choronic diseases

Chronic Diseases - Samuel Hahnemann
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Nature of Chronic Diseases.
The Homoeopathic healing art, as taught in my own writings and in those of my pupils, when faithfully followed, has hitherto shown its natural superiority over any allopathic treatment in a very decided and striking manner; and this not only in those diseases which suddenly attack men (the acute diseases), but also in epidemic diseases and in sporadic fevers.
Venereal diseases also have been radically healed by Homoeopathy much more surely, with less trouble and without any sequelae; for without disturbing or destroying the local manifestation it heals the internal fundamental disease from within only, through the best specific remedy. But the number of the other chronic diseases on this great earth has been immeasurably greater, and remains so.
Treatment by allopathic physicians hitherto merely served to increase the distress from this kind of disease; for this treatment consisted of a whole multitude of nauseous mixtures (compounded by the druggist from violently acting medicines in large doses, of whose separate true effects they were ignorant), together with the use of manifold baths, the sudorific and salivating remedies, the, pain-killing narcotics, the injections, fomentations, fumigations, the blistering plasters, the exutories and fontanelles, but especially the everlasting laxatives, leeches, cuppings and starving treatments, or whatever names may be given to all these medicinal torments, which continually varied like the fashions. By these means the disease was either aggravated and the vital force, spite of so-called tonics used at intervals, was more and more diminished; or, if any striking change was produced by them, instead of the former. sufferings, there appeared a worse state nameless diseases caused by medicine, far worse and more incurable than the original natural one - while the physician consoled the patient with the words: The former sickness I have been fortunate enough to remove; it is a great pity that a new (?) disease has appeared, but I hope to be as successful in removing this latter as in the former. And so, while the same disease assumed various forms, and while new diseases were being added by the use of improper, injurious medicines, the sufferings of the patient were continually aggravated until his pitiable lamentations were hushed forever with his dying breath, and the relatives were soothed with the comforting pretence: Everything imaginable has been used and applied in the case of the deceased.
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It is not so with Homoeopathy, the great gift of God!
Even in these other kinds of chronic diseases, its disciples, by following the teachings presented in my former writings and my former oral lectures, accomplished far more than all the afore-mentioned methods of curing; i. e., when they found the patient not too much run down and spoiled by allopathic treatment, as was unfortunately too often the case where the patient had any money to spend.
Using the more natural treatment, Homoeopathic physicians have frequently been able in a short time to remove the chronic disease which they had before them, after examining it according to all the symptoms perceptibly to the senses; and the means of cure were the most suitable among the Homoeopathic remedies, used in their smallest doses which had been so far proved as to their pure, true effects. And all this was done without robbing the patient of his fluids and strength, as is done by the allopathy of the common physicians; so that the patient, fully healed, could again enjoy gladsome days. These cures indeed have far excelled all that allopathists had ever - in rare cases - been able to effect by a lucky grab into their medicine chests.
The complaints yielded for the most part to very small doses of that remedy which had proved its ability to produce the same series of morbid symptoms in the healthy body; and, if the disease was not altogether too inveterate and had not been too much and in too great a degree mismanaged by allopathy, it often yielded for a considerable time, so that mankind had good reason to deem itself fortunate even for that much help, and, indeed, it often proclaimed its thankfulness. A patient thus treated might and often did consider himself in pretty good health, when he fairly judged of his present improved state and compared it with his far more painful condition before Homoeopathy had afforded him its help.*
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(* Of this kind were the cures of diseases caused by a psora not yet fully developed, which had been treated by my followers with remedies which did not belong to the number of those which, later, proved to be the chief anti-psora remedies; because these remedies were not yet known. They had been merely treated with such medicines as Homoeopathically best covered and temporarily removed the then apparent moderate symptoms, thus causing a kind of a cure which brought back the manifest psora into a latent condition and thus produced a kind of healthy condition, especially with young, vigorous persons, such as would appear as real health to every observer who did not examine accurately; and this state often lasted for many years. But with chronic diseases caused by a psora already fully developed, the medicines which were then known never sufficed for a complete cure, any more than these same medicines suffice at the present time.)
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Even some gross errors of diet, taking cold, the appearance of weather especially rough, wet and cold or stormy, or even the approach of autumn, if ever so mild, but, more yet, winter and a wintry spring, and then some violent exertion of the body or mind, but particularly some shock to the health caused by some severe external injury, or a very sad event that bowed down the soul, repeated fright, great grief, sorrow and continuous vexation, often caused in a weakened body the re-appearance of one or more of the ailments which seemed to have been already overcome; and this new condition was often aggravated by some quite new concomitants, which if not more threatening than the former ones which had been removed homoeopathically were often just as troublesome and now more obstinate. This would be especially the case whenever the seemingly cured disease had for its foundation a psora which had been more fully developed. When such a relapse would take place the Homoeopathic physician would give the remedy most fitting among the medicines then known, as if directed against a new disease, and this would again be attended by a pretty good success, which for the time would again bring the patient into a better state. In the former case, however, in which merely the troubles which seemed to have been removed were renewed, the remedy which had been serviceable the first time would prove less useful, and when repeated again it would help still less. Then perhaps, even under the operation of the Homoeopathic remedy which seemed best adapted, and even where the mode of living had been quite correct new symptoms of disease would be added which could be removed only inadequately and imperfectly; yea, these new symptoms were at times not at all improved, especially when some of the obstacles above mentioned hindered the recovery.
Some joyous occurrence, or an external condition of circumstances improved by fortune, a pleasant journey, a favorable season or a dry, uniform temperature, might occasionally produce a remarkable pause of shorter or longer duration in the disease of the patient, during which the Homoeopath might consider him as fairly recovered; and the patient himself, if he good-naturedly overlooked some passable moderate ailments, might consider himself as healthy. Still such a favorable pause would never be of long duration, and the return and repeated returns of the complaints in the end left even the best selected Homoeopathic remedies then known, and given in the most appropriate doses, the less effective the oftener they were repeated. They served at last hardly even as weak palliatives. But usually, after repeated attempts to conquer the disease which appeared in a form always somewhat changed, residual complaints appeared which the Homoeopathic medicines hitherto proved, though not few, had to leave uneradicated, yea, often undiminished. Thus there ever followed varying complaints ever more troublesome, and, as time proceeded, more threatening, and this even while the mode of living was correct and with a punctual observance of directions. The chronic disease could, despite all efforts, be but little delayed in its progress by the Homoeopathic physician and grew worse from year to year.
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This was, and remained, the quicker or slower process in such treatments in all non-venereal, severe chronic diseases, even when these were treated in exact accordance with the Homoeopathic, art as hitherto known. Their beginning was promising, the continuation less favorable, the outcome hopeless.
Nevertheless this teaching was founded upon the steadfast pillar of truth and will evermore be so. The attestation of its excellence, yea, of its infallibility (so far as this can be predicated of human affairs), it has laid before the eyes of the world through facts.
Homoeopathy alone taught first of all how to heal the well-defined idiopathic diseases, the old, smooth scarlet fever of Sydenham, the more recent purples, whooping cough, croup, sycosis, and autumnal dysenteries, by means of the specifically aiding Homoeopathic remedies. Even acute pleurisy, and typhous contagious epidemics must now allow themselves to be speedily turned into health by a few small doses of rightly-selected Homoeopathic medicine.
Whence then this less favorable, this unfavorable, result of the continued treatment of the non-venereal chronic diseases even by Homoeopathy? What was the reason of the thousands of unsuccessful endeavors to heal the other diseases of a chronic nature so that lasting health might result? Might this be caused, perhaps, by the still too small number of Homoeopathic remedial means that have so far been proved as to their pure action? The followers of Homoeopathy have hitherto thus consoled themselves; but this excuse, or so-called consolation, never satisfied the founder of Homoeopathy - particularly because even the new additions of proved valuable medicines, increasing from year to year, have not advanced the healing of chronic (non-venereal) diseases by a single step, while acute diseases (unless these, at their commencement, threaten unavoidable death) are not only passably removed, by means of a correct; application of homoeopathic remedies, but with the assistance of the never-resting, preservative vital force in our organism, find a speedy and complete cure.
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Why then, cannot this vital force, efficiently affected through Homoeopathic medicine, produce any true and lasting recovery in these chronic maladies even with the aid of the Homoeopathic remedies which best cover their present symptoms; while this same force which is created for the restoration of our organism is nevertheless so indefatigably and successfully active in completing the recovery even in severe acute diseases? What is there to prevent this?
The answer to this question, which is so natural, inevitably led me to the discovery of the nature of these chronic diseases.
To find out then the reason why all the medicines known to Homoeopathy failed to bring a real cure in the above-mentioned diseases, and to gain an insight more nearly correct and, if possible, quite correct, into the true nature of the thousands of chronic diseases which still remain uncured, despite the incontestable truth of the Homoeopathic Law of Cure, this very serious task has occupied me since the years 1816 and 1817, night and day; and behold! the Giver of all good things permitted me within this space of time to gradually solve this sublime problem through unremitting thought, indefatigable inquiry, faithful observation and the most accurate experiments made for the welfare of humanity.*
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(*Yet I did not allow any of these unintermitted endeavors to become known either to the world or to my followers, not, indeed, because the ingratitude so frequently shown to me prevented me, for I heed neither ingratitude nor persecutions on my troublous path of life, which yet has not proved altogether joyless, because of the great goal toward which I have striven. No, I left it unmentioned because it is improper, yea, hurtful to speak or write of things still immature. Not until the year I827 did I communicate the essentials of the discovery to two of my pupils, who had been of the greatest service to the art of Homoeopathy, for their own benefit and that of their patients, so that the whole discovery might not be lost to the world if perchance a higher call to eternity had called me away before the completion of the book - an event not so very improbable in my seventy-third year.)
It was a continually repeated fact that the non-venereal chronic diseases, after being time and again removed homoeopathically by the remedies fully proved up to the present time, always returned in a more or less varied form and with new symptoms, or reappeared annually with an increase of complaints. This fact gave me the first clew that the Homoeopathic physician with such a chronic (non-venereal) case, yea in all cases of (non-venereal) chronic disease, has not only to combat the disease presented before his eyes, and must not view and treat it as if it were a well-defined disease, to be speedily and permanently destroyed and healed by ordinary homoeopathic remedies but that he has always to encounter only some separate fragment of a more deep-seated original disease.
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The great extent of this is shown in the new symptoms appearing from time to time; so that the Homoeopathic physician must not hope to permanently heal the separate manifestations of this kind in the presumption, hitherto entertained, that they are well-defined, separately existing diseases which can be healed permanently and completely. He, therefore, must first find out as far as possible the whole extent of all the accidents and symptoms belonging, to the unknown Primitive malady before he can hope to discover one or more medicines which may homoeopathically cover the whole of the original disease by means of its peculiar symptoms. By this method he may then be able victoriously to heal and wipe out the malady in its whole extent, consequently also its separate members; that is, all the fragments of a disease appearing in so many various forms.
But that the original malady sought for must be also of a miasmatic, chronic nature clearly appeared to me from this circumstance, that after it has once advanced and developed to a certain degree it can never be removed by the strength of any robust constitution, it can never be overcome by the most wholesome diet and order of life, nor will it die out of itself. But it is evermore aggravated, from year to year, through a transition into other and more serious symptoms,* even till the end of man's life, like every other chronic, miasmatic sickness; e. g., the venereal bubo which has not been healed from within by mercury, its specific remedy, but has passed over into venereal disease. This latter, also never passes away of itself, but, even with the most correct mode of life and with the most robust bodily constitution, increases every year and unfolds evermore into new and worse symptoms, and this, also, to the end of man's life.
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(*Not unfrequently phthisis passes over into insanity; dried-up ulcers into dropsy or apoplexy; intermittent fever into asthma; affections of the abdomen into pains in the joints or paralysis; pains in the limbs into haemorrhage, etc., and it was not difficult to discover that the later must also have their foundation in the original malady and can only be a part of a far greater whole.)
I had come thus far in my investigations and observations with such non-venereal patients, when I discovered, even in the beginning, that the obstacle to the cure of many cases which seemed delusively like specific, well-defined diseases, and yet could not be cured in a Homoeopathic manner with the then proved medicines, seemed very often to lie in a former eruption of itch, which was not unfrequently confessed; and the beginning of all the subsequent sufferings usually dated from that time. So also with similar chronic patients who did not confess such an infection, or, what was probably more frequent, who had, from inattention, not perceived it,. or, at least, could not remember it. After a careful inquiry it usually turned out that little traces of it (small pustules of itch, herpes, etc.) had showed themselves with them from time to time, even if but rarely, as an indubitable sign of a former infection of this kind.
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These circumstances, in connection with the fact that innumerable observations of physicians,* and not infrequently my own experience, had shown that an eruption of itch suppressed by faulty practice or one which had disappeared from the skin through other means was evidently followed, in persons otherwise healthy, by the same or similar symptoms; these circumstances, I repeat, could leave no doubt in my mind as to the internal foe which I had to combat in my medical treatment of such cases.
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(*So also, more lately, VON AUTENRIETH (in Tubitiger Blatter fur Naturwissenschaft and Arzneikunde, 2 vol., 2d part.))
Gradually I discovered more effective means against this original malady that caused so many complaints; against this malady which may be called by the general name of Psora; i. e., against the internal itch disease with or without its attendant eruption on the skin. It then became manifest to me, through the aid afforded when using these medicines in similar chronic diseases, in which the patient was unable to show a like cause, that also these cases in which the patient remembered no infection of this kind were of necessity caused by a Psora with which he had been infected, perhaps, even in his cradle, or in some other way that had escaped his memory; and this often received corroboration on a more careful inquiry with the parents or aged relatives.
Most painstaking observations as to the aid afforded by the anti-psoric remedies which were added in the first of these eleven years have taught me evermore, how frequently not only the moderate, but also the more severe and the most severe, chronic diseases are of this origin. This observation taught me that not only most of the many cutaneous eruptions which Willan distinguishes with such extreme care from one another, and which have received separate names, but also almost all adventitious formations, from the common wart on the finger up to the largest sarcomatous tumor, from the malformations of the finger-nails up to the swellings of the bones and the curvature of the spine, and many other softenings and deformities of the bones, both at an early and at a more advanced age, are caused by the Psora. So, also, frequent epistaxis, the accumulation of blood in the veins of the rectum and the anus, discharges of blood from the same (blind or flowing piles), haemoptysis, hematemesis, hematuria, and deficient as well as too frequent menstrual discharges, night-sweats of several years' duration, parchment-like dryness of the skin, diarrhoea of many years, standing, as well as permanent constipation and difficult evacuation of the bowels, long-continued erratic pains, convulsions occurring repeatedly for a number of years, chronic ulcers and inflammations, sarcomatous enlargements and tumors, emaciation, excessive sensitiveness as well as deficiencies in the senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling; excessive as well as extinguished sexual desire; diseases of the mind and of the soul, from imbecility up to ecstasy, from melancholy up to raging insanity; swoons and vertigo; the so-called diseases of the heart; abdominal complaints and all that is comprehended under hysteria and hypochondria - in short, thousands of tedious ailments of humanity called by pathology with various names, are, with few exceptions, true descendants of this many-formed Psora alone. I was thus instructed by my continued observations, comparisons and experiments in the last years, that the ailments and infirmities of body and soul which, in their manifest complaints, differ, so radically and which, with different patients, appear so very unlike (if they do not belong to the two venereal diseases, syphilis and sycosis), are but partial manifestations of the ancient miasma of leprosy and itch; i. e., merely descendants of one and the same vast original malady, the almost innumerable symptoms of which form but one whole and are to be regarded and to be medicinally treated as the parts of one and the same disease in the same way as in a great epidemic of typhus fever. Thus in the year 1813 one patient would be prostrated with only a few symptoms of this plague, a second patient showed only a few but different ailments, while a third, fourth, etc., would complain of still other ailments belonging to this epidemic disease, while they were, nevertheless, all sick with one and the same pestilential fever, and the entire and complete image of the typhus fever reigning at the time could Only be obtained by gathering together the symptoms of all, or at feast of many of these patients. Then the one or two remedies,* found to be Homoeopathic, healed the whole epidemy, and therefore showed themselves specifically helpful with every patient, though the one might be suffering from symptoms differing from those of others, and almost all seemed to be suffering from different diseases.
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(*In the typhus of 1813 bryonia and rhus toxicodendron were the specific remedies for all the patients.)
Just so, only upon a far larger scale, it is with the Psora, this fundamental disease of so many chronic maladies, each of which seems to be essentially different from the others, but really is not; as may readily be seen from the agreement of several symptoms common to them which appear as the disease runs its course, and also from their being healed through the same remedy.
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All chronic diseases of mankind, even those left to themselves, not aggravated by a perverted treatment, show, as said, such a constancy and perseverance, that as soon as they have developed and have not been thoroughly healed by the medical art, they evermore increase with the years, and during the whole of man's lifetime; and they cannot be diminished by the strength belonging even to the most robust constitution. Still less can they be overcome and extinguished. Thus they never pass away of themselves, but increase and are aggravated even till death. They must therefore all have for their origin and foundation constant chronic miasms, whereby their parasitical existence in the human organism is enabled to continually rise and grow.
In Europe and also on 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 eruption of itch; i. e., the PSORA; which I shall treat of first as the most important.
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.
(See Organon of the Healing Art, fifth edition, 1834, § 100 sq.)
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.
Chronic Diseases - Samuel Hahnemann
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The oldest monuments of history which we possess show the Psora even then in great development. Moses* 3400 years ago pointed out several varieties. At that time and later on among the Israelites the disease seems to have mostly kept the external parts of the body for its chief seat. This was also true of the malady as it prevailed in uncultivated Greece, later in Arabia and, lastly in Europe during the Middle Ages. The different names which were given by different nations to the more or less malignant varieties of leprosy, (the external symptom of Psora) which in many ways deformed the external parts of the body, do not concern us and do not affect the matter, since the nature of this miasmatic itching eruption always remained essentially the same.
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(*In Leviticus not only in the thirteenth chapter, but also (chapt. 21, verse 20) where he speaks of the bodily defects which must not be found in a priest who is to offer sacrifice, malignant itch is designated by the word garab, which the Alexandrian translators (in the Septuagint) translated with psora agria, but the Vulgate with scabies jugis. The talmudic interpreter, Jonathan, explained it as dry itch spread over the body; while the expression, yalephed, is used by Moses for lichen, tetter, herpes (see M. Rosenmueller, Scholia in Levit., p. II., edit. sec., p. 124). The commentators in the so-called English Bible-work also agree with this definition, Calmet among others saying: Leprosy is similar to an inveterate itch with violent itching. The ancients also mention the peculiar, characteristic voluptuous itching which attended itch then as now, while after the scratching a painful burning follows; among others Plato, who calls itch glykypikron, while Cicero marks the dulcedo of scabies.)
The Occidental Psora, which during the Middle Ages had raged in Europe for several centuries under the form of malignant erysipelas (called St. Anthony's Fire), reassumed the form of leprosy through the leprosy which was brought back by the returning crusaders in the thirteenth century. And though it thus spread in Europe even more than before, (for in the year 1226 there were in France alone 2,000 houses for the reception of lepers), this Psora, which now raged as a dreadful eruption, found at least an external alleviation in the means conducive to cleanliness, which also were brought by the crusaders from the Orient; namely, the (cotton? linen?) shirts before unknown in Europe, and the more frequent use of warm baths. Through both of those means, as well as through the more exquisite diet and refinement in the mode of living introduced by increased cultivation, the external horrors of the Psora within the space of several centuries were at last so far moderated, that, at the end of the fifteenth century it appeared only in the form of the common eruption of itch, just at the time when the other miasmatic chronic disease, syphilis, began (in 1493) to raise its dreadful head.
