The primary lesion of psora is an itching eruption. Itch is a primary skin pathology and was at the time of the development of the theory of psora a common human experience and the common treatment of it was suppressive. Besides his own observation of instances of internal diseased states following the suppression of the itch eruption, Hahnemann reports recorded observations of one hundred different doctors. These doctors also note that the internal disease was healed only if the eruptions were restored to their place on the skin.
The disease reported to follow the suppression place on the skin. The diseases reported to follow the suppression of the itch eruption were asthma, coughs, bronchitis, pleurisy, dropsy, cataract, constipation, cystitis, nephritis, erysipelas, pemphigus, ulcers, glandular swellings, fever, chills, diarrhoea, mental diseases, anaemia, headache, epilepsy, conclusions, paralysis, hemiplegia, death. Is it possible that one hundred doctors were mistaken?.
Hundreds of doctors in the past one hundred years have made similar observations. The discovery of the itch mite as the exciting cause of itch occasional opposition to the theory of psora, but never discredited it in the minds of those who had employed their knowledge of psora to cure chronic to cure chronic sickness. One of the tragedies of science is the destruction of an old theory by a new fact, but the newer fact that the mosquito carries malaria and the tastes fly carries sleeping sickness and the tapeworm pernicious anaemia may yet lend credence to the idea that the itch mite carries a chronic miasm.
Itch is an experience from which the race has escaped only through improved conditions of living. But the race has not yet recovered from the consequences of bad conditions through thousands of generations. Moreover, the principles of sickness applied to psora can be observed operating in any acute disease having an eruption as a part of its symptom complex. Whatever criticism may be launched against the theory of psora, the remedy psorinum should silence when it is used strictly in accordance with the law of cure.
Homoeopathy has always flung out its challenge, “test its principles and its methods and publish the failures.” Psora does not comprehend all non-venereal chronic sickness. It does not included occupational, deficiency, medicinal, unhygienic, unsanitary disturbances produced by their own peculiar cause.
Psora is in a class by itself just as is syphilis. Psora sets up a conditions of suboxidation inducing what is called the carbo- nitrogenoid state, a metabolism in which elimination is deficient. It perverts organ function made manifest in a multitude of symptoms present in those tedious states of sickness whose name is legion and whose cure cane be accomplished by the restoration of eruptions that have been suppressed in millions of individuals through countless generations.
Only the human kind suffer syphilis and from time immemorial. The wages of sex sin is syphilis. Syphilis may be acquired by infection or by inheritance. The infection, as a rule, is acquired by sexual intercourse, occasionally by contact of an abraded spot on the skin with some article soiled with the syphilitic virus. Once acquired, it may become an heirloom handed down to the third and fourth generation, beyond which there may be no offspring.
The infection is made manifest first in a primary skin lesion, a single chancre, which, as a rule, has all the physical appearances of and stages of development of a single smallpox eruption, or a typical vaccination sore produced by a pure cow- pox vaccination, only larger. For this reason syphilis is sometimes called pock or big pock.
In the second stage, if the chancre ulcer should be healed, a rash-like eruption appears on the skin, mucous patches form in the mouth and throat and the hair falls out. If the chancre ulcer is not restored to its place by the appropriate homoeopathic remedy, the third stage appears, with general poor health, anaemia, malnutrition, bone diseases, gummata or soft tumor-like growths in the deeper tissues. These tumors affecting the nervous system cause locomotor ataxia, paresis, mental defect dependency. Syphilitics become absolutely morally irresponsible, economically incompetent.
Congenital or hereditary syphilis is sometimes called the fourth stage. It is characterized by skin rashes, snuffles, wasting of tissues, eye diseases, malformation of teeth and bones, etc. Should the syphilis affect the nerves, congenital idiocy, or mental defectives, delinquents, unmoral, unsocial, criminal personalities may result. Moral irresponsibility may become a fixed state in the congenital syphilitic.
The recognized treatment for syphilis has been suppressive since 800 B.C. The more modern therapeutic assaults on syphilis devote stream after they had first closed the chancer ulcer that nature made gateway of exit, not the means of entrance, which was an abrasion. The homoeopathic treatment detailed in the Organon is eliminative. Here too the challenge is made, “test the methods and publish the failure”.
The genius of syphilis is to dissolve tissue. It creates the oxygenoid constitution. By virtue of this trait of over-oxidation it becomes the substratum in which all wasting diseases are planted; of these tuberculosis is typical.
Syphilis has another aspect that should not be ignored. Syphilis begins in moral turpitude and ends in moral defect. Strange enough, too, syphilis may produce a genius, like Edgar Allan Poe, a strange personality of excesses; weird poetry, alcoholism and doubtful morals. He is an inexplicable personality on any other hypothesis. With a different trend of intellect he might have been a super-criminal. Lord Byron, another literary genius, descended from a dissolute and degenerate royal strain, astonishes us with his excesses and his brilliancy.
Sycosis.
Sycosis, or the venereal wart disease, is the least frequently observed chronic miasm. The venereal warts, as primary lesions, complicate warts is followed by a secondary stage that has not been carefully described. One pathology noted is the contraction of the tendons of the palms of the hands. The warts and moles that appear so frequently without apparent cause may be but mute evidence of hereditary taint acquired from immediate or remote ancestor. The genius of sycosis is to stack up redundant cell growth.
It produces the hydrogenoid constitution which signifies excess of water and by virtue of this trait of stimulating or originating foci of proliferating cells is the substratum of those diseases characterized by exaggerated cell or tissue growth of which cancer is typical.
These pathological lesions do not result from the suppression of gonorrhoeal discharges. The usual case of gonorrhoea is an acute urethritis with a purulent discharge which, if suppressed by any method of treatment, causes acute inflammatory processes, chordee, stricture, orchitis, gleet, sterility, rheumatism, and in the wife, pelvic congestions that induce sterility and inspires the surgeon to perform mutilating and unsexing operations on the innocent and unsuspecting victims of wayward male mates and the unscientific methods of so-called scientific medicine. These ultimate conditions are avoided by primary cure, and cured by restoring primary discharges. Again the challenge, “Test the methods and publish the failures”.
Modern medical schools are teaching their pupils to deal with the ultimate results of disease and not the cause of disease. Physicians who deal with disease from the standpoint of effects only, always become therapeutic nihilists. Therapeutic nihilism is to the art of healing what anarchy is to the state. It subverts all law, all order. It suppresses all intelligible reason in medicine. The Organon champions law and order. It puts of premium on intelligible reason in medicine and makes it capable of infinite progress.
Homoeopathy alone can save clinical medicine. Homoeopathy alone can save the race from the ultimate end products of disease that are baffling the dominant school of medicine, and will forever baffle it. Homoeopathic physicians, as a body, have not yet fully awakened to the real merits of and the far-reaching benefits the philosophy of and the therapeutic law and methods of homoeopathy can bestow on the race. We may not fully realize these ideals, but let us earnestly endeavor to approximate them and be guilty of none of the frightful malpractices of those who can see nothing of sickness but its effects and no nothing for sickness but disorder it.
