The itch-vesicles are an abnormal organ produced by the inner organism upon the skin, designed by nature to be the external substitute of the internal disease, to take the latter upon itself, to absorb it, as it were, and so to keep it subdued. slumbering, and latent. That this is the case is evident from this, that so long as the vesicles remain on the skin and continue to itch and discharge, the internal disease cannot make its appearance; and from this also, that whenever it is partially destroyed on the skin, without any previous cure of the internal itch-disease (especially if it be of some what long standing and have attained to any extent) being effected by means of the internal employment of its specific remedy sulfur, this internal disease then bursts forth rapidly, often in a frightful manner; in the form of phthisis, asthma, insanity, dropsy, apoplexy, amaurosis, paralysis and it not infrequently occasions sudden death.”
This we shall presently find is exactly the doctrine taught in the work on Chronic Diseases, with this difference, that in the latter place it is made much more general or universal in its application.
Let us how see from Hahnemann’s own account, contained in the first part of this Chronic Diseases, how it was he came to invent his fully developed doctrine of the peculiar nature of chronic disease. We shall best learn this form the work on that subject I have so often alluded to.
In comparison with allopathy, he observers, Homoeopathy has been exceedingly successful, not only with acute disease, epidemics, and sporadic fevers, but also with he numerous array of chronic maladies in which allopathic treatment was so often worse than useless. Under homoeopathic treatment, the actual morbid state of these chronic maladies was often removed in the very short time, so that the patients in their improved state could again enjoy happy days. Hahnemann denominates the condition of these patient are the homoeopathic treatment expressly improvement or amelioration, and alleges that through they were often very much relieved, they were not cured, for their complaints would allow to a great degrees be brought back by many unfavorable circumstances, such as great errors of diet, a chill, raw, wet, or stormy weather, the autumn session, but particularly the winter and a wintry spring, violent corporeal or mental exertion, an injury, some mental emotion, such as fright, grief, care, or vexation; their return under these circumstances was generally attended with the appearance of new symptoms; and if they were not more serious, they were generally more troublesome and more difficult of removal than before.
If a medicine was found that answered both the old and new symptoms, it would soon produce an amelioration; but if it was only the old symptoms that recurred, the medicine that had at first done good was now no longer so effectual, and if it required to be repeated again, it was still less so. But notwithstanding the observance of the best- regulated diet and the employment of the apparently best-suited homoeopathic remedy, new symptoms constantly made their appearance, which were with difficult and imperfectly removed by other medicines, or perhaps were not at all ameliorated, if the unfavorable influences above alluded to occurred. occasionally, some favorable influence, such as a piece of good fortune, an ameliorated condition of life, an agreeable journey, a good season and dry uniform weather, would cause the malady to come to a stand for some time; but this was never of long duration, the disease would continue to progress, the remedies employed would do little or no good, and the disease increased from year to year.
“This, “he says, m”was and continued to be the more rapid or slower course of such treatment of all non-venereal, considerable chronic disease, even when apparently conducted strictly according to the doctrines of the homoeopathic art as hitherto known. Their commencement was cheering, their progress less favorable, their issue hopeless.
“And yet” he adds, “the doctrine itself is built upon the impregnable pillars of truth, and must every remain so. As proofs of tits excellence and almost infallibility, he cites the splendid successes obtained by it in disease of a fixed character, such as the scarlet fever of Sydenham, the miliary fever the whooping-cough, the croup, the sycosic disease, autumnal dysenteries, pleurisies, typhus, fever, etc., and then he asks, ‘Whence this inferior success, the absolute want of success in the prolonged treatment of non-venereal chronic disease?” His disciples attributed it to the want of a sufficient number of medicines properly proved; but to this Hahnemann could not ascribe it, especially as, in spite of the additions yearly made to the Materia Medica, no progress was made in the cure of chronic disease. He says that from there 1816-17 the solution of this problem occupied him and and night, and at length he succeeded in solving it, and in 1827 he summoned to his side two of his most esteemed disciples, viz., Dr. Stapf and Gross, and communicated to them his discovery, in case his death, for he was then in his seventy-third year, should have occurred before the publication of his book on the subject. This remarkable book duly appeared the following year.