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Thus this eruption, externally reduced in cultivated countries to a common itch, could be much more easily removed from the skin through various means; so that with the medicinal external treatment since introduced, especially in the middle and higher classes, through baths, washes and ointments of sulphur and lead, and by preparations of copper, zinc and mercury, the external manifestations of Psora on the skin were often so quickly suppressed, and are so now, that in most cases either of children or of grown persons the history of itch infection may remain undiscovered.
But the state of mankind was not improved thereby; in many respects it grew far worse. For, although in ancient times the eruption of psora appearing as leprosy was very troublesome to those suffering from it, owing to the lancinating pains in, and the violent itching all around the tumors, and scabs, the rest of the body enjoyed a fair share of general health. This was owing to the obstinately persistent eruption on the skin which served as a substitute for the internal psora. And what is of more importance, the horrible and disgusting appearance of the lepers made such a terrible impression on healthy people that they dreaded even their approach; so that the seclusion of most of these patients, and their separation in leper hospitals, kept them apart from other human society and infection from them was thus limited and comparatively rare.
In consequence of the very much milder form of the psora during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when it appeared as itch, the few pustules appearing after infection made but little show and could easily be concealed. Nevertheless they were scratched continually because of their unbearable itching, and thus the fluid was diffused around, and the psoric miasma was communicated more certainly and more easily to many other persons, the more it was concealed. For the things rendered unclean by the psoric fluid infected the persons who unwittingly touched them, and thus contaminated far more persons than the lepers, who, on account of their horrible appearance, were carefully avoided.
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PSORA has thus become the most infectious and most general of all the chronic miasmas. For the miasm has usually been communicated to others before the one from whom it emanates has asked for or received any external repressive remedy against his itching eruption (lead-water, ointment of the white precipitate of mercury), and without confessing that he had an eruption of itch, often even without knowing it himself; yea, without even the physician's or surgeon's knowing the exact nature of the eruption which has been repressed by the lotion of lead, etc.
It may well be conceived that the poorer and lower classes, who allow the itch to spread on their skin for a long time, until they become an abomination to all around them and are compelled to use something to remove it, must have in the meanwhile infected many.
Mankind, therefore, is worse off from the change in the external form of the psora, - from leprosy down to the eruption of itch - not only because this is less visible and more secret and therefore more frequently infectious, but also especially because the Psora, now mitigated externally into a mere itch, and on that account more generally spread, nevertheless still retains unchanged its original dreadful nature. Now, after being more easily repressed, the disease grows all the more unperceived within, and so, in the last three centuries, after the destruction* of its chief symptom (the external skin-eruption) it plays the sad role of causing innumerable secondary symptoms; i. e., it originates a legion of chronic diseases, the source of which physicians neither surmise nor unravel, and which, therefore, they can no more cure than they could cure the original disease when accompanied by its cutaneous eruption; but these chronic diseases, as daily experience shows, were necessarily aggravated by the multitude of their faulty remedies.
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(*The external eruption of itch may not only be driven away by the faulty practices of physicians and quacks, but unfortunately it not infrequently of its own accord withdraws from the skin (see below, e.g., in the observation of the older physicians, Nos. 9, 17, 26, 36, 50, 58, 61, 64, 65). Syphilis and sycosis both have an advantage over the itch disease, in this, that the chancre (or bubo) in the one and the fig-wart in the other never leave the external until they have been either mischievously destroyed through external repressive remedies or have been in a rational manner removed through the simultaneous internal cure of the whole disease. The venereal disease cannot, therefore, break out so long as the chancre is not artificially destroyed by external applications, nor can the secondary ailments of sycosis break out so long as the fig-wart has not been destroyed by faulty practice; for these local symptoms, which act as substitutes for the internal disease, remain standing even until the end of man's life, and prevent the breaking out of the internal disease. It is, therefore, just as easy to heal them then, even in their whole extent; i.e. thoroughly, through their specific internal medicines, which need only to be continued until these local symptoms (chancre and fig-wart) which are in their nature unchangeable except through artificial external application, are thoroughly healed. Then we may be quite certain that we have thoroughly cured the internal disease; i. e., syphilis and sycosis.
This good feature psora has lost in the present more and more mitigated nature of its chief symptom, which has changed from leprosy to itch in the last three centuries. The eruption of itch by no means remains as persistently in its place on the skin as the chancre and the fig-wart. Even if the eruption of itch has not (as is nearly always the case) been driven away from the skin through the faulty practices of physicians and quacks by means of desiccating washes, sulphur ointments, drastic purgatives or cupping, it frequently disappears, as we say, of itself; i. e., through causes which are not noticed. It often disappears through some unlucky physical or psychical occurrence, through a violent fright, through continual vexations, deeply-affecting grief, through catching a severe cold, or through a cold temperature (see below, observation 67); through cold, lukewarm and warm river baths or mineral baths, by a fever arising from any cause, or through a different acute disease. (e. g., smallpox; see below, observation 39); through persistent diarrhoea, sometimes also perhaps through a peculiar want of activity in the skin, and the results in such a case are just as mischievous as if the eruption had been driven away externally by the irrational practice of a physician. The secondary ailments of the internal psora and any one of the innumerable chronic diseases flowing from this origin will then break out sooner or later.
But let no one think that the psora which has been thus mitigated in its local symptom, its cutaneous eruption, differs materially from ancient leprosy. Even leprosy, when not inveterate, could in ancient times not seldom be driven from the skin by cold baths or by repeated dipping in a river and through warm mineral baths (see below, No. 35); but also then the evil effects resulting were as little regarded as the more modern physicians regard the acute diseases and the insidious maladies which do not fail to develop sooner or later from the indwelling psora when an eruption of the present itch disease has disappeared of itself or has been violently driven away).
So great a flood of numberless nervous troubles, painful ailments, spasms, ulcers (cancers), adventitious formations, dyscrasias, paralyses, consumptions and cripplings of soul, mind and body were never seen in ancient times when the Psora mostly confined itself to its dreadful cutaneous symptom, leprosy. Only during the last few centuries has mankind been flooded with these infirmities, owing to the causes just mentioned.*
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(*That the drinking of warm coffee and Chinese tea which has spread so generally in the last two centuries, and which has so largely increased the irritability of the muscular fibre as well as the excessive excitability of the nerves, has further augmented the tendency of this period to a multitude of chronic diseases, and has thus aided the psora, I least of all can doubt, as I have made prominent, perhaps too prominent, the part which coffee takes with respect to the bodily and mental sufferings of humanity, in my little work on The Effects of Coffee (Die Wirkungen des Kaffee's. Leipzig, 1803). This, perhaps undue, prominence given was owing to the fact that I had not then as yet discovered the chief source of chronic diseases in the psora. Only in connection with the excessive use of coffee and tea, which both offer palliatives for several symptoms of psora, could, psora spread such innumerable, such obstinate chronic sufferings among mankind; for psora alone could not have produced this effect.)
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It was thus that PSORA became the most universal mother of chronic diseases.
The psora, which is now so easily and so rashly robbed of its ameliorating cutaneous symptom, the eruption of itch, which acts vicariously for the internal disease, has been producing within the last three hundred years more and more secondary symptoms, and indeed so many that at least seven-eighths of all the chronic maladies spring from it as their only source, while the remaining eighth springs from syphilis and sycosis or from a complication of two of these three miasmatic chronic diseases, or (which is rare) from a complication of all three of them. Even syphilis, which on account of its easy curability yields to the smallest dose of the best preparation of mercury, and sycosis, which on account of the slight difficulty in its cure through a few doses of thuja and nitric acid in alternation, only pass into a tedious malady difficult to cure when they are complicated with psora. Thus PSORA is among all diseases the one which is most misapprehended, and, therefore, has been medically treated in the worst and most injurious manner.
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It is incredible to what an extent modern physicians of the common school have sinned against the welfare of humanity; since, with scarcely an exception, teachers of medicine and the more prominent modern physicians and medical writers have laid down the rule and taught it as an infallible theorem that: Every eruption of itch is merely a local ailment of the skin, in which ailment the remaining organism takes no part at all, so that it may and must be driven away from the skin at any time and without any scruple, through local applications of sulphur ointment or of the yet more active ointment of Jasser, through sulphur fumigations, by solutions of lead and zinc, but most quickly by the precipitates of mercury. If the eruption is once removed from the skin everything is well and the person is restored and the whole disease removed. Of course, if the eruption is neglected and allowed to spread upon the skin, then it may eventually turn out that the malignant matter may find opportunity to insinuate itself through the absorbent vessels into the mass of humors, and thus to corrupt the blood, the humors and the health. Then, indeed, man may finally be afflicted with ailments from these malignant humors, though these might soon again be removed from the body by purgatives and abluents; but through prompt removal of the eruption from the skin all sequelae are prevented, and the internal body remains entirely healthy.
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These horrible untruths have not only been, and are still being taught, but they are also carried out in practice. The consequence is that at the present day the patients in all the most celebrated hospitals, even in those countries and cities that seem most enlightened, as well as the private itch-patients of the lower and higher classes, the patients in all the penitentiaries and orphan asylums, in other civil and military hospitals, wherever such eruptions are found - in short, the innumerable multitude of patients, - without exception, are treated, not only by physicians unknown to fame, but by all, even those most celebrated, with the above mentioned external remedies,* using perhaps at the same time large doses of flowers of sulphur, and strong purgatives (to cleanse the body, as they say). These physicians think that the more quickly these eruptions are driven from the skin the better. Then they dismiss the patients from their treatment as cured, with brazen assurance and the declaration that everything is now all right, without regarding or being willing to notice the ailments which sooner or later are sure to follow; i. e., the Psora which shows itself from within in a thousand different diseases.** If the deceived wretches then sooner or later return with the malady following unavoidably on such a treatment; e. g., with swellings, obstinate pains in one part or another, with hypochondriac or hysterical troubles, gout, consumption, tubercular phthisis, continual or spasmodic asthma, blindness, deafness, paralysis, caries of the bones, ulcers (cancer), spasms, haemorrhages, diseases of the mind and soul, etc., the physicians imagine that they have before them something entirely new and treat it again and again according to the old routine of their therapeutics in a useless and hurtful manner, directing their medicines against phantom diseases; i. e., against causes invented by them for the ailments as they appear, until the patient, after many years' suffering continually aggravated, is at last freed from their hands by death, the end of all earthly maladies.
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(*Then, as these gentlemen dream in their perverted minds, in which they have disposed of the nature of this most important disease in their arbitrary way and without consulting nature, then these frivolous gentlemen assure us, the matter of the itch has not yet had time to penetrate inwardly and to be received by the absorbent vessels to the detriment of the whole mass of humors. But how then, 0 conscientious men! if even the first little pustule of itch with its unbearable voluptuous itching, forcing a man irresistibly to scratch, and with the following burning pain, is in every case and every time the proof of a universal itch-disease which has been previously developed in the interior of the whole organism, as we shall see below? How then, if in accordance with this fact any external repression of the, itch-eruption can not only do nothing toward alleviating the internal general disease, but rather as thousands of facts go to prove, compel it to develop and break forth quickly into innumerable, different, acute sufferings, or gradually into chronic sufferings, which make mankind so helpless and miserable? Can you then heal these? Experience says no; you cannot do it.)
(In some vigorous itch patients the vital force, following the law of nature on which it rests (her instinct showing more wisdom than the intelligence of her destroyers), after some weeks, drives back to the skin the eruption seemingly destroyed by itch ointments and purgatives; the patient returns to the hospital and the mischievous destruction of the eruption by means of ointments and lotions of solutions of lead and zinc, is renewed. I have seen in military hospitals this eruption thus destroyed in an irrational a cruel manner three times in succession within a few months, while the quack who applied the ointment pretended that the patient must have been infected anew with itch three times in this short period, which was really impossible.)
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(** I wrote this six years ago, but even at this day the physicians of the old school continue to act and teach with the same criminal negligence. In this most important medical affair they have up to this day not become the least bit wiser or more humane.)
(By accident (for they cannot give any but a feigned reason for their action) they found out a refuge which temporarily often alleviates the sufferings of their patients when they can not do anything at home with their prescriptions against the unknown diseases; that is, they send him to some sulphur bath or other, where the patients often get rid of a small part of their psora, and thus are also at the first use of the baths for a time relieved of their chronic disease; but afterwards they fall back into the same or a kindred ailment, and the repetition of the bath then avails little or nothing, because the cure of a developed Psora requires a far more adequate treatment than the impetuous use of such baths.)
The older physicians were more conscientious in this matter and observed with less prejudice. They saw clearly and became convinced that innumerable ailments and the most severe chronic diseases follow the destruction of the itch-eruption from the skin. And since this experience compelled them to assume the existence of an internal disease, in every case of itch they endeavored to extirpate this internal malady by means of a multitude of internal remedies, as good as their therapeutics afforded. It was, indeed, but a useless endeavor, because the true method of healing, which it could only be the prerogative of Homoeopathy to discover, was unknown to them. Nevertheless this sincere endeavor was praiseworthy, since it was founded on an appreciation of the great internal disease present together with the eruption of itch, which internal disease it was necessary to remove. This prevented their reliance on the mere local destruction of the itch from the skin, as practiced by modern physicians, who think that they cannot quickly enough drive it away as if it were a mere external disease of the skin-without regarding the great injuries attending such a course. The older physicians, on the other hand, have warningly laid these injuries before our eyes in their writings, giving thousands of examples.
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The observations of those honest men are too startling to be rejected contemptuously, or ignored by conscientious men.
I shall here adduce some of these numerous observations handed down to us, which I might increase by an equal number of my own if the former were not already abundantly sufficient to show with what fury the internal Psora manifests itself when the external local symptom which serves to assuage the internal malady is hastily removed. They also show that it must be a matter of conscience for the physician who loves his fellow-man to direct all his endeavors to cure, first of all, the internal malady, whereby the cutaneous eruption will at the same time be removed and destroyed and all the subsequent innumerable lifelong chronic sufferings springing from the Psora be prevented or, if they are already embittering the life of the patient, be cured.
The diseases, partly acute but chiefly chronic, springing from such a one-sided destruction of the chief skin-symptom (eruption and itching) which acts vicariously and assuages the internal Psora (which destruction is erroneously called Driving the itch into the body) are innumerable; as manifold as the peculiarities of bodily constitutions and of the outer world which modifies them.
A brief survey of the manifold misfortunes resulting thence is given by the experienced and honest LUDWIG CHRISTIAN JUNCKER in his Dissertalio de Damno ex Scabie Repulsa, Halle, 1750, p. 15-18. He observed that with young people of a sanguine temperament the suppression of itch is followed by phthisis, and with persons in general who are of a sanguine temperament it is followed by piles, haemorrhoidal colic and renal gravel; with persons of sanguino-choleric temperament by swellings of the inguinal glands, stiffening of the joints and malignant ulcers (called in German Todenbruche); with fat persons by a suffocating catarrh and mucous consumption; also by inflammatory fever, acute pleurisy and inflammation of the lungs. He further states that in autopsies the lungs have been found indurated and full of cysts containing pus; also other indurations, swellings of the bones and ulcers have been seen to follow the suppression of an eruption. Phlegmatic persons in consequence of such suppressions suffered chiefly from dropsy; the menses were delayed, and when the itch was driven away during their flow, they were changed into a monthly haemoptysis. Persons inclined to melancholy were sometimes made insane by such repression; if they were pregnant the foetus was usually killed. Sometimes the suppression of the itch causes sterility,* in nursing women the milk is generally lacking, the menses disappear prematurely; in older women the uterus becomes ulcerated, attended with deep, burning pains, with wasting away (cancer of the womb).
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*A pregnant Jewess had the itch on her hands and drove it away in the eighth month of her pregnancy so that it might not be seen during the period of her delivery. Three days afterwards she was delivered and the lochial discharge did not appear and she was seized with a high fever; since that time for seven years she had been sterile and had suffered from leucorrhoea. Then she became poor and had to walk a great distance barefooted; hereupon the itch again appeared and she thus lost her leucorrhoea and her other hysteric affections; she became again pregnant and was safely delivered. (Juncker, ibid.)
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His experiences were frequently confirmed by the observations of others, as e. g. with reference to Asthma, Lentilius Miscell. med. pract. Tom. I., P. 176. Fr. Hoffmann Abhandlung v. d. Kinderkrankheitenn, Frft., 1741, P. 104. Detharding in Append. ad Ephem. Nat. Cur. Dec. III., ann 5 et 6 et in obs. parallel. ad obs. 58. Binninger, Obs. Cent. V., obs. 88. Morgagni, de sedibus et. caus. morb. Epist. XIV., 35. Acta Nat. Cur. Tom. V obs. 47. J. Juncker, Consp. ther. spec. tab. 31. F. H. L. Muzell, Wahrnehm. Samml. II. Cas. 8.1 J. Fr. Gmelin in Gesner's Samml. v. Beob. V. S. 21.2 Hundertmark.-Zieger Dissert. de scabie artificiale, Lips. 1758, p. 32.3 Beireis-Stammen. Diss. de causis cur imprismis plebs scabie laboret. Helmst., 1792, P. 26.4 Pelargus (Storch) Obs. clin. Jahrg., 1722, P. 435 n 438.5 Breslauer Sammlung v. Jahre 1727, P, 293.6 Riedlin, the father, Obs. Cent. II., obs. 90. Augsburg, 1691.7
Suffocating Catarrh, Ehrenfr. Hagendorn, hist. med. phys. Cent. I., hist 8, 9.8 Pelargus, Obs. clin. Jahrg., 1723, P. 15.9
(When writing the fast edition of the Chronic Diseases, I was not as yet acquainted with Autenrieth's Versuche fuer die prakt. Heilkunde aus den Klinishen Anstalten von Tubingen, 1808. But I saw on examining the work, that what he says about diseases following the driving away of itch through local applications is only a confirmation of what I had already found with the other hundred writers. He also had observed that the external driving away of itch was followed by ulcers on the feet, pulmonary consumption, hysterical chlorosis with various menstrual irregularities; white swelling of the knee, dropsy of the joints, epilepsy, amaurosis, with obscured cornea; glaucoma, with complete amaurosis; mental derangement, paralysis, apoplexy and curvature of the neck; these he erroneously attributed to the ointments alone. But his own slow local driving away of the eruption by means of sulphuret of potash and soft soap, which he in vain calls healing it, is in no way better. Just as if his treatment were anything else than a local driving away of the eruption from the skin! Of any true cure he knows just as little as the other Allopaths, for he writes: It is, of course, absurd to endeavor to cure itch (scab) by internal remedies. No! it is not only absurd, but even watched to undertake to cure an internal itch-disease which cannot be cured by any local application, through any but internal means, which alone can cure the disease thoroughly and with certainty.)
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(1 A man 30 to 40 years of age had been afflicted with the itch a long time before, and it had been driven away by ointments; from which time he had become more and more asthmatic. His respiration became at last, even when not in motion, very short and extremely labored, emitting at the same time a continuous hissing sound, but attended with only little coughing. He was ordered an injection of one drachm of squills, and to take internally 3 grains of squills. But by mistake he took the drachm of squills internally. He was near losing his life with an indescribable nausea and retching. Soon after this the itch appeared again on his hands, his feet and his whole body in great abundance, and by this means the asthma was at once removed.)
(2 The violent asthma was combined with general swelling and fever.)
(3 A man of 32 years had the itch driven away by sulphur ointment, and he suffered for eleven months from the most violent asthma until by drinking birch-juice the eruption was brought back on the twenty-third day.)
