But just as incontrovertibly does it follow that every disappearance of the chancre (or the bubo) owing to a mere local destruction, since it was no real cure founded on the extirpation of the internal venereal disease through the internally given appropriate mercury medicine, leaves to us the certainty that the syphilis remains behind; and every one who supposes himself healed by any such merely local, pretended cure, is to be, considered as much venereally diseased as he was before the destruction of the chancre.
The second state in which, as mentioned above, syphilis may have to be treated, is the rare case when an otherwise healthy person, affected with no other chronic disease (and thus without any developed psora), has experienced this injudicious driving away of the chancre through local applications, effected by an ordinary physician in a short time and without attacking the organism overmuch with internal and external remedies. Even in such a case, – as we have not as yet to combat any complication with psora – all outbreaks of the secondary venereal disease may be avoided, and the man may be freed from every trace of the venereal miasma through the before-mentioned simple internal cure effected by a like dose of the above mentioned mercurial medicine – although the certainty of his cure can no more be so manifestly proved as if the chancre had still been in existence during this internal cure, and as if it had become a mild ulcer simply through this internal remedy, and had been thus manifestly cured of itself.
But here also there may be found a sign of the non-completed as well as of the completed cure of the internal syphilis which has not yet broken out into the venereal disease; but this sign will only manifest itself to an exact observer. In case the chancre has been driven out through local application, even if the remedies used had not been very acrid, there will always remain in the place where it stood, as a sign of the unextinguished internal syphilis, a discolored, reddish, red or blue scar; while on the contrary, when the cure of the whole venereal disease has been effected by the internal remedy, and if thus the chancre heals of itself without the action of an external application, and when it disappears because it is no more needed as a substitute and alleviator of an internal venereal disorder which now has ceased, then the spot of the former chancre can no more be recognized, for the skin covering that place will be just as smooth and of the same color as the rest, so that no trace can be discerned of the spot where the chancre had stood.
Now if the Homoeopathic physician has carefully taken cognizance of the presence of the discolored scar remaining after the quick, merely local expulsion of the venereal local symptom, as a sign of the unextinguished internal syphilis, and if the person to be healed is otherwise in good health, and consequently his venereal disorder is not yet complicated with psora, he will also, even now, be able to free him from every remainder of the venereal. miasma by one dose of the best preparation of mercury as above described, and he will be convinced that the cure is completed, from the fact that during the time of the activity of the specific remedy the scar will again assume the healthy color of the other skin and all discoloration of that spot will disappear.
Even when, after the expulsion of the chancre by local applications, the bubo has already broken out but the patient is not yet seized with any other chronic disease, and consequently the internal syphilis is not yet complicated with a developed psora (which is nevertheless a rare case), the same treatment will also here, while the bubo is only developing, produce a cure; and its completion will be recognized by the same signs.
In both cases, if they have been rightly treated, the cure is a complete one, and no outbreak of the venereal disease need any more be apprehended.
The most difficult of all these cases, the third, is still to be treated: when the man at the time of the syphilitic infection was already laboring under a chronic disease, so that his syphilis was complicated with psora, even while the chancre yet existed, or when, even while there was no chronic disease in the body at the outbreak of the chancre, and the indwelling psora could only be recognized by its tokens, an allopathic physician has, nevertheless, destroyed the local symptom, not only slowly and with very painful external applications, but has also subjected him for a long time to an internal treatment, weakening and strongly affecting him so that the general health has been undermined and the psora which had as yet been latent within him has been brought to its development and has broken out into chronic ailments, and these irrepressibly combine with the internal syphilis, the local symptom, of which had been at the same time destroyed in such an irrational manner. Psora can only be complicated with the venereal disease when it has been developed and when it has ultimated itself in a manifest chronic disease; but not when it is as yet latent and slumbering. By the latter the cure of syphilis is not obstructed, but when complicated with developed psora, it is impossible to cure the venereal disease alone.