His researches and reflections, as he tells us in this work, led him to the conclusion that the cause of the constant recurrence of chronic disease after the symptoms present had been removed by the homoeopathically selected remedy, and their recurrence with new and grave symptoms, was that the Homoeopathic physician in these disease had not merely to do with the morbid phenomena actually present, but that these phenomena only represented a portion of the deeply-seated fundamental malady, whose great extent was manifested by the new symptoms peculiar to it, he could not hope to discover any medicines which should correspond in their peculiar pathogenetic effects to the whole fundamental malady, and therefore he would be unable cure it in its whole extend, or in its several features. That the sought-for fundamental malady must be of a chronic miasmatic nature, Hahnemann was convinced from the fact that it could not be overcome by the spontaneous efforts of the most robust constitution, nor by the most healthy diet and careful regimen, but that it increase in intensity and extent from year to year, and became always worse and worse until the termination of life, like every chronic miasmatic disease; for example, syphilis, which if not cured by its specific mercury, increased from year to year, and always developed new and graver symptoms.
His further researches showed that the obstacle to the cure seemed to lie in a previous scabious eruption which the patient frequently confessed to having had, and from which he often dated all his sufferings. When the patients did not confess to any such infection, they yet showed in their persons slight traces of it, such as scabious vesicles, herpetic eruptions, etc., that appeared from time to time to time as infallible signs of a former infection of this nature.
These circumstances and innumerable observations of other physicians, together with his own experience, that chronic disease occurred on the suppression artificially, or disappearance from other causes of a scabious eruption from the skin in otherwise healthy individuals, left no doubt on his mind as to the character of the internal enemy with which he had to deal.
By degrees he became acquainted with more efficient remedies for this fundamental malady, the cause of so many sufferings, which he called psora, meaning thereby the internal itch-disease, with or without its exanthema, and he was convinced by the excellent services rendered by these same medicines in similar chronic disease, where the patients could not call to remembrance any such infection, that these diseases also must have owed their origin to some psora communicated to them either when they were infants, or at some unrememberable period of their lives and it often happened that careful inquiries among their parents or friends confirmed the accuracy of this conjecture.
Careful observation, he says, of the curative powers of the antipsoric medicines discovered in the eleven years of his researches, taught him how frequently severe and most severe as well as moderate chronic disease were derived from his source. It likewise taught him that this Proteus-like psora was the source not only of most of those varieties of skin diseases so carefully distinguished by Willam, but also of almost all abnormal growths, from the wart on the finger to the largest insisted tumour, from the deformed nail to the tumours on bones and the distortions of the spine, and many other kinds of softening and deformity of the bones; that it was the origin of a tendency to epistaxis and haemorrhoids if haemoptysis, haematemesis, and haematuria, of suppressed as well as of excessive catamenial discharge, of long-continued nocturnal diaphoresis and of a parchment -like dryness of the skin, of a habit of diarrhoea as well as inveterate constipation, of neuralgic pains and convulsive disease, of chronic ulcers and inflammations, of hypersarcoses and tumours, of marasmus and excessive sensitiveness, of the many abnormal condition or complete loss of the senses of hearing, sight, smell, taste and touch, of excessive salacity and of complete impotence, of all mental diseases from from imbecility to extasis, from melancholia to fury, of syncope and vertigo, of diseases, of the heat and those of the viscera of the abdomen, going under the name of hysteria and hypochondriasis-in a word, of many thousands of the chronic diseases described under different names in pathological works. In a word, his observations convince him that all those chronic diseases which could not be said to arise from the infection of the two venereal maladies, syphilis and sycosis, were but partial developments of the very ancient chronic leprous an scabious miasm, that is to say, were only derivatives from one and the same fundamental disease; just as in an epidemic, say of typhus, all the patients on their disease to one and the same pestilential influence, though some may present on series of symptoms, others another, and all the symptoms from all the patients together present the complete picture of the disease; and every case is curable by one, or at the most two remedies, however much the case may apparently differ from each other from each other, and present the appearance of being totally different diseases.
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.