(4 A student was seized with the itch just as he was going to dance, on which account he had it driven out by a practitioner with sulphur ointment. But soon after, he was attacked by such a severe asthma that he could only draw breath by throwing his head back, and was almost suffocated during the attacks. After thus wrestling with death for an hour, he would cough up little cartilaginous pieces which would ease him for a very short time. Having returned home to Osterode he suffered continually for two years of this disease, being attacked about ten times a day, which could not even be mitigated through the help of his physician, Beireis)
(5 A boy of 13 years having suffered from his childhood with tinea capitis had his mother remove it for him, but he became very sick within eight or ten days, suffering with asthma, violent pains in the limbs, back and knee, which were not relieved until an eruption of itch broke out over his whole body a mouth later.)
(6 Tinea capitis in a little girl was driven away by purgatives and other medicines, but the child was attacked with oppression of the chest, cough and great lassitude. It was not until she stopped taking the medicines, and the tinea broke out again, that she recovered her cheerfulness and this, indeed, quickly.)
(7 A boy of 5 years suffered for a long time from itch, and when this was driven away by a salve it left behind a severe melancholy with a cough.)
(8 Owing to tinea capitis, which had been driven off by rubbing with almond oil, there arose an excessive lassitude of all the limbs, headache on one side, loss of appetite, asthma, waking up at night with suffocating catarrh, with severe rattling and whistling on the chest and convulsive twisting of the limbs, as if about to die, and hematuria. When the tinea broke out again, he recovered from all these ailments.A 3-year-old girl had the itch, for several weeks; when this was driven out by an ointment she was seized the next day by a suffocating catarrh with snoring, and with numbness and coldness of the whole body, from which she did not recover until the itch re-appeared.)
(9 A girl of twelve years had the itch with which she had frequently suffered, driven away from the skin by an ointment, when she was seized with an acute fever with suffocative catarrh, asthma and swelling, and afterward with pleurisy. Six days afterward, having taken an internal medicine containing sulphur, the itch again appeared and all the ailments, excepting the swelling, disappeared but after twenty-four days the itch again dried up, which was followed by a new inflammation in the chest with pleurisy and vomiting.)
Chronic Diseases - Samuel Hahnemann
(Page 20... 29)
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Suffocations from Asthma, Joh. Phil. Brendel, Collsila. med., Frft., 1615, Cons., 73. Ephem. Nat. Citr., Ann. II., obs. 3I3. Wilh. Fabr. V. Hilden, Obs. Cent. III., Obs. 39.10 Ph. R. Vicat. Obs. Pract., obs. 35, Vitoduri, 1780.11 J. J. Waldschmid, Opera, P. 244.12
Asthma with General Swelling. Waldschmid, ibid. Hoechstetter, Obs. Dec. III., obs. 7 Frft. et Lips, 1674, P. 248. Pelargus, Obs. Clin. Jahrg., 1723, P. 504.13 Riedlin, the father, Obs. Cent. II. obs. 91.14
Asthma with Dropsy of the Chest. Storch in Act. Nat. Cur. Tom. V., obs. 147. Morgagni, de sed. et causis morb. XVI., Art. 34.15 Richard, Recueil d'observ. de Med. Tom. III., P.308, a Paris, 1772. Hagendorn, as above, Cent. II., hist. 15.16
Pleurisy and Inflammation in the Chest, Pelargus, as above, P.10.17 Hagendorn, as above, Cent. III., hist. 58. Giseke, Hamb. Abhandl., P.310. Richard, as above. Pelargus, as above. Jahrg., 1721, P.2 3 and 114,18 and Jahrg., 1723, P.29, 19 also in Jahrg., 1722, P.459.20 Sennert praxis med. lib. II., P.III., Cap. 6, P.380. Jerzembsky, Diss. Scabies salubris in hyrrope, Halae, I777.21 Karl Wenzel, Die Nachkrankheiten von zuruckgetretener Kratze, Bamb., 1826, P.49.22
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(10 The dyspnoea of a youth, 20 years, caused by the driving away of itch was so great that he could not get any breath, and his pulse was hardly perceptible, in consequence of which he suffocated.)
(11 A moist herpes on the left upper arm of a youth of 19 years was finally locally removed by many external applications. But soon after, there ensued a periodical asthma which was suddenly increased by a lengthy foot-tour in the heat of summer, even to suffocation, with a puffed up bluish-red face and quick, weak, uneven pulse.)
(12 The dyspnoea from the driven out itch came on very suddenly, and the patient was suffocated.)
(13 A 5-year-old girl had had for some time large itch vesicles on the hands, which dried up of themselves. Shortly after, she became sleepy and tired and was seized with dyspnoea. The following day the asthma continued and her abdomen became distended.)
(14 A 50 year old farmer, who had been long tortured with the itch, while he was driving it out by external applications, was seized with a dyspnoea, a loss of appetite and a swelling of the whole body.)
(15 A girl in Bologna drove away the itch with an ointment and was seized with the most severe asthma without fever. After two blood-lettings her strength decreased so much and the asthma was so much augmented that she died on the following day. The whole chest was filled with bluish water, also the pericardium.)
(16 A girl of 9 years with the tinea capitis had it driven away, when she was seized with a lingering fever, a general swelling and dyspnoea; when the lines broke out again she recovered.)
(17 A man of 46 drove out his itch with a sulphur ointment. Thereupon he was seized with inflammation in the chest with bloody expectoration, dyspnoea and great anguish. The following day the heat and the anguish became almost unbearable and the pains in the chest increased on the third day. Then sweat broke out. After fourteen days the itch broke out again and he felt better. But be had a relapse, the itch dried up again and he died on the 13th day after the relapse.)
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(18 A thin man died of inflammation in the chest and other ailments twenty days after driving out the itch.)
(19 A boy of 7 years whose tinea capitis and itch dried up, died after four days from an acute fever and asthma accompanied with expectoration.)
(20 A youth who removed his itch with a lead ointment, died four days afterward of a disease of the chest.)
(21 A general dropsy was quickly cured by a return of the itch, but when this was suppressed by a severe cold, pleurisy supervened and death ensued in three days.)
(22 A young peasant was attacked with acute fever with pleurisy and dyspnoea, six days after driving out an eruption of itch with sulphur ointment.)
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Pleurisy and Cough, Pelargus, as above, Jahrg., 1722, P.79.23
Severe Cough, Richard, as above. Juncker, Conspect. med. theor. et pract. tab., 76. Hundertmark, as above, P. 23.23*
Hemoptysis, Phil. Georg. Schroeder, Opusc. II., P.322. Richard, as above, Binninger, Obs. Cent. V., obs. 88.
Haemoptysis and Consumption. Chn. Max Spener, Diss. de egro febri maligni, phthisi complicata laborante, Giess, 1699.24 Baglio, Opera, P.2I5. Sicelius Praxis casual. Exerc. III., Cas. I., Frft et Lips, I743.25 Morgagni, as above, XXI., Art. 32.26 Unzers Arzt C C C., P.508.27 Karl Wenzel, as above, P. 32.
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(23 A school boy of 13 years was seized with cough and stitches in the chest, when his itch dried up. These ailments disappeared when the itch broke out again.)
(23* A man of 36 years had the itch removed sixteen months ago by an ointment of lead and mercury; he suffered since from a whooping cough accompanied with great anguish.)
(24 A youth of 19 years had the itch, which he finally drove away with a black looking lotion. A few days after, he was seized with chills and heat, lassitude, oppression of the heart, headache, nausea, violent thirst, cough and difficulty in breathing; he expectorated blood, commenced to speak deliriously, his face was deadly pale and sunken, the urine was deep red without sediment.)
(25 An eruption of itch in a youth of 18 years driven out by a mercurial plaster.)
(26 Itch which disappeared from the skin of itself, was followed by a lingering fever and fatal expectoration of pus; at the autopsy the left lung was found full of pus.)
(27 A robust looking candidate for the ministry who was about to preach in a few days and therefore wished to free himself from his old itch, rubbed himself one day with itch ointment, and in a few hours, soon after noon he passed away with anxiety, dyspnoea and tenesmus; the autopsy showed that the whole of the lungs was filled with liquid pus.
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Collection of Pus in the Chest. F. A. Waltz, Medic. Chirurg. Aufsatze Th. 1., P.114, 115.28 Preval, in the journal de Medec., LXI., P.491.
Cysts of Pus in the Intestines, Krause. Schubert, Diss. de scabie humana. Lips, 1779, P.23.29
Great Degeneration of a Great Part of the Intestines. J. H. Schulze, in Act. Nat. Cur. Tom., I obS., 231.30
Degeneration of the Brain. Dimenbrock, Obs. et Curat. med., obs. 6o. Bonet, Spulchretum anal., Sect. IV., obs. I, §131 and §2.32 J. H. Schulze, as above.
Hydrocephalus, Acta helvet., V., P.190.
Ulcers in the Stomach. L. Chn. Juncker, Diss. de scabie repulsa, Halle, 1750, P.16.33
Sphacelus of the Stomach and Duodenum. Hundertmark, as above, P.29.34
General Dropsical Swelling.35
Dropsy of the Chest. Hessler in Karl Wenzel, as above, P.100 and 102.
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(28 Empyema followed the driving away, through external means, of an eruption of itch which had come out a few years before, and appeared especially in March and April.)
(29 A young man who had been warned by (the good physician and) Prof. Krause against the use of sulphur ointment for the re-appearing itch did not follow his advice, but rubbed himself with it, when he died of constipation in his body, at the autopsy, were found sacs of pus in his abdominal viscera.)
(30 Also the diaphragm and the liver were diseased.)
(31 A little prince of two years had his tinea capitis driven away; in consequence, after his death, much bloody water was found under his skull.)
(32 In a woman who had driven out the tinea by a lotion, one-half of the brain was found putrefied and filled with yellow humor.)
(33 A man of rank, of a cholerico-sanguine temperament, was afflicted with gouty pains of the abdomen and pains as from gravel. After the removal of the gout through various remedies the itch broke out, which he drove out through a desiccating bath of tan-bark; an ulcer formed on his stomach, which, as the autopsy showed, hastened his death.)
(34 A boy of 7 weeks and a youth of 18 years died very suddenly from an itch driven out through a sulphur ointment. At the autopsy in the case of the infant the upper part of the stomach immediately below the orifice was found destroyed by gangrene, and in the second case that part of the duodenum into which the biliary duct and the pancreatic duct empty was found similarly diseased. A similar fatal inflammation of the stomach from driven out itch, in Morgagni, as above, LV., art. II.)
(35 Of this, innumerable cases are found in a number of writers of which I only desire to mention the one reported in J. D. Fick, Exercitatio med. de scabie retropulsa, Halle, 1710, §6, where an eruption of itch driven out by application of mercury, left behind it general dropsy, which was only mitigated by the re-appearance of the eruption.
The author of the book Epidemion lib. 5, No.4, who gives his name as Hippocrates, first mentions the sad result of such a case, where an Athenian was seized by a violently itching eruption, spread over the whole body and especially over the genital organs; he expelled it by the use of the warm baths on the island of Melos, but died of the resulting dropsy.
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Dropsy of the Abdomen, Richard, as above, and with other observers.
Swelling of the Scrotum (in boys). Fr. Hoffmann, Med. rat. syst., III., P.175.
Red Swelling of the Whole Body. Lentilius, Misc. med. pract., Part I., P.176.
Jaundice. Baldinger, Krankheiten ein. Armee, P.226. job. Rud. Camerarius, Memorab. Cent., X., §65.
Swelling of the Parotid Glands. Barette, in the journal de Med., XVIII., P.169.
Swelling of the Cervical Glands, Pelargus, as above, Jahrg., 1723, P.593.36 Unzer, Arzt. Part VI., St. 301.37
Obscuration of the Eyes and Presbyopia, Fr. Hoffman, Consult. med., I Cas. 50.38
Inflammation of the Eyes, G. W. Wedel. Snetter, Diss. de Ophthalmia, Jen., 1710. Hallmann, in Koenigl. Vetenskaps Handl. f. A. X., P.210.39 G. Chph. Schiller, de Scabie humida,
P.42, Erford. 1747.
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(36 A boy of 8 or 9 years, who had been shortly before healed of tinea showed many swellings of the glands of the neck by which his neck was drawn crooked and stiff.)
(37 A youth of 14 years had the itch in June, 1761. He rubbed with a grey ointment and the itch passed away. Upon this the glands behind both of his ears swelled up; the swelling on the left ear passed away of itself, but the right one in five months became monstrously enlarged and about August began to pain him. All the glands of the neck were swollen. On the outside the large gland was full of hard knots and without sensitiveness, but internally there was an obtuse pain, especially at night; at the same time he suffered from dyspnoea and obstructed deglutition. All means used to produce suppuration were in vain; it became so large that the patient was suffocated in the year 1762.)
(38 A girl of 13 years was seized with the itch, especially on the limbs, in the fare and on the pudenda; this was finally driven away by ointments of zinc and sulphur, whereupon she gradually became weak of sight. Little dark bodies floated before her eyes, and these could also be seen from without floating in the aqueous humor of the anterior chamber of the eye. At the same time she could not recognize small bodies except with spectacles. The pupils were dilated.)
(39 A girl had a violent eruption of itch on the legs, with large ulcers on the bend of the knee. Being attacked with smallpox the itch was suppressed. This induced a humid inflammation of the white of the eye and of the eyelids, with itching and suppuration of the same, and the vision of dark bodies floating before her eyes; this lasted for two years. Then for three days she put on the stockings of a child afflicted with the itch. On the last day a fever broke out with dry cough, tension in the chest, with inclination to vomit. On the following day the fever and the tension of the chest diminished and a sweat broke out, which increased until erysipelas broke out on both legs, and on the following day these passed over into the real itch. The eyes then improved.
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Cataract, Chn. Gottlieb Ludwig, Advers. med. II., P.157.40
Amaurosis, Northof, Diss. de scabie, Gotting., I792, P.10.41 Chn. G. Ludwig, as above.42 Sennert, prax. lib. III., Sect. 2, Cap 44. Trecourt, chirurg. Wahrnehmungen P.173 Leipz I777. Fabricius ab Hilden. Cent. II., obs. 39.43
Deafness. Thore in Capelle, journal de sante, Tom. I. Daniel, Syst. aegritud. II., P.228. Ludwig, as above.
Inflammation of the Bowels, Hundertmark, Diss. de scabie artificiali, Lips. I758, P.29.
Piles, Hemorrhoids, Acta helvet. V., P.I92.44 Daniel, Syst. aegritud. II., P.245.45
Abdominal Complaints, Fr. Hoffmann, Med. rat. syst. III., P.177.46
Diabetes (Mellitaria), Comment. Lips. XIV., P.365. Eph. Nat. Cur. Dec. II., ann. 10, P.162. C. Weber, Obs. f. I., P.26.
Suppression of Urine, Sennert, Prax. lib. 3, P.8. Morgagni, as above, XLI., art. 2.47
Erysipelas, Unzer Artz, Th. V., St. 301.48
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(40 A man whose itch had been driven off, but who was of robust constitution, was seized with cataract.)
(41 From itch expelled by external application there arose amaurosis, which passed away when the eruption re-appeared on the skin.)
(42 A vigorous man, when the itch had been expelled from the skin, was seized with amaurosis and remained blind to an advanced age.)
(43 Amaurosis from the same cause, with terrible headache.)
(44 Bleeding piles returned every month.)
(45 In consequence of itch driven off by external applications, loss of blood up to eight pounds within a few hours, colic, fever, etc.)
(46 After the expulsion of itch a most violent colic, pain in the region of the left lower ribs, restlessness, lingering fever, anxiety and obstinate constipation.)
(47 A young peasant had driven off the itch with ointment, and shortly after he suffered from suppression of urine, vomiting and at times from a pain in the left loin. Still he, after awhile, passed urine a few times, but only a little, of dark color and attended with pains. In vain the attempt was made to empty it with a catheter. At last the whole body swelled up, difficult and slow respiration ensued, and he died on about the twenty-first day after the suppression of the itch. The bladder contained two pounds of urine just as dark, but the abdominal cavity, water, which being held for awhile over the fire thickened into a sort of albumen.)
(48 A man rubbed himself with mercurial ointment against the itch, when there followed an erysipelatous inflammation in the neck, of which he died after five weeks.)
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Discharges of acrid humors. Fr. Hoffman, Consult. Tom. II., Cas. I25.
Ulcers, Unzer Arzt, Th. V., St. 3O1.49 Pelargus, as above, Jahrg., 1723, P.673.50 Breslauer Samm., 1727, P.107.51 Muzell, Wahrnehm. II., Cas. 6.52 Riedlin, the son, Cent. obs. 38.53 Alberti-Gorn, Diss. de scabi., P.24. Halle, 1718.
Caries. Richard, as above.
Swelling of the Bones of the Knee. Valsalva in Morgagni, de sede et caus. morb. I. art. 13.
Pain in the bones, Hamburger Magaz., XVIII., P.3, 253.
Rachitis and Marasmus in Children, Fr. Hoffman. Kinderkrankh. Leipiz., I74I, P.132.
Fever, B. V. Faventinus, Medicina empir., P.260. Ramazzini, Constit. epid, urbis. II. No. 32, 1691.54 J. C. Carl in Act. Nat. Cur. VI., obs. 16.55
Fever, Reil, Memorab. Fasc. III., P. 169.56 Pelargus, as above; Jahrg., I72I, P.276.57 and ibid. Jahrg., 1723.58 Amatus, Lusit. Cent. II., Cor. 33. Schiller Diss. de scabie humida, Erford,
1747, P. 44.59 J. J. Fick, Exerdiatio med. de scabie retropulsa. Halle, 1710, §2.60 Pelargus, as above, Jahrg,. 1722, p.122.61 Also Jahrg., 1723, P.10, P.14.62 and P.291. C. G. Ludwig,
Advers. med. II., pp. I57-160.63 Morgagni, as ab. X., art. 9;64 XXI., art. 31;65 XXXVIII., art. 22;66 LV., art. 3.67
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(49 A woman, after using a mercurial ointment against itch, had a putrescent eruption all over her body, so that whole pieces of flesh rotted away; she died in a few days with the greatest pains.)
(50 A youth of 16 years had the itch for some time; when this passed away ulcers broke out on the legs.)
(51 After rubbing with an ointment against the itch there followed with a man of 50 years tearing pains in the left shoulder for five weeks, when several ulcers broke out in the arm-pit.)
(52 A quack gave a student an ointment for the itch, from which it disappeared indeed, but instead of it an incurable ulcer broke out in the mouth.)
(53 A student who had been for a long time afflicted with the itch drove it off with an ointment, and instead of this there broke out ulcers on his arms and legs, and glandular swellings in the arm-pits. These ulcers were finally cured by external applications, when he was seized with dyspnoea and then with dropsy, and from these he died.)
(54 Many observations are found there respecting cases where the itch, being driven off by ointments, there followed fever and blackish urine, and where, when the itch was brought back to the skin, the fever disappeared and the urine became like that of a healthy person.)
(55 A man and a woman had an eruption of itch on the hand, of many years' standing, and as often as it dried up fever always ensued, and as soon as this came to an end the eruption of itch again returned; and yet this itch extended but to a small part of the body and was not driven off by external applications.)
(56 Itch was suppressed by a fever that set in; when the fever was removed it returned.)
(57 A mother put ointment on the tinea of a boy of 9 years; it, passed away, but there followed a violent fever.)
(58 A child, 1 year old, had had for some time tinea capitis and an eruption in the face; both these had shortly before dried up, when there followed heat, cough and diarrhoea. A return of the eruption on the head gave alleviation.)
