The Virus of Measles.
DRUG PICTURES : 84.
WHAT we are trying to say here is merely tentative. But one has a feeling that the least one can do is to throw out suggestions, trusting that they may, if fertile, germinate in even unforseen quarters and bear fruit to the common good. This has happened every now, when one has joyfully discovered that it is not only “curses and chickens that come home to roost”. But-the seed must be good, and the soil on which it falls, propitious, or-“nothing doing !”.
In the past one has foolishly despised MEASLES; scarcely troubling to record its occurrence in the patients past History : for has not nearly everyone had measles ? but now, at long last, Morbillinum, with like remedies of “childish diseases”, begins to loom up very big through the mists, in the treatment of Chronic Diseases. So much so, indeed, that one sets ones teeth and determines that, please God, one will not have any more Old Chronics. Sounds fantastic ?-extravagant ? We shall see !.
Homoeopathy has been taunted before now with its very moderate or non-success in the treatment of certain baffling disease : and the fact that they are equally baffling everywhere else is no excuse. And now, it is just here that one is glimpsing a faint dawning of day, even in regard to the most terrible and baffling of them all. Hence this pointing finger, trembling with hope.
Let us emphasize once more the fact, the Hahnemann would have none of Old Chronics. When first he realized the stop-spot, in some cases, of the simple remedies of the present complex symptom-picture, he had to know WHY. And when he at length discovered (as he claimed and as would appear) the NATURE of Chronic Disease and its only possible treatment, he was so far ahead of his time as to provoke bitter animosity and scorn among outsiders, and neglect, because of the impossibility, in those days, of proving his contentions, among his own followers. Hence his greatest work (unfinished, as we are beginning to sense it) has been tacitly set aside and neglected.
To start with, let us try, once again, to enunciate and elucidate his later, all-important teachings: carrying them forward (as he must have done had he lived on) on his own lines.
And we will venture to reduce his dicta into terms of to-day. Anyone who desires to verify and explore farther is referred to No. 12 of our Correspondence Course, published by the B.H.A.; or, better still, to Hahnemanns own Chronic Diseases, Vol. 1.
“All chronic diseases originate and are based upon fixed chronic infections, which enable their parasitical ramifications to spread through the human organism, and to grow without end”.
“Certain diseases, such as small-pox, measles, true scarlet fever, the venereal diseases,the itch of workers in wool, canine rabies, whooping cough, etc., are caused by a peculiar contagium of tolerably fixed character. These are so fixed in their course as to be always recognized. They can be named, and we can endeavour to lay down some fixed method of treatment suitable, as a rule, for each of them”.
In all these diseases, he tells us, “infection is instantaneous”.
And in all these, after infection, there is an incubation period of varying duration, be fore the disease comes to the surface with fever, and eruption or cutaneous manifestation capable of communicating the disease.
He asks, “Is there any parasitic disease in the world which, when it has infected from without, does not first make the organism sick, before its external signs manifest themselves ?-we can only answer, No : there is none”.
“We find that all infectious diseases which form local affections on the skin, are internal diseases, the last result of which is the local cutaneous affection”.
Some of the above mentioned acute infections are, for him, chronic diseases-syphilis, gonorrhoea, and psora (under which term he masses al non-venereal chronic diseases-epilepsy, asthma, melancholia and insanity, marasmus, diabetes, consumption, cancer, and a long list of inveterate conditions of viscera and special organs of sense. One observes that chronic diseases, for him, persist in varying forms and intensity so long as life lasts, unless cured by remedies homoeopathic to the original disease.
Whereas the others, seemingly acute merely, after running their curse of about two or three weeks, end in a crisis by means of which the fever, together with the eruption, are annihilated in the system, and the patient either dies of these diseases, or else recovers. “They have the peculiar nature of becoming extinct in the body”.
