Dr. Gift of Ella Huntington * (C - fj&P rMJZg** ^^w<^ r!^?MIW$e l ^&^mmm ^,fW^i%^i^ f- ^^T\V S. ^ ^ vv>5^* ai^s?afi&;ifi CHRONIC DISEASES, 1 THEIR PECULIAR NATURE AND THEIR HOMEOPATHIC CURE. (THEORETICAL PART ONLY IN THIS VOLUME.) DR. SAMUEL HAHNEMANN. X TRANSLATED FROM THE SECOND ENLARGED GERMAN EDITION OF 1835, BY PROF. LOUIS H. TAFEL. PHILADELPHIA : BOERICKE & TAFEL. 1904. t i | i O cO r iO ?.D3Jl COPYRIGHTED BY BOERICKE & TAFEL. 1904. PRINTED BY T. B. & H. B. COCHRAN, LANCASTER, PA. CONTENTS. PUBLISHER'S PREFACE 5 AUTHOR'S PREFACE 7 NATURE OF CHRONIC DISEASES 21 SYCOSIS I4 9 SYPHIUS '53 PSORA l6 7 THE MEDICINES 2 4 2 PUBLISHERS' PREFACE. This volume, which contains the theoretical part of Hahnemann's CHRONIC DISEASES, has been issued at the urgent request of several Professors in Homoeo- pathic Medical Colleges, who wish to use it as a col- lege text book. It is to be hoped, too, that the pro- fession at large will appreciate this volume, which in the opinion of many ranks in importance with the ORGANON. AUTHOR'S PREFACE. TO THE FIRST EDITION 1828. If I did not know for what purpose I was put here on earth to become better myself as far as possible and to make better everything around me that is with- in my power to improve I should have to consider myself as lacking very much in worldly prudence to make known for the common good, even before my death, an art which I alone possess, and which it is within my power to make as profitable as possible by simply keeping it secret. But in communicating to the world this great dis- covery I am sorry that I must doubt whether my con- temporaries will comprehend the logical sequence of these teachings of mine, and will follow them carefully and gain thereby the infinite benefits for suffering hu- manity which must inevitably spring from a faithful and accurate observance of the same, or whether, frightened away by the unheard of nature of many of these disclosures, they will not rather leave them un- tried and uninitiated and, therefore, useless. At least I cannot hope that these important com- munications will fare better than the general Homoe- opathy, which I have published hitherto. From unbe- lief in the efficacy of the small and attenuated doses of medicine, which I made known to the medical world 8 AUTHOR'S PREFACE. after a thousand warning trials, as being the most effi- cient (distrusting my faithful asseverations and rea- sons), men prefer to endanger their patients for years longer with large and larger doses. Owing to this, they generally do not live to see the curative effects, even as was the case with myself before I attained this diminution of dose. The cause of this was that it was overlooked that these doses by their attenuation were all the more suitable for their homeopathic use owing to the development of their dynamic power of opera- tion. What would men have risked if they had at once followed my directions in the beginning, and had made use of just these small doses from the first? Could anything worse have happened than that these doses might have proved inefficient ? They surely could do no harm! But in their injudicious, self-willed applica- tion of large doses for homoeopathic use they only, in fact only once again, went over that roundabout road so dangerous to their patients in order to reach the truth, which I myself had already successfully passed over, and indeed with trembling, so as to save them this trouble; and if they really desired to heal, they were nevertheless at last compelled to arrive at the only true goal, after having inflicted many an injury and wasted a good part of their fair life. All this I had already laid before them faithfully and frankly, and had long before given them the reasons. May they do better with the great discovery here- with presented to them! And if they should not treat this discovery any better well, then a more conscien- tious and intelligent posterity will alone have the ad- AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 9 vantage to be obtained by a faithful, punctual observ- ance of the teachings here laid down, of being able to deliver mankind from the numberless torments which have rested upon the poor sick owing to the number- less, tedious diseases, even as far back as history ex- tends. This great boon had not been put within their reach by what Homoeopathy had taught hitherto. PREFACE TO THE FOURTH VOLUME.* INQUIRY INTO THE PROCESS OF HOMOEOPATHIC HEALING. We have no means of reaching with our senses or of gaining essential knowledge as to the process of life in the interior of man, and it is only at times granted us to draw speculative conclusions from what is happen- ing as to the manner in which it may have occurred or taken place; but we are unable to furnish conclusive proofs of our explanations from the changes which are observed in the organic kingdom; for the changes in living organic subjects have nothing in common with those taking place in what is organic, since they take place by processes entirely different. It is, therefore, quite natural that in presenting the Homoeopathic Therapeutics I did not venture to ex- plain how the cure of diseases is effected by operating on the patient with substances possessing the power to excite very similar morbid symptoms in healthy per- sons. I furnished, indeed, a conjecture about it, but I did not desire to call it an explanation, i. e., a definite explanation of the modus operandi. Nor was this at *The work on the "Chronic Diseases" was originally published in five parts, and every part, except the second, had its own pre- face, discussing some questions of general interest to Homoeop- athy. Transl. 12 AUTHOR'S PREFACE. all necessary, for it is only incumbent upon us to cure similar symptoms correctly and successfully, according to a law of nature which is being constantly confirmed; but not to boast with abstract explanations, while we leave the patients uncured, for that is all which so- called physicians have accomplished. These physicians have made many objections to the explanation I have given, and the} 7 would have pre- ferred to reject the whole homoeopathic method of cur- ing (the only one possible) merely because they were not satisfied with my efforts at explaining the mode of procedure which takes place in the interiors of man during a homoeopathic cure. I write the present lines, not in order to satisfy those critics, but in order that I may present to myself and to my successors, the genuine practical Homoeopaths, another and more probable attempt of this kind toward an explanation. This I present because the human mind feels within it the irresistible, harmless and praiseworthy impulse to give some account to itself as to the mode in which man accomplishes good by his actions. As I have elsewhere shown, it is undeniable that our vital force, without the assistance of active remedies of human art, cannot overcome even the slight acute diseases (if it does not succumb to them) and restore some sort of health without sacrificing a part (often a large part) of the fluid and the solid parts of the or- ganism through a so-called crisis. How our vital force effects this, will ever remain unknown to us; but so much is sure, that this force cannot overcome even these diseases in a direct manner, nor without such AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 13 sacrifices. The Chronic Diseases, which spring from miasms, cannot be healed unaided, even by such sacri- fices, nor can real health be restored by this force alone. But it is just as certain that even if this force is enabled by the true (homoeopathic) healing art, guided by the human understanding, to overpower and overcome (to cure) not only the quickly transient, but also the chronic diseases arising from miasms in a di- rect manner and without such sacrifices, without loss of body and life, nevertheless, it is always this power, the vital force, which conquers. It is in this case as with the army of a country, which drives the enemy out of the country; this army ought to be called victor- ious, although it may not have won the victory without foreign auxiliaries. It is the organic vital force of our body which cures natural diseases of every kind di- rectly and without any sacrifices as soon as it is en- abled by means of the correct (homoeopathic) rem- edies to win the victory. This force would not, in- deed, have been able to conquer without this assist- ance, for our organic vital force, taken alone, is only sufficient to maintain the unimpeded progress of life so long as man is not morbidly affected by the hostile op- eration of forces causing disease. Unassisted, the vital force is no match to these hos- tile powers; it hardly opposes a force equal to the hostile operation, and this, indeed, with many signs of its own sufferings (which we call morbid symptoms). By its own power our vital force would never be able to overcome the foe of chronic disease, nor even to conquer transient diseases, without considerable losses inflicted on some parts of the organism, if it remained 14 AUTHOR'S PREFACE. without external aid, without the assistance of genuine remedies. To give such support is the duty enjoined on the physician's understanding by the Preserver of life. As I have said above, our vital force Jiardly opposes an equal opposition to the foe causing the disease, and yet no enemy can be overcome except by a superior force. Only homoeopathic medicine can give this superior power to the invalidated vital force. Of itself this vital principle, being only an organic vital force intended to preserve an undisturbed health, opposes only a weak resistance to the invading mor- bific enemy; as the disease grows and increases it op- poses a greater resistance, but, at best, it is only an equal resistance; with weakly patients it is not even equal, but weaker. This force is neither capable, nor destined, nor created for an overpowering resistance, which will do no harm to itself. But if we physicians are able to present and oppose to this instinctive vital force its morbific enemy, as it were magnified through the action of homoeopathic medicines even if it should be enlarged every time only by a little if in this way the image of the mor- bific foe be magnified to the apprehension of the vital principle through homoeopathic medicines, which, in a delusive manner, simulate the original disease, we gradually cause and compel this instinctive vital force to increase its energies by degrees, and to increase them more and more, and at last to such a degree that it becomes far more powerful than the original disease. The consequence of this is, that the vital force again becomes sovereign in its domain, can again hold and AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 15 direct the reins of sanitary progress, while the appar- ent increase of the disease caused by homoeopathic medicines disappears of itself as soon as we, seeing the preponderance of the restored vital force, /. e., of the restored health, cease to use these remedies. The fund or the fundamental essence of this spirit- ual vital principle, imparted to us men by the infinitely merciful Creator, is incredibly great, if we physicians understand how to maintain its integrity in the days of health, by directing men to a healthy mode of living, and how to invoke and augment it in diseases by purely homoeopathic treatment. PREFACE TO FIFTH VOLUME. DILUTIONS AND POTENCIES (DYNAMIZA- TIONS). Dilutions, properly so-called, exist almost solely in objects of taste and of color. A solution of salty and bitter substances becomes continually more deprived of its taste the more water is added, and eventually it