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(59 A woman of 43 years, long afflicted with dry itch, rubbed her joints with an ointment of sulphur and mercury, and thus drove it off, this was followed by pains under the right ribs, lassitude in all the limbs, heat and feverish irritation. After using sudorific remedies for six days, large vesicles of itch broke out all over the body.)
(60 Two youths, brothers, drove off the itch by one and the same remedy, but they lost all appetite, a dry cough and a lingering fever set in, they became emaciated and fell into a slumberous stupor, so that they would have died if the eruption had not luckily re-appeared on the skin.)
(61 With a three-year old child when tinea capitis had disappeared of itself, there arose a violent fever on the chest, cough and weariness, and it only recovered when the eruption re-appeared on the head.)
(62 A Journeyman purse-maker, who had to make some embroidery, drove of his frequent itch with lead-ointment. Scarcely was the itch drying off in consequence, when he was seized with chills, heat, dyspnoea and a rattling cough, of which he suffocated on the fourth day.)
(63 A vigorous, healthy man of 30 years was taken with the itch and drove the eruption from the skin, but was then seized with a catarrhal fever with an uncontrollable perspiration; he was slowly recovering from it when he was seized without any further cause by another fever. The attacks began with anxiety and headache, and increased with heat, a quick pulse and morning sweats. There was added an unusual sinking of the strength, and delirious speech, anxious tossing about, a sobbing respiration with suffocation - a disease which despite all medicines ended with death.)
(64 With a boy the itch passed away of itself, this was followed by fever. The itch now appeared more violent and the fever passed away, but the child grew thin, and when the itch again dried up there followed diarrhoea, convulsions and soon afterwards death.)
(65 Itch disappeared from the skin of itself, on which lingering fever, expectoration of pus and lastly death followed, and at the autopsy the left lungs were found full of pus.)
(66 A woman of 30 years had for a long time pain in the limbs and a strong eruption of itch, which she drove off with ointment, when she was attacked by fever with violent heat, thirst and raging headache, which was accompanied with delirious speech, uncontrollable dyspnoea, tumefaction of the body and great distension of the abdomen. She died on the sixth day of the fever. The abdomen contained much air, and especially the stomach was distended with air, filling half of the abdomen.)
(67 A man whose tinea capitis had passed off from intense cold, was seized after eight days with a malignant fever, with vomiting, accompanied at last with hiccough; he died in consequence on the ninth day.)
(In the same article Morgagni mentions the case of a man who, having scabs from itch on the arms and on other parts, drove off nearly the whole eruption by a sulphurated shirt, but was seized at once with drawing pains on the whole body combined with fever, so that he could neither rest at night nor move about in the daytime; also the tongue and the fauces were thus attacked. With much trouble the eruption was brought out again on the skin, and thus his health was restored.)
Fever. Lanzonus, in Ebh. Nat. Cur., Dec. III., ann. 9 anct zo, obs. i6 and 113. Hoechstetter, Obs. med., Dec. VIII., Cas. 8.68 Triller. Wehle, Diss. nullam medicinam interdum esse optimam, Witemb., 1754.69 Fick, as ab., §1.70 Waldschmidt, Opera., P.241. Gerbizius. in Eph. Nat. Cur., Dec. III., ann. 2, obs. 167. Amatus, Lusit., Cent. II., Curat. 33.71 Fr. Hoffmann, Med. rat. system, T. III., P.175.72
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Tertian Intermittent Fever. Pelargus, as ab., Jahrg. 1722, P.103, cfr. with P.79.73 Juncker, as ab., tab. 79; Eph. Nat. Cur., Dec. I., ann. 4. Welsch, Obs. 15. Sauvages, Spec. II. De Hautesierk, Obs., Tom. II., P.300; Comment. Lipsienses XIX., P.297.
Quartan Fever, Thom. Bartholinus, Cap. 4, hist. 35. Sennert, Paralip., P.116. Fr. Hoffman, Med. rat. system III., P.175.74
Vertigo and a Total Sinking of the Strength, Gabelchofer, Obs. Med. Cent. II., obs. 42.
Vertigo Like Epilepsy, Fr. Hoffmann, Consult. Med. I., Cas. 12.75
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(68 A malignant fever with opisthotonus from driving off the itch.)
(69 A young merchant had driven off the itch with ointment, when he was suddenly seized with such hoarseness that he could not speak a loud word; then followed dry asthma, loathing of food, severe cough, troublesome especially at night and robbing him of sleep, violent ill-smelling night-sweats, and, despite of all medical treatment, death.)
(70 A burgomaster, 6o years of age, was infected with the itch, and suffered unspeakably from it through the nights; he used many medicines in vain, and at last was taught by a beggar a so-called infallible remedy, composed of oleum laurinum, flowers of sulphur and lard. Having rubbed with this several times he was, indeed, freed from the eruption, but soon after he was seized with a violent chill, followed by an excessive heat all over the body, vehement thirst, a gasping asthma, sleeplessness, violent trembling all over the body and great lassitude, so that on the fourth day he expired.)
(71 From the same cause a fever combined with insanity, precipitating death.)
(72 After driving off itch, most frequently acute fevers with a great sinking of the strength follow. In one such case the fever lasted seven days, when the eruption of itch re-appeared and stopped the fever.)
(73 A boy of 15 years for a long time had tinea capitis and had received from Pelargus a strong purgative to cure it; he was seized with pain in the back, cutting pains during micturition, followed by tertian fever.)
(74 Old people have especially dry itch, and if this is driven off by external applications usually quartan fever ensues, which vanishes as soon as the itch re-appears on the skin.)
(75 A count, 57 years old, had suffered for three years with dry itch. It was driven off, and he enjoyed for two years an apparently good health only he had during this time two attacks of vertigo, which gradually so increased that once after finishing his meal he was seized with such vertigo that he would have fallen to the floor if he had not been supported. He was covered with an icy perspiration, his limbs trembled, all the parts of his body were as dead, and he repeatedly vomited up a sour substance. A similar attack followed six weeks later, then once a month for three months. He indeed retained consciousness, but there always followed heaviness of the head and a drunken stupor. At last these attacks came daily, though in a milder form. He could not read nor think nor turn around quickly nor stoop down. This wis attended with sadness, sorrowful, anxious thoughts and sighs.)
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Epilepsy Like Vertigo, Fr. Hoffmann, as ab., P.30.76
Convulsions, Juncker, as ab. tab. 53. Hoechstetter, Eph. Nat. Cur. Dec. 8, Cas. 3. Eph. nat. cur. dec. 2, ann. obs. 35, and ann. 5, obs. 224. D. W. Triller. Welle, Diss. nullam medicinam interdum esse optimam, Viteb., 1754, §13, 14.77 Sicelius, Decas Casuum I., Cas. 5.78 Pelargus, as ab., Jahrg., 1723, P.545.79
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(76 A woman of 36 years had the itch driven from the skin a few years before with mercurial remedies. Her menses became irregular, and were often interrupted for ten or even fifteen weeks; she was at the same time constipated. Four years ago during pregnancy she was seized with vertigo, and she would suddenly fall down while standing or walking. While sitting she would retain her senses during the vertigo and could speak, eat and drink. At her first attack she felt in her left foot, as it were, a crawling sensation and formication, which terminated in a violent jerking up and down of the feet. In time these attacks took away consciousness, and afterwards in travelling in a carriage there came an attack of real epilepsy which returned thrice in the following winter. During these attacks she could not speak; she did not indeed turn her thumbs inward, but yet there was foam at her month. The sensation of formication in the left foot announced the attack, and when this sensation reached the pit of the stomach it suddenly brought on the fit. This epilepsy was removed by a woman with five powders, but instead of it her vertigo reappeared, but much more violently than before. It also commenced with a crawling sensation in the left foot, which rose up to the heart; this was attended with great anxiety and fear, as if she were falling down from a height, and while supposing that she had fallen she lost consciousness and speech; at the same time her limbs moved convulsively. But also outside of these attacks the least touch of her feet caused her the most intense pain as if from a boil. This was attended with severe pains and heat in the head and with loss of memory.)
(77 After an itch driven away by ointment there followed with a girl a most profound swoon and soon after the most terrible convulsions and death.)
(78 A girl of 17, in consequence of tinea capitis which disappeared of itself, was seized with continual heat in the head and attacks of headache. She sometimes suddenly started up as if from fright, and while awake she was seized with convulsive motions of the limbs, especially of the arms and hands, as also with oppression in the pit of the stomach as if her breast was laced together; with moaning; then her limbs would jerk convulsively and she would start up.)
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(79 A full-grown man who had been for some time affected with tremor of the hands had his tinea dry up. He was thereupon seized with great lassitude and red patches without heat broke out on his body. The tremor passed over into convulsive shaking, bloody matter was discharged from his nose and his ears, he also coughed up blood, and he died on the 23d day amidst convulsions.)
Epileptic Convulsions and Epilepsy, J. C. Carl in Act. Nat. Cur. VI., obs. 16.80 E. Hagendorn, as above, hist. 9.81 Fr. Hoffnann, Consult. med. I., Cas. 31.82; ibid. med. rat. syst. T. IV., P.111., Cab. I., and in Kinderkranjheiten, P.108. Sauvages, Nosol. spec. II. de Hautesierk, obs. T. II., P.300. Sennert, prax. III., Cap.44. Eph. Nat. Cur. Dec. III., ann. 2, obs. 29. Gruling, obs. Med. Cent. III., obs. 73. Th. Bartolin, Cent. III., hist. 20. Fabr. de Hilden, Cent. III., obs. 10.83 Riedlin, lin. med. ann., 1696, Maj. obs. I.84 Lentilius, Miscell. med. pr., P. I., P.32. G. W. Wedel, Diss. de aegro epileptico, jen., 1673.85 Herrm. Grube, de arcanis medicorum. non arcanis, Hafn., 1673, P.165.86 Tulpius, obs. lib. I., Cap. 8.87 Th. Thompson, Medic. Rathpflege, Leipzig, 1779, PP.107, 108.88
(80 A man who had driven off a frequently occurring eruption of itch with an ointment fell into epileptic convulsions, which disappeared again when the eruption reappeared on the skin.)
(81 A youth of 18 years drove off the itch with a mercurial ointment and two months after he was unexpectedly seized with convulsions, which attacked all the limbs of the body, now this, now that; with painful constriction of the breast and the neck, coldness of the limbs and great weakness. The fourth day he was seized with epilepsy, foaming at the mouth, while the limbs were strangely contorted. The epilepsy only yielded when the eruption returned.)
(82 With a boy, with tinea had been driven off by rubbing it with almond oil.)
(83 With children, combined with suffocating catarrh.)
(84 A servant girl after twice rubbing her itch with ointment had an attack of epilepsy.)
(85 A youth of 18, who had driven out itch with mercurial remedies, was seized a few weeks later with epilepsy, which returned after four weeks with the new moon.)
(86 A boy of 7 months was seized with epilepsy, while the parents were unwilling to acknowledge that he had had the itch. But when the physician enquired more particularly, the mother confessed that the little boy had some vesicles of itch on the sole of the foot, which had soon yielded to lead ointment; the child, as she said, had no other sign of the itch. The physician correctly recognized in this the only cause of the epilepsy.)
(87 Two children were freed from epilepsy by the breaking out of humid tinea, but the epilepsy returned when the tinea was incautiously driven off.)
(88 Five-year-old itch passed away and this, after several years, produced epilepsy.)
Chronic Diseases - Samuel Hahnemann
(Page 30 ... 39)
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Hundertmark, as ab., P.32.89 Fr. Hoffrnann, Consult. med. I. Cas. 28, P.141.90
Apoplexy. Cummius in Eph. Nat. Cur. Dec I., ann. I, obs. 58. Mobius, Institut. med., P.65. J. J. Wepfer, Histor. Apoplect. Amstel., 1724, P.457.
Paralysis, Hoechstetter. Obs. med.,Dec. VIII., obs. 8, P.245. journal de Med., 1760, Sept., P.211. Unzer, Arzt VI., St. 301.91 Hundertmark, as above, P.33.92 Krause. Schubert, Diss. de scabie humani corp., Lips., 1779, P.23.93 Karl Wenzel, as above, P.174.
Melancholy, Reil, memorab. Fasc., III., P.177.94
Insanity, Landais in Roux, journ. de Medecine, Tom. 41. Amat. Lusitanus, Curat. med. Cent. II., Cur. 74. J. H. Schulze, Brune, Diss. Casus aliquot mente alienatorm, Halle, 1707, Cas. I, P.5.95 F. H. Waitz, medic.-chirurg. Aufsatze, Th I, P.130.96 Altenburg, 1791. Richter in Hufel. Journal, XV., II. Grossmann in Baldinger's neuem', Magaz., XI., I.97
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(89 The itch in a youth of 20 years was suppressed by a purgative which was allowed to act violently for several days, after which he for two years suffered daily the most violent convulsions, until, through the use of birch-juice, the itch was brought back to the skin.)
(90 A young mail of 17 years, of vigorous constitution and good intelligence, was attacked three years ago, after itch had been driven out, first by haemoptysis and then by epilepsy, which grew worse through medicines until the fits came on every two hours. Another surgeon, through frequent blood-lettings and many medicines, effected that he remained free from epilepsy for four weeks, but soon afterwards the epilepsy returned while he was taking his noonday nap, and the patient had two or three fits in the nights; at the same time he was attacked with a very severe cough and suffocating catarrh, especially during the nights, when he expectorated a very fetid fluid. He was confined to his bed. At last, after much medicine, the disease increased so much that he had ten fits at night and eight during the day. Nevertheless he never in these fits either clenched his thumbs or had foam at his mouth. His memory is weakened. The attacks come at the approach of meal-time, but more frequently after meals. During his nightly attacks he remains in the deepest sleep without awaking, but in the morning he feels as if bruised all over. The only warning of a fit consists in his rubbing his nose and drawing up his left foot, but then he suddenly falls down.)
(91 A woman, after having the itch driven out, had paralysis of one leg and remained lame.)
(92 After driving off the itch with sulphur ointment, a man of 53 years had hemiplegia.)
(93 A minister who for a long time had in vain used internal remedies against the itch finally grew tired of it and drove it off with ointment, when his upper extremities were, in a measure, paralyzed and a hard, thick skin formed in the palms of the hands, full of bloody chaps and insufferable itching.
In the same place the author mentions also a woman whose fingers contracted from an itch driven out by external means; she suffered of them a long time.)
(94 He found an idiotic melancholy arise in consequence of suppressed itch; when the itch broke out again the melancholy disappeared.)
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(95 A student, 20 years old, had the humid itch, which so covered his hands that he became incapable of attending to his work. It was driven off by sulphur ointment. But shortly after it appeared how much his health had suffered from it. He became insane, sang or laughed where it was unbecoming, and ran until he sank to the ground from exhaustion. From day to day he became more sick in soul and in body, until at last hemiplegy came on and he died. The intestines were found grown together into a firm mass, studded with little ulcers full of protuberances, some of the size of walnuts, which were filled, with a substance resembling gypsum.)
(96 The same story.)
(97 A man of 50 years with whom, after driving away the itch by ointments, general dropsy had set in; when the itch re-appeared and drove away the swelling he drove it away again, when he fell into raving madness, while head and neck swelled up to suffocation; at last blindness and complete suppression of urine were added. Artificial irritants applied to the skin and a strong emetic brought back the itch again; when the eruption extended over the whole body all the former accidents disappeared.)
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Who, after meditating on even these few examples which might be much increased from the writings of the physicians of that time and from my experience,* would remain so thoughtless as to ignore the great evil hidden within, the Psora, of which evil the eruption of itch and its other forms, the tinea capitis, milk crust, tetter, etc., are only indications announcing the internal, monstrous disease of the whole organism, only local external symptoms which act vicariously and mitigatingly for the internal disease? Who, after reading even the few cases described, would hesitate to acknowledge that the Psora, as already stated, is the most destructive of all chronic miasmas? Who would be so stolid as to declare, with, the later allopathic physicians, that the itch-eruption, tinea and tetters are only situated superficially upon the skin and may, therefore, without fear, be driven out through external means since the internal of the body has no part in it and retains its health?
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(* An opponent, of the old school, has reproached me that I have not adduced my own experience to prove that the chronic maladies, when they are not of syphilitic or sycotic origin, spring from the miasma of itch, as such proofs from experience would have been convincing. Oho! If the examples here adduced by me from both the older and from modern non-Homoeopathic writings have not yet enough convincing proof, I should like to know what other examples (even my own not excepted) could be conceived of as more striking proofs? How often (and I might say almost always) have opponents of the old school refused all credence to the observations of honorable Homoeopathic physicians, because they were not made before their own eyes and because the names of the patients were only indicated with a letter; as if private patients would allow their names to be used! Why should I endure the like? And do I not prove my point in a manner most indubitable and most free from partisanship through the experience of so many other honest practitioners?)
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Surely, among all the crimes which the modem physicians of the old school are guilty of, this is the most hurtful, shameful and unpardonable!
The man who, from the examples given and from innumerable others of a like nature, is not willing to see the exact opposite of that assertion blinds himself on purpose and works intentionally for the destruction of mankind.
Or are they so little instructed as to the nature of all the miasmatic maladies connected with diseases of the skin that they do not know that they all take a similar course in their origin? And that all such miasmas become first internal maladies of the whole system before their external assuaging symptom appears on the skin?
We shall more closely elucidate this process, and in consequence we shall see that all miasmatic maladies which show peculiar local ailments on the skin are always present as internal maladies in the system before they show their local symptom externally upon the skin; but that only in acute diseases, after taking their course through a certain number of days, the local symptom, together with the internal disease, is wont to disappear, which then leaves the body free from both. In chronic miasmas, however, the outer local symptom may either be driven from the skin or may disappear of itself, while the internal disease, if uncured, neither wholly nor in part ever leaves the system; on the contrary, it continually increases with the years, unless healed by art.
I must here dwell the more circumstantially on this process of nature, because the common physicians, especially of modem days, are so deficient in vision; or, more correctly stated, so blind that although they could, as it were, handle and feel this process in the origin and development of acute miasmatic eruptional diseases, they nevertheless neither surmised nor observed the like process in chronic diseases, and therefore declared their local symptoms as secondary growths and impurities existing merely externally on the skin, without any internal fundamental disease, and this as well with the chancre and the fig-wart as with the eruption of itch, and fore - since they overlooked the chief disease or perhaps even boldly denied it - by a mere external treatment and destruction of these local ailments they have brought unspeakable misfortunes on suffering humanity.
With respect to the origin of these three chronic maladies, as in the acute, miasmatic eruptional diseases, three different important moments are to be more attentively considered than has hitherto been done: First, the time of infection; secondly, the period of time during which the whole organism is being penetrated by the disease infused, until it has developed within; and thirdly, the breaking out of the external ailment, whereby nature externally demonstrates the completion of the internal, development of the miasmatic malady throughout the whole organism.
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The infection with miasmas, as well of the acute as of the above-mentioned chronic diseases, takes place, without doubt, in one single moment, and that moment, the one most favorable for infection.
When the smallpox or the cowpox catches, this happens in the moment when in vaccination the morbid fluid in the bloody scratch of the skin comes in contact with the exposed nerve, which then, irrevocably, dynamically communicates the disease to the vital force (to the whole nervous system) in the same moment. After this moment of infection no ablution, cauterizing or burning, not even the cutting off of the part which has caught and received the infection, can again destroy or undo the development of the disease within. Smallpox, cowpox, measles, etc., nevertheless will complete their course within, and the fever peculiar to each will break out with its smallpox, cowpox, measles,* etc., after a few days, when the internal disease has developed and completed itself.
