Take a case of inflammation of a joint that has gone to ankylosis the suitable remedy will cure the inflammation, but will be powerless to break down the adhesions, and surgical aid must be sought. The same holds good with regard to tumors, for when the patient is cured the tumor will cease to grow and perhaps may be absorbed, but very often it persists, and must be removed by the knife.
Pathology also warms us that it is dangerous to attempt the cure certain conditions of diseases, such as advanced phthisis, or deeply situated abscesses, or where foreign bodies are encysted near vital organs. In such cases, Nature can cure only by ulcerating out the foreign substance, and the exhaustion entailed by such an operation is often fatal. Of course, in such cases, if a surgical operation is not deemed advisable, we can do much to relive by means of short-acting remedies which have no tendency to excite Nature to get rid of the foreign body or dead tissue by suppuration.
CHRONIC MIASMS.
I now come to a matter which has given rise to the sharpest controversy in the past, and which many have absolutely rejected, viz., Hahnemanns doctrine of psora. I would not have alluded to it this evening, after having spoken of so many things that I cannot expect all to accept, unless it had been that the discussion of the comparative rank of symptom would not be complete unless this matter was considered.
All are agreed, at any rate, on the existence of the two other chronic diseases, viz., Syphilis and Sycosis, and I would like to indicate, before closing, the views of the man who more than any one even more than Boenninghausen has elucidated the course and progress of these diseases I mean, of course, James T. Kent.
Kent holds that these chronic diseases may exist either in an active or a latent condition and may present themselves in three ways, viz.,.
As a single miasm.
Two or three miasms co-existing or separate, but only one active at a time.
Two or three miasms forming a complex.
But, to come to the point we are interested in this evening, both Hahnemann and Kent teach that we must attack the one that is uppermost at the time, and ignore the symptoms of those that are latent, except in the last monstrous phase, where two or three form a complex, which is a rare thing, seldom brought about except by the prolonged abuse of unsuitable remedies.
Where two miasms, say syphilis and sycosis, co-exist, it is not uncommon to find them alternating, though only one is active at a time. In such a state of affairs we naturally will select the remedy solely in accordance with the symptoms of the now active miasm, and ignore those of the one that has become temporarily latent in other words, only the symptoms of the active one have any value in the selection of the remedy that is required at the moment.
Such, gentlemen, is a very imperfect sketch of the rules that must guide us in determining the comparative value of the different classes of symptoms, a matter of the utmost practical importance in connection with the problem of the cure of complex chronic diseases.
And it is solely by our success in the treatment of this class of diseases that we can hope to convince our brethren of the old school that the true and only law of cure is that of similia similibus curantur.
