In Europe and also in the other continents so far as it is known, according to all investigations, only three chronic miasms are found, the diseases caused by which manifest themselves through local symptoms, and from which most, if not all, the chronic diseases originate; namely, first, Syphilis, which I have also called the venereal change disease; then sycosis, or the fig-wart disease, and finally the chronic disease which lies at the foundation of the itching eruption; i. e., the Psora; which I shall treat first as the most important one.
Psora is that most ancient, most universal, most destructive, and yet most misapprehended chronic miasmatic disease which for many thousands of years has disfigured and tortured mankind, and which during the last centuries has become the mother of all the thousands of incredibly various (acute and) chronic (non-venereal) diseases, by which the whole civilized human race on the inhabited globe is being more and more afflicted.
Psora is the oldest miasmatic chronic disease known to us. just as tedious as syphilis and sycosis, and therefore not to be extinguished before the last breath of the longest human life, unless it is thoroughly cured, since not even the most robust constitution is able to destroy and extinguish it by its own proper strength, Psora, or the Itch disease, is beside this the oldest and most hydra-headed of all the chronic miasmatic diseases.
In the many thousands of years during which it may have afflicted mankind, for the most ancient history of the most ancient people does not reach to its origin, it has so much increased in the extent of its pathological manifestations, an extent which may to some degree be explained by its increased development during such all inconceivable number of years in so many millions of organisms through which it has passed, that its secondary symptoms are hardly to be numbered. And, if we except those diseases which have been created by a perverse medical practice or by deleterious labors in quicksilver, lead, arsenic, etc., which appear in the common pathology under a hundred proper names as supposedly separate and well-defined diseases (and also those springing from syphilis and the still rarer ones springing from sycosis), all the remaining natural chronic diseases, whether with names or without them, find in PSORA their real origin, their only source.
