In girls and youths (more rarely in adults): frequent epistaxis; cold hands or sweat on the palms; cold, dry feet, or perspiration on the feet of a foetid odour; tendency to falling asleep of the arms or legs, frequent cramps in the calves or arms; painless twitching of certain muscular parts here and there; frequent of chronic cold in the head and catarrh, or impossibility of catching cold notwithstanding the greatest occasion for it; chronic stoppage of one or other nostril; ulcerated nostrils; troublesome dry feeling in the nose; frequent inflammation of the throat, and hoarseness; short cough in the morning; frequent attacks of asthma; easy catching cold of the whole body or of separate parts, with tendency of those parts to perspire; tendency to sprains from very slight exertions, and sundry uncomfortable symptoms after any unusual muscular exertion; hemicrania or toothache from a moderate moderate mental emotion; frequent flying redness and heat in the face, with anxious feeling; falling out, dryness, or scaliness of the hair; tendency to erysipelas; absence or irregularity of the catamenia, with accompanying headache; twitching of the limbs when going to sleep; fatigue on waking in the morning; unrefreshing sleep; morning sweat in bed; too easy perspiration during the day or inability to perspire; white or pale or cracked tongue; much hawking of mucous; frequent or constant bad smell from the mouth; sour taste; morning sickness; empty feeling in the stomach; repugnance to warm cooked victuals, especially to meat; repugnance to milk; dryness in the mouth at night or the morning; frequent griping; hard constipated motions, often covered with a slimy envelope, or soft, diarrhoeic, fermented stools; haemorrhoids, discharge of blood by stool; discharge of mucus from the fundament; itching in anus; dark-coloured urine; swollen enlarged veins in the legs; chilblains and pain of chilblains independent of cold weather, even in summer; corns without pressure of the shoes; bending, straining, and cracking of various joints; drawing stretching pain in the nape, the back, the limbs, and especially in the teeth in damp, stormy weather, during north-west and north-east winds, after a chill, over- exertion, disagreeable mental emotions, etc.; recurrence of pains and symptoms when at rest, which go off when moving; most of the complaints are at night, and are renewed or increased when the barometer is low, in the north or north-east wind, in winter and spring. Disturbing, frightful, or too vivid dreams; unhealthy skin, every little wound festers; chapped skin to the hands and lips; frequent boils and whitlows; rough skin on the limbs and cheeks; here and there a rough, spot on the skin, that sometimes occasions voluptuous itching and, after rubbing or scratching, burning. Here and there an occasional vesicle, with intolerable but voluptuous itching, that becomes filled with purulent matter, and after being rubbed burns, on the finger, the wrist, or elsewhere.
An individual may have one or more of these ailments and still feel himself and appear to others quite well, and may remain so for many years, as long as he continues in the robust period of life, has not too much care or annoyance, is in easy circumstances, and does not exert himself too much. But even under these favourable circumstances a disproportionately small cause, such as some slight vexation, a chill, or an error of diet, will often a violent attack of acute disease, such as colic, inflammation of the chest, quinsy, erysipelas, fever, etc. But the actual symptoms of the real psoric disease frequently show themselves if the patient’s frame is weakened and shaken by the occurrence of small-pox, measles, whooping-cough, scarlatina, etc., or by some serious injury or contusion, a fall, a wound, a burn, the fracture of an arm or leg, a tedious labour, a sedentary life in the confined air of one room, afflicting intelligence causing profound grief, want of proper nourishment or the necessaries of life.
Under any of these circumstances the slumbering psora may be aroused and show itself in some one or more of a long list of symptoms Hahnemann details, which includes almost every imaginable uncomfortable feeling and symptom of chronic disease, the bare enumeration of which occupies thirty pages, and the occurrence of which symptoms marks the transition of the latent psora into a more serious chronic disease. Of course the symptoms vary according to the peculiarity of the individual’s original constitution, his hereditary predisposition, the different faults of his education and his habits, his mode of life and diet, his occupations, his mental pursuits, his morality, etc.