has hardly any taste, no matter how much it may be shaken. So, also, a solution of coloring matter, by the admixture of more and more water, becomes at last almost colorless, and any amount of shaking will not increase its color. These are, and continue to be, real attenuations or dilutions, but no dynamizations. Homeopathic Dynamizations are processes by which the medicinal properties, which are latent in natural substances while in their crude state, become aroused, and then become enabled to act in an almost spiritual manner on our life; i. e., on our sensible and irritable fibre. This development of the properties of crude natural substances (dynamization) takes place, as I have before taught, in the case of dry substances by means of trituration in a mortar, but in the case of fluid substances, by means of shaking or succussion, which is also a trituration. These preparations can- not be simply designated as dilutions, although every preparation of this kind, in order that it may be raised 18 AUTHOR'S PREFACE. to a higher potency, i. t\, in order that the medicinal properties still latent within it may be yet farther awakened and developed, must first undergo a further attenuation, in order that the trituration or succussion may enter still further into the very essence of the medicinal substance, and may thus also liberate and expose the more subtle part of the medicinal powers that lie hidden more deeply, which could not be effected by any amount of trituration and succussion of the substances in their concentrated form. We frequently read in homosopathic books that, in the case of one or another person in a certain case of disease, some high (dilution) dynamization of a medi- cine was of no use at all, but a lower potency proved effectual, while others have seen more success from higher potencies. But no one in such cases investi- gates the cause of the great difference of these effects, What prevents the preparer of the medicines (and this ought to be the homoeopathic physician himself; he himself ought to forge and whet the arms with which to fight the disease) what prevents him, in pre- paring a potency, from giving 10, 20, 50 and more suc- cussive strokes against a somewhat hard, elastic body to every vial containing one drop of the lower potency with 99 drops of alcohol, so as to obtain strong p<> tencies ? This would-be vastly more effective than giving only a few nerveless succussive strokes, which will produce little more than dilutions, which ought not to be the case. ... The perfection of our unique art of healing and the welfare of the patients seem to make it worth while for the physician to take the trouble necessary to secure the utmost efficiency in his medicines. AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 19 Modern wiseacres have even sneered at the 30th po- tency, and would only use the lower, less developed and more massive preparations in larger doses, where- by they have been, however, unable to effect all that our art can accomplish. If, however, every potency is dynamized with the same number of succussive strokes, we obtain, even in the fiftieth potency, medi- cines of the most penetrating efficacy, so that every minute pellet moistened with it. after being dissolved in a quantity of water, can and must be taken in small parts, if we do not wish to produce too violent an action with sensitive patients, while we must remem- ber that such a preparation contains almost all the properties latent in the drug now fully developed, and these can only then come into full activity. PARIS, December 19th, 1838. 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 immeas- urably greater, and remains so. Treatment by allopathic physicians hitherto merely served to increase the distress from this kind of dis- ease ; for this treatment consisted of a whole multi- tude of nauseous mixtures (compounded by the drug- gist from violently acting medicines in large doses, of whose separate true effects they were ignorant), to- gether 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 fontanels, but especially the everlasting laxatives, leeches, cuppings and starv- 22 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. ing 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 dimin- ished ; or, if any striking change was produced by them, instead of the former sufferings, there appeared a worse state nameless diseases caused by medi- cine, far worse and more incurable than the original natural one while the physician consoled the pa- tient 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 com- forting pretense : "Everything imaginable had been used and applied in the case of the deceased." It is not so with Homreopathy, 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, accom- plished 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. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 23 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 symp- toms perceptible to the senses ; and the means of cure were the most suitable among the Homoeopathic rem- edies, 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 abil- ity to produce the same series of morbid symptoms in the healthy body ; and, if the disease was not alto- gether 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 thank- fulness. 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 Homoeop- athy had afforded him its help.* * 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, 24 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 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 threaten- ing than the former ones which had been removed homceopathically 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 devel- oped. When such a relapse would take place the Homoeopathic physician would give the remedy most fitting among the medicines then known, as if directed later, proved to be the chief auti-psora remedies ; because these remedies were not yet known. They had been merely treated with such medicines as Homoeopathically best covered and tempo- rarily removed the then apparent moderate symptoms, thus caus- ing 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 dis- eases 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. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 25 against a new disease, and this would again be at- tended by 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 trou- bles which seemed to have been removed were re- newed, 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 dis- ease would be added which could be removed only inadequately and imperfectly ; yea, these new symp- toms 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 jour- ney, 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 ail- ments, might consider himself as healthy. Still such a favorable pause would never be of long duration, and the return and repeated returns of the com- plaints in the end left even the best selected Homoeo- pathic 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 at- 3 26 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. tempts 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. This was, and remained, the quicker or slower pro- cess in such treatments in all non-venereal, severe chronic diseases, even when these were treated in exact accordance with the Homoeopathic art as hith- erto known. Their beginning was promising, the con- tinuation 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 predicted 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 dysen- teries, by means of the specifically aiding Homoeo- pathic 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. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 27 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 Homoeo- pathic remedial means that have so far been proved as to their pure action ? The followers of Homoeo- pathy 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 com- mencement, 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 organ- ism, find a speedy and complete cure. Why, then, cannot this vital force, efficiently af- fected 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 organ- ism 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. 28 HAHNEMANN'S 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 dis- eases which still remain uncured, despite the incon- testable 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 unre- mitting thought, indefatigable inquiry, faithful obser- vation and the most accurate experiments made for the welfare of humanity.* 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 reap- peared annually with an increase of complaints. This * Yet I did not allow any of these uniutermitted endeavors to become known either to the world or to rny followers, not, indeed, because the ingratitude so frequently shown to me prevented ine, 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 un- mentioned because it is improper, yea, hurtful to speak or write of things still imni iture. Not until the year 1827 did I communi- cate 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. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 29 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 reme- dies, but that he has always to encounter only some separate fragment of a more deep-seated original dis- ease. The great extent of this disease is shown in the new symptoms appearing from time to time ; so that the Homoeopathic physician must not hope to perma- nently 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 dis- cover one or more medicines which may Homoeopath- ically 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 sepa- rate 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 con- 30 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. stitution, it can never be overcome by the most whole- some 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 symp- toms,* even till the end of man's life, like every other chronic, miasmatic sickness, c. 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 symp- toms, and this, also, to the end of man's life. I had come thus far in my investigations and obser- vations with such non-venereal patients, when I dis- covered, 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 erup- tion 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 * Not unfrequeutly phthisis passes over into in-anity ; 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 hemorrhage, etc. and it was not difficult to discover that the later diseases must also have their foundation in the original malady and can only be a part of a far greater whole. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 31 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. 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 cir- cumstances, 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. 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. i\, 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 rela- tives. *So also, more lately, VON AUTENRIETH (in Tubinger Blattet fur Naturwissenschaft und Arzneikunde, 2 vol., ad part). 