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Dr. Ledermann is interviewed by Dr. Brian Kaplan:
The interview continues...
(Part 1) (Part
2)
PART 3:
EL: I
joined the
Nature Cure
Clinic in
1936 and
remained there
for over
fifty years.
With
regard to
starting a
private practice
,doctors would
buy one
and often
had to
borrow money from the Bank
which would
mean paying back the
loan for about twenty yeas. I
decided
to
put up a plate and wait for patients.
BK:
This was
all private
practice?
EL:
In those
days patients
who were
working belonged
to an
insurance that
would pay medical
fees but their families
were
not covered. If you see a child and the child's
not very well, how
much do you charge?
Two and sixpence.
They don't come
in tomorrow with another two and
sixpence.
BK:
So you
carried on
doing that
for a
while?
EL:
I had
a small
insurance practice.
A patient
came once
and said, "Dr.
Ledermann, I want you send me to a throat
specialist." "Can
I look at your throat, please?" "No, I don't want you to
look at my throat, I want you to send me
to a throat specialist." "Don't
come back to me", I said.
BK:
And so
you were
mainly using
the stuff
that you'd
learned at
the Homeopathic Hospital and
with Mr Thompson,
mainly that?
EL:
Yes, and
I had
an education
as a
doctor. I
qualified in
Germany and then in
Edinburgh.
BK:
And the
main therapeutic
interventions you
were making
were either
homeopathic or
naturopathic?
EL:
Yes but
if necessary
I would
ask a
surgeon to
come in
to see a patient
BK:
And so
then, staying
a little
bit with
homeopathy, as
you were
studying homeopathy , what
were the people reading
at
this time? Were
they reading the British
writers
like Dudgeon, or was it
the Americans like Kent or
the Organon?
What did they talk about?
EL:
Kent was
still very
powerful in
those days.
He had
started high
potencies, you see.
Tyler
was very
popular. She was great
friends
with John Weir.
BK:
I'm quite
interested in
homeopathic terms,
if there
were people
like Tyler
and Sir John
Weir. These are
very
Kentian people,,
determined to
try to find the
homeopathic
remedy that suited
the whole person in every
case.
EL:
I kept
doing natural
therapy as
well, you
see. And
when I
joined his ward
round Sir
John Weir said, "This man here
knows something
about diet.”
BK:
Right. So
just a
little more,
staying with
homeopathy, the
thing that
puzzles me a little
bit, in principle, we
should match the patient's
symptoms to
symptoms that are produced by provers, healthy
people
taking
the medicines,
but the
truth about
much of
what has
been written
about the homeopathic medicines is not based
on the provings,
it's
based on
clinical observation
of patients.
EL:
Both the
method of
proving remedies
on volunteers
and the
method of
discovering the pharmacological effects
of medicines lead
to the same result
, the similimum , a picture of a whole
person...
But
Hanemann wrote
a further
book after
the Organon,
a book
on chronic
diseases and that
book became now the main link
with scientific conventional medicine.
When you
prescribe a
nosode, (a
product of
the disease)
in potency,
for instance influensinum to
prevent the symptoms of
influenza or a
potentised pollen extract for hayfever
this illustrates the link with scientific
medicine.
BK:
What I
would say
in homeopathy
today is
that there
is quite
a lot of focus
on finding a medicine
that suits the whole person.
EL:
As a
homeopath you
can find
the simillimum
which relates
the patient, to a type of
a whole person,
for instance Pulsatilla is
a remedy for sensitive people
who want fresh air, are better for
sympathy, suffer from secretions of their
mucous
membranes,are
thirstless, unable to tolerate rich food,
having
changeable bowel symptoms, in a woman
you
find scanty
painful periods. You always treat a type
of a person, not
the individual “Mr. James Brown” or “Mrs.
Jane Smith.”
BK:
Well, the
ones who
have a
scientific attitude
like Peter
Fisher, are
doing studies to prove
the efficacy of homeopathic
treatment for
diseases.
EL:
This idea
is mistaken
because the
homeopathic remedy
involves a
matching of
bodily, mental and
spiritual characteristics of
real people, whereas
the disease is as a scientific concept connot
include
the freedom
of spiritual ethics which distinguishes man
from the
animals.
BK:
Is it
not still
necessary to
prove that
it is
the actual
homeopathic treatment that is
working?
EL:
Yes, when
I was
at the
London Homeopathic
Hospital I
did attempt
to provide this
proof and I was helped by
my colleague, Dr.
Golomb. The method was as follows: The dispenser
at the
hospital would, in certain cases, replace
the name
of
the
medicine
on the
prescription sheet
by sugar .as instructed
by the
Medical Research Council .
When seeing
a patient for whom we
had prescribed the 30. potency of a certain remedy
.we
decided
that
the patient
was better , worse
or unchanged . Then we found
out whether he had received the medicine or the placebo.
When asking
. "How are you this morning?" He might say “much
better”. " When looking up his case, we may find that he
was a placebo case – which does not prove that homeopathy is
ineffective
, only that people make spontaneous recoveries Unfortunately
the
experiment was abandoned when Dr. Gollomb was killed
in
that plane crash... We never had sufficient material
for
a statistical evaluation.
BK:
A proper
double blind
study, yes.
But you
shouldn't restrict
the practitioner
to one medicine
or one disease.
EL:
I agree
that this
type of
investigation doesn’t use classification
of diseases which may in our skin department
involve
patients who have either psoriasis or eczema.
or other
dermatological
conditions. But we would exclude
diseases which are malignant such as melanoma.
