Hahnemann’s doctrine of Chronic disease



Dr. Hering seeks in this essay to discover a prophylactic for the itch. He has never, he says, met with a case of incurable itch. Perhaps, he observes, with much candour, this may be owing to the circumstances of such patients as were not rapidly cured leaving off his treatment. When he was unable to cure the disease by internal remedies, he succeeded with the most important remedies repeatedly applied externally. These remedies were chiefly sulphur, tinctura acris, arsenic, zinc, carbo vegetabilis, sarsaparilla, jacea, natrum carbonicum, sepia, and finally, olive oil duty potentized. In this same essay Hering talks a great deal about psorine, enumerating its various properties, among which he states that it is a prophylactic against infection with itch. Amidst many curious remarks, he states that psorine is capable or developing itch, which may be of great extent and severity, though caused only by a globule of the 30th dilution; and that this itch, whether it be developed primarily or whether it be the internal psora transferred to the skin, disappears most certainly with the primary action of the remedy.

Before proceeding to give you an account of the discoveries respecting the psora-theory and the modifications of it that its partisans have proposed since the general acceptations of the acarus scabiei as an essential element in the disease, scabies, I shall content myself in the present lecture with merely adducing a few more authorities from the allopathic ranks who, with Hahnemann and Autenrieth, look upon scabies as a source of chronic diseases.

In the third volume of the British Journal of Homoeopathy (page 255) you will find some interesting observations by the late Professor Beer, the celebrated oculist of Vienna, on the production of amaurosis by the suppression of itch, and the hopelessness of a cure in such cases without reproducing the psoric eruption, “bringing back the itch,” as he terms it.

The justly celebrated Professor Schonlein of Berlin is a firm believer in psoric after-disease. In his work on General and Special Pathology and Therapeutics (page 87), he gives a description of a disease which he terms asthma psoricum “It is” says he, “always preceded by itch that has been rudely suppressed by ointments. After a longer or shorter time, the patient becomes affected with a pressive pain in the sternum, which, though at times better and worse, never leaves him. Towards evening, and after exertion, this pain increases suddenly to an attack of asthma, by which the chest is much oppressed; the patient has a sensation as if a breath or a ball rose from the pelvis or generally only from the ensiform cartilage, a sensation which closes the larynx, so that he think he must be suffocated, or that something is striking in the larynx and impeding respiration.” Such an attack, he continues, lasts several hours, and is relieved if an exanthema appears. He also speaks of psoric-phthisis, and in a clinical lecture, reported in the Lancet for 1844, apropos of a cure of organic disease of the heart with dropsy, he says:- “What is the cause of this affection? On looking backwards, we find no other complaint than the itch.

I must confess that, according to my own observations and to those of many other physicians who deserve the fullest confidence, I have no doubt whatever about the existence of sequelae of the itch.

Dr. Weitenweber, in a series of papers published in the Austrian Medical Journal, (Medorrhinum Jahrb. d.k.k. ost. States, 1844.) enumerates twenty-seven different disease as the results of repelled itch, from his own and others’ observations.

In the Hamburg Medical Journal for. October, 1839, a Dr. Nathan passes a critique on the psora-theory of Hahnemann, which is interesting as proceeding from an allopathic writer. He examines it without acerbity and in a spirit of perfect fairness, a quality by no means rare with the thoughtful and speculative German physicians when treating of homoeopathy, but which we almost entirely miss in the analogous writings of English allopaths. He regards the psora-theory as analogous to the dyscrasia-theories of ancient medicine. “If,” says he, “we substitute for psora, disease of the blood, state of the blood and vice versa, then this theory will correspond perfectly with the others.” In this sense he is quite of Hahnemann’s way of thinking. If in place of psora we substitute the expression, general cachexia, and bearing in mind this change, peruse Hahnemann’s exposition with due attention, then, says he, we gain an insight into the collective array to of these pathological state, that we can nowhere else obtain.” Thus, it will be observed, the views of the allopath Nathan are almost identical with those of the homoeopath Rau on the subject on the psora- doctrine of Hahnemann.

R.E. Dudgeon
Robert Ellis Dudgeon 1820 – 1904 Licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh in 1839, Robert Ellis Dudgeon studied in Paris and Vienna before graduating as a doctor. Robert Ellis Dudgeon then became the editor of the British Journal of Homeopathy and he held this post for forty years.
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.