32 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. Most painstaking observations as to the aid afforded by the antipsoric 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 com- mon 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 epis- taxis, the accumulation of blood in the veins of the rectum and the anus, discharges of blood from the same (blind or flowing piles), hemoptysis, hemateme- sis, hematuria, and deficient as well as too frequent menstrual discharges, nightsweats of several years' duration, parchment-like dryness of the skin, diarrhrea of many years' standing, as well as permanent consti- pation and difficult evacuation of the bowels, long- continued erratic pains, convulsions occurring repeat- edly for a number of years, chronic ulcers and inflam- mations, sarcomatous enlargements and tumors, ema- ciation, 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 ecstacy, from melancholy up to raging insanity; HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 33 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 humaniiy called by pathology with various names, are, with few exceptions, true de- scendants of this many-formed Psora alone. I was thus instructed by my continued observations, com- parisons and experiments in the last years that the ail- ments 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 an- cient miasma of leprosy and itch; /. e., merely descend- ants 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 pa- tient showed only a few, but different ailments, while a third, fourth, etc., would complain of still other ail- ments 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 least of many of these patients. Then the one or two remedies* found to be homoeopathic healed the *In the typhus of 1813 Bryonia and Rhm to. ri cod end ran were the specific remedies for all the patients. 34 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. whole epidemy, and therefore showed themselves spe- cifically 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. 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 differ- ent from the others, but really is not, as may readily be seen from the agreement of several symptoms com- mon to them which appear as the disease runs its course, and also from their being healed through the same remedy. 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 ever- more 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 the> T never pass away of themselves, but increase and are aggravated even till death. They must there- fore 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 other continents so far as is known, according to all investigations, only three chronic miasms are found, the diseases caused by which manifest themselves through local symptoms, HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 35 and from which most, if not all, the chronic diseases originate; namely, first, SYPHILIS, which I have also called the venereal chancre disease; then SYCOSIS, or the fig-ivart disease, and finally the chronic disease which lies at the foundation of the eruption of itch; *'. 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 dis- eases. In the man} 7 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 t See Organon of the Healing Art, fifth edition, 1834, \ 100 sqq. 36 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. some degree be explained by its increased develop- ment during such an 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 hun- dred 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. 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 dis- *In Leviticus not only in the thirteenth chapter, but also (chap. 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 asdryitch spread over Ihebody; while the expression, yalephed, is used by Moses for lichen, tetter, herpes (see M. Rosenmueller, Scholia inLevit., 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 \\xfaglykypikron, while Cicero marks the dulcedo of scabies. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 87 ease 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 na- tions 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 na- ture of this miasmatic itching eruption always remained essentially the same. 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 cru- saders 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 ex- ternal alleviation in the means conducive to cleanli- ness, 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 sev- eral 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 38 HAHNEMANN S CHRONIC DISEASES. time when the other miasmatic chronic disease, syph- ilis, began (in 1493) to raise its dreadful head. 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 ex- ternal manifestations of Psosa on the skin were often so quickly suppressed, and are so now, that in most cases, either of children or of grown persons, the his- tory 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 lep- rosy was very troublesume to those suffering from it, owing to the lancinating pains in and the violent itch- ing 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 infec- tion 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, HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 39 when it appeared as itch, the few pustules appearing after infection made but little show and could easily be concealed. Nevertheless they were scratched contin- ually 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 per- sons who unwittingly touched them, and thus contam- inated far more persons than the lepers, who, on ac- count of their horrible appearance, were carefully avoided. PSORA has thus become the most infections 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 re- pressed 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 visi- ble and more secret and therefore more frequently in- 40 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. fectious, but also especially because the Psora, now mitigated externally into a mere itch and on that ac- count 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 cen- turies, after the destruction* of its chief symptom (the *The external eruption of itch may not only be driven away by the faulty practices of physicians and quacks, but unfortunately it not unfrequently 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 bath have an ad- vantage 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 parts until they have been either mischievously destroyed through ex- ternal repressive remedies or have been in a rational manner re- moved through the simultaneous internal cure of the whole dis- ease. 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 break- ing 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 appli- cation, are thoroughly healed. Then we may be quite certain that we have thoroughly cured the internal disease, /'. 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 fig-wart. Even if the eruption of itch has not (as is HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 41 external skin eruption) it plays the sad role of causing innumerable secondary symptoms, /. e., it originates a legion of chronic diseases, the source of which physi- cians neither surmise nor unravel, and which, there- fore, they can no more cure than they could cure the original disease when accompanied by its cutaneous eruption; but these chronic diseases, as daily experi- ence shows, were necessarily aggravated by the multi- tude of their fault3 r remedies. nearly always the case) been driven away from the skin through the faulty practices of physicians and quacks by means of desiccat- ing 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 6ji; 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 diarrhosa, sometimes also perhaps through a peculiar want of activity in the skin, and the results in sch 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 dis- eases flowing from this origin will then break out sooner or later. But let no one think that the Psora, which has been thus miti- gated in its local symptom, its cutaneous eruption, differs materi- ally 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 de- velop 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. 4 42 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 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 dur- ing the last few centuries has mankind been flooded with these infirmities, owing to the causes just men- tioned.* 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 hun- dred 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, *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 prom- inent, perhaps too prominent, the part which coffee takes with re- spect 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 ow- ing 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. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 43 while the remaining eightJi 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 difficult} 7 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 wJiicJi is most mis- apprehended, and, therefore, has been medically treated in the worst and most injurious manner. 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 ail- ment 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 appli- cations 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 re- moved 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 ma- lignant matter may find opportunity to insinuate itself 44 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 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." These horrible untruths have not only been, and are still being taught, but they are also being 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 en- lightened, as well as the private itch-patients of the lower and higher classes, the patients in all the peni- tentiaries and orphan asylums, in other civil and military hospitals, wherever such eruptions are found in short, the innumerable multitude of patients, with- out exception, are treated, not only by physicians un- known to fame, but by all, even those most celebrated, with the above mentioned external remedies,* using *Then, as these gentlemen dream in their perverted minds, in which they have disposed of the nature of this most important dis- ease 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 ab- sorbent vessels to the detriment of the whole mass of humors. But how then, Oh conscientious men! if even the first little pustule of itch with its unbearable voluptuous itching, forcing a man irre- sistibly 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 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 45 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 delaration that everything is now all right, * without re- garding or being willing to notice the ailments which sooner or later are sure to follow; /'. e. , the Psora which shows itself from within in a thousand different diseases. t If the deceived wretches 'then soonor or later return with the malady following unavoidably on any exteinal 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 gradully into chronic sufferings, which make mankind so help- less 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 its 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 oint- ments 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 and cruel manner three times in succession within a few months, while the quack who applied the ointment pretended that the pa- tient must have been infected anew with itch three times in this short period, which was really impossible. 1 1 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. 46 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. such a treatment; c. g., with swellings, obstinate pains in one part or another, with hypochondriac or hysteri- cal troubles, gout, consumption, tubercular phthisis, continual or spasmodic asthma, blindness, deafness, paralysis, caries of the bones, ulcers (cancer), spasms, hemorrhages, diseases of the mind and soul, etc., the physicians smagine that they have before them some- thing entirely new and treat it again and again accord- ing to the old routine of their therapeutics in a useless and hurtful manner, directing their medicines against phantom diseases; /. 