Internally the ancient physicians gave no sulphur in itch, because they, like the moderns, did not see that this miasmatic disease was, at the same time and especially, an internal disease.
Modern physicians have never given sulphur only, and internally, to cure the itch, because they have never recognized the itch-disease as being also an internal and, indeed, chiefly internal disease. They only gave it in connection with the external means of driving away the itch, and, indeed, in doses which would act as purgatives, – ten, twenty and thirty grains at a dose, frequently repeated, – so that it never became manifest how useful or how injurious this internal application of such large doses, in connection with the external application, had been; at least the whole itch-disease (psora) could never be thoroughly healed thereby. The external driving out of the eruption was simply advanced by it as by any other purgative, and with the same injurious effects as if no sulphur at all had been used internally. For even if sulphur is used only internally, but in the above described large doses, without any external destructive means, it can never thoroughly heal a psora; partly because in order to cure as an antipsoric and homoeopathic medicine, it must be given only in the smallest doses of a potentized preparation, while in larger and more frequent doses the crude sulphur* in some cases increases the malady or at least adds a new malady; partly because the vital force expels it as a violently aggressive remedy through purging stools or by means of vomiting, without having put its healing power to any use.
(*Here it is proper to subjoin the words of an impartial and even practical connoisseur of Homoeopathy, the deep-thinking, many-sided scholar and indefatigable investigator of truth, Count Buquoy, in his Anregungen fur ph. w. Forschungen (Leipzig, 1825, P.386 sgg.). After assuming that a drug, which in a normal state of health causes the symptoms a, b, g, – in analogy with other physiological phenomena, produces the symptoms x, y, z, which appear in an abnormal state of health – can act upon this abnormal state in such a way that the disease-symptoms x, y, z, are transformed into the drug symptoms a, b, g, which latter have the peculiar characteristic of temporariness or transitoriness; he then continues: This transitory character belongs to the group of symptoms of the medicine a, b, g, which is substituted for the group of symptoms belonging to the disease, merely because the medicine is used in an extraordinarily small dose. Should the homoeopathic physician give the patient too large a dose of the homoeopathic remedy indicated, the disease x, y, z may indeed be transformed into the other, i.e., into a, b, g – but the new disease now just sits as firmly fixed as the former x, y, z; so that the organism can just as little free itself from the disease a, b, g, as it was able to throw off the original disease x, y, z. If a very large dose is given, then a new often very dangerous disease is produced, or the organism does its utmost to free itself very quickly from the poison (through diarrhoea, vomiting, etc.).)
Now if, as experience teaches, not even the fresh itch-disease which is the most easy to cure of all, i.e., the internal, recently formed psora together with the external, recent eruption, can be thoroughly healed by external applications accompanied with large quantities of flowers of sulphur, it may easily be seen, that the psora, after it has been deprived of its eruption and has become merely internal and inveterate, having developed secondary ailments and thus having change into chronic diseases of various kinds, for the same reason can be just as little cured by a quantity of sulphur flowers, or by a number of baths in sulphurous mineral waters, or on the other hand by simultaneously drinking the same or a similar water; in a word, it cannot be cured by a superabundance and frequent repetition of this remedy, although it is of itself antipsoric.* It is true that many such chronic patients by the first treatment at the baths seem to get rid for some time of the symptoms of their disease (therefore we see an incredible throng of many thousands, suffering from innumerable different chronic ailments at Teplitz, Baden, Aix-la-Chapelle, Neundorf, Warmbrunn, etc.); yet they are not on that account restored to health, but instead of the original chronic (psoric) disease, they have for a time come under the dominion of a sulphur-disease (another, perhaps more bearable, malady). This in time passes away, when the psora again lifts its head, either with the same morbid symptoms as before, or with others similar but gradually more troublesome than the first, or with symptoms developing in nobler parts of the organism. Ignorant persons will rejoice in the latter case, that their former disease at least has passed away, and they hope that the new disease also may be removed by another journey to the same baths. They do not know, that their changed morbid state is merely a transformation of the same psora; but they always find out by experience, that their second tour to the baths causes even less alleviation, or, indeed, if the sulphur-baths are used in still greater number, that the second trial causes aggravation.
Thus we see that either the excessive use of sulphur in all its forms, or the frequent repetition of its use by allopathic physicians in the treatment of a multitude of chronic diseases (the secondary psoric ailments) have taken away from it all value and use; and we may well assert that, to this day, hardly anything but injury has been done by allopathic physicians through the use of sulphur.
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(*Used in small doses, sulphur as one of the antipsoric remedies will not fail to make a brief beginning of a cure of the chronic (non-venereal and therefore psoric) diseases. I know a physician in Saxony who gained a great reputation by merely adding to his prescriptions in nearly all chronic diseases flowers of sulphur, and this without knowing a reason for it. This in the beginning of such treatments is wont to produce a strikingly beneficent effect, but of course only in the beginning, and therefore after that his help was at an end.)
But even supposing that anyone should desire to make the only correct use of sulphur in this kind of disease, it will seldom be possible to do this with the same desired success as where the homoeopathic physician finds a recent case of the itch-disease with its still existing eruption. Even when, owing to its undeniable anti-psoric effects, sulphur may be able of itself to make the beginning of a cure, after the external expulsion of the eruption, either with the still hidden and latent psora or when this has more or less developed and broken out into its varied chronic diseases, it can nevertheless be but rarely made use of for this purpose, because its powers have usually been already exhausted, because it has been given to the patient already before by allopathic physicians for one purpose or another, perhaps has been given already repeatedly; but sulphur, like most of the antipsoric remedies in the treatment of a developed psora that has become chronic, can hardly be used three or four times (even after the intervening use of other antipsoric remedies) without causing the cure to retrograde.
The cure of an old psora that has been deprived of its eruption, whether it may be latent and quiescent, or already broken out into chronic diseases, can never be accomplished with sulphur alone, nor with sulphur-baths either natural or artificial.
Here I may mention the curious circumstance that in general with the exception of the recent itch-disease still attended with its unrepressed cutaneous eruption, and which is so easily cured from within* – every other psoric diathesis, i.e., the psora that is still latent within, as well as the psora that has developed into one of the innumerable chronic diseases springing from it, is very seldom cured by any single anti-psoric remedy, but requires the use of several of these remedies – in the worst cases the use of quite a number of them – one after the other, for its perfect cure.
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(* Recent itch-disease with its still present cutaneous eruption has been cured at times without any external remedy by even one very small dose of a properly potentized preparation of sulphur and thus within two, three or four weeks; once a dose of 1/2 grain of carbo vegetabilis potentized a million fold sufficed for a family of seven persons, and three times a like dose of as highly potentized sepia was sufficient.)
This circumstance need not astonish us when we consider that the psora is a chronic miasma of quite peculiar and especial character which in several thousands of years has passed through several millions of human organisms, and must have assumed such a vast extension of varied symptoms, – the elements of those innumerable, chronic, non-venereal ailments, under which mankind now groans, and could transmute itself into such an indefinite multitude of forms differing from one another as it gradually ultimated itself in the various bodily constitutions of individual men who differed from one another in their domiciles, their climatic peculiarities, their education, habits, occupations,* modes of life and of diet, and was moulded by varying bodily and psychic relations. It is, therefore, not strange, that one single and only medicine is insufficient to heal the entire psora and all its forms, and that it requires several medicines in order to respond, by the artificial morbid effects peculiar to each, to the unnumbered host of psora symptoms, and thus to those of all chronic (non venereal) diseases, and to the entire psora, and to do this in a curative homoeopathic manner.
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.