The
acne
patient for instance is for the homeopath
a sufferer
from a bodily,
mental and spiritual condition and if he
were suicidal,
he would need a homeopathic remedy
which takes into consideration this spiritual
characteristic
apart from the bodily lesions
on his face.
BK:
You began
to realise
that some
people have
great problems
that require
the studying of
psychiatry by their doctor.
EL:
I realised
when I
was working
in a
Berlin hospital
before my
medical qualification how
important the spiritual dimension
in medical
practice is.
A
patient suffering
from severe
bronchial asthma
was successfully
treated by
a certain
drug that relieves
the spasm
in the bronchi, but
his asthma came back after his
discharge several
times. And so I asked him to
explain what
brought on these asthmatic attacks
after he had
left
the
hospital.
His reply
was, “It
is the fault of the scoundrel, my son-in-law. I hate him because
he seduced my daughter whom I love dearly, although he did marry
her later. Each time when
we meet now I get one of them attacks of bad breathing.” I
said to the physician in charge, "You know, I'm not very
pleased with this case." "Nonsense” said
the physician, “he did very well I said, “But the
scoundrel, the son-in-law wasn't considered and he is the cause
of the asthma attacks.” At
that time I had
no idea how to deal
with such a situation.
Later
I realised
that my
duty had
been to
try bringing
together the
patient and the son-in-law to help my
patient to overcome
his hatred and rather to
use his
spiritual and ethical freedom to make
a new and good relationship with his son-in-law.
BK:
So when
did you
feel drawn
to study
psychotherapy and
psychiatry? How
did that happen, when did it
happen?
EL:
In 1943
I got
a job
in Dr.
Bierer's psychiatric
day hospital where
I rose to
Consulant in 1963 .
For
my understanding
the philosophical
foundation of
psychiatry and
medicine in
general I
was helped by
lectures given by Professor Liebert
who had come to
England from Germany
were he had studied Kant’s philosophy... I was introduced
to Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason “., but also to
his “Critique
of Practical, Ethical Reason’’ which involves
our spiritual dimension. BK:
Can you
explain how
the spiritual
dimension is
so important
in psychiatry?
EL:
You first
have to
realise that
if psychiatry
is part
of scientific
medicine, you may
learn of scientific psychotherapies, whether
formulated
by Freud, which is based
on the sexual
instinct, or by Jung, who finds archetypes
the main unconscious basis, but they
are unable to
account for man’s spiritual dimension. Therefore
I developed a form of psychotherapy which
I called ‘true-self’ psychotherapy – which
meant that the true self is accepted
by the spiritual
conscience.
And while Freud makes the unconscious
libido conscious
and Jung makes the unconscious
archetype conscious, I make the unconscious
conscience
conscious.
BK:
Are there
methods in
spiritual true-self
psychotherapy which
reveal the
workings of
the spiritual dimension
?
EL:
Yes, dream
analysis, for
instance. A
woman may
be suffering
from a
relationship with a
man who does no allow her
to be her true
self, and in a dream she swims
with him in cold
water and is being
abused by him at the same time.
In the analysis of
this
dream
she
realises the
coldness and inappropriateness
of the relationship.
BK:
What other
methods?
EL:
Paintings of
patients may
reveal their
false selves.
For instance,
a woman
painted herself as a
block completely determined
by her mother’s
eyes looking down from heaven, and she admitted that
this dependency had made it impossible
for her to discover who she really was. She was also
afraid that she would not be able to accept her truly
self if it became known
to her. True-self psychotherapy enabled her to resolve
this conflict.
BK:
You did
use LSD
as I
know, and
I would
like to
hear the role played
by LSD in true-self psychotherapy.
EL:
LSD enables
some patients
to realise
the false
relationship enforced
by their
parents. One woman
in particular was brought up by
a mother
who did not
allow her to be aware of her own
development as a woman. She was not allowed to
use
the
word ‘breast’, only the word ‘chest’. She herself
reported that through having had LSD, her frozen
icy self had become a warm self receptive of her true- and other true-selves.
(Dr. Ledermann
stopped using LSD
when the pharmaceutical industry stopped supplying
the drug to doctors. It’s
use subsequently became illegal.)
BK:
What about
Chinese medicine?
EL:
In Chinese
medicine there
is no
separation of
bodily, mental
and spiritual
elements of the
human person. The same
energy channel not only
refers to bodily
suffering such as pain or mental suffering
such as
depression
but
also refers to the spiritual dimension,
for instance,
to
make
decisions to be free of anxiety in order
to
be creative. On
my
web site (www.wholepersonmedicine.co.uk)
you will find
a section
which
is called “An Appreciation of Chinese Medicine” which
explains the subject more fully.
In
my book
Medicine for
the Whole
Person – A Critique of scientific
Medicine, (Chrysalis Books,
London, 2002,) the spiritual
dimension plays a prominent
part and is considered
to be manifest in the ethics
of conscience
and missing in our social-spiritual
malaise.
Again
in my
website the
same subject
is extensively
dealt with
in ”Foundations
of Medical Humanities’”
BK:
I'm delighted
to see
you here
in yet
another new
surgery with
diplomas on the
wall from the British Acupuncture Society and from
the Chinese Medical Institute.
EL:
Can you
see there's
a piece
of paper
there?
BK:
Amazing. Is
this your
original doctor
diploma?
EL:
It enabled
me to
be requalified
in Edinburgh.
This is
my doctor's
diploma in Latin.
BK:
It’s very unique. I can't see a date which
I'd like to see…
EL:
It must
have been
in '32
BK:
It's been a great chat. Thank you for
your
time.
(Part
1) (Part
2) (Obituary) |
