Chronic Diseases, Psora



He had observed that certain substances in the crude state have no, or only a slight, effect on the human organism, for instance, gold-leaf, calcareons, earth, silica, etc., after having been triturated carefully for several hours with another neutral substance acquire a high degree of medicinal power. But he did not notice that this development only continues up to that degree of resolution which is necessary, so that these substances may be made perceptible to the sensitive nervous system, and every further trituration is therefore certainly a weakening. With most other dry substances, without a doubt, the first trituration is usually a dilution, and this happens also with all fluid substances.

At the same time Hahnemann was convinced that such potentisation takes place with the dilution of every medicinal substance. Therefore one full minim seems to him to be too strong a dose, and he therefore prescribed that with every drop should be moistened three hundred small sugar globules of the size of poppy seeds, and of these, one to three should be given as a dose. To this extreme smallness of the dose he adds this other exaggeration of the long duration of its effects and asserts, that in accordance with the condition of the patient, the remedy should be allowed to act from four to ten week before repeating the dose.

With very irritable patients Hahnemann considered that even the globules might be a dangerous dose of medicine, and recommended to let them only smell at a small glass into which had been placed one globule saturated with decillionfold dilution!

With this extravagance Hahnemann’s homoeopathy had reached the highest summit, and would have undoubtedly gone under, if sensible physicians had not taken the matter in hand, and protected the great discovery which this genius had made, and saved it for the benefit of humanity. There is indeed something tragic in it, if we consider how Hahnemann himself moved by hatred against the older medical school, developed his own creation more and more one sidedly, and drove it even to a sharper point, until he nearly destroyed it.

Baron von Brunnow relates later on the course of this strife in another passage:

Hahnemann remained faithful to his strict dogma in spite of all these letters, and spoke most violently against the behaviour of the more moderate school of homoeopathy. Against many he formally fulminated excommunication, with others he was content to break off friendly relations. The latter happened to me after I have openly declared my inclination to emancipate myself from the old rigid dogmatism. By a request from the editor of my French translation of Hahnemann’s “Organon,” I had compiled a new revision of it in accordance with the latest fourth edition of the original. I had prefaced this second translation, which came out in 1832, with a new detailed introduction, in which I declared myself as a follower of the new moderate ideas, and sparing Hahnemann as much as possible. He was very irate about it, and demanded from me a repudiation of all the heretical parts that displeased him, in some homoeopathic periodical. After I had expressed myself firmly against such presumption he at once broke of all correspondence with me. There years before his death, I received unexpectedly from Paris, an affectionate letter in which he completely ignored what had happened, and adopted the old tone of friendship. It goes without saying that I replied most warmly to the letter of this eminent man, without mentioning the scientific points of dissension.

Puffer of Vienna deals, in the Austrian “Zeitschrift fur Homoeopathie,” at some length, with the doctrine of psora and the conception of Hebra which was opposed to it (more about this further on). He points to an exchange of relationship between the external skin and the whole organism, mentions from his own experience and that of others, ” the consequences of the disappearance of skin eruptions, and the subsequent setting in of hydrocephalus, apoplexy, etc., after herpetic eruptions and footsores”; he agrees that Hahnemann’s idea of psora “is based” on a great truth. He agrees with HAhnemann about itch being contagious, and considers skin eruptions as important. The contagion to him is not the reason but only the outward manifestation of the itch disease; corresponding to all other contagious diseases, there is in the itch an external as well as an internal momentum. There, it is a predisposition to the itch, here, it is uncleanliness, bad nourishment, etc. In that way “a disease product shows itself, in which animalculae are present, this is a production which in its turn bears testimony to its relation to the organism.” (With this conception Puffer remained isolated-R.H.)

He declines the external treatment of the itch, like Hahnemann, and is in favour of internal treatment with Sulphur, although not in the highly diluted dose, or at the long intervals, prescribed by Hahnemann.

Among Hahnemann’s contemporaries, Griesselich entered into the psora teaching extensively, first sternly rejecting it, later the remarkable admissions.

