This mode of curing itch I believe to be quite safe, and as the general eruption is not suddenly checked, the equilibrium of the functions is gradually restored without that sudden shock to the system which often attended the former allopathic treatment, of rubbing the whole body over with sulphur-ointment.
With respect to the other two chronic miasms or sources of chronic diseases, syphilis and sycosis, I shall only say a few words.
The first, syphilis, is recognized by all as a fertile source of chronic diseases, the symptoms and causes of which are sufficiently known to you all to render it superfluous for me to enter into any detailed account of them.
As regards the third of Hahnemann’s chronic miasms, sycosis or the condylomatous venereal disease, the notion of its independent nature has been considerably contested, not alone by allopaths, but also by some of our own school. The disease always arises in consequence of impure coitus, and appears in the form of dry or warty-looking or soft and spongy excrescences, in the form of a cock’s-comb or cauliflower, easily bleeding and secreting a foetid fluid, and sometimes accompanied by a sort of blenorrhoea from the urethra. Their seat is the glans or foreskin in the male, the vulva and its appendages in the female. Their removal by the ligature or cautery, actual or potential, is, according to Hahnemann, followed by similar growths on other parts of the body or other ailments, the only one he mentions being shortening of the flexor tendons, particularly of the fingers.
It is, Hahnemann alleges, the rarest of the three chronic miasms, and, as I before observed, it is very doubtful if it be a peculiar disease, and not rather a form of syphilis. The secondary effects Hahnemann describes as arising from it must certainly be rare, for I can state from my own experience that I know several persons who have had such venereal condylomata burnt off many years ago, and who have never had the slightest trace of those after-effects Hahnemann alludes to; though at the same time I am bound to admit that I think I have observed a connection of certain pseudo-rheumatic affections and inveterate gleets with the fig-wart disease. I have frequently heard homoeopathic practitioners attributing to sycotic infection, the occurrence of ordinary warts and encysted and other tumours, but Hahnemann distinctly says that these are of psoric and not sycotic origin. Hahnemann’s antisycotic medicines are thuja and nitric acid; but here we have another proof of the disadvantage of arranging homoeopathic remedies into distinct categories, for both thuja and nitric acid cure many disease besides sycotic ones, and we would grievously err were we to infer the sycotic nature of a disease from its curability by either of these two medicines, as Hahnemann did with regard to psoric diseases and antipsorics.
Robert Ellis Dudgeon practiced at the London Homeopathic Hospital and specialised in Optics.
Robert Ellis Dudgeon wrote Pathogenetic Cyclopaedia 1839, Cure of Pannus by Innoculation, London and Edinburgh Journal of Medical Science 1844, Hahnemann’s Organon, 1849, Lectures on the Theory & Practice of Homeopathy, 1853, Homeopathic Treatment and Prevention of Asiatic Cholera 1847, Hahnemann’s Therapeutic Hints 1847, On Subaqueous Vision, Philosophical Magazine, 1871, The Influence of Homeopathy on General Medical Practice Since the Death of Hahnemann 1874, Repertory of the Homeopathic Materia Medica, 2 vols 1878-81, The Human Eye Its Optical Construction, 1878, Hahnemann’s Materia Medica Pura, 1880, The Sphygmograph, 1882, Materia Medica: Physiological and Applied 1884, Hahnemann the Founder of Scientific Therapeutics 1882, Hahnemann’s Organon 1893 5th Edition, Prolongation of Life 1900, Hahnemann’s Lesser Writing.