Nature of Chronic Diseases-4



Now, if the entire disease thus arising is again extinguished through the internally given specific remedy, then the chancre also is healed and the man recovers.

But if the chancre is destroyed through local applications* before the internal disease is healed, – and this is still a daily practise with physicians of the old school, – the miasmatic chronic venereal remains in the organism as syphilis, and it is aggravated, if not then cured internally, from year to year until the end of man’s life, the most robust constitution being unable to annihilate it within itself.

Only through the cure of the venereal disease, which pervades the whole internal of the body (as I have taught and practiced for many years), the chancre, its local symptom, will also simultaneously be cured in the most effective manner; and this is best without the use of any external application for its removal – while the merely local destruction of the chancre, without any previous general cure and deliverance of man from the internal disease, is followed by the most certain outbreak of syphilis with its sufferings.

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(*The venereal disease not only breaks out through the removal of the chancre by the cautery, – in which case some wretched casuists have considered syphilis as resulting from the driving back of the poison out of the chancre into the interior of the body, which up to this time is supposed by them to have been healthy, – no, even after the quick removal of the chancre without any external stimulants, the venereal disease breaks out, which gives additional conformation, if this were needed, of the indubitable pre-existence of syphilis in the system. Petit cut off a part of the labia minora, in which for some days a venereal chancre had appeared; the wound healed, indeed, but the venereal disease broke out notwithstanding. M. s. Fabre, Lettres, supplement à son traité des maladies vénériennes, Paris, 1786. Of course! because the venereal disease was present in the whole interior of the body even before the outbreak of the chancre.

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Psora (itch disease), like syphilis, is a miasmatic chronic disease, and its original development is similar.

The itch disease is, however, also the most contagious of all chronic miasmata, far more infectious than the other two chronic miasmata, the venereal chancre disease and the figwart disease. To effect the infection with the latter there is required a certain amount of friction in the most tender parts of the body, which are the most rich in nerves and covered with the thinnest cuticle, as in the genital organs, unless the miasma should touch a wounded spot. But the miasma of the itch needs only to touch the general skin, especially with tender children. The disposition of being affected with the miasma of itch is found with almost everyone and under almost all circumstances, which is not the case with the other two miasmata.

No other chronic miasma infects more generally, more surely, more easily and more absolutely than the miasma of itch; as already stated, it is the most contagious of all. It is communicated so easily, that even the physician, hurrying from one patient to another, in feeling the pulse has unconsciously * inoculated other patients with it; wash which is washed with wash infected with the itch; new gloves which had been tried on by an itch patient, a strange lodging place, a strange towel used for drying oneself have communicated this tinder of contagion; yea, often a babe, when being born, is infected while passing through the organs of the mother, who may be infected (as is not infrequently the case) with this disease; or the babe receives this unlucky infection through the hand of the midwife, which has been infected by another parturient woman (or previously); or, again, a suckling may be infected by its nurse, or, while on her arm, by her caresses or the caresses of a strange person with unclean hands; not to mention the thousands of other possible ways in which things polluted with this invisible miasma may touch a man in the course of his life, and which often can in no way be anticipated or guarded against, so that men who have never been infected by the psora are the exception. We need not to hunt for the causes of infection in crowded hospitals, factories, prisons, or in orphan houses, or in the filthy huts of paupers; even in active life, in retirement, and in the rich classes, the itch creeps in. The hermit on Montserrat escapes it as rarely in his rocky cell, as the little prince in his swaddling clothes of cambric.

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(* CAR. MUSITANI, Opera de tumoribus, Cuprum 20.)

(As WILLIS has noticed in TURNER, des maladies de la peau, traduit de l’anglais, à Paris, 1783, Tom. II., Cap. 3, P.77.)

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As soon as the miasma of itch, e. g., touches the hand, in the moment when it has taken effect, it no more remains local. Henceforth all washing and cleansing of the spot avail nothing. Nothing is seen on the skin during the first days; it remains unchanged, and, according to appearance, healthy. There is no eruption or itching to be noticed on the body during these days, not even on the spot infected. The nerve which was first affected by the miasma has already communicated it in an invisible dynamic manner to the nerves of the rest of the body, and the living organism has at once, all unperceived, been so penetrated by this specific excitation, that it has been compelled to appropriate this miasma gradually to itself until the change of the whole being to a man thoroughly psoric, and thus the internal development of the psora, has reached completion.

Only when the whole organism feels itself transformed by this peculiar chronic-miasmatic disease, the diseased vital force endeavors to alleviate and to soothe the internal malady through the establishment of a suitable local symptom on the skin, the itch-vesicles. So long as this eruption continues in its normal form, the internal psora, with its secondary ailments, cannot break forth, but must remain covered, slumbering, latent and bound.

Usually it takes six, seven or ten, perhaps even fourteen days from the moment of infection before the transformation of the entire internal organism into psora has been effected. Then only, there follows after a slight or more severe chill in the evening and a general heat, followed by, perspiration in the following night, (a little fever which by many persons is ascribed to a cold and therefore disregarded), the outbreak of the vesicles of itch, at first fine as if from miliary fever, but afterwards enlarging on the skin* – first in the region of the spot first infected, and, indeed, accompanied with a voluptuously tickling itching – which may be called unbearably agreeable (Grimmen), which compels the patient so irresistibly to rub and to scratch the vesicles of itch, that, if a person restrains himself forcibly from rubbing or scratching, a shudder passes over the skin of the whole body. This rubbing and scratching indeed satisfies somewhat for a few moments, but there then follows immediately a long- continued burning of the part affected. Late in the evening and before midnight this itching is most frequent and most unbearable.

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(* Far from being an independent, merely local, cutaneous disease the vesicles or pustules of itch are the reliable proof that the completion of the internal psora has already been effected, and the eruption is merely an integrating factor of the same; for this peculiar eruption and this peculiar itching make a part of the essence of the whole disease in its natural, least dangerous state.)

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The vesicles of itch contain in the first hours of their formation a lymph clear as water, but this quickly changes into pus, which fills the tip of the vesicle.

The itching not only compels the patient to rub, but on account of its violence, as before mentioned, to rub and scratch open the vesicles; and the humor pressed out furnishes abundant material for infecting the surroundings of the patient and also other persons not yet infected. The extremities defiled even to an imperceptible degree with this lymph, so also the wash, the clothes and the utensils of all kinds, when touched, propagate the disease.

Only this skin symptom of the psora which has permeated the whole organism (and which as more manifestly falling under the cognizance of the senses has the name of itch), only this eruption, as well as the sores which later arise from it and are attended on their borders with the itching peculiar to psora, as also the herpes which has this peculiar itching and which becomes humid when rubbed (the tetter), as also the tinea capitis – these alone can propagate this to other persons, because they alone contain the communicable miasma of the psora. But the remaining secondary symptoms of the psora, which in time manifest themselves after the disappearance or the artificial expulsion of the eruption, i.e., the general psoric ailments, cannot at all communicate this disease to others. They are, so far as we know, just as little able to transfer the psora to others, as the secondary symptoms of the venereal disease are able to infect other men (as first observed and taught by J. HUNTER) with syphilis.

Samuel Hahnemann
Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843) was the founder of Homoeopathy. He is called the Father of Experimental Pharmacology because he was the first physician to prepare medicines in a specialized way; proving them on healthy human beings, to determine how the medicines acted to cure diseases.

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.