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.* The older physicians were more conscientious in this matter and observed with less prejudice. They saw clearly and became convinced that innumerable ail- ments 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 * 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 cannot do any- thing at home with their prescriptions against the unknown dis- ease; that is, they send him to some sulphur hath 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. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 47 they endeavor to extirpate this internal malady by means of a multitude of internal remedies, as good as their therapeutics afforded. It was, indeed, but a use- less 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 dis- ease 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 phy- sicians, 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 attend- ing 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. The observations of those honest men are too start- ling to be rejected contemptuously, or ignored by con- scientious men. I shall here adduce some of these numerous observa- tions 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 48 HAHNEMANN S CHRONIC DISEASES. and destroyed and all the subsequent innumerable life- long 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, spring- ing 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 modi- fies them. A brief survey of the manifold misfortunes resulting thence is given by the experienced and honest LUDWIG CHRISTIAN JUNCKER in his Dissertatio de Damno ex Scabie Repnlsa, 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 tem- perament it is followed by piles, hemorrhoidal colic and renal gravel; with persons of sanguine-choleric temperament by swellings of the inguinal glands, stiff- ening of the joints and malignant ulcers (called in German Todenbriiclii) ; with fat persons by a suffocat- ing catarrh and mucous consumption; also by inflam- matory 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 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 49 were delayed, and when the itch was driven away dur- ing their flow, they were changed into a monthly hemoptysis. Persons inclined to melancholy were sometimes made insane by such repression; if they were pregnant the foetus was usually killed. Some- times 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, burn- ing pains, with wasting away (cancer of the womb). His experiences were frequently confirmed by the observationsf of others, as c. g. with reference to: * A pregnant Jewess had the itch on her hands and drove it away in the eighth month of her prrgnancy 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 leucorrhcea Then she became poor and had to walk a great distance barefooted ; hereupon the itch again appeared and she thus lost her leucor- rhcea and her other hysteric affections ; she became again preg- nant and was safely delivered, (funcker, ibid. ) f When writing the first edition of the Chronic Diseases, I was not as yet acquainted with Autenrioth's Versuche fucr die prakt. Heilkunde aus den Klinishen Anstalten ron Tubingen, 1808. But I saw on examining the work, tint what he says about dis- eases following the driving away of itch through local applica- tions is only a confirmation of what I had already found with the other hundred writers. He also had observed that the exter- nal driving away of itch was followed by ulcers on the feet, pul- monary consumption, hysterical chlorosis, with various menstrual irregularities ; white swelling of the knee, dropsy of the joints, epilepsy, amaurosis, with obscured cornea ; glaucoma with com- plete amaurosis ; mental derangement, paralysis, apoplexy and curvature of the neck ; these he erroneously attributed to the 50 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. Asthma, Lentilius Miscell. med. pract. Tom. I., p. 176. Fr. Hoffmann Abhandlung i\ d. Kinderkrankkeiten, 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 cans, morb. Epist., XIV. 35. Acta Nat, Cur. Tom. V. obs. 47. J. Juncker, Cons p. 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.* Hundertmark-Zieger Dissert, de scabic artificiale, Lips. 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 treat- ment were anything else than a local driving away of the erup- tion 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 wretched to undertake to cure an inter- nal 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. 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 res- piration became at last, even when not in motion, very short and extremely labored, emitting at the same time a continuous hiss- ing sound, but attended with only little coughing. He was or- dered 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. 1 The violent asthma was combined with general swelling and fever. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 51 1758, p. 32. s Beireis Stammen. Diss. de causis cur im- primis plebs scabie laboret. Helmst., 1792, p. 26.* Pelargus (.Storcli) Obs. din. Jahrg., 1722, p. 435 438. 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. mcd. phys. 3 A man of 32 years had the itch driven away by sulphur oint- ment, 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 physi- cian, Beireis. 5 A boy of 13 years having suffered from his childhood with tinea capitis had his mother lemove 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 month later. 6 Tinea capitis in a little girl was driven away by purgatives and other medicines, but the child was attacked with < ppression 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. OZ HAHNEMANN S CHRONIC DISEASES. Cent. I., hist 8, 9. 8 Pelargus, Obs. din. Jahrg., 1723, p. 15. 9 Suffocations from Asthma, Job. Phil. BrmdelfConsitia nted., Frft., 1615, Cons. 73. Ephem. Nat. Cur., Ann. II., obs. 313. Wilh. Fabr. V. Hilden, Obs. Cent. III., Obs. 39. 10 Ph. R. Vicat, Obs. Pract., obs. 35, Vitoduri, 1780." J. J. Waldschmid, Opera, p. 244. 12 8 Owing to tinea capttis, 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 und 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 suffo- cating 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 fre- quently suffered, drivei^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, dis- appeared ; but after twenty-four days the itch again dried up, which was followed by a new inflammation in tht chest with pleurisy aud vomiting. 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 suffo- cated. 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. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 53 Asthma with General Swelling. Waldschmid, ibid. Hoech- stetter, Obs. Dec. III., obs. 7 Frft. et Lips, 1674, p. 248. Pelargus, Obs. Clin. Jahrg., 1723, p. 504. 1? Riedlin, the father, Obs. Cent. II. , obs. 91." Asthma with Dropsy of the Chest. Storch in Act. Nat. Cur. Tom. V., obs. 147. Morgagni, dc scd. et causis morb. XVI., Art. 34. l5 Richard, Recucil d' obscrv. 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, 18 A 5-year-old girl had had for soma time large itch vesicles on the hands, which dried up of themselves. Shortly after, she be- came sleepy and tired and was seized with dyspnoea. The follow- ing day the asthma continued and her abdomen became distended. 14 A so-year-old farmer, who had been long tortured with the itch, while he was driving it out by external applications, was seized with a dyspncea, a loss of appetite and a swelling of the whole body. 16 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 dyspncea ; when the tinea broke out again she recovered. "A man of 46 drove out his itch with a sulphur ointment. There- upon he was seized with inflammation in the chest, with bloody expectoration, dyspncea 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 he had a relapse, the itch dried up again, and he died on the thirteenth day after the relapse. 54 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. Hamb. AbhandL, p. 310. Richard, as above. Pelargus, as above. Jahrg., 1721, p. 23 and 114, 18 and Jahrg. , 1723, p. 29, 19 also in Jahrg., 1722, p. 459.' Sennert, praxis med. lib. II., P. III., Cap. 6, p. 380. Jerzembsky, Diss. Scabies salubris in hydrope, Halae, 1777. ll Karl Wenzel, Die NacJikrankheiten von zuruckgetretener Krcitze, Bamb., 1826, p. 49. M Pleurisy and Cough, Pelargus, as above, Jahrg., 1722, p. 79. * Severe Cough, Richard, as above. Juncker, Conspect. med. theor. et pract. tab., 76. Hundertmark, as above, p. 23.* 8 ' 1 Hemoptysis, Phil. Georg. Schroeder, Opusc. II., p. 322. Richard, as above. Binninger, Obs. Cent. V., obs. 88. Hemoptysis and Consumption. Chn. Max. Spener, Diss. de egro febri maligni phthisi complicata laborante, Giess, 18 A thin man died of inflammation in the chest and other ail- ments 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 by expectoration. M 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. M A young peasant was attacked with acute fever, with pleurisy and dyspnoea, six days after driving out an eruption of itch with sulphur ointment. 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. M *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 by great anguish. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 55 1699." Baglio, Opera, p. 215. Sicelius, Praxis casual. Exerc. III., Cas. I., Frft. et Lips, 1743. K Morgagni, as above, XXL, Art. 32. 26 Unzers, Arzt C C C., p. 508. 27 Karl Wenzel, as above, p. 32. Collection of Pus in the Chest. F. A. Waitz, Medic. Chi- rurg. Aufsatz Th. I., p. 114, 115. 28 Preval, in the Journal de Medec., LXL, p. 491. Cysts of Pus in the Intestines, Krause. Schubert, Diss. dc scabie humana. Lips. 1779, p. 23. 29 Great Degeneration of a Great Part of the Intestines. J. H. Schulze, in Act. Nat. Cur. Tom., 1 obs. t 231. 30 M A youth of 18 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 expec- torated blood, commenced to speak deliriously, his face was deadly pale and sunken, the urine was deep red without sediment. ^An eruption of itch in a youth of 18 years driven out by a mer- curial 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. 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. 56 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. Degeneration of the Brain. Dimenbrock, Obs. et Curat, med., obs. 60. Bonet, Sepulchretum anat., Sect. IV., obs. 1, I 31 and 2. 32 J. H. Schulze, as above. Hydrocephalus, Ada 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. 85 Dropsy of the Chest. Hessler in Karl Wenzel, as above, p. 100 and 102. 31 A little prince of two years had his tinea capitis driven away; in consequence, after his death, much bloody water was found un- der 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. ^A man of rank, of a cholerico-sanguine temperament, was af- flicted 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. n. 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. Pick, 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 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 57 Dropsy of the Abdomen, Richard, as above, and with sev- eral other observers. Swelling of the Scrotum (in boys). Fr. Hoffman, 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. Joh. 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. s7 Obscuration of the Eyes and Presbyopia, Fr. Hoffman, Con- sult, med., 1 Cas. 50. S8 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. 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 gray 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 inter- nally 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 face and on the pudenda; this was finally driven away 5 58 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. Inflammation of the Eyes, G. W. Wedel. Snetter, Diss. de Ophthalmia, Jen., 1710. Hallmann, in Kcenigl. Vetenskaps HandL f. A. X., p. 210. 