The same is the case, not to mention several other acute miasmas, also when the skin of man is contaminated with the blood of cattle affected with anthrax. If, as is frequently the case, the anthrax has infected and caught on, all ablutions of the skin are in vain; the black or gangrenous blister, nearly always fatal, nevertheless, always comes out after four or five days (usually in the affected spot); i.e., as soon as the whole living organism has transformed itself to this terrible disease.
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(*We may justly ask: Is there in any probability any miasma in the world, which, when it has infected from without, does not first make the whole organism sick before the signs of it externally manifest themselves? We can only answer this question with, no, there is none !
Does it not take three, four or five days after vaccination is effected, before the vaccinated spot becomes inflamed? Does not the sort of fever developed - the sign of the completion of the disease-appear even later, when the protecting pock has been fully formed; i.e., on the seventh or eighth day?
Does it not take ten to twelve days after infection with smallpox, before the inflammatory fever and the outbreak of the smallpox on the skin take place?
What has nature been doing with the infection received in these ten or twelve days? Was it not necessary to first embody the disease in the whole organism before nature was enabled to kindle the fever, and to bring out the eruption on the skin?
Measles also require ten or twelve days after infection or inoculation before this eruption with its fever appears. After infection with scarlet fever seven days usually pass before the scarlet fever, with the redness of the skin, breaks out.
What then did nature do with the received miasma during the intervening days? What else but to incorporate the whole disease of measles or scarlet fever in the entire living organism before she had completed the work, so as to be enabled to produce the measles and the scarlet fever with their eruption.)
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(It is just so with the infection of half-acute miasmas without eruption. Among many persons bitten by mad dogs - thanks to the benign ruler of the world only few are infected, rarely the twelfth; often, as I myself have observed, only one out of twenty or thirty persons bitten. The others, even if ever so badly mangled by the mad dog, usually all recover, even if they are not treated by a physician or surgeon.*) But with whomsoever the poison acts, it has taken effect in the moment when the person was bitten, and the poison has then communicated itself to the nearest nerves and, therefore, without contradiction, to the whole system of the nerves, and as soon as the malady has been developed in the whole organism (for this development and completion of the disease nature requires at least several days, often many weeks), the madness breaks out as an acute, quickly fatal disease. Now if the venomous spittle of the mad dog has really taken effect, the infection usually has taken place irrevocably in the moment of contagion, for experience shows that even the immediate excision and amputation of the infected part does not protect from the progression of the disease within, nor from the breaking out of the hydrophobia - therefore, also, the many hundreds, of other much lauded external means for cleansing, cauterizing and suppurating the wound of the bite can protect just as little from the breaking out of the hydrophobia.
From the progress of all these miasmatic diseases we may plainly see that, after the contagion from without, the malady connected with it in the interiors of the whole man must first be developed; i.e., the whole interior man must first have become thoroughly sick of smallpox, measles or scarlet fever, before these various eruptions can appear on the skin.
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(*We are indebted especially to the careful English and American physicians for these comforting experiences - to HUNTER and HOULSTON (in London Med. Journal, Vol. 1.), and to VAUGHAN, SHADWELL and PERCIVAL., whose observations are recorded in jam. Mease's On the Hydrophobia, Philadelphia, 1793.)
(An eight-year-old girl, in Glasgow, was bitten by a mad dog on the 21st of March, 1792. A surgeon immediately, exsected the wound altogether, kept it suppurating and gave mercury until it produced a mild salivation, which was kept tip for two weeks; nevertheless hydrophobia broke out on the 27th of April and the patient died on the 29th of April. M. DUNCAN'S Med. Comment, Dec. II., Vol. VII., Edinb. 1793, and The New London Med. journ., II.)
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For all these acute miasmatic diseases the human constitution possesses that process which, as a rule, is so beneficent: to wipe them out (i.e., the specific fever together with the specific eruption) in the course of from two to three weeks, and of itself to extinguish than again, through a kind of decision (crisis), from the organism, so that man then is wont to be entirely healed of them and, indeed, in a short time, unless he be killed by them.*
In the chronic miasmatic diseases nature observes the same course with respect to the mode of contagion and the antecedent formation of the internal disease, before the external declarative symptoms of its internal completion manifests itself on the surface of the body; but then that great remarkable difference from the acute diseases shows itself, that in the chronic miasmata the entire internal disease, as we have mentioned before, remains in the organism during the whole life, yea, it increases with every year, if it is not exterminated and thoroughly cured by art.
Of these chronic miasmata I shall for this purpose only adduce those two, which we know somewhat more exactly; namely, the venereal chancre and the itch.
In impure coition there arises, most probably at the very moment in the spot which is touched and rubbed, the specific contagion.
If this contagion has taken effect, then the whole living body is in consequence seized with it. Immediately after the moment of contagion the formation of the venereal disease in the whole of the
interior begins.
In that part of the sexual organs where the infection has taken place, nothing unnatural is noticed in the first days, nothing diseased, inflamed or corroded; so also all washing. and cleansing of the parts immediately after the impure coition is in vain. The spot remains healthy according to appearance, only the internal organism is called into activity by the infection (which occurs usually in a moment), so as to incorporate the venereal miasma and to become thoroughly diseased with the venereal malady.
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(* Or have these various, acute, half-spiritual miasmas the peculiar characteristic that - after, they have penetrated the vital force in the first moment of the contagion (and each one in its own way has produced disease) and them, like parasites, have quickly grown up within it and have usually developed themselves by their peculiar fever, after producing their fruit (the mature cutaneous eruption which is again capable of producing its miasma) - they again die out and leave the living organism again free to recover?
On the other hand, are not the chronic miasmas disease-parasites which continue to live as long as the man seized by them is alive, and which have their fruit in the eruption originally produced by them (the itch-pustule, the chancre and the fig-wart, which in turn are capable of infecting others and which do not die off of themselves like the acute miasmas, but can only be exterminated and annihilated by a counter-infection, by means of the potency of a medicinal disease quite similar to it and stronger than it (the anti-psoric), so that the patient is delivered from them and recovers his health?)
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Only when this penetration of all the organs by the disease caught has been effected, only when the whole being has been changed into a man entirely venereal, i.e., when the development of the venereal disease has been completed, only then diseased nature endeavors to mitigate the internal evil and to soothe it, by producing a local symptom which first shows itself as a vesicle (usually in the spot originally infected), and later breaks out into a painful ulcer called the chancre; this does not appear before five, seven or fourteen days, sometimes, though rarely, not before three, four or five weeks after the infection. This is therefore manifestly a chancre ulcer which acts vicariously for the internal malady, and which has been produced from within by the organism after it has become venereal through and through, and is able through its touch to communicate also to other men the same miasma; i.e., the venereal disease.
Now, if the entire disease thus arising is again extinguished through the internally given specific remedy, then the chancre also is healed and the man recovers.
But if the chancre is destroyed through local applications* before the internal disease is healed, - and this is still a daily practise with physicians of the old school, - the miasmatic chronic venereal remains in the organism as syphilis, and it is aggravated, if not then cured internally, from year to year until the end of man's life, the most robust constitution being unable to annihilate it within itself.
Only through the cure of the venereal disease, which pervades the whole internal of the body (as I have taught and practiced for many years), the chancre, its local symptom, will also simultaneously be cured in the most effective manner; and this is best without the use of any external application for its removal - while the merely local destruction of the chancre, without any previous general cure and deliverance of man from the internal disease, is followed by the most certain outbreak of syphilis with its sufferings.
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(*The venereal disease not only breaks out through the removal of the chancre by the cautery, - in which case some wretched casuists have considered syphilis as resulting from the driving back of the poison out of the chancre into the interior of the body, which up to this time is supposed by them to have been healthy, - no, even after the quick removal of the chancre without any external stimulants, the venereal disease breaks out, which gives additional conformation, if this were needed, of the indubitable pre-existence of syphilis in the system. Petit cut off a part of the labia minora, in which for some days a venereal chancre had appeared; the wound healed, indeed, but the venereal disease broke out notwithstanding. M. s. Fabre, Lettres, supplement à son traité des maladies vénériennes, Paris, 1786. Of course! because the venereal disease was present in the whole interior of the body even before the outbreak of the chancre.
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Psora (itch disease), like syphilis, is a miasmatic chronic disease, and its original development is similar.
The itch disease is, however, also the most contagious of all chronic miasmata, far more infectious than the other two chronic miasmata, the venereal chancre disease and the figwart disease. To effect the infection with the latter there is required a certain amount of friction in the most tender parts of the body, which are the most rich in nerves and covered with the thinnest cuticle, as in the genital organs, unless the miasma should touch a wounded spot. But the miasma of the itch needs only to touch the general skin, especially with tender children. The disposition of being affected with the miasma of itch is found with almost everyone and under almost all circumstances, which is not the case with the other two miasmata.
No other chronic miasma infects more generally, more surely, more easily and more absolutely than the miasma of itch; as already stated, it is the most contagious of all. It is communicated so easily, that even the physician, hurrying from one patient to another, in feeling the pulse has unconsciously * inoculated other patients with it; wash which is washed with wash infected with the itch; new gloves which had been tried on by an itch patient, a strange lodging place, a strange towel used for drying oneself have communicated this tinder of contagion; yea, often a babe, when being born, is infected while passing through the organs of the mother, who may be infected (as is not infrequently the case) with this disease; or the babe receives this unlucky infection through the hand of the midwife, which has been infected by another parturient woman (or previously); or, again, a suckling may be infected by its nurse, or, while on her arm, by her caresses or the caresses of a strange person with unclean hands; not to mention the thousands of other possible ways in which things polluted with this invisible miasma may touch a man in the course of his life, and which often can in no way be anticipated or guarded against, so that men who have never been infected by the psora are the exception. We need not to hunt for the causes of infection in crowded hospitals, factories, prisons, or in orphan houses, or in the filthy huts of paupers; even in active life, in retirement, and in the rich classes, the itch creeps in. The hermit on Montserrat escapes it as rarely in his rocky cell, as the little prince in his swaddling clothes of cambric.
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(* CAR. MUSITANI, Opera de tumoribus, Cup. 20.)
(As WILLIS has noticed in TURNER, des maladies de la peau, traduit de l'anglais, à Paris, 1783, Tom. II., Cap. 3, P.77.)
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As soon as the miasma of itch, e. g., touches the hand, in the moment when it has taken effect, it no more remains local. Henceforth all washing and cleansing of the spot avail nothing. Nothing is seen on the skin during the first days; it remains unchanged, and, according to appearance, healthy. There is no eruption or itching to be noticed on the body during these days, not even on the spot infected. The nerve which was first affected by the miasma has already communicated it in an invisible dynamic manner to the nerves of the rest of the body, and the living organism has at once, all unperceived, been so penetrated by this specific excitation, that it has been compelled to appropriate this miasma gradually to itself until the change of the whole being to a man thoroughly psoric, and thus the internal development of the psora, has reached completion.
Only when the whole organism feels itself transformed by this peculiar chronic-miasmatic disease, the diseased vital force endeavors to alleviate and to soothe the internal malady through the establishment of a suitable local symptom on the skin, the itch-vesicles. So long as this eruption continues in its normal form, the internal psora, with its secondary ailments, cannot break forth, but must remain covered, slumbering, latent and bound.
Usually it takes six, seven or ten, perhaps even fourteen days from the moment of infection before the transformation of the entire internal organism into psora has been effected. Then only, there follows after a slight or more severe chill in the evening and a general heat, followed by, perspiration in the following night, (a little fever which by many persons is ascribed to a cold and therefore disregarded), the outbreak of the vesicles of itch, at first fine as if from miliary fever, but afterwards enlarging on the skin* - first in the region of the spot first infected, and, indeed, accompanied with a voluptuously tickling itching - which may be called unbearably agreeable (Grimmen), which compels the patient so irresistibly to rub and to scratch the vesicles of itch, that, if a person restrains himself forcibly from rubbing or scratching, a shudder passes over the skin of the whole body. This rubbing and scratching indeed satisfies somewhat for a few moments, but there then follows immediately a long- continued burning of the part affected. Late in the evening and before midnight this itching is most frequent and most unbearable.
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(* Far from being an independent, merely local, cutaneous disease the vesicles or pustules of itch are the reliable proof that the completion of the internal psora has already been effected, and the eruption is merely an integrating factor of the same; for this peculiar eruption and this peculiar itching make a part of the essence of the whole disease in its natural, least dangerous state.)
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The vesicles of itch contain in the first hours of their formation a lymph clear as water, but this quickly changes into pus, which fills the tip of the vesicle.
The itching not only compels the patient to rub, but on account of its violence, as before mentioned, to rub and scratch open the vesicles; and the humor pressed out furnishes abundant material for infecting the surroundings of the patient and also other persons not yet infected. The extremities defiled even to an imperceptible degree with this lymph, so also the wash, the clothes and the utensils of all kinds, when touched, propagate the disease.
Only this skin symptom of the psora which has permeated the whole organism (and which as more manifestly falling under the cognizance of the senses has the name of itch), only this eruption, as well as the sores which later arise from it and are attended on their borders with the itching peculiar to psora, as also the herpes which has this peculiar itching and which becomes humid when rubbed (the tetter), as also the tinea capitis - these alone can propagate this to other persons, because they alone contain the communicable miasma of the psora. But the remaining secondary symptoms of the psora, which in time manifest themselves after the disappearance or the artificial expulsion of the eruption, i.e., the general psoric ailments, cannot at all communicate this disease to others. They are, so far as we know, just as little able to transfer the psora to others, as the secondary symptoms of the venereal disease are able to infect other men (as first observed and taught by J. HUNTER) with syphilis.
When the itch-eruption has only lately broken out and is not yet widely spread on the skin, nothing of the general internal malady of the psora is as yet to be noticed in the state of the patient. The emotional symptom acts as a substitute for the internal malady and keeps the psora with its secondary ailments as it were latent and confined.*
In this state, the disease is most easily cured through specific remedies internally administered.
But if the disease is allowed to advance in its peculiar course without the use of an internal curative remedy or an external application to drive away the eruption, the whole disease within rapidly increases, and this increase of the internal malady makes necessary a corresponding increase of the skin-symptom. The itch-eruption, therefore, in order to be able to soothe and to keep latent the increased internal malady, has to spread and must finally cover the whole surface of the body.
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(* As also the chancre, when not expelled, acts vicariously and soothingly for the syphilis within, and does not permit the venereal disease to break out, so long as it remains undisturbed in its place. I examined a woman who was free from all the secondary symptoms of the venereal disease; with her a chancre had remained in its place untreated for two years, and had gradually acquired the size of almost an inch in diameter. The best preparation of Mercury, internally administered soon and entirely healed, not only the internal malady, but also the chancre.)
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Chronic Diseases
Chronic Diseases - Samuel Hahnemann
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Yet even at this acme of the disease the patient still appears healthy in every other respect; all the symptoms of the internal Psora, now so much increased, still remain covered and assuaged through the skin-symptom augmented in the same proportion. But so great a torture, as is caused by so unbearable an itching spread over the whole body, even the most robust man cannot continue to bear. He endeavors to free himself from these torments at any price, and, as there is no thorough help for him with the physicians of the old school, he endeavors to secure deliverance at least from this eruption, which itches so unbearably, even if it should cost his life; and the means are soon furnished him, either by other ignorant persons, or by Allopathic physicians and surgeons. He seeks deliverance from his external tortures, without suspecting the greater misfortune which unavoidably follows, and is bound to follow, on the expulsion of the external skin-symptom (which hitherto has acted vicariously for the internal enlarged psora-disease), as has been sufficiently proved by the observations mentioned before. But when he thus drives away such an eruption of itch by external applications, he exposes himself to a similar misfortune, and acts just as unreasonably, as a person who in order to be quickly delivered from poverty, and thus as he supposes to make himself happy, steals a great sum of money, and is, therefore, sent to the dungeon and the gallows.
The longer the itch-disease has already lasted, whether the eruption, as is usually the case, has spread over the greater part of the skin, or whether, owing to a peculiar lack of activity in the skin, (as in some cases) the eruption has been confined to a few vesicles of itch* - in both cases, supposing only that the Psora together with its skin-symptom has grown old, the expulsion of the eruption of itch, whether greater or smaller or even as small as you please, is attended with the most destructive consequences on account of the internal itch-disease (psora) with its unspeakable sufferings, which, through its long continuance, has increased to a high degree and then unavoidably breaks forth.
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(* See the observation to No. 86. P.29)
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But the ignorance of the uninstructed layman may be pardoned if he drives out the itch-eruption and the troublesome itching by a cold shower-bath, by rolling in the snow, by cupping, or by rubbing the whole skin, or only the skin around the joints, with sulphur mixed with lard; for he does not know to what dangerous accidents and outbreaks of the Psora-disease, that lurks within, he thereby opens the door and ingress. But who will pardon the men whose office and duty it is to know the extent of the inevitably following, illimitable misfortune, resulting from the external expulsion of the itch-eruption, owing to the Psora which is then aroused from the whole organism, and who ought to have guarded against it in every way by a thorough internal cure of the whole of this disease,* when we see them treat the itch patients all in the same erroneous manner; yea, with even more violent internal and external remedies, sharp purgatives, with the Jasser ointment, with lotions of acetate of lead, with the sublimate of mercury or sulphate of zinc, but especially with an ointment prepared of fat with flowers of sulphur or with a preparation of mercury; with which they lightly and carelessly destroy the eruption, declaring this is merely an impurity located in the skin, and must be driven out; then everything will be well and the man will be healthy and free from every ailment. Who can pardon them if they are not willing to learn from the many warning examples recorded by the older, more conscientious observers, nor by the many thousands of other examples, which frequently, yea, almost daily, come before their eyes? Yet they cannot see nor be convinced as to the certain, quickly fatal or lifelong insidious misfortune they bring upon the itch-patient through the destruction of his eruption, as they thus merely unfetter the internal malady (psora), which is laden with innumerable ailments. This disease is neither destroyed nor cured; and so this thousand-headed monster, instead of being conquered, is inexorably let loose against the deceived patient to his destruction, by tearing down the barriers that shut it in.
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(* For even when the itch-disease has reached this high degree, the eruption, together with the internal malady, in one word, the whole psora, may still be healed by the internal, specific Homoeopathic remedies, with greater difficulty, indeed, than in the beginning, immediately after its origin, but still far more easily and certainly than after a complete expulsion of the eruption by mere external applications, when we must cure the internal psora as it brings forth its secondary symptoms and develops into nameless chronic diseases. The itch-disease, though it may have advanced so far, may nevertheless in its entire state be most easily, certainly and thoroughly cured, together with its external eruption, through the suitable internal remedies, without the least local application, just as the venereal chancre disease may most surely and easily be thoroughly cured often by the least, single dose of the best preparation of mercury internally administered - when the chancre, without calling in the aid of the remedy, quickly becomes a mild ulcer, and in a few days heals of itself, so that no trace of secondary symptoms (venereal disease) then ever appears or can appear, since the internal symptom has been cured together with the local symptoms, as I have taught for many years orally and in my writings, and have proved by my cures of this kind.