Only too often, I should say, do we find the syphilis which has remained uncured after the merely local destruction of the chancre, complicated with awakened psora, not always because the psora was already developed before the venereal infection – for this is rarely the case with young people – but because it is violently awakened and brought to its outbreak by the usual treatment of the venereal disease. By means of friction with mercury, large doses of calomel, corrosive sublimate and similar acrid mercurial remedies, (which originate fever, dysenteric abdominal ailments, chronic exhausting salivation, pains in the limbs, sleeplessness, etc., without possessing sufficient anti-syphilitic power to cure the chancre-miasma mildly, quickly and perfectly,) they assault the venereal patient often for many months, with the intermediate use of many weakening warm baths and purgatives; so that the internal slumbering psora (whose nature causes it to break forth in all great convulsions and in the weakening of the general health) is awakened before the syphilis can be cured by such all injudicious treatment, and thus becomes associated and complicated therewith.
There arises in this manner and through this combination what is called a masked, spurious syphilis, and in England pseudo syphilis, a monster of a double disease,* which no physician hitherto has been able to cure, because no physician hitherto has been acquainted with the psora in its great extent and its nature, neither in its latent nor its developed state; and no one suspected this dreadful combination with syphilis, much less perceived it. No one, therefore, could heal the developed psora, the only cause of the uncurableness of this bastard syphilis, – nor could they in consequence free the syphilis from this horrible combination so as to make it curable, just as the psora remains incurable if the syphilis has not been extirpated.
In order to reach this so-called masked venereal disease successfully, the following rule must serve the homoeopathic physician:
After removing all hurtful influences that affect the patients from without and after settling on a light and yet nourishing and strengthening diet for the patient, let him first give the anti-psoric medicine which is homoeopathically the best fitting to the then prevailing state of disease, as will be shown below; and when this medicine has completed its action, also probably a second, most suitable to the still prominent psora symptoms, and these should be allowed to act against the psora, until they have effected all that can be at present done against it – then should be given the dose above described of the best mercurial preparation to act against the venereal disease for three, five to seven weeks; i.e., so long as it will continue to produce an improvement in the venereal symptoms.
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(* Yea, after such a treatment it is even more than a double disease; the sharp mercurial medicines, in large and frequent doses, have also added their medicinal disease, which when we consider in addition the than a double disease; the sharp mercurial medicines, in large and frequent doses, have also added their medicinal disease, which when we consider in addition the debility caused by such treatment must place the patient in a most sad state. In such a case hepar sulphuris is probably to be preferred to the pure sulphur.)
In inveterate and difficult cases, however, this first course will hardly accomplish all that is desired. There usually still remain some ailments and disorders, which cannot be definitely classed as purely psoric, and others which cannot be classed as definitely syphilitic, and these require yet some additional aid. A repetition of a similar process of cure is here required; i.e., first another application of one or more of the anti-psoric remedies that have not yet been used, and which are homoeopathically the most appropriate, until whatever seems still unsyphilitically morbid – i.e., psoric – may disappear, when the before mentioned dose of the mercurial remedy, but in another potency, should be given again and allowed to complete its action, until the manifest venereal symptoms (the pricking, painful ulcer of the tonsils, the round copper-colored spots that shimmer through the epidermis, the eruptive pimples which do not itch and are found chiefly in the face upon a bluish-red foundation, the painless cutaneous ulcers on the scalp and the penis, which are smooth, pale, clean, merely covered with mucus, and almost level with the healthy skin, etc., and the boring, nightly pains in the exostoses) have entirely passed away. But since these secondary venereal symptoms are so changeable that their temporary disappearance gives no certainty of their complete extinction, we must also wait for that more conclusive sign of the complete extirpation of the venereal miasm afforded by the return of the healthy color and the entire disappearance of the discoloration found in the scar which remains after the extirpation of the chancre by local, corrosive applications.
I have, in my practice, found only two cases* of the threefold complication of the three chronic miasms, the figwart disease with the venereal chancre miasm and at the same time a developed psora, and these cases were cured according to the same method; i.e., the Psora was treated first, then the one of the other two chronic miasmata, the symptoms of which were at the time the most prominent, and then the last one. The remaining psoric symptoms had then still to be combated with suitable remedies, and then lastly what there yet remained of sycosis or syphilis, by means of the remedies given above. I would also remark that the complete cure of sycosis which has taken possession of the whole organism before the outbreak of its local symptoms is demonstrated, like that of the chancre miasma, by the complete disappearance of the discoloration on the spot of the skin, which discoloration remains after every merely local destruction of the figwart as a sign of the unextirpated sycosis.
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.