, and not the disturbed vital activity of the patient's body, could be the cause of the disease, turned out to be a godsend for doctors. They got something more mysterious than the most mysterious linguistic construct. These pesky parasites are invisible, and their treacherous ways are unknown to the uninitiated. Laboratories began to make fun of the medical knowledge of the past.

One of the earliest examples of how the medical community sought to seize and consolidate its monopoly on medical knowledge is the behavior of the College of Physicians with Nicholas Culpeper. After Culpeper published his translation of the Pharmacopoeia into a living colloquial language so that non-specialists could understand it - that is, those who, like no one else, are interested in treatment, they began to pour mud at him. From the pages of the press and from church pulpits, accusations rained down on Culpeper that “all the recipes he cites contain certain impurities, at least rebellion and atheism” [3]. In our time, such accusations are formulated somewhat differently. But anyone who dares to doubt the monopoly of doctors on medical knowledge is well aware of the hysterical notes that appear in their answer. It is possible that the author of the book you now hold in your hands will also receive a few blows for daring to fill the gap that keeps traditional medicine in the safe insulator of the distant past. As a worthy successor to Culpeper, Oskar Hoffmann passes on his knowledge and experience to us not in the form of a curiosity or an abstract-intellectual archaeological opus, but as a living and working system capable of producing an effective result.

Paraphrasing the "father of medicine" Hippocrates, Culpeper proclaimed that "a doctor without astrology is like a pudding without fat"[four]. To provide medical care to his clients, Oscar resorts to astrology. There is no doubt that the allopathic approach to the treatment of diseases that prevails today does not live up to the expectations placed on it. Modern doctors reduce man more and more to a complex mechanism, and with all their growing arrogance inevitably assume the role of mechanics. And if a person is nothing more than a mechanism, then calls for removing it as soon as it stops working properly sound quite convincing. But the thing is, people are not machines. Even the most unintelligent driver is able to understand that filling a diesel engine with gasoline is not the best thing to do. The understanding of what constitutional types of a person differ from each other no less strongly than different models of engines, it turns out to be inaccessible to modern physicians. They believe that the correspondence between remedies and symptoms is the same for all people. Violation of this rule causes them bewilderment.

The astrological approach to diagnosing and treating diseases is necessarily holistic. Astromedicine focuses not on the symptoms as such, but on the general condition of a person - on his malaise or unhealthiness, which manifests itself in the form of symptoms. While the modern physician is surprised that a remedy that worked well in Patient A does not work in Patient C, who has the same symptoms, it is quite natural for the traditional physician. The use of astrology in the system of traditional medicine guarantees an individual approach to each patient.

Of particular interest in