39 G. Chph. SchiUer, de scabie humida, p. 42, Erford., 1747. Cataract, Chn. Gottlieb Ludwig, Advers. med. II., p. 157." Amaurosis, Northof, Diss. de scabie, Getting., 1792, p. 10. 41 Chn. G. Ludwig, as above." Sennert, prax. lib. III., Sect. 2, Cap. 44. Trecourt, cliirurg. Wahrnehmungen, p. 173., Leipz., 1777. Fabridus ab Hilden, Cent. II., obs. 39." 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. 89 A girl had a violent eruption of itch on the legs, with large ul- cers in 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 ery- sipelas broke out on both legs, and on the following day these passed over into the real itch. The eyes then improved. 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 amau- rosis, 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. HAHNEMANN S CHRONIC DISEASES. 59 Deafness. Thore in Capelle, Journal de Saute, Tom. I. Daniel, Syst. aegritud. II., p. 228. Ludwig, as above. Inflammation of the Bowels, Hundertmark, Diss. dc s cable artificial^ Lips. 1758, p. 29. Piles, Hemorrhoids, A eta helvet. V., p. 192. 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. Epk. Nat. Cur. Dec. II., ami. 10, p. 162. C. Weber, Obs. f. I., p. 26. Suppression of Urine, Sennert, Prax. lib. 3, p. 8. Mor- gagni, as above, XLL, art. 2. 47 Erysipelas, Unzer Arts Tk. V., St. 30 1. 48 Discharges of acrid humors. Fr. Hoffman, Consult. Tom. II., Cas. 125. 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. ^After the expulsion of itch a most violent colic, pain in the re- gion 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 a while, 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 supres- sion of the itch. The bladder contained two pounds of urine just as dark, but the abdominal cavity, water, which when 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. 60 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. Ulcers, Unzer Arst. Th. V., St. 301. 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 cans. morb. I. art. 13. Pain in the Bones, Hamburger Magaz., XVIII., p. 3, 253. Rachitis and Marasmus in Children, Fr. Hoffman. Kinder- krankh. Leipz. 1741, p. 132. Fever, B.V. Faventinus, Medicinaempir., p. 260. Ramaz- zini, Constit. epid. urbis. II. No. 32, 1691." J. C. Carl in Act. Nat. Cur. VI., obs. 16. 55 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 offby ointments, there followed fever and black- ish 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. 65 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 en- sued, 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. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 61 Fever, ReU, Memorab. Fasc. III., p. 169. 56 Pelargus, as above; Jahrg., 1721, p. 276, 57 and ibid. JaJirg., 1723. 58 Amatus, Lusit. Cent. II., Cor., 33. Schiller, Diss. de scabie humida, Erford, 1747, p. 44. 59 J. J. Pick, Exercitatio med. de scabie retropulsa, Halle, 1710, 2. 60 Pelargus, as above, Jahrg., 1722, p. 122. 61 &\so Jahrg., 1723, p. 10, p. 14 62 and p. 291. C. G. Lud- * 6 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 nine years; it passed away, but there followed a violent fever. 58 A child, one year old, had had for some time tinea capitis and an eruption on 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. 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 rem- edies 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 slumbrous 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 weari- ness, and it only recovered when the eruption re-appeared on the head. 62 A journeyman purse-maker, who had to make some embroid- ery, drove off his frequent itch with Lead ointment. Scarcel}' 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. 62 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. wig, Advcrs. nied. II., pp. 157-160. 63 Morgagni, as ab., X., art. 9; 64 XXL, art. 31 j 65 XXXVIII., rtr/,22; 66 LV., art. 3. 67 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 thestrength, 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, uncon- trollable dyspnoea, tumefaction of the body and great distension of the abdomen. She died on the sixth day of the fever. The abdo- men 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 day- time; also the tongue and the fauces were thus attacked. With HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 63 Fever. Lanzonus, in Eph. Nat. Cur., Dec. III., ann. 9 and 10, obs. 16 and 113. Hoechstetter, Obs. mcd., Dec. VIII., Cas. S. 68 Triller. Wehle, Diss. mi I lain mcdidnam interdum esse optimum, Witemb., 1754. 69 Pick, as ab., I. 70 Waldschmidt, Opera., p. 241. Gerbizius, in Eph. Nat. Cur., Dec. III., ann. 2, obs. 167. Amatus, Lit sit., Cent. II., Curat. 33. 71 Fr. Hoffmann, Mcd. rat. system, T. III., p. 175. 72 Tertian Intermittent Fever. Pelargus, as ab., Jahrg., 1722, p. 103, cfr. with p. 79. 73 Juncker, as ab., tab. 79; much trouble the eruption was brought out again on the skin, and thus his health was restored. ^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 nightsweats, and, despite all medical treatment, death. 70 A burgomaster, 60 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 laurinutn, 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, precipi- tating 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 re- 64 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. Eph. Nat. Cur. Dec. I., ann. 4. Welsch, Obs. 15. Sau- vages, Spec. 11. De Hautesierk, Obs., Tom. II., p. 300; Comment. Lipsicnscs XIX., p. 297. Quartan Fever, Thorn. Bartholinus, Cap. 4, hist. 35. Sen- nert, 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., Caj. 12. 75 Epilepsy Like Vertigo, Fr. Hoffmann, as ab., p. 30. 76 ceived 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 perspira- tion, his limbs trembled, all the parts of his body were as dead, and he repeatedly vomited up a sour substance. A similar attack fol- lowed 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 was attended with sadness, sorrowful, anxious thoughts and sighs. 76 A woman of 36 years had the itch driven from the skin a few years before with mercurial remedies. Her menses became irreg- ular, and were often interrupted for ten or even fifteen weeks; she was at the same time constipated. Four years ago during preg- HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 65 Convulsions, Juncker, as ab. tab., 53. Hoechstetter, Eph. Nat. Cur. Dec. 8, Cas. 3. Eplt. nat. cur. dec. 2, ann. obs. 35, and ann. 5, obs. 224. D. W. Triller. Welle, Diss. nullam medicinain interdum esse optimam, Viteb., 1754, 13, 14. 77 Sicelius, Decas Casuum I., Cas. 5. 78 Pelargus, asab.,///r^., 1723, p. 545. 79 nancy 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 sen- sation and formication, which terminated in a violent jerking up and down of the feet. In time these attacks took away conscious- ness, and afterwards, in traveling in a carriage, there came an at- tack of real epilepsy, which returned thrice in the following win- ter. During these attacks she could not speak; she did not, in- deed, turn her thumbs inward, but yet there was foam at her mouth. 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 veitigo re-appeared, 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. "After an itch driven away by ointment there followed, with a girl, a most profound swoon, and soon after the most terrible con- vulsions 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. 7!> 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, 66 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. Epileptic Convulsions and Epilepsy, J. C. Carl in Act. Nat. Cur. VI., obs. 16. 80 E. Hagendorn, as above, hist. 9. 81 Fr. Hoffmann, Consult, mcd. I., Cas. 31 ; 82 ibid. med. rat. syst. T. IV., P. III., Cap. I., and i,n KindcrkrankJieiten, p. 108. Sauvages, Nosol. spec. 11. De Hautesierk, obs. T. II., p. 300. Sen- nert, prax. III., Cap. 44. Eph. Nat. Cur. Dec. III., ann. 2, obs. 29. Grilling, obs. Med. Cent. III., obs. 73. Th. Bartolin, Cent. III., /'**. 20. Fabr. de Hilden, Cent. III., obs. 10. 83 Riedlin, //. ;//^. aim., 1696, J/rt/. 0fo. I. 84 Lentilius, Mis cell. med. pr., P. I., p. 32. G. W. Wedel, Diss. de aegro epileptico, Jen., 1673. " Herrm. Grube, de arcanis medicorum non arcanis, Hafn., 1673, bloody matter was discharged from his nose and his ears, he also coughed up blood, and he died on 23d day amidst convulsions. 80 A man who had driven off a frequently occurring eruption of itch with an ointment fell into epileptic convulsions, which disap- peared again when the eruption re-appeared on the skin. 81 A youth of 18 years drove off the itch with a mercurial oint- ment and two months after he was unexpectedly seized with con- vulsions, 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, whose 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. ^A youth of 18, who had driven out itch with mercurial rem- edies, was seized a few weeks later with epilepsy, which returned after four weeks with the new moon. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 67 p. 165. 86 Tulpius, obs. lib. I., Cap. 8. 87 Th. Thompson, Medic. Rathpfiege, Leipzig, 1779, pp. 107, 108. ** Hun- dertmark, as ab., p. 32. 89 Fr. Hoffmann, Consult, nicd. I., Cas. 28, p. 141. * ^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 con- fessed 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 incau- tiously driven off. 88 Five-year-old itch passed away, and this, after several years, produced epilepsy. 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 the most violent convulsions, until, through the use of birch-juice, the itch was brought back to the skin. 90 A young man of 17 years, of vigorous constitution and good in- telligence, was attacked three years ago, after itch had been driven out, first by hemoptysis and then by epilepsy, which grew worse through medicines until the fits came on every two hours. An- other surgeon, through frequent blood-lettings and many medi- cines, effected that he remained free from epilepsy for four weeks, but soon afterwards the epilepsy returned while he was taking his noon-day nap, and the patient had two or three fits in the night; at the same time he was attacked with a very severe cough and suffocating catarrh, especially during the nights, when he expec- torated a very fetid fluid. He was confined to his bed. At last, after much medicine, the disease increased so much that he bad ten fits at night and eight during the day. Nevertheless he never in these fits either clenched his hands 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 68 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. Apoplexy. Cummius in Ep/i. Nat. Cur. Dec. I., ann.\, obs. 58. Mobius, Institut. med., p. 65. J. J. Wepfer, His- tor. 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. dc scabic 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 Medicine, Tom. 41. Amat. Lusitanus, Cur at. med. Cent. II., Cur. 74. J. H. Schulze, Brune, Diss. Casus aliquot mente alienatorum, Halle, 1707. Cas. 1, p. 5. 95 F. H. Waitz, medic. -chirurg. 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 rem- edies 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 liard, 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 fin- gers contracted from an itch driven out by external means; she suffered from them a long time. 94 He found an idiotic melancholy arise in consequence of sup- pressed itch; when the itch broke out again the melancholy disap- peared. 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, HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 69 Aufsfitse, Th. 1, p. 130. 