Gouty concretions, so frequently found in gouty adults, are also found of birth in the mouth, nose, ears, rectum, and urethra, and in the outlets of the body, in these babies of sycotic parentage. I call to mind, a case in a new born male child where it was unable to urinate until the gouty concretions were removed from the urethra. In fact a probe had to be used in order to remove the concretion, which consisted of the usual crystalline formation found in common gout.
As has already been mentioned, the disease is not ushered in by such painful spasmodic symptoms, as we find in the simple catarrhal form of gonorrhoea, but the main difference is that it shows no tendency to a spontaneous cure. The acute stage gradually subsides in from six to eight weeks, and the disease settles down to a scanty catarrhal discharge of a characteristic yellowish-green color, generally purulent, and more or less offensive. If not interfered with by local treatment, the patient suffers from no special pain, simply a slight soreness along the urethra, and the mental disturbances before mentioned, produced by the fact that he has a specific venereal disease that must be stopped at once, and at all hazard.
Quite often the discharge dwindles down to a single drop of a creamy consistency and greenish-yellow color. Now it is this apparently insignificant drop, which to the patient seems of so little consequence, that he thinks it ought to be disposed of at once. Little does he know of the specific virus contained in that small drop of purulent matter. Each corpuscle contains a virus as specific, as malignant and as far reaching in its profundity of action, as the little seropurulent drop from the true chancre. Behind it is that dynamis of death. Like the bloody spot on Lady Macbeth’s hands, all the multitudinous seas could not wash it out, when conveyed to an unaffected organism. It is the “damned drop.” It damns the body at its birth, and it condemns the organism forever after, until it is fully eradicated from it by and through that God given principle, *”the law of Similia.” No other system of medicine yet known can remove the effects of that specific poison, from the organism, but the Homoeopathic, with its well selected remedy. An attempt to cure by any other method has been fully shown to be impossible, we think, to the satisfaction of all Schools of Medicine.
The male is capable of infecting the female at any remote period in the history of the case, even years after the disappearance of the discharge, and their offspring will show symptoms of infection at birth, and all through their natural life, unless anti-sycotic constitutional treatment is given the mother before and during gestation. The latent infection in the wife now becomes an active disease manifest by the symptoms of pain; inflammatory changes, and more or less suffering in the multiplied forms in which Sycosis may now present itself. The history of that case is the history of suffering and ill health, well-known to every physician. We speak of the woman as having the part of the endometrium affected, such as the cervix or any special part, specifying the local condition, as if the disease could advance by extension.
Such may be true of an ordinary inflammatory process, but in Sycosis every drop of blood, every fiber in that organism is affected. We might say the same thing of diphtheria, or some tubercular inflammatory process. The process may be localized, but the whole organism even the very life itself, is diseased. No part or portion is favoured. The whole Biotic life is a oneness, although its pathology may have its habitat, as the pathology of every disease has. Usually diphtheria selects the mucous membrane of the pharynx or the throat. What you see there is not the disease but the eliminative process. It comes out at that point; *it is but the waste gate, through which the disease of the polluted city escapes. The potential is the disease, and the potential (the life force) is that which is disturbed. It is similar process which creates a tumor, a gonorrhoea leucorrhoeal, or catarrhal discharge. If death-dealing element is put into the organism, the organism must deal with it as such; or if a life- giving principle, such as food, is put into the organism, the result is that of more life, more power, more energy.
Noeggerath and many other close observers have recognized this fact. One of the latest authors in his work on venereal and sexual disease, says:
“The more carefully we study the pelvic diseases of women, the narrower their etiological field becomes, and the more frequently are they found to depend on gonorrhoea. Thus, when freed from pathologic and anatomic errors, pelvic inflammations are dependent, in the majority of cases, if not all, upon tubal disease, the tubal disease is unquestionably due to gonorrhoea and its congeners or derivatives.”
How true this is found to be by those who have given the subject study and attention. These inflammation do not act like other inflammations, which are due to Psora or Syphilis. There is always a definite feature about them, a persistence and positiveness conspicuously noticeable. The pains and the aches of Sycosis have seemingly a mysterious origin. These patients often suffer from month to month, or from year to year, with very little relief in spite of the efforts of their physician. In fact, he does not seem to understand the case, nor can the patients give satisfactory reasons for their disease. Their parents were not found to be rheumatic or gouty, there is no such family history or record. It all seems a mystery, an enigma, and not until the physician goes fully into the history of the case, he trace the effect to the cause. The patient usually gives you a good family history.
She has never had any serious illness in her life, except the usual children’s diseases. In fact, she was well until after marriage. In a year or two a child was born, and since that she has been suffering with pelvic pain, neuralgia, rheumatism, chronic back-ache, chronic bladder troubles, uterine or ovarian troubles, headaches, menstrual irregularities, and such symptoms. The truth is that she has never seen a well day since the birth of her child. The whole case is a history of pain and suffering, or general bad health, all due to that primary infection (and that, too, from a husband who was considered free from that disease) who for years perhaps showed no signs or symptoms of its presence in his organism. This is where we all err in looking for symptoms of the primary or secondary stage, for it has now passed into the tertiary stage.
These symptoms are foreign to the majority of medical men, who have not given subject of Sycosis a careful study. The phenomena are now unfamiliar to them, especially when it has suppressed by local measures, and the symptoms by no means represent gonorrhoeal infection as seen in its first and second stages. This is the parting of the ways to many physicians who lose sight of the original disease. The new phenomena, growing out of the suppression, is an enigma to them as it has but little in common with the original malady. The attending physician will tell the patient, as soon as the discharge is completely suppressed, that he is fit subject to marry, as he is cured. But this is to true, and he should delay marriage, indeed he should never marry until the discharge has been reproduced or re-established, and cured in a proper and scientific manner. Only then should he marry a healthy wife, for only then will she continue so and bring forth healthy children.
It is only the busy general practitioner who realizes the frequency with which women break down in a year or eighteen months after marriage with uterine or pelvic troubles. A close observer need not always go to the annoyance of getting the husband’s early history, for the symptoms of disease and suffering found in the wife are sufficient.
I can best illustrate this by a typical case. Mrs. F., age 24, German by birth, well developed physically, bright intellectually, and of sunny disposition, married three years, no children, was pregnant eighteen months after marriage, but aborted the third month. Her treatment was curettement, after which she was confined to her bed for three months. She has been unable to look after her household duties ever since. On making an examination of the pelvic contents, the uterus is found to be very much hypertrophied, and extremely sensitive to be very much hypertrophied, and extremely sensitive to touch. She complains of shooting pains in the ovaries and through the uterus, bearing down and continual aching through the pelvic region; she has fainting spells during the menses, and much trouble with her heart, although on examination it seems normal; she suffers with a scanty musty smelling leucorrhoea and pruritis vulvae. I decided at once from the previous and present history of her case, that she was infected with Sycosis, and told her that her husband would also require treatment, in order to make a perfect cure.
J.H. Allen was a student of H.C. Allen. He was the president of the IHA in 1900. Dr. Allen taught at the Hering Medical College in Chicago. Dr. Allen died August 1, 1925
Books by John Henry Allen:
Diseases and Therapeutics of the Skin 1902
The Chronic Miasms: Psora and Pseudo Psora 1908
The Chronic Miasms: Sycosis 1908