How can we excuse the whole host of physicians, who, hitherto, after treating this generally spread venereal disease for more than three hundred years, nevertheless remain so ignorant in recognizing its nature, that in looking at a chancre they even to this day acknowledge nothing diseased in the infected patient, but this same chancre, and do not see the syphilis, which was already present within and had been developed in the whole organism, even before the breaking out of the chancre; and so they blindly suppose, that the chancre is the only venereal evil which is to be extirpated, and that this needs but to be destroyed by external applications, in order to be able to declare the man cured; and this without being instructed, by the many thousand cases in their experience, that by the local extermination of the chancre they have never done anything but injury, as they have only deprived the syphilis pre-existing within of its diverting local symptoms and have thereby compelled the internal malady to break out only the more certainly and dreadfully (and in a manner more difficult of cure), as venereal disease. How can such a universal, pernicious obliquity of vision be excused?
Or why did these physicians never reflect on the origin of the figwarts? Why did they always overlook the internal universal malady, which is the cause of these excrescences? It is only when this is recognized, that it can be thoroughly cured by its Homoeopathic remedies, which then cause the figwarts to be healed, without the application of any external means of destruction.
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But even if a shadow of an excuse might be offered for this sad negligence and ignorance, and if anyone would claim that these physicians have only had three and one-half centuries, in which to discern clearly the true nature of syphilis, and that they might have learned this truth after a still more extended practice (still I have endeavored, though in vain, to convince them of their error a number of years ago and since then from time to time), nevertheless, that general negligence of previous physicians and, I may well say, their obstinate blindness, are quite without excuse, in that they did not recognize the internal pre-existing malady, the psora, which lies at the bottom of the itch-disease, which has infected men for several thousands of years, and that they ignored in their proud levity all the facts which point to it, so that they might continue the delusion and leave the world in its destructive infatuation that: the unbearably itching pustules are only a mere superficial ailment of the skin, and by their local destruction man is delivered from the whole disease, and has fully recovered.
Not perchance mere medical scribblers, no, the greatest and most celebrated physicians of modern and most modern days have made themselves guilty of this grievous error (or shall I say of this intentional crime), from VON HELMONT even to the latest advocates of the Allopathic medical practice.
By the use of the above mentioned remedies, they indeed usually reached their aim; i.e., the driving away of the eruption and of the itching from the skin, and they supposed in the intoxication of their spirit (or at least they pretended), they had destroyed the disease itself and, indeed, totally, and they sent away the patients, thus abused, assuring them that they were again healthy.
All the sufferings, which follow the one-sided destruction of the cutaneous eruption, which belongs to the natural form of the psora, they passed off as a newly arisen disease, owing to quite another origin. In their narrowness of mind, they never regarded the innumerable, plain testimonies of honest observers of earlier days, which record the sad consequences of the local expulsion of the itch-eruption, which often followed so closely, that a man would have to deny his reason, or else acknowledge them as the immediate result of the indwelling severe malady (the psora), which had been deprived of the local symptom (the cutaneous eruption), destined by nature to alleviate the internal malady, whence the uncured internal disease has been compelled to a manifest outbreak of its secondary symptoms.)
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It may easily be imagined, as experience, also teaches, that the more months a neglected itch-eruption, has flourished on the skin, the more surely has internal psora, which underlies it, been able to reach, in even a moderate space of time, a great - and finally its greatest - degree, which dreadful increase it also then proves through the more dangerous consequences, which the expulsion of so inveterate an eruption unavoidably draws after it in every case.
On the other hand, it is just as certain that the eruption of a few vesicles of itch which has broken out only a few days before, in consequence of a recent infection, may be expelled with less immediate danger; as the internal psora that has sprung up in the whole organism has not yet had time to grow up to a high degree, and we must confess that the expulsion of a few vesicles of itch, that have just arisen, often shows no immediate, manifestly strong, evil consequences. Wherefore with delicate and aristocratic persons, or their children, it usually remains unknown, that a single vesicle or, a few vesicles itching violently, which showed only a few days and were at once treated by the careful physician with lead ointment or a lotion of lead, and which disappeared the following day, had itch for their foundation.
However small the internal psora, may be at the time of the quick suppression of an itch-eruption, which has only developed a few vesicles and which is then followed by only moderate ailments and complaints (which are then usually, from ignorance, ascribed by the domestic physician to other causes of little import): the internal malady of psora, although as yet of slight degree, remains in its character and in its chronic nature the same general psoric disease of the whole organism; i.e., without the aid of art it is ineradicable, and cannot be extirpated by the strength of even the best and most robust bodily constitution, and it will increase even to the end of the patient's life. It is usually the case, indeed, that this disease, deprived as early as possible of the first traces of its cutaneous symptom by local applications, will grow but slowly in the beginning and will make but slow progress in the organism - much slower progress than where the eruption has been allowed to remain for a long time on the skin; for in the latter case the progress of the internal psora is of immense rapidity; but the disease, nevertheless, increases unceasingly, and even in the best cases and under the most favorable circumstances, quietly and often for years unperceived by the eyes; so that anyone, who does not know the signs of its latent presence, would suppose and declare such persons to be healthy and free from any internal malady. Often for years it does not manifest itself in prominent symptoms, which might be called manifest diseases.
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Many hundred observations have gradually acquainted me* with the signs, by which the internally slumbering, hitherto latent Psora (itch malady) may be recognized even in those cases where it has not yet manifested itself in any startling disease, so that I am able to root out and to thoroughly cure this malady with its roots, more easily before the internal psora has risen to a manifest (chronic) disease, and has developed to such a fearful height that the dangerous conditions make the cure difficult and in some cases impossible.
There are many signs of the psora which is gradually increasing within, but is as yet slumbering, and has not yet come to the full out-break of a manifest disease; but no one person has all these symptoms; the one has more of them, the other a smaller number; the one has at present only one of them, but in the course of time he will also have others; he may be free from some, according to the peculiar disposition of his body or according to the external circumstances of different persons.
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(* It was more easy to me, than to many hundreds of others, to find out and to recognize the signs of the Psora as well when latent and as yet slumbering within, as when it has grown to considerable chronic diseases, by an accurate comparison of the state of health of all such persons with myself, who, as is seldom the case, have never been afflicted with the psora, and have, therefore, from my birth even until now in my eightieth year, been entirely free from the (smaller and greater) ailments enumerated here and further below, although I have been, on the whole, very apt to catch acute epidemic diseases, and have been exposed to many mental exertions and thousand fold vexations of spirit.)
(Allopathy has also assumed hidden (latent) conditions of disease in patients, in order to explain, or, at least, to excuse its blind inroads with violent medicines, blood-letting, anodynes, etc. These so-called qualitates occultae Fernelli are, however, wholly suppositions and imaginary, as (according to the statement of this same physician) they are supposed not to be recognizable by any manifestations and symptoms. But whatever does not make known its hidden, imaginary existence by any sign does not exist for us men, who are limited by our Creator in our cognizance of things to observations - it is consequently a phantom of a roving fancy. It is quite different with the various forces slumbering (latent) in nature; despite their ordinary occultness, they, nevertheless, show themselves when the requisite circumstances and conditions appear; e.g., latent heat, even in metals that feel cold, is manifested when they are rubbed, just as the Psora manifests itself; e.g., as a drawing pain in the sheaths of the muscles, when the person infected with Psora has been, exposed to a draught, etc.
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SYMPTOMS OF LATENT PSORA.
Mostly with children: frequent discharge of ascarides and other worms; unsufferable itching caused by the latter in the rectum.
The abdomen often distended.
Now insatiable hunger, then again want of appetite.
Paleness of the face and relaxation of the muscles.
Frequent inflammations of the eyes.
Swellings of the cervical glands (scrofula).
Perspiration on the head, in the evening after going to sleep.
Epistaxis with girls and youths (more rarely with older persons), often very severe.
Usually cold hands or perspiration on the palms, (burning in the palms).
Cold, dry, or ill-smelling sweaty feet, (burning in the soles of the feet).
The arms or hands, the legs or feet, are benumbed by a slight cause.
Frequent cramps in the calves (the muscles of the arms and hands).
Painless subsultus of various portions of the muscles here and there on the body.
Frequent or tedious dry or fluent coryza or catarrh,* or impossibility of catching a cold even from the most severe exposure, even while otherwise having continually ailments of this kind.
Long continued obstruction of one or both nostrils.
Ulcerated nostrils (sore nose).
Disagreeable sensation of dryness in the nose.
Frequent inflammation of the throat, frequent hoarseness.
Short tussictilation in the morning.
Frequent attacks of dyspnoea.
Predisposition to catching cold (either in the whole body or only in the head, the throat, the breast, the abdomen, the feet; e.g., in a draught, (usually, when these parts are inclined to perspiration), and many other, sometimes long- continuing ailments arising therefrom.
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(* The epidemic catarrhal fevers and catarrhs which seize almost everyone, even the healthiest persons (Grippe, Influenza), do not belong to this category.)
(Persons not afflicted with psora through draughts and damp cold air may not be agreeable to them, do not suffer any colds or evil after-effects therefrom.)
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Predisposition to strains, even from carrying or lifting a slight weight, often caused even by stretching upward and reaching out the arms for objects which are hung high (so also a multitude of complaints resulting from a moderate stretching of the muscles: headache, nausea, prostration, tensive pain in the muscles of the neck and back, etc.)
Frequent one-sided headache or toothache, even from moderate emotional disturbances.
Frequent flushes of heat and redness of the face, not infrequently with anxiety.
Frequent falling out of hair of the head, dryness of the same, many scales upon the scalp.
Predisposition to erysipelas now and then.
Amenorrhoea, irregularities in the menses, too copious, too scanty, too early (too late), of too long duration, too watery, connected with various bodily ailments.
Twitching of the limbs on going to sleep.
Weariness early on awaking; unrefreshing sleep.
Perspiration in the morning in bed.
Perspiration breaks out too easily during the daytime, even with little movement (or inability to bring out perspiration).
White, or at least very pale tongue; still more frequently cracked tongue.
Much phlegm in the throat.
Bad smell from the mouth, frequently or almost constantly, especially early in the morning and during the menses, and this is perceived either as insipid, or as slightly sour, or as if from a stomach out of order, or as mouldy, also as putrid.
Sour taste in the mouth.
Nausea, in the morning.
Sensation of emptiness in the stomach.
Repugnance to cooked, warm food, especially to meat (principally with children).
Repugnance to milk.
At night or in the morning, dryness in the mouth.
Cutting pains in the abdomen, frequently or daily (especially with children), more frequently in the morning.
Hard stools, delaying usually more than a day, clotted, often covered with mucus (or nearly always soft, fermenting stools, like diarrhoea).
Venous knots on the anus; passage of blood with the stools.
Passing of mucus from the anus, with or without faeces.
Itching on the anus.
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Dark urine.
Swollen, enlarged veins on the legs (swollen veins, varices).
Chilblains and pains as from chilblains, even outside of the severe cold of winter; even, also, in summer.
Pains as of corns, without any external pinching of the shoes.
Disposition to crack, strain or wrench one joint or another.
Cracking of one or more joints on moving.
Drawing, tensive pains in the neck, the back, the limbs, especially, also, in the teeth (in damp, stormy weather, in northwest and northeast winds, after colds, overlifting, disagreeable emotions, etc.).
Renewal of pains and complaints while at rest, and disappearance of the same while in motion.
Most of the ailments come on at night, and are increased with a low barometer, with north and northeast* winds, in winter and towards spring.
Uneasy, frightful, or at least too vivid, dreams.
Unhealthy skin; every little lesion passes into sores, cracked skin of the hands and of the lower lips.
Frequent boils, frequent felons (whitlows).
Dry skin on the limbs; on the arms, the thighs, and also at times on the cheeks.
Here or there a rough, scaling spot on the skin, which causes at times a voluptuous itching and, after the rubbing a burning sensation.
Here or there at times, though seldom, a single insufferably pleasant, but unbearably itching vesicle, at its point sometimes filled with pus, and causing a burning sensation after rubbing, on a finger, on the wrist or in some other place.
Suffering from several or from a greater number of these ailments (even at various times and frequently), a person will still consider himself as healthy, and is supposed to be so by others. He may also lead a quite endurable life in such a state, and without much hindrance, attend to his business as long as he is young or still in his vigorous years, and so long as he does not suffer any particular mishap from without, has a satisfactory income, does not live in vexation or grief, does not overexert himself; but especially if he is of quite a cheerful, equable, patient, contented, disposition. With such persons the psora (internal itch malady), which may be recognized by a connoisseur by means of a few or by more of the above symptoms, may slumber on for many years within, without causing any continuing chronic disease.
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(* In Europe northeast winds are cold, sharp and dry, corresponding to our west winds.-Transl.)
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But still, even in such favorable external relations, as soon as these persons advance in age, even moderate causes (a slight vexation, or a cold, or an error in diet, etc.), may produce a violent attack of (however only a brief) disease: a violent attack of colic, inflammation of the chest or the throat, erysipelas, fever and the like, and the violence of these attacks seems to be out of proportion to its moderate cause. This is mostly wont to happen in fall or winter, but often also by preference in springtime.
But even where a person, whether a child or an adult, who has the psora slumbering within him, shows much semblance of health, but happens upon the opposite of the above-described favorable conditions of life, when his health and whole organism have been very much weakened and shaken by a prevalent epidemic fever or an infectious acute disease,* smallpox, measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever, purple rash, etc., or through an external severe lesion, a shock, a fall, a wound, a considerable burn, the breaking of an arm or a leg, a hard labor, the confinement due to a disease (usually helped on by the incorrect and weakening Allopathic treatment), confinement at a sedentary occupation in a gloomy, close room, weakening the vital force; the sad losses of beloved relatives bending down the soul with grief, or daily vexation and annoyance which embitter the life; deterioration of the food or an entire want of what is necessary and indispensable, exposure and inferior food beating down man's courage and strength; then the, psora, which has hitherto slumbered, awakes and shows itself in the heightened and augmented symptoms enumerated below, in its transition to the formation of severe maladies; one or another of the nameless (psoric) chronic diseases breaks out and most of all through weakening and exhausting improper treatment by allopathic physicians, they are aggravate from time to time without intermission, often to a fearful height, if external circumstances favorable for the patient do not interpose, and cause a moderation in the process of the malady.
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(* At the termination of an acute fever there often follows, as if incited by such a fever, an appearance of an old psora residing in the body, as an eruption of itch. This the physicians explain as a new generation of itch in this individual body replete with bad humors (scilicet), since they know nothing of a psora in man which may be quiescent for a long period. But the itch-disease cannot now be generated or arise or be created anew of itself, just as no smallpox or cow-pox, no measles, no venereal chancre disease, etc., can now make its appearance with any man without previous infection.)
(The one or the other disease, according to the original bodily constitution, a peculiar mode of living, a peculiar disposition of the mind often arising from the individual education or a more receptive or more weakened condition of some part of the body, gives a peculiar direction to the disease, and thus causes the itch disease to lead to the origin of the one or the other disease, so as to show itself preferably in that one direction and develop itself in that particular modification. A passionate, peevish disposition gives an extraordinary predisposition to the development of the psora; so also previous exhaustion through frequent pregnancies, excessive nursing of infants, extraordinary hardships, exhausting erroneous medical treatment, debauchery, and a profligate mode of living. The internal itch-disease is, as before mentioned, of such a peculiar nature that it may remain, as it were, tied down and covered up for a long through external favorable surroundings, so that a man may seem to the superficial observer healthy for years, even for many years, until circumstances unfavorable to the body or the soul, or to both, may arise, and serve as a hostile impulse to awaken the disease slumbering within and thus develop its germs. His acquaintances and his physician, yea, the patient himself, can not then comprehend how his health could so suddenly fall into a decline. To bring some examples for explanation from my own experience: After a simple fracture of a limb attended with confinement to bed for five or six weeks, there may follow diseased conditions of another kind, the cause of which cannot be guessed, which diseased condition, even when measurably removed, nevertheless returns, and which even without any error in diet nevertheless at their return show aggravation. This is mostly the case in fall (winter) and spring and becomes a tedious ailment increasing from year to year, a lasting cure for which, without the substitution of a still worse disease for it by an allopathic cure, has been hitherto vainly sought for in the councils of former physicians and also in visits to mineral springs. There are in man's life innumerable stumbling-blocks or unfavorable occurrences of this kind which serve to awaken the psora (the internal itch-disease) which till then has been slumbering (perhaps for a long time previously) and which cause its germs to develop. They are often of such a nature that the grave evils which gradually follow on them are out of all proportion to them, so that no rational man can consider those occurrences as sufficient causes for the chronic diseases which follow and which are often of a fearful character. But such a man is compelled to acknowledge a deeper seated hostile cause of these appearances, which cause has only now developed itself.
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For example, a young married woman who, viewed superficially and according to the common standard, was healthy, but who had in her childhood been infected with psora, had the misfortune to be thrown out of her carriage while in the third month of her pregnancy, from which she suffered not only slight injury and the fright, but also a miscarriage, and the attending loss of blood gave her a considerable set-back. In a few weeks, however, her youthful constitution had pretty well recovered, and she might have been of a speedy return to lasting good health, when the announcement of the dangerous illness of a beloved sister, living at a distance, threw her back and augmented her former ailments, which had not yet been quite removed, by the addition of a multitude of nervous disorders and convulsions, thus turning them into a serious illness. Better news from her sister, indeed, follow, and at last good news. At last her sister, entirely restored herself, pays her a visit. But the sick young wife still remains sick, and even if she seems to recover for a week or two, her ailments nevertheless return without any apparent cause. Every succeeding confinement, even when quite easy, every hard winter, adds new ailments to the old, or the former disorders change into others still more troublesome, so that at last there ensues a serious chronic illness though no one can see why the full vigor of youth, attended by happy external surroundings, should not have soon wiped out the consequence of that one miscarriage; still less can it be explained why the unfortunate impression of those sad tidings should not have disappeared, on hearing of the recovery of her sister, or at least on the actual presence of her sister fully restored.
Chronic Diseases - Samuel Hahnemann
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If the cause must at all times be proportionate to its effect and consequence, as is the in nature, no one can see how, after the removal of the causes assailing her health, the resulting ailments could not only continue, but even increase from year to year, if their cause were not in something else, something deeper, so those unhappy occurrences (the miscarriage and the sad tidings), since they both disappeared of themselves and therefore could not possibly yield a sufficient ground for the ensuing chronic disease, can only be regarded as the occasion, but not the efficient cause, of the development of a hostile power of greater importance, pre-existent in the internal organism but hitherto quiescent.
In a similar manner, a robust merchant, apparently healthy, despite some traces of internal psoral perceptible only to the professional examiner, may in consequence of unlucky commercial conjunctures become involved in his finances, even so as to approach bankruptcy, and at the same time he will fall gradually into various ailments and finally into serious illness. The death of a rich kinsman, however, and the gaining of a great prize in a lottery, abundantly cover his commercial losses; he becomes a man of means - but his illness, nevertheless, not only continues but increases from year to year, despite all medical prescriptions, in spite of his visiting the most famous baths, or rather, perhaps, with the assistance of these two causes.
A modest girl, who, excepting some signs of internal psora, was accounted quite healthy, was compelled into a marriage which made her unhappy of soul, and in the same degree her bodily health declined, without any trace of venereal infection. No allopathic medicine alleviates her sad ailments, which continually grow more threatening. But in the midst of this aggravation, after one year's suffering, the cause of her unhappiness, her hated husband, is taken from her by death, and she seems to revive, in the conviction, that she is now delivered from every occasion of mental or bodily illness, and hopes for a speedy recovery; all her friends hope the same for her, as the exciting cause of her illness lies in the grave. She also improves speedily, but unexpectedly she still remained an invalid, despite the vigor of her youth; yea, her ailments but seldom leave her, and are renewed from time to time without any external cause, and they are even aggravated from year to year in the rough months.
