You remember Hahnemann’s classification of the causes of chronic diseases : syphilitic, sycotic and psoric diatheses. Vide Organon and Chronic Diseases. In our clinic you see many broken constitutions due to the former. To-day most diseases are supposed to be due to micro-organisms, as Hahnemann claimed a hundred years ago. You will not overlook the rheumatic, warty, second class. Grauvogl would class them as hydrogenoid. Some years ago (1873), in a study of sick children, I found them easily divisible into two divisions, which I termed acid and alkaline, depending upon the relative activity of the acid or alkaline digestive organs. Autopsy revealed in the former a large stomach and a small mahogany liver, while in the latter the relative size of the organs were reversed. This division enabled me to “see right through children,” and to select the food needed and the class of remedies for each. You will find it elaborated in my work on Paedohygea. I have lived to see some of these two classes of children reach maturity. Those I have treated I endeavored to bring to the normal alkaline condition. Health is the golden mean.
The effort to harmonize these various classifications has resulted in consolidating them into two, as follow : In one class may be found the acid, oxygenoid and nervous and sanguine temperaments, while in the other list we may find, I think, the alkaline, hydrogenoid and lymphatic temperament–perhaps bilious as well. These two classes you can detect at a glance. This aids in diagnosis. The lymphatic body may be acquired (see How to be Plump). Thirty years ago I was classed as nervo- bilious, weighing 130 pounds. I passed a rigid military examination in ’61, being (5 ft. 5 in high) of fair proportion. Now I weigh nearer 200 pounds and would be classed, perhaps, as lympho-nervo-bilious. The acid class are believed to suffer with spinal anaemia, while the alkaline subjects suffer from hyperaemia of the nerve centres. In the former class we find a tendency to visceral inflammation including one form of tuberculosis, in the latter the other. Here also are met many cases of cancer cachexia. Let me impress upon you the fact that we can do much by hygiene, diet and medicine to control and often to cure the disease tendency in humanity.
The causes of disease you will find classified as predisposing and exciting. We have been studying the former, the undercurrent. These we may control, as you will learn. The other predisposing causes we will consider at another lecture. I cannot dismiss Physicians are conservators of the race. You can begin part of your work now. We can do much along the line of bringing peoples up to a healthy standard. Likes beget likes. Blondes should not marry blondes, and vice versa. The temperaments should be mixed. Healthy children and peoples are of mixed temperaments, chiefly of the three. The bilious and lymphatic give vigor. Nervous temperaments should not intermarry, neither should the lymphatics. Extremes are the bases of disease–predisposing thereto–and are to be avoided.
We hear much of the degeneracy of the race and the “survival of the fittest.” In these days of wise physicians and much learning we may modestly assume the role of “medical advisers” and take the high and honorable position of family physician, whose noble prerogative it is to “heal the sick” and “to improve the race.
Editor of The United States Medical Investigator. Member of the Chicago Paedological Society. First President of the American Paedological Society Author of: Diseases of infants and children, with their homoeopathic treatment. Published 1878 and Hand book on the diseases of the heart and their homeopathic treatment. by Thomas C. Duncan, M.D. Published 1898