Though Hahnemann relates many cases from the works of ancient writers showing how the symptoms of the disease disappeared on the reappearance of a psoric eruption on the skin, he warns us that the recurrence of a psoric eruption is not to be trusted to in a curative point of view, as this secondary psoric eruption is generally very evanescent, and often dies away very soon after its appearance, and is too rarely and uncertainly produced to enable us to found on it a method of cure.
In the first edition of his Chronic Diseases he was of a different opinion, and believed that if we could succeed in developing and maintaining an eruption on the skin, this would be the best way of effecting a cure. Accordingly, in this first edition, and in an essay he sent to the homoeopathic Congress in 1830, he recommended the application to the back or elsewhere of a Burgundy-pitch plaster, for the purpose of bringing out an eruption; but he afterwards found that the production of such an eruption did not forward the cure, so in the second edition of the Chronic Diseases, and the fifth of the Organon, he retracts his recommendation of it. He says, however, that the plaster may be serviceable to show the reality of the existence of the psoric disease, for it is, he alleges, only where the latter exists that the former produces the eruption; in a non-psoric individual the plaster occasions neither eruption nor itching. A statement some-what at variance with this, however, occurs in the last edition of the Organon, which shows at once, as it seems to me, the uncertainty Hahnemann felt as to the truth of his doctrine of chronic disease, and his unwillingness to make a complete retraction of opinions he had formerly expressed, though by failing to do so he put himself in the predicament of inculcating opposite opinions in different works.
In the first three editions of his Organon he had adduced a number of examples of chronic diseases, especially asthma and phthisis, cured by infection with itch, as examples of homoeopathic cures by nature. In the last two editions of the Organon, he says they must not be looked upon as such, for these maladies were themselves originally of psoric origin, and by the new infection with itch they were, as it were, converted into their original form of simple itch, the dangerous symptoms disappeared, and the patients were thus put in a much more favourable state to be cured of the whole psora by antipsoric medicines. Organon, p. 149, note. The obvious therapeutic deduction from these statements would be, that the bet method of treating all non-venereal chronic diseases (which, according to Hahnemann, are all of psoric origin) would be to inoculate the patients with itch; for who would not prefer having a simple itch, which moreover, as here stated, could be readily cured by antipsorics, than those dangerous and life-long maladies, asthma, phthisis, and so forth? This treatment of chronic diseases, however, Hahnemann is far from advising; indeed his recantation of the Burgundy-pitch-cure sufficiently shows that he had abandoned the principle altogether, and had he had less respect for his litera scripta, and more for his character as a pathologist and consistent teacher, we should have doubtless had from him a solemn retractation and explanation of the dangerous treatment just alluded to.
Hahnemann protests against the dispersion by means of external remedies not only of the primary itch-eruption, but of every eruption whatsoever. If, says he, we have a case of fresh itch to treat, one or two globules of tincture of sulphur in the decillionth potency will suffice to cure the whole disease, external as well as internal. Although sulphur has been recognised for ages as the cure for itch, it has hitherto been so improperly used that more harm than good head resulted from its use. If the primary itch-eruption has been some considerable time on the skin, in that case the internal disease has developed itself further, and sulphur will seldom alone suffice for the cure. If the eruption has been suppressed or driven off the skin, then sulphur will not suffice for the cure, but several antipsorics in succession will be needed to effect a cure.
Hahnemann then proceeds to point out the peculiarities of the treatment of psoric diseases, which I need not dwell upon here, as you must study that for yourselves in the Organon, and in the work upon Chronic Diseases, both of which works are translated into English, and should be in the library of every homoeopathist. I may mention that the directions for the treatment of psoric diseases do not differ essentially, though there are of course considerable variations in the details, from the rules laid down in the Organon. The main practical difference consists in this, that they can only be cured effectively with antipsoric medicines; that is to say, those medicines which exhibit, in their positive and pure pathogenetic effects upon the healthy human body, most of the symptoms that are more frequently observed as peculiar to the latent as well as to the developed psora. Otherwise their selection is to be made strictly in accordance with the homoeopathic therapeutic law. In this great work on Chronic Diseases, Hahnemann presents us with the symptoms of forty-seven carefully-proved antipsoric remedies, some of which had already figured in his Materia Medica before his promulgation of the psora-doctrine.
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.