A person who had been unjustly suspected and become involved in a serious criminal suit, and who had before seemed healthy, with the exception of the marks of latent psora mentioned above, during these harassing months fell into various diseased states. But finally the innocence of the accused is acknowledged, and an honorable acquittal followed. We might suppose that such a happy, gratifying event would necessarily give new life to the accused and remove all bodily complaints. But this does not take place, the person still at times suffers from these ailments, and they are even renewed with longer or briefer intermissions, and are aggravated with the passing years, especially in the wintry seasons.
How shall we explain this? If that disagreeable event had been the cause, the sufficient cause, of these ailments, ought not the effect; i.e., the disease, to have entirely ceased of necessity, after the removal of the cause? But these ailments do not cease, they are in time renewed and even gradually aggravated, and it becomes evident that those disagreeable events could not have been the sufficient cause of the present ailments and complaints - it is seen that they only served as an occasion and impetus toward the development, of a malady, which till then only slumbered within.
The recognition of this old internal foe, which is so frequently present, and the science which is able to overcome it, make it manifest, that generally an indwelling itch (psora) was the ground of all these ailments, which can not be overcome even by the vigor of the best constitution, but only through art.)
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But even if favorable external conditions should again check the rapid development of a disease that has broken out, true health can not be lastingly restored by any of the modes of treatment hitherto known, and the customary allopathic treatments, with their aggressive, inappropriate remedies - such as baths, mercury, prussic acid, iodine, digitalis, quinine, starvation and other fashionable remedies included - only hasten death, the end of all those maladies which the physician cannot heal.
When once, under the above-mentioned unfavorable outward surroundings, the transition of the psora from its slumbering and bound condition to its awakening and outbreak has taken place, and the patient leaves himself to the injurious activity of the usual allopathic physician, who deems it appropriate to his office and his income to mercilessly assault the organism of the patient (as we are sorry to witness every day) with the battering-rams of his violent, inappropriate remedies and weakening treatments; - in such a case, the external circumstances of the patient and his situation with respect to his surroundings may have changed ever so favorably, but the aggravation of the disease nevertheless proceeds under such hands without any escape.
The awakening of the internal psora which has hitherto slumbered and been latent, and, as it were, kept bound by a good bodily constitution and favorable external circumstances, as well as its breaking out into more serious ailments and maladies, is announced by the increase of the symptoms given above as indicating the slumbering psora, and also by a numberless multitude of various other signs and complaints. These are varied according to the difference in the bodily constitution of a man, his hereditary disposition, the various errors in his education and habits, his manner of living and diet, his employments, his turn of mind, his morality, etc.
Then when the itch-malady develops into a manifest secondary disease there appear the following symptoms, which I have derived and observed altogether from accounts of diseases which I myself have treated successfully and which confessedly originated from the contagion of itch, and were mixed neither with syphilis nor sycosis.
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I am quite willing to believe that many more symptoms may have occurred in the experience of others.
I would only add further, that among the symptoms adduced there are also such as are entirely opposed to each other, the reason of which may be found in the varying bodily constitutions existing at the time - when the outbreak of the internal psora occurred. Yet the one variety of symptoms is found more rarely than the other and it offers no particular obstruction to a cure:
Vertigo; reeling while walking.
Vertigo; when closing the eyes, everything seems to turn around with him; he is at the same time seized with nausea.
Vertigo; on turning around briskly, he almost falls over.
Vertigo, as if there was a jerk in the head, which causes a momentary loss of consciousness.
Vertigo with frequent eructations.
Vertigo even when only looking down on the level ground, or when looking upward.
Vertigo while walking on a road not enclosed on either side, in an open plain.
Vertigo; she seems to herself now too large, now too small, or other objects have this appearance to her.
Vertigo, resembling a swoon.
Vertigo, passing over into unconsciousness.
Dizziness; inability to think or to perform mental labor.
Her thoughts are not under her control.
She is at times quite without thought (sits lost in thought).
The open air causes dizziness and drowsiness in the head.
Everything at times seems dark and black before his eyes, while walking or stooping, or when raising himself from a stooping posture.
Rush of blood to the head.1
Heat in the head (and in the face).2
A cold pressure on the top of the head.3
Headache, a dull pain in the morning immediately on waking up, or in the afternoon when walking rapidly or speaking loudly.
Headache on one side, with a certain periodicity (after 28, 14 or a less number of days), more frequently during full moon, or during the new moon, or after mental excitement, after a cold, etc.; a pressure or other pain on top of the head or inside of it, or a boring pain over one of the eyes.4
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(1 While the mind is uneasy, with anxiety and disinclination to work.)
(2 Not unfrequently accompanied with coldness of the hands and feet.)
(3 Usually accompanied with anxiety.)
(4 At the same time a great internal disquiet and anxiety, especially in the abdomen; a lack of stools, or frequent, scanty evacuations attended with anxiety; heaviness in the limbs, quivering in the whole body, tension of all the nerves with great irritability and sensitiveness; the eye can not bear any light, lachrymation, sometimes with swelling of the eyes; the feet are cold; at times attended with dry coryza; often chills, then again a flying heat; conjoined with this, continuous nausea, also at times, retching and vomiting; she lies either as if stunned, or throws herself anxiously from side to side, the attacks lasting from twelve to twenty-four and more hours. After these attacks either great weariness with sadness, or a feeling of tension all over the body. Before these attacks there are frequently jerks of the limbs during sleep and starting up from sleep, anxious dreams, gnashing of the teeth in sleep and tendency to start at any sudden noise.)
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Headache daily at certain hours; e.g., a stitching in the temples.1
Attacks of throbbing headache (e.g., in the forehead) with violent nausea as if about to sink down, or, also, vomiting; starting early in the evenings, repeated every fortnight, or sooner or later.
Headache as if the skull were about to burst open.2
Headache, drawing pains.3
Headache, stitches in the head (passing out at the ears).4 Roaring noise in the brain, singing, buzzing, humming, thundering, etc.
The scalp full of dandruff, with or without itching.
Eruption on the head, tinea capitis, malignant tinea with crusts of greater or less thickness, with sensitive stitches when one of the places becomes moist; when it becomes moist a violent itching; the whole crown of the head painfully sensitive to the open air; with it hard swellings of the glands in the neck.
The hair of the head as if parched.
The hair of the head frequently falls out, most in front, on the crown and top of the head; bald spots or beginning baldness of certain spots.
Under the skin are formed painful lumps, which come and pass away, like bumps and round tumors.5
Feeling of contraction in the skin of the scalp and the face.
Paleness of the face during the first sleep, with blue rings around the eyes.
Frequent redness of the face, and heat.6
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(1 Which also swell at times, with lachrymation of the one eye.)
(2 In some cases a drawing pain from the nape of the neck toward the occiput, at times also over the whole head and face, which is often bloated from it, while the head aches when touched, not infrequently attended with nausea.)
(3 Usually while walking, especially while walking and moving after meals.)
(4 At the same time everything frequently appears dark before her face.)
(5 Which also in rare cases pass over into suppuration.)
(6 He at times also becomes quite weak and weary from it or anxious, and he perspires on the upper part of the body; his eyes at times become dim; everything becomes black before his eyes, his mind is sad; his head also feels as if too full, with burning in the temples.)
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Yellowish, yellow color of the face.
Sallow yellowish complexion.
Erysipelas on the face.1
Pressive pain on the eyes, especially late in the evening; he must shut them.
He cannot look long at anything, else everything flickers before him; objects seem to move.
The eyelids, especially in the morning, are as if closed; he cannot open them (for minutes; yea, even for hours); the eyelids are heavy as if paralyzed or convulsively closed.
The eyes are most sensitive to daylight; they are pained by it and close involuntarily.2
Sensation of cold in the eyes.
The canthi are full of pus-like mucus (eye-gum).
The edges of the eyelids full of dry mucus.
On the edges of the eyelids, inflammation of single Meibomian glands or of several of them.
Inflammations of the eyes, of various kinds.3
Yellowness around the eyes.
Yellowness of the white of the eye.4
Dim, opaque spots on the cornea.5
Dropsy of the eye.
Obscuration of the crystalline lens, cataract.
Squinting.
Far-sightedness; he sees far in the distance, but cannot clearly distinguish small objects held close.
Short-sightedness; he can see even small objects by holding them close to the eye, but the more distant the object is, the more indistinct it appears, and at a great distance he does not see it.
False vision; he sees objects double, or manifold, or only the one-half of them.
Before his eyes there are floating as it were flies, or black points, or dark streaks, or networks, especially when looking into bright daylight.
The eyes seem to look through a veil or a mist; the sight becomes dim at certain times.
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(1 In some cases with much fever, also at times with burning, itching, stinging watery blisters in the face, which turn into scabs (Erysipelas bullosum.)
(2 Usually with more or less inflammation.)
(3 The fistula lachrymalis has probably never any other cause than the itch-disease.)
(4 Or grey color of the same.)
(5 Even without having had any previous inflammation of the eyes.)
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Night blindness; he sees well in daytime, but, in the twilight he cannot see at all.
Blindness by day; he can only see well during the twilight.
Amaurosis; uninterrupted dimness of vision1 increased finally even to blindness.
Painfulness of various spots in the face, the cheeks, the cheek-bones, the lower jaw, etc., when touched; while chewing, as if festering inwardly; also like stitches and jerks; especially in chewing there are jerks, stitches and a tension so that he cannot eat.2
The hearing is excessively irritated and sensitive; she cannot bear to hear a bell ring without trembling; he is thrown into convulsions by the beating of the drum, etc.; many sounds cause pain in the ear.
There are stitches in the ear, outwardly.3
Crawling sensation and itching in the ear.
Dryness in the ear; dry scabs within, without any ear-wax.
Running from the ear of thin, usually ill-smelling pus.
Pulsation in the ear.
Various sounds and noises in the ear.4
Deafness of various degrees even up to total deafness, with or without noise in the ear; occasionally worse, according to the weather.
Swelling of the parotid glands.5
Epistaxis, more or less profusely, more or less frequently.
The nostrils as it were stopped up.6
Sensation of dryness in the nose, troublesome even when the air passes freely.
Polypi of the nose (usually with the loss of the power of smelling); these may extend also through the nasal passages into the fauces.
Sense of smell, weak, lost.
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(1 More frequently without opacity of the crystalline lens than with it.)
(2 During chewing or speaking there is at times also a similar twitching on the sides of the head, where protuberances like painful bumps often arise. When the pain is still more unbearable and at times combined with a burning pain, it is called Fothergill's pain in the face.)
(3 Especially while walking in the open air.)
(4 Such as clinking, rushing, seething, roaring, humming, chirping, ringing, drumming, thundering, whizzing, fluttering, murmuring, etc.)
(5 Often with stinging pains in the glands.)
(6 Either one or both, or alternately, first one, then the other; often there is only the sensation of being stopped up, while the air can be freely drawn in through it.)
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Sense of smell perverted.1
Too violent sensation of smell, higher and highest sensitiveness for even imperceptible odors.
Scabs in the nose; discharge of pus or hardened clots of mucus.2
Fetid smell in the nose.
Nostrils frequently ulcerated, surrounded with, pimples and scabs.
Swelling and redness of the nose or the tip of the nose, frequent or continual.
Under the nose or on the upper lip, long-lasting scabs or itching pimples.
The red of the lips is quite pale.
The red of the lips is dry, scabby, peeling off; it chaps.
Swelling of the lips, especially of the upper lip.3
The inside of the lips is lined with little sores or blisters.4
Cutaneous eruption of the beard and of the roots of the hairs of the beard, with itching.
Eruptions of the face of innumerable kinds.5
Glands of the lower jaw swollen, sometimes passing over into chronic suppuration.
Glandular swellings down the sides of the neck.
Gums bleeding at a slight touch.
Gums, the external or the internal, painful, as if from wounds.
Gums, with erosive itching.
Gums, whitish, swollen, painful on touching.
Gums, recession, leaving the front teeth and their roots bare.
Gnashing of the teeth during sleep.
Looseness of the teeth, and many kinds of deterioration of the teeth, even without toothache.
Toothache of innumerable varieties, with varying causes of excitation.
She cannot remain in bed at night, owing to toothache
On the tongue, painful blisters and sore places.
Tongue white, coated white or furred white.
Tongue pale, bluish-white.
Tongue full of deep furrows; here and there, as if torn above.
Tongue dry.
Sensation of dryness on the tongue, even while it is properly moist.
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(1 E.g., the smell of manure or some other peculiar smell is in the nose.)
(2 Sometimes also a discharge of acrid mucus from the nose.)
(3 At times with a burning, biting pain.)
(4 Often very painful, coming and passing away.)
(5 Milk-crust, pimples, blotches, herpes and carcinomatous ulcers of the nose, lips and face (also called cancer), with burning and stinging pain.)
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Stuttering, stammering; also at times sudden attacks of inability to speak.
On the inside of the cheeks painful blisters or sores.
Flow of blood from the mouth; often severe.
Sensation of dryness of the whole internal mouth, or merely in spots, or deep down in the throat.1
Fetid smell from the mouth.
Burning in the throat.
Constant flow of saliva, especially while speaking, particularly in the morning.
Continual spitting of saliva.
Frequent mucus deep down in the throat (the fauces), which he has to hawk up and expectorate frequently during the day, especially in the morning.
Frequently inflammation of the throat, and swelling of the parts used in swallowing.
Insipid, slimy taste in the mouth.
Intolerably sweet taste in the mouth, almost constantly.
Bitter taste in the mouth, mostly in the morning.2
Sourish and sour taste in the mouth, especially after eating, though the food tasted all right.3
Putrid and fetid taste in the mouth.
Bad smell in the mouth, sometimes mouldy, sometimes putrid like old cheese, or like fetid foot-sweat, or like rotten sour kraut.
Eructations, with the taste of the food, several hours after eating.
Eructations, empty, loud, of mere air, uncontrollable, often for hours, not infrequently at night.
Incomplete eructation, which causes merely convulsive shocks in the fauces, without coming out of the mouth.
Eructation, sour, either fasting or after food, especially after milk.
Eructation, which excites to vomiting.
Eructation, rancid (especially after eating fat things).
Eructation, putrid or mouldy, early in the morning.
Frequent eructations before meals, with a sort of rabid hunger.
Heartburn, more or less frequent; there is a burning along the chest, especially after breakfast, or while moving the body.
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(1 Chiefly on waking up at night or in the morning, with or without thirst; with a great deal of dryness in the throat, often a pricking pain in swallowing.)
(2 Not rarely, this is constant.)
(3 Rarely an offensively sweet taste in the mouth, even without eating or drinking.)
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Water-brash, a gushing discharge of a sort of salivary fluid from the stomach, preceded by writhing pains in the stomach (the pancreas), with a sensation of weakness (shakiness), nausea causing as it were a swoon, and gathering of the saliva in the mouth, even at night.1
The ruling complaints in any part of the body are excited after eating fresh fruit, especially if this is acidulous, also after acetic acid (in salads, etc.).
Nausea early in the morning.2
Nausea even to vomiting, in the morning immediately after rising from bed, decreasing from motion.
Nausea always after eating fatty things or milk.
Vomiting of blood.
Hiccough after eating or drinking.
Swallowing impeded by spasms, even causing a man to die of hunger.
Spasmodic, involuntary swallowing.
Frequent sensation of fasting and of emptiness in the stomach (or abdomen), not unfrequently with much saliva in the mouth.
Ravenous hunger (canine hunger), especially early in the morning; he has to eat at once else he grows faint, exhausted and shaky, (or if he is in the open air he has to lie straight down).
Ravenous hunger with rumbling and grumbling in the abdomen.
Appetite without hunger; she has a desire to swallow down in haste various things without there being any craving therefor in the stomach.
A sort of hunger; but when she then eats ever so little, she feels at once satiated and full.
When she wants to eat, she feels full in the chest and her throat feels as if full of mucus.
Want of appetite; only a sort of gnawing, turning and writhing in the stomach urges her to eat.
Repugnance to cooked, warm food, especially to boiled meat, and hardly any longing for anything but rye-bread (with butter), or for potatoes.3
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(1 This also at times turns into vomiting of water, mucus, or a gush of acrid acid - more frequently after eating flour dumplings, vegetables causing flatulence, baked prunes, etc.)
(2 Often coming very suddenly.)
(3 Especially in youth and childhood.)
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In the morning, at once, thirst; constant thirst.
In the pit of the stomach there is a sensation of swelling painful to the touch.
Sensation of coldness in the pit of the stomach.
Pressure in the stomach or in the pit of the stomach, as from a stone, or a constricting pain (cramp).1
In the stomach, beating and pulsation, even when fasting.
Spasm in the stomach; pain in the pit of the stomach as if drawn together.2
Griping in the stomach; a painful griping in the stomach;3 it suddenly constricts the stomach, especially after cold drinking.
Pain in the stomach, as if sore, when eating even the most harmless kinds of foods.
Pressure in the stomach, even when fasting, but more from every kind of food, or from particular dishes, fruit, green vegetables, rye-bread, food containing vinegar, etc.4
During eating, feels dizzy and giddy, threatening to fall to one side.
After the slightest supper, nocturnal heat in bed; in the morning, constipation and exceeding lassitude.
After meals, anxiety and cold perspiration with anxiety.5
During eating, perspiration.
Immediately after eating, vomiting.
After meals, pressure and burning in the stomach, or in the epigastrium, almost like heartburn.
After eating, burning in oesophagus from below upward.
After meals, distension of the abdomen.6
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(1 In some cases even while fasting, and causing him to wake up out of sleep at night, sometimes oppressing the breathing.)
(2 Usually a short time after eating.)
(3 Not infrequently with vomiting of mucus and water, without which in such a case the griping is not alleviated.)
(4 Even after partaking of the slightest quantity of such things, there may also ensue colic, pain or numbness of the jaws, tearing pain in the teeth, copious accumulation of mucus in the throat, etc.)
(5 There may also be pains, renewed now and then; e.g., stitches in the lips, griping and digging in the abdomen, pressure in the chest, heaviness in the back and the small of the back, even to nausea; when nothing but an artificially excited vomiting will give relief. With some the anguish is aggravated after eating, even to an impulse to destroy themselves by strangulation.)
(6 With this, at times, weariness in the arms and legs.)
Chronic Diseases - Samuel Hahnemann
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After meals, very tired and sleepy.1
After meals, as if intoxicated.
After meals, headache.
After meals, palpitation of the heart.
Alleviation of several, even remote, complaints from eating.
The flatus does not pass off, but moves about, causing many ailments of body and of spirit.2
The abdomen is distended by flatus,3 the abdomen feels full, especially after a meal.
Sensation as if the flatus ascended; followed by eructations - then often a sensation of burning in the throat, or vomiting by day and by night.
Pain in the hypochondria when touched, and in motion, or also during rest.
Constricting pain in the epigastrium, immediately under the ribs.
Cutting pains in the abdomen, as if from obstructed flatus; there is a constant sensation of fullness in the abdomen - the flatus rises upwards.
Cutting pains in the abdomen almost daily, especially with children, oftener in the morning than in other parts of the day, sometimes day and night, without diarrhoea.
Cutting pains in the abdomen, especially on the one side of the abdomen, or the groin.4
In the abdomen, qualmishness, a sensation of voidness, disagreeable emptiness,5 even immediately after eating, he felt as if he had not eaten anything.
From the small of the back, around the abdomen, especially below the stomach, a sensation of constriction as from a bandage, after she had had no stool for several days.
Pain in the liver, when touching the right side of the abdomen.
Pain in the liver, a pressure and tension-a tension below the ribs on the right side.
Below the last ribs (in the hypochondria), a tension and pressure all over, which checks the breathing and makes the mind anxious and sad.