96 Altenbnrg, 1791. Richter in Hufel. Journal, XV., II. Grossmann in Baldinger's ncncm Magaz., XL, I. 97 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 experi- ence,* would remain so thoughtless as to ignore the 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 body, until at last hetniplegia 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 suffoca- tion; 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. *An opponent, of the old school, has reproached me that I have not adduced my own experience to prove that the chronic mala- dies, 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 refxised 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 pa- tients would allow their names to be used! Why should I endure the like ? And do I not prove my point in a manner most indu- bitable and most free from partisanship through the experience of so many other honest practitioners? 70 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 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 announc- ing 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 ? Surely, among all the crimes which the modern phy- sicians 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 seethe 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 be- come first internal maladies of the whole system be- fore their external assuaging symptoms appear on the skin ? We shall more closely elucidate this process, and in consequence we shall see that all miasmatic maladies HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 71 which show peculiar local ailments on the skin are always present as internal maladies in the system be- fore they show their local symptoms 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 symptoms 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, es- pecially of modern 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 ob- served the like process in chronic diseases, and there- fore 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, therefore since they over- looked 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 dis- 72 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. eases, 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 de- veloped within; and thirdly, the breaking out of the external ailment, whereby nature externally demon- strates the completion of the internal development of the miasmatic malady throughout the whole organism. 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 small-pox or the cow-pox catches, this happens in the moment when in vaccination the mor- bid fluid in the bloody scratch of the skin comes in contact with the exposed nerve, which then, irrevoc- ably, 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. Small-pox, cow-pox, measles, etc., neverthe- less will complete their course within, and the fever peculiar to each will break out with its small-pox, cow- pox, measles, * etc., after a few days, when the internal disease has developed and completed itself. * 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! HAHNEMANN'S" CHRONIC DISEASES. 73 The same is the case, not to mention several other acute miasmas, also when the skin of man is con- taminated 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. (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 Does it not take three, four or five days after vaccination is ef- fected, before the vaccinated spot becomes inflamed ? Does not the sort of fever developed the sign of the completion of the dis- ease 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 small- pox, before the inflammatory fever and the outbreak of the small- pox 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 dis- ease 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 inocu- lation 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 mea- sles and the scarlet fever with their eruption. 6 74 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 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 re- quires 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 irre- vocably in the moment of contagion, for experience shows that even the immediate excisionf and amputa- tion of the infected part does not protect from the progression of the disease within, nor from the break- ing out of the hydrophobia therefore, also, the many * We are indebted especially to the careful English and Ameri- can physicians for these comforting experiences to HUNTER and HOUSTON (in London Meet. Journal, Vol. I.), and to VAUGHAN, SHADWEI,L and PERCIVAI,, whose observations are recorded in Jam. Mease's " On the Hydrophobia, Philadelphia, 1793." t An eight-year-old girl, in Glasgow, was bitten by a mad dog on the 2 ist 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 up for two weeks; nevertheless hydrophobia broke out on the 27th of April and the patient died on the 2gth of April. M. DUNCAN'S Med. Comment, Dec. II., Vol. VII., Edinb., 1793, and The New London Med. fourn., II. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 75 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; /. e. , the whole interior man must first have become thoroughly sick of small-pox, measles or scarlet fever, before these various eruptions can appear on the skin. For all these acute miasmatic diseases the human constitution possesses that process, which, as a rule, is so beneficent: to wipe them out (/. e., the specific fever together with the specific eruption) in the course of from two to three weeks, and of itself to extinguish them 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.* *Or have these various, acute, half-spiritual miasms 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 then, like parasites, have quickly grown up within it and have usually developed themselves by their pecu- liar fever after producing their fruit (the mature cutaneous erup- tion 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 them- selves like the acute miasmas, but can only be exterminated and 76 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 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 inter- nal 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 men- tioned 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. Immedi- ately 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 ^vasJling and cleansing of the parts immediately after the impure coition is in vain. The spot remains healthy according to appearance, only the internal or- ganism is called into activity by the infection (which 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? HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 77 occurs usually in a moment), so as to incorporate the venereal miasma and to become thoroughly diseased with the venereal malady. 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 pro- ducing 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 vene- real 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 extin- guished through the internally given specific remedy, then the chancre also is healed and the man recoveis. But if the chancre is destroyed through local appli- tions* before the internal disease is healed and this is *The venereal disease not only breaks out through the removal of the chancre by the cautery in which case some wretched casu- ists 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 stimu- 78 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. still a daily practice with physicians of the old school the miasmatic, chronic, venereal disease 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, even 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 affected 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. Psora (itch disease), like syphilis, is a miasmatic chronic disease, and its original development is similar. The itch disease is, however, also the most conta- gions of all chronic miasmata, far more infectious than the other two chronic miasmata, the venereal chancre disease and the figwart disease. To effect the infec- tion with the latter there is required a certain amount of friction in the most tender parts of the body, which lants, the venereal disease breaks out, which gives additional con- firmation, if this wrre needed, of the indubitable pre-existeuce 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 notwithstand- ing." M. s. Fabre, Lettres, supplement a son traite des maladies ventriennes, Paris, 1786. Of course! because the venereal disease was present in the whole interior of the body even before the out- break of the chancre. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 79 are the most rich in nerves and covered with the thin- nest 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 the 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 conta- gious 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 in- fected with the itch;t new gloves, which had been tried on by an itch patient; a strange lodging place, a strange towel used for drying oneself have communi- cated this tinder of contagion; yea, often a babe, when being born, is infected while passing through the or- gans of the mother, who may be infected (as is not in- frequently the case) with this disease; or the babe re- ceives 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 un- clean hands, not to mention the thousands of other possible ways in which things polluted with this invisi- * CAR. MUSITANI, Opera de titmoribus, Cap. 20. fAs WILLIS has noticed in TURNER, des maladies de la peau, traduit de Vanglois, a Paris, 1783, Tom. II , Cap. 3, p. 77. 80 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. ble 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 in- fected by the Psora are the exception. We need not to hunt for the causes of infection in crowded 'hospi- tals, factories, prisons, or in orphan houses, or in the filthy huts of paupers; even in active life, in retire- ment, 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. 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 trans- formed by this peculiar chronic-miasmatic disease, the diseased vital force endeavors to alleviate and to soothe the internal malady through the establishment of a HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 81 suitable local symptom on the skin, the itch-vesicles. So long as this eruption continues in its non^l 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 four- teen 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 gen- eral 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 re- gion of the spot first infected, and, indeed, accompan- ied with a voluptuously tickling itching, which may be called unbearably agreeable (.Grimmen), which compels the patient so irresistibly to rub and to scratch the ves- icles 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 mid- night this itching is most frequent and most unbear- able. . *Far from being an independent, merely local, cutaneous dis- ease, 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 pecu- liar eruption and this peculiar itching make a part of the essence of the whole disease in its natural, least dangerous state. 82 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 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 sur- roundings of the patient and also other persons not yet infected. The extremities defiled even to an im- perceptible 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 per- meated the wh6le organism (and which is more mani- festly falling under the cognizance of the senses has the name of itc/i), 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 disease to other persons, because they alone con- tain 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, /. e., the gen- eral 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. