But let no one think that the psora which has been thus mitigated in its local symptom, its cutaneous eruption, differs materially from ancient leprosy. Even leprosy, when not inveterate, could in ancient times not seldom be driven from the skin by cold baths or by repeated dipping in a river and through warm mineral baths (see below, No. 35); but also then the evil effects resulting were as little regarded as the more modern physicians regard the acute diseases and the insidious maladies which do not fail to develop sooner or later from the indwelling psora when an eruption of the present itch disease has disappeared of itself or has been violently driven away).
So great a flood of numberless nervous troubles, painful ailments, spasms, ulcers (cancers), adventitious formations, dyscrasias, paralyses, consumptions and cripplings of soul, mind and body were never seen in ancient times when the Psora mostly confined itself to its dreadful cutaneous symptom, leprosy. Only during the last few centuries has mankind been flooded with these infirmities, owing to the causes just mentioned.*
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(*That the drinking of warm coffee and Chinese tea which has spread so generally in the last two centuries, and which has so largely increased the irritability of the muscular fibre as well as the excessive excitability of the nerves, has further augmented the tendency of this period to a multitude of chronic diseases, and has thus aided the psora, I least of all can doubt, as I have made prominent, perhaps too prominent, the part which coffee takes with respect to the bodily and mental sufferings of humanity, in my little work on The Effects of Coffee (Die Wirkungen des Kaffee’s. Leipzig, 1803). This, perhaps undue, prominence given was owing to the fact that I had not then as yet discovered the chief source of chronic diseases in the psora. Only in connection with the excessive use of coffee and tea, which both offer palliatives for several symptoms of psora, could, psora spread such innumerable, such obstinate chronic sufferings among mankind; for psora alone could not have produced this effect.)
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It was thus that PSORA became the most universal mother of chronic diseases.
The psora, which is now so easily and so rashly robbed of its ameliorating cutaneous symptom, the eruption of itch, which acts vicariously for the internal disease, has been producing within the last three hundred years more and more secondary symptoms, and indeed so many that at least seven-eighths of all the chronic maladies spring from it as their only source, while the remaining eighth springs from syphilis and sycosis or from a complication of two of these three miasmatic chronic diseases, or (which is rare) from a complication of all three of them. Even syphilis, which on account of its easy curability yields to the smallest dose of the best preparation of mercury, and sycosis, which on account of the slight difficulty in its cure through a few doses of thuja and nitric acid in alternation, only pass into a tedious malady difficult to cure when they are complicated with psora. Thus PSORA is among all diseases the one which is most misapprehended, and, therefore, has been medically treated in the worst and most injurious manner.
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It is incredible to what an extent modern physicians of the common school have sinned against the welfare of humanity; since, with scarcely an exception, teachers of medicine and the more prominent modern physicians and medical writers have laid down the rule and taught it as an infallible theorem that: Every eruption of itch is merely a local ailment of the skin, in which ailment the remaining organism takes no part at all, so that it may and must be driven away from the skin at any time and without any scruple, through local applications of sulphur ointment or of the yet more active ointment of Jasser, through sulphur fumigations, by solutions of lead and zinc, but most quickly by the precipitates of mercury. If the eruption is once removed from the skin everything is well and the person is restored and the whole disease removed. Of course, if the eruption is neglected and allowed to spread upon the skin, then it may eventually turn out that the malignant matter may find opportunity to insinuate itself through the absorbent vessels into the mass of humors, and thus to corrupt the blood, the humors and the health. Then, indeed, man may finally be afflicted with ailments from these malignant humors, though these might soon again be removed from the body by purgatives and abluents; but through prompt removal of the eruption from the skin all sequelae are prevented, and the internal body remains entirely healthy.
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These horrible untruths have not only been, and are still being taught, but they are also carried out in practice. The consequence is that at the present day the patients in all the most celebrated hospitals, even in those countries and cities that seem most enlightened, as well as the private itch-patients of the lower and higher classes, the patients in all the penitentiaries and orphan asylums, in other civil and military hospitals, wherever such eruptions are found – in short, the innumerable multitude of patients, – without exception, are treated, not only by physicians unknown to fame, but by all, even those most celebrated, with the above mentioned external remedies,* using perhaps at the same time large doses of flowers of sulphur, and strong purgatives (to cleanse the body, as they say). These physicians think that the more quickly these eruptions are driven from the skin the better. Then they dismiss the patients from their treatment as cured, with brazen assurance and the declaration that everything is now all right, without regarding or being willing to notice the ailments which sooner or later are sure to follow; i. e., the Psora which shows itself from within in a thousand different diseases.** If the deceived wretches then sooner or later return with the malady following unavoidably on such a treatment; e. g., with swellings, obstinate pains in one part or another, with hypochondriac or hysterical troubles, gout, consumption, tubercular phthisis, continual or spasmodic asthma, blindness, deafness, paralysis, caries of the bones, ulcers (cancer), spasms, haemorrhages, diseases of the mind and soul, etc., the physicians imagine that they have before them something entirely new and treat it again and again according to the old routine of their therapeutics in a useless and hurtful manner, directing their medicines against phantom diseases; i. e., against causes invented by them for the ailments as they appear, until the patient, after many years’ suffering continually aggravated, is at last freed from their hands by death, the end of all earthly maladies.
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(*Then, as these gentlemen dream in their perverted minds, in which they have disposed of the nature of this most important disease in their arbitrary way and without consulting nature, then these frivolous gentlemen assure us, the matter of the itch has not yet had time to penetrate inwardly and to be received by the absorbent vessels to the detriment of the whole mass of humors. But how then, 0 conscientious men! if even the first little pustule of itch with its unbearable voluptuous itching, forcing a man irresistibly to scratch, and with the following burning pain, is in every case and every time the proof of a universal itch-disease which has been previously developed in the interior of the whole organism, as we shall see below? How then, if in accordance with this fact any external repression of the, itch-eruption can not only do nothing toward alleviating the internal general disease, but rather as thousands of facts go to prove, compel it to develop and break forth quickly into innumerable, different, acute sufferings, or gradually into chronic sufferings, which make mankind so helpless and miserable? Can you then heal these? Experience says no; you cannot do it.)
(In some vigorous itch patients the vital force, following the law of nature on which it rests (her instinct showing more wisdom than the intelligence of her destroyers), after some weeks, drives back to the skin the eruption seemingly destroyed by itch ointments and purgatives; the patient returns to the hospital and the mischievous destruction of the eruption by means of ointments and lotions of solutions of lead and zinc, is renewed. I have seen in military hospitals this eruption thus destroyed in an irrational a cruel manner three times in succession within a few months, while the quack who applied the ointment pretended that the patient must have been infected anew with itch three times in this short period, which was really impossible.)
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(** I wrote this six years ago, but even at this day the physicians of the old school continue to act and teach with the same criminal negligence. In this most important medical affair they have up to this day not become the least bit wiser or more humane.)
Hahnemann's three major publications chart the development of homeopathy. In the Organon of Medicine, we see the fundamentals laid out. Materia Medica Pura records the exact symptoms of the remedy provings. In his book, The Chronic Diseases, Their Peculiar Nature and Their Homoeopathic Cure, he showed us how natural diseases become chronic in nature when suppressed by improper treatment.