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(1 Often until the patient lies down and sleeps.)
(2 At times drawing pains in the, limbs, especially in the lower limbs, or stitches in the pit of the stomach, or in the side of the abdomen, etc.)
(3 The flatus often ascends; less frequently a great quantity of flatus is charged, especially in the morning, without smell and without alleviating the other ailments; in other cases flatulence, with a great quantity of excessively fetid flatus passing off.)
(4 The cutting pain also at times passes down into the rectum and down the thigh.)
(5 In some cases alternating with a contractive pain in the abdomen.)
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Pain in the liver, stitches - mostly when stooping quickly.
Inflammation of the liver.
Pressure in the abdomen as from a stone.1
Hardness of the abdomen.
Crampy colic, a grasping pain in the bowels.
In colic, coldness on one side of the abdomen.
A clucking, croaking and audible rumbling and grumbling in the abdomen.2
So-called uterine spasms, like labor pains, grasping pains often compelling the patient to lie down, frequently quickly distending the abdomen without flatulence.
In the lower abdomen, pains pressing down toward the genitals.3
Inguinal hernias, often painful while speaking and singing.4
Swellings of the inguinal glands, which sometimes turn into suppuration.
Constipation; delayed stools sometimes for several days, not infrequently with repeated ineffectual urging to stool.
Stools hard, as if burnt, in small knots, like sheep-dung, often covered with mucus, sometimes also enveloped by veinlets of blood.
Stools of mere mucus (mucous piles).
Passage of round worms from the anus.
Discharge of pieces of tape-worm.
Stools, in the beginning very hard and troublesome, followed by diarrhoea.
Very pale, whitish stool.
Grey stools.
Green stools.
Clay-colored stools.
Stools with putrid, sour smell.
At the stools, cutting pains in the rectum.
Stools show diarrhoea for several weeks, months, years.5
Frequently repeated diarrhoea, with cutting pains in the abdomen, lasting several days.
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(1 Which often rises to the pit of the stomach, digging and causing vomiting.)
(2 At times only in the left side of the abdomen, passing upwards with the inspiration and downward with the expiration.)
(3 Pressing down as if to cause a prolapsus, and when it is passed she feels heavy in all her limbs, the limbs go to sleep; she must stretch and extend her limbs.)
(4 Inguinal hernias rise as a rule only from internal psora, excepting the few cases, when these parts are injured by great external violence, or when the hernia arises from superhuman exertions of the body through lifting or pushing quickly, while in a great fright.)
(5 Usually preceded by rumbling or fermentation in the abdomen; chiefly in the morning.)
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After a stool, especially after a softer, more copious evacuation, great and sudden prostration.1
Diarrhoea, soon so weakening, that she cannot walk alone.
Painless and painful haemorrhoidal varices on the anus, 2 the rectum (blind piles).
Bleeding haemorrhoidal varices on the anus or in the rectum3 (running piles), especially during stools, after which the haemorrhoids often pain violently for a long time.
With bloody discharges in the anus or in the rectum, ebullition of blood through the body and short breathing.
Formication and itching formication in the rectum, with or without the discharge of ascarides.
Itching and erosion in the anus and the perineum.
Polypi in the rectum.
During micturition, anxiety, also at times prostration.
At times too much urine is discharged, succeeded by great weariness.4
Painful retention of urine (with children and old people).
When he is chilled (feels cold through and through), he cannot urinate.
At times owing to flatulence, she cannot urinate.
The urethra is constricted in parts, especially in the morning.5
Pressure on the bladder, as if from an urging to urinate, immediately after drinking.
He cannot hold the urine for any length of time, it presses on the bladder, and passes off while he walks, sneezes, coughs or laughs.
Frequent micturition at night; he has to get up frequently at night for that purpose.
Urine passes off in sleep involuntarily.
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(1 Especially, weakness in the pit of the stomach, anxiety, restlessness, also at times chills in the abdomen or the small of the back, etc.)
(2 Which not infrequently have a slimy fluid oozing from them.)
(3 Fistula in ano have probably never any other cause than this malady, especially when to this there are added a stimulating diet, an excess in spirituous liquors, frequent laxatives, a sedentary occupation and abuse of the sexual instinct.)
(4 Diabetes, which with Allopathic remedies is usually so fatal, has probably never any other origin than this malady.)
(5 The urine frequently passes off as thin as a thread, or the stream spreads out; the urine is only discharged in jerks at long intervals; these interruptions are frequently caused by a spasm in the neck, of the bladder which antagonizes the action of the bladder and springs from the same psoric malady. So also inflammation of the bladder from strictures of the urethra, and the fistula in vesica are always of psoric origin, though in rare cases sycosis may be complicated with the psora.)
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After urinating, the urine continues to drip out for a long time,.
Whitish. urine, with a sweetish smell and taste, passes off in excessive abundance, with prostration, emaciation and inextinguishable thirst (diabetes).
During urination, burning, also lancinating pains in the urethra and the neck of the bladder.
Urine of penetrating, sharp odor.
The urine quickly deposits a sediment.
The urine discharged is at once turbid like whey.
With the urine there is discharged from time to time a red sand (kidney grits).
Dark-yellow urine.
Brown urine.
Blackish urine.
Urine with blood particles, also at times complete hematuria.
Discharge of prostatic fluid after urination, but especially after a difficult stool (also almost constant dripping of the same).1
Nocturnal passage of semen, too frequent, one, two or three times a week, or even every night.2
Nightly discharge of the genital fluid in a women, with voluptuous dreams.
Nocturnal pollutions, even if not frequent, yet immediately attended by evil consequences.3
Semen passes off almost involuntarily the daytime, with little excitation, often even without erection.
Erections very frequent, long continuing, very painful without pollutions.
The semen is not discharged, even during a long-continued coition and with a proper erection,4 but it passes off afterward in nocturnal pollutions or with the urine.
Accumulation of water in the tunica vaginalis of the testicle (hydrocele).
There is never a complete erection, even with the most voluptuous excitement.
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(1 Sometimes also consumption from the constant oozing out of the prostatic fluid.)
(2 With healthy chaste young men, pollutions naturally only take place every twelve or fourteen days, without any attending troubles, and they are (followed by cheerfulness and a feeling of strength and serenity.)
(3 Gloominess, obtuseness, dimness of the thinking powers, diminished vividness of the imagination, want of memory, depression, melancholy; the vision is weakened, as well as the digestion and the appetite; stools are retained, a rush of blood to the head ensues, also toward the anus, etc.)
(4 The testicles in such a case are never drawn up to the body, but hang down more or less.)
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Painful twitches in the muscles of the penis.
Itching of the scrotum, which is sometimes beset with pimples and scabs.
One or both of the testicles chronically swollen, or showing a knotty infection (Sarcocele).
Dwindling, diminution, disappearance of one or both testicles.
Induration and enlargement of the prostatic gland.
Drawing pain in the testicle and the spermatic chord.
Pain as from contusion in the testicle.
Lack of the sexual desire in both sexes, either frequent or constant.1
Uncontrollable insatiable lasciviousness,2 with a cachectic complexion and sickly body.
Sterility, impotence, without any original organic defect in the sexual parts.3
Disorders of the menstrual function; the menses do not appear regularly on the twenty-eighth day after their last appearance, they do not come on without other ailments and not at once, and do not continue steadily for three or four days with a moderate quantity of healthy-colored, mild blood, until on the fourth day it imperceptibly comes to an end without any disturbance of the general health of body and spirit; nor are the menses continued to the forty-eighth or fiftieth year, nor do they cease gradually and without any troubles.
The menses are slow in setting in after the fifteenth year and later, or after appearing one or more times, they cease for several months and for years.4
The menses do not keep their regular periods, they either come several days too early, sometimes every three weeks, or even every fortnight.5
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(1 Often for, years, yea, for many years. The male and the female genital parts cannot then be excited to any agreeable or voluptuous sensation - the body of the male penis hangs down relaxed, is thinner than the glans penis, which feels cold and is of a bluish or white color; in the female parts the labia are not excitable, they are relaxed and small; the vagina almost numb and insensible, and usually dry; sometimes there is a falling out of the hair of the pudenda, or entire bareness of the female genital parts.)
(2 Metromania and Nymphomania are of the same origin.)
(3 Too frequent coition from impotent lasciviousness, with too sudden a passing off of immature, watery semen, or lack of erection, or lack of the issue of semen, or lack of sexual desire - menses too copious, or a constant flow of blood watery, scanty or deficient menses; copious discharge of mucus from the vagina (leucorrhoea), indurated ovaries, the breasts have either dwindled down or become knotty; insensibility, or merely painful sensibility of the genital organs, are merely the proximate usual symptoms of sterility or impotence with the one sex or the other.)
(4 Consequent sallow paleness and tumefaction of the face, heaviness of the limbs, swelling of the feet, chilliness, weariness, asthma (chlorosis), etc.
(5 The menses rarely come several days too late, and flow then in too great abundance, with prostrating weariness and many other ailments.
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The menses flow only one day, only a few hours, or in imperceptibly small quantities.
The menses flow for five, six, eight and more days, but only intermittently, a little flow every six, twelve, twenty-four hours, and then they cease for half or whole days, before more is discharged.
The menses flow too strongly, for weeks, or return almost daily (bloody flux).1
Menses of watery blood or of brown clots of blood.
Menses of very fetid blood.
Menses accompanied with many ailments, swoons or (mostly stitching) headaches, or contractive, spasmodic, cutting pains in the abdomen and in the small of the back; she is obliged to lie down, vomit, etc.
Polypi in the vagina.
Leucorrhoea from the vagina, one or several days before, or soon after, the monthly flow of blood, or during the whole time from the one menstrual discharge to the other, with a diminution of the menses, or continuing solely instead of the menses; the flow is like milk, or like white, or yellow mucus, or like acrid, or sometimes like fetid, water.2
Premature births.
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(1 Often followed by swelling of the face, of the hands and feet, painful in the breast and the abdomen, innumerable ailments from nervous debility, excessive sensitiveness, as well in general, as of particular sensory organs, etc., and before the appearance of the flow, anxious dreams, frequent awakenings with a rush of blood to the head, palpitation., restlessness, etc. With a more violent flow of blood from the uterus, there are often cutting pains in the one side of the abdomen and in the groin; the cutting pain sometimes descends into the rectum and into the thigh; then she frequently cannot urinate, or sit down, on account of her pains; after these pains the abdomen aches as if it were festering.)
(2 Leucorrhoea, especially the more malignant kind, is accompanied by an innumerable multitude of ailments. Not to mention the lesser ones (such as the itching of the pudenda and the vagina, with excoriation on the outside of the pudenda and the adjacent part of the thigh, especially in walking), hysterical states of all kinds follow the more severe cases of this troublesome flux, as also disturbances of the mind and spirit, melancholy, insanity, epilepsy, etc. Often it comes in the form of an attack, and then it is preceded by a digging in the one side of the abdomen, or by burning in the stomach, in the lower abdomen, in the vagina, or stitches in the vagina and in the mouth of the uterus, or a constrictive pain in the uterus and pressure toward the vagina as if everything were about to fall out, also at times most keen pains in the small of the back; the flatus is obstructed, causing pain, etc. Has the so-called uterine cancer any other origin than this (psora) malady?
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During pregnancies great weariness, nausea, frequent vomiting, swoons, painful varicose veins on the thighs and the legs, and also at times on the labia, hysteric ailments of various kinds, etc.
Coryza at once, whenever she comes into the open air; then usually a stuffed coryza while in her room.
Dry coryza and a stuffed nose often, or almost constantly, also sometimes with intermissions.
Fluent coryza at the least taking of cold, therefore mostly in the inclement season and when it is wet.
Fluent coryza, very often, or almost constantly, also in some cases uninterruptedly.
He cannot take cold, even though there have been strong premonitory symptoms of it, simultaneously with other great ailments from the itch malady.
Hoarseness, after the least amount of speaking; she must vomit in order to clear her voice.
Hoarseness, also sometimes aphony (she cannot speak loud but must whisper), after a slight cold.
Constant hoarseness and aphony for years; he cannot speak a loud word.
Suppuration of the larynx and the bronchia (laryngo-bronchial phthisis).1
Hoarseness and catarrh very often, or almost constantly; his chest is continually affected.
Cough; frequent irritation and crawling in the throat; the cough torments him, until perspiration breaks out on his face (and on his hands).
Cough, which does not abate until there is retching and vomiting, mostly in the morning or in the evening.
Cough, which terminates every time with sneezing.
Cough, mostly in the evening after lying down and whenever the head lies low.
Cough, waking the patient up after the first brief sleep.
Cough, especially in the night.
Cough, worst after awaking in the morning.
Cough, worst after eating.
Cough, at once, with every deep breath.
Cough, causing a sensation of soreness in the chest, or at times stitches in the side of the chest or the abdomen.
Dry cough.
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(1 Inflammation of the larynx (croup) cannot take place with any child that is free from latent psora or has been made free from it by treatment.)
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Cough, with yellow expectoration resembling pus, with or without spitting of blood.1
Cough, with excessive expectoration of mucus and sinking of strength (mucous phthisis).
Attacks of whooping cough.2
Violent, at times unbearable stitches in the chest at every breath; cough impossible for pain; without inflammatory fever (spurious pleurisy).
Pain in the chest on walking, as if the chest was about to burst.
Pressive pain in the chest, at deep breathing or at sneezing.
Often a slightly constrictive pain in the chest, which, when it does not quickly pass, causes the deepest dejection.3
Burning pain in the chest.
Frequent stitches in the chest, with or without cough.
Violent stitches in the side; with great heat of the body, it is almost impossible to breathe, on account of stitches in the chest with haemoptysis and headache; he is confined to his bed.
Night-mare; he usually suddenly awakes at night from a frightful dream, but cannot move, nor call, nor speak, and when he endeavors to move, he suffers intolerable pains, as if he were being torn to pieces.4
Obstruction of the breath, with stitching pains in the chest at the slightest amount of walking;5 he cannot go a step farther (angina pectoris).
Asthma, merely when moving the arms, not while walking.
Attacks of suffocation especially after midnight; the patient has to sit up, sometimes he has to leave his bed, stand stooping forward, leaning on his hands; he has to open the windows, or go out into the open air, etc.; he has palpitations; these are followed by eructations or yawning, and the spasm terminates with or without coughing and expectoration.
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(1 Suppurative pulmonary phthisis has probably seldom any other cause than this malady, even when it seems as if the fumes of quicksilver or arsenic had caused it; at least most of these cases of suppurative phthisis originate in pneumonias mismanaged with blood-letting, and this disease may always be considered as the manifestation of latent Psora.)
(2 She is suddenly compelled to cough, but cannot do so, as her breath fails her, even to suffocation, with a dark-red, bloated face; usually the oesophagus is then also constricted, so that not a drop of water will pass; after eight or ten minutes, there follow eructations from the stomach, and the spasm terminates.)
(3 Usually the attacks last from evening to morning, the whole night.)
(4 Such attacks, in some cases, also occur several times in one night, especially when he has not been out in the open air during the day.)
(5 especially when ascending a height.)
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Palpitation with anxiety, especially at night.
Asthma, loud, difficult, at times also sibilant respiration.
Shortness of breath.
Asthma, on moving, with or without cough.
Asthma, mostly while sitting down.
Asthma, spasmodic; when she comes into the open air it takes her breath.
Asthma, in attacks, lasting several weeks.
Dwindling of the breasts, or excessive enlargement of the same, with retroceding nipples.
Erysipelas on one of the breasts (especially while nursing).
A hard, enlarging and indurating gland with lancinating pains in one of the mammae.1
Itching, also moist and scaly eruptions around the nipples.
In the small of the back, in the back and in the nape of the neck, drawing (tearing), tensive pains.
Lancinating, cutting, painful stiffness of the nape of the neck; of the small of the back.
Pressive pain between the shoulder-blades.
Sensation of pressure upon the shoulders.
In the limbs, drawing (tearing), tensive pains, partly in the muscles and partly in the joints (rheumatism).
In the periosteum, here and there, especially in the periosteum of the long bones, pressive and pressive-drawing pains.2
Stitching pains in the fingers or toes.3
Stitches in the heels and soles of the feet while standing.
Burning in the soles of the feet.4
In the joints a sort of tearing, like scraping on the bone, with red, hot swelling which is painfully sensitive to the touch and to the air, with unbearably sensitive, peevish disposition (gout, podagra,
chiragra, gout in the knees, etc.).5
The joints of the fingers, swollen with pressive pains, painful when touching and bending them.
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(1 Is it probable that the different varieties of cancer of the breast have any other origin than this psora malady?)
(2 These spots then also pain on being touched, as if they were bruised or sore.)
(3 In worse, chronic cases, this is aggravated into a cutting pain.)
(4 Especially at night under a feather bed.)
(5 The pains are either worse in daytime, or at night. After every attack, and when the inflammation is past, the joints of the hand are painful, as also those of the knee, the foot, those of the big toe when moved, when he stands up, etc., they feel intolerably benumbed and the limb is weakened.)
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Thickening of the joints; they remain hard swollen, and there is pain on bending them.
The joints, as it were, stiff, .with painful, difficult motion, the ligaments seem too short.1
Joints, painful on motion.2
Joints crack on moving, or they make a snapping noise.
The joints are easily sprained or strained.3
Increasing disposition to strains and to overlift oneself even at a very slight exertion of the muscles, even in slight mechanical work, in reaching out or stretching for something high up, in lifting things that are not heavy in quick turns of the body, pushing, etc. Such a tension or stretching of the muscles often then occasions long confinement to the bed, swoons, all grades of hysterical troubles,4 fever, haemoptysis, etc., while persons who are not psoric lift such burdens as their muscles are able to, without the slightest after effects.5
The joints are easily sprained at any false movement.6
In the joint, of the foot there is pain on treading, as if it would break.
Softening of the bones, curvature of the spine (deformity, hunchback), curvature of the long bones of the thighs and legs (morbus anglicus, rickets).
Fragility of the bones.
Painful sensitiveness of the skin, the muscles and of the periosteum on a moderate pressure.7
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(1 E.g., the tendo Achillis on standing erect, stiffness of the tarsus, of the knees, either transient (after sitting, when rising), or permanent (contraction.)
(2 E.g., the shoulder-joint on raising the arm; the tarsus pains on treading as if it was about to break.)
(3 E.g., the tarsus, the wrist-joint, the joint of the thumb.)
(4 Often also, at once severe headache in the crown of the head, which is then also painful externally when touched, or suddenly a pain in the small of the back, or pain in the uterus, not unfrequently stitches in the side of the breast, or between the shoulder blades, which check the respiration, or painful stiffness of the neck or spine, frequent audible eructations, etc.)
(5 The common people, especially in the country, seek alleviation through a sort of mesmeric stroking, but without lasting effects; the tendency to over-lifting nevertheless remains. It is usually woman (called a stroking woman) who makes with the tips of her thumbs passes over the shoulder blades toward the shoulders or along the spine, sometimes also from the pit of the stomach along below the ribs, only they usually exert too strong a. pressure while stroking.)
(6 E. g.. the ankle at a false step, so also the shoulder-joint. Of this kind is also the gradual luxation of the hip-joint (i.e., of the head of the femur from the acetabulum, when the leg then becomes too long, or too short causing limping).
(7 As when he moderately strikes against something, it becomes very painful and for a long time; the parts on which he lies in bed are very painful, wherefore he frequently turns over at night,, the posterior muscles of the thigh and the bone on which she sits are quite sore; a slight stroke with the hand on the thighs causes great pain. A slight knock against a hard object leaves blue marks, suffusion of blood.)