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 83 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 erup- tional symptom acts as a substitute for the internal malady and keeps the Psora with its secondary ail- ments 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 neces- sary 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. Yet even at this acme of the disease the patient still appears healthy in every other respect; all the symp- toms of the internal Psora, now so much increased, still remain covered and assuaged through the skin- symptom augmented in the same proportion. But so * As also the chancre, when not expelled, acts vicariously and soothingly for the syphilis within, and does not permit the vene- real 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. 84 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. great a torture, as is caused by so unbearable an itch- ing 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 fur- nished him, either by other ignorant persons, or by Allopathic physicians and surgeons. He asks deliver- ance from his external tortures, without suspecting the greater misfortune which unavoidably follows, and is bound to follow, on the expulsion of the external skin- symptoms (which hitherto has acted vicariously for the internal enlarged P-sw^-disease), as has been suf- ficiently 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 to- gether with its skin-symptom has grown old, the ex- *See the observation to No. 86, p. 67. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 85 pulsion 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 suf- ferings, which, through its long continuance, has in- creased to a high degree and then unavoidably breaks forth. 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 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 ac- cidents 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 * 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 homoeo- pathic remedies, with greater difficulty, indeed, than in the begin- ning, 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, cer- tainly and thoroughly cured, together with its external eruption, 86 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. see them treat the itch patients all in the same er- roneous manner; yea, with even more violent internal and external remedies, with sharp purgatives, with through the suitable internal remedies, without the least local ap- plication, 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 least external 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 symptom, as I have taught for many years orally and in ray 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 recogniz- ing 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 pres- ent within and had been developed in the whole organism, even before the breaking out of the chancre; and so they blindly sup- pose, that the chancre is the only venereal evil which is to be ex- tirpated, and that this needs but to be destroyed by external ap- plications, in order to be able to declare the man cured; and this without being instructed, by the many thousand cases in their ex- perience, 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 symptom, and have thereby compelled the internal malady to break out only the more certainly and dreadfully (and in a manner more difficult to 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 fig-warts ? 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 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 87 the Jasser ointment, with lotions of acetate of Lead, with the sublimate of Mercury or sulphate of Zinc, but especially with anointment prepared of fat with flowers homoeopathic remedies, which then cause the fig-warts to be healed, without the application of any external means of destruc- tion. 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), never- theless, 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 in- fected 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 form 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 ad- vocates 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 intoxi- cation 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 tothe natural form of the Psora, 88 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. of Sulphur or with a preparation of Mercury ; with which they lightly and carelessly destroy the eruption, de- claring " 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 ail- ment." 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 life-long insidious misfortune they bring upon the itch-patient through the destruction of his erup- tion, 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 con- quered, is inexorably let loose against the deceived patient to his destruction, by tearing down the barriers that shut it in. It may easily be imagined, as experience also teaches, that the more months a neglected itch-erup- they passed off as a newly arisen disease, owing to quite another origin. In their narrowness of mind, they never regarded the in- numerable, 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 imme- diate 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 out- break of its secondary symptoms. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 89 tion has flourished on the skin, the more surely has in- ternal 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 un- avoidably 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, inconsequence 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 com- plaints (which are then usually, from ignorance, as- cribed 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 7 90 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. the whole organism ; /. 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 tJie patient 's life. It is usually the case, indeed, that this disease, de- prived as early as possible of the first traces of its cu- taneous symptom by local applications, will grow but slowly in the beginning and will make but slow prog- ress 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 prog- ress of the internal Psora is of immense rapidity; but the disease, nevertheless, increases unceasingly, and even in the best cases and uder the most favorable ex- ternal circumstances, quietly and often for years un- perceived 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 diseases. Many hundred observations have gradually ac- quainted me* with the signs, by which the internally * 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 exer- tions and thousand fold vexations of spirit. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 91 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 de- veloped 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 gradu- ally increasing within, but is as yet slumbering, and has not yet come to the full outbreak of a manifest dis- ease; 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 * Allopathy has also assumed hidden (latent) conditions of dis- ease 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 occulttz Fernelii are, however, wholly suppositious 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, never- theless, show themselves when the requisite circumstauces 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. 92 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. or according to the external circumstances of different persons. 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 *The epidemic catarrhal fevers and catarrhs, which seize almost everyone, even the healthiest persons (Grippe, Influenza), do not belong to this category. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 93 severe exposure, even while otherwise having continu- ally 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 tussiculation 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. Predisposition to strains, even from carrying or lift- ing a slight weight, often caused even by stretching upward and reaching out true arms for objects which are hung high (so also a multitude of complaints re- sulting from a moderate stretching of the muscles, headache, nausea, prostration, tensive pain in the mus- cles 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 unfrequently 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. * Persons not afflicted with Psora, though draughts and damp cold air may not be agreeable to them, do not suffer any colds or evil after-effects therefrom. 94 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. Amenorrhoea, irregularities in the menses, too copi- ous, too scant}', too early (too late), of too long dura- tion, too watery, connected with various bodily ail- ments. 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 day- time, even with little movement (or inability to bring out perspiration). White, or at least very pale tongue; still more fre- quently cracked tongue. Much phlegm in the throat. Bad smell from the mouth, frequently or almost con- stantly, 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 spools, like diarrhoea). Venous knots on the anus; passage of blood with the stools. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 95 Passing of mucus from the anus, with or without faeces. Itching on the anus. Dark urine. Swollen, enlarged veins on the legs vswollen 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 in- creased with a low barometer, with north and north- east* 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. *In Europe northeast winds are cold, sharp and dry, correspond- ing to our west winds. Trans! . 96 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. Here or there at times, though seldom, a single in- sufferably pleasant, but unbearably itching vesicle, at its point sometimes filled with pus, and causing a burn- ing 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 hin- drance, 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 satis- factory 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. But still, even in such favorable external relations, as soon as these* persons advance in age, even moder- ate 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, inflam- mation 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 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 97 adult, who has the Psora slumbering within him, shows much semblance of health, but happens upon the opposite of the above-described favorable condi- tions 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,* small- pox, measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever, purple rash, etc., or through an external severe lesion, a shock, a fall, a wound, a considerable burn, the break- ing 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 sed- entary occupation in a gloomy, close room, weakening the vital force; the sad losses of beloved relatives bend- ing down the soul with grief, or daily vexation and an- noyance, which embitter the life; deterioration of the food or an entire want of what is necessary and indis- pensable, 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 be- low, in its transition to the formation of severe mala- dies; one or another nameless (psoric) chronic dis- *At the termination of an acute fever there often follows, as if in- cited 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 cowpox, no measles, no venereal chancre disease, etc., can now make its appearance with any man without previous in- fection. 