He wrote to Hahnemann: Karlsruhe, 20th May, 1834.

As regards psora I confess openly and truly to you from my innermost conviction, that this has made more enemies for homoeopathy than all the literary attacks against it. No one has as yet written this to you-very well-I write it although I am running danger of being misunderstood by you.- All that I cannot approve, does not minimise in any way, my great conviction, that you have achieved 1,000 times more than anyone before you, and that you principle is well worth a whole milliards of stupid little Hufelands.

In 1836 he summarised the judgment of t he contemporary homoeopaths on the psora doctrine in the one sentence:

I have enquired from all homoeopaths, if they recognised psora as the original evil, and must confess, that I do not remember one who agree with it.

His opinion, twelve years later, sounds considerably different. In his work “Handbook to the knowledge of the Homoeopathic or specific Art of Healing” (1848) he deals extensively with the doctrine of psora. We reproduce the main thoughts in the following:

“The doctrine of psora with its truths is a complement to the various deficiencies in Hahnemann’s homoeopathy”; he also sees in the assumption that the itch miasm is the original evil, Hahnemann’s one-sidedness and exaggeration. Although he speaks on an “hereditary tendency” which decides to a certain extent the form that the chronic psora disease will take, yet he nowhere mentions that chronic disease can be inherited, and instead, traces everything back to itch, making no distinction between, skin diseases. He combats the opinion that skin diseases can arise independently, in his opinion the whole organism is always involved; he calls this disease condition, psora, others call it “activity, dyscrasia and cachexia.” Inherited skin diseases, are, as Hahnemann says, “lightning conductors” allaying the slumbering psora; to disperse them as everyone knows, conductors” allaying the slumbering psora; to disperse them as knows, means freeing internal diseases of various kinds, “according to the individual disposition.

“Whether we call this general disease condition psora, or dyscrasia, or cachexia, or acidity makes on the whole no differences; we recognise in a larger number of skin diseases the reflection of a general disease condition of the organism, together with a means of allaying it, which is imitated by the physicians by stones, hair etc., but the patient is not curd by it, and another outlet is found for the general condition.” Briefly: The truth of the psora doctrine lies in the undeniable fact of the so-called disease condition of the bodily humours, and in an exchange of relationship between the skin and the inner organs.” Taken in an narrower sense only as an itch doctrine it is, to say the least, one-sided (as it not always possible to prove an itch disease that has been overcome).

The reception which the psora doctrine received from the opponents of homoeopathy will be sufficiently explained by the following statements of some of their eminent representative. Either it was designated as something that was already widely known, for instance, the psora theory of an “internal itch disease, ” or else it was rejected as the culminating point of the nonsensical homoeopathic system, which had been already sufficiently derided.

Among these who agreed to a partially correct appreciation, Nathan must in the first place be mentioned. He makes Hahnemann’s psora doctrine correspond with the dyscrasia-theory of medicine and says: “Put instead of psora, disease of the blood, a disintegrating of the blood and vice versa, then the theory coincides with the other,” and in this sense he agrees with Hahnemann; put instead of psora general cachexia, “then you acquire an insight into the sum total of these pathological conditions, that so other representation can give.”

Riecke the Professor of Tubingen, who has already been mentioned several times, says:

Richard Haehl
Richard M Haehl 1873 - 1932 MD, a German orthodox physician from Stuttgart and Kirchheim who converted to homeopathy, travelled to America to study homeopathy at the Hahnemann College of Philadelphia, to become the biographer of Samuel Hahnemann, and the Secretary of the German Homeopathic Society, the Hahnemannia.

Richard Haehl was also an editor and publisher of the homeopathic journal Allgemcine, and other homeopathic publications.

Haehl was responsible for saving many of the valuable artifacts of Samuel Hahnemann and retrieving the 6th edition of the Organon and publishing it in 1921.
Richard Haehl was the author of - Life and Work of Samuel Hahnemann