98 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. eases* breaks out and, most of all, through weakening and exhausting improper treatment by allopathic phy- sicians, they are aggravated from time to time without intermission, often to a fearful height, if external cir- cumstances favorable for the patient do not interpose, and cause a moderation in the process of the malady. *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 recep- tive 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 time 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 de- cline. To bring some examples for explanation from my own ex- perience: After a simple fracture of a limb attended with confine- ment to bed for five or six weeks, there may follow diseased condi- tions of another kind, the cause of which cannot be guessed, which diseased conditions, even when measurably removed, nevertheless return, 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 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 99 But even if favorable external conditions should again check the rapid development of a disease that 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. 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 preg- nancy, 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 youth- ful constitution had pretty well recovered, and she might have been assured 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 multi- tude of nervous disorders and convulsions, thus turning them into a serious illness. Better news from her sister, indeed, followed, 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 confine- ment, 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 100 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. has broken out, true health can not be lastingly re- stored by any of the modes of treatment hitherto 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. If the cause must at all times be proportionate to its effect and consequence, as is the case 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 that 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-ex- istent in the internal organism, but hitherto quiescent. In a similar manner, a robust merchant, apparently healthy, de- spite some traces of internal Psora, perceptible only to the profes- sional examiner, may, in consequence of unlucky commercial con- junctures, become involved in his finances, even so as to approach bankruptcy, and at the same time he will fall gradually into vari- ous 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 in- creases 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 allo- pathic 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 hus- HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 101 known, and the customary allopathic treatments, with their aggressive, inappropriate remedies such as baths, Mercury, Prussic acid, Iodine, Digitalis, Qui- band, 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 remains an invalid, despite the vigor of her youth; yea, her ail- ments 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 ac- cused 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 ef- fect, 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 suf- ficient cause of the present ailments and complaints it is seen that they only served as an occasion and impetus tozvard the develop- ment 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 man- ifest that generally an indwelling itch disease (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. 102 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. nine, starvation and other fashionable remedies in- cluded only hasten death, the end of all those mala- dies 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 awak- ening 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 organ- ism of the patient (as we are sorry to witness every day) with the battering-rams of his violent, inappro- priate 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 favor- able external circumstances, as well as its breaking ' out into more serious ailments and maladies, is an- nounced by the increase of the symptoms given above as indicating the slumbering Psora, and also by a numberless multitude of various other signs and com- plaints. 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 mani- HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 103 fest secondary disease there appear the following symptoms, which I have derived and observed alto- gether 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. I am quite willing to believe that many more symp- toms 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. 104 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 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. 1 Headache, a dull pain in the morning immediately on waking up, or in the afternoon when walking rap- idly or speaking loudly. Headache on one side, with a certain periodicity (after 28, 14 or a less number of days), more fre- quently 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.* 1 While the mind is uneasy, with anxiety and disinclination to work. a Not (infrequently accompanied with coldness of the hands and feet. 3 Usually accompanied with anxiety. * At the same time a great internal disquiet and anxiety, espe- cially in the abdomen ; a lack of stools, or frequent, scanty evacu- ations 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, HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 105 Headache daily at certain hours; e.g., a stitching in the temples. 1 Attacks of throbbing headache (e. g., in the fore- head) with violent nausea as if about to sink down, or, also, vomiting ; starting early in the evenings, re- peated every fortnight, or sooner or later. Headache as if the skull were about to burst open. 2 Headache, drawing pains.* Headache, stitches in the head (passing out at the ears). 4 Roaring noise in the brain, singing, buzzing, hum- ming, 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 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 frequent 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. 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 all over the whole head and face, which is often bloated from it, while the head aches when touched, not infrequently attended with nausea. 'Usually while walking, especially while walking and moving after meals. *At the same time everything frequently appears dark before her face. 106 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 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. 1 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. 2 Yellowish; yellow color of the face. Sallow yellowish complexion. Erysipelas on the face. 8 Pressive pain on the eyes, especially late in the even- ing; 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 1 Which also in rare cases pass over iuto suppuration. J 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. 8 In some cases with much fever, also at times with burning, itch- ing, stinging watery blisters in the face, which turn into scabs (Erysipelas bullosum). HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 107 for hours); the eye-lids are heavy as if paralyzed or convulsively closed. The eyes are most sensitive to daylight; they are pained by it and close involuntarily. 1 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 several of them. Inflammations of the eyes, of various kinds. 2 Yellowness around the eyes. Yellowness of the white of the eye. 3 Dim, opaque spots on the cornea. 4 Dropsy of the eye. Obscuration of the crystalline lens, cataract. Squinting. Far-sightedness; he sees far in the distance, but can- not 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. 1 Usually with more or less inflammation. 2 The fistula lachrymalis has probably never any other cause than the itching disease. 3 Or gray color of the same. *Even without having had any previous inflammation of the eyes. 108 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. The eyes seem to look through a veil or a mist; the sight becomes dim at certain times. 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 vision 1 in- creased finally even to blindness. Painfulness of various spots in the face, the cheeks, the cheekbones, 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 pains in the ear. There are stitches in the ear, outwardly. 8 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.* 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 pain- ful 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. 'Especially while walking in the open air. *Such as clinking, rushing, seething, roaring, humming, chirp- HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 109 Deafness of various degrees even up to total deaf- ness, with or without noise in the ear; occasionally worse, according to the weather. Swelling of the parotid glands. 1 Epistaxis, more or less profusely, more or less fre- quently. The nostrils as it were stopped up. 2 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. Sense of smell perverted. 3 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.* Fetid smell in the nose. Nostrils frequently ulcerated, surrounded with pim- ples 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. ing, ringing, drumming, thundering, whizzing, fluttering, mur- muring, etc. 1 Often with stinging pains in the glands. * 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. 3 E.g., the smell of manure or some other peculiar smell is in the nose. 4 Sometimes also a discharge of acrid mucus from the nose. 110 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 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. 1 The inside of the lips is lined with little sores or blisters.* Cutaneous eruption of the beard and of the roots of the hairs of the beard, with itching. Eruptions of the face of innumerable kinds. 8 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 deteri- oration of the teeth, even without toothache. Toothache of innumerable varieties, with varying causes of excitation. She cannot remain in bed at night, owing to tooth- ache. On the tongue, painful blisters and sore places. *At times with a burning, biting pain. 2 Often very painful, coming and passing away. 3 Milk-crust, pimples, blotches, herpes and carcinomatous ulcers of the nose, lips and face (also called cancer}, with burning and stinging pain. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. Ill 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. Stuttering, stammering; also at times sudden at- tacks 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 fre- quently 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 con- stantly. Bitter taste in the mouth, mostly in the morning.* 1 Chiefly on waking up at night or in the morning, with or with- out thirst; with a great deal of dryness in the throat, often a prick- ing pain in swallowing. 'Not rarely, this is constant. 112 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. Sourish and sour taste in the mouth, especially after eating, though the food tasted all right. 1 Putrid and fetid taste in the mouth. Bad smell in the mouth, sometimes mouldy, some- times 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, uncontroll- able, often for hours, not infrequently at night. Incomplete eructation, which causes merely convul- sive shocks in the fauces without coming out of the mouth. Eructation, sour, either fasting or after food, es- pecially 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. Heart-burn, more or less frequent; there is a burn- ing along the chest, especially after breakfast, or while moving the body. Water-brash, a gushing discharge of a sort of sali- vary 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. 2 1 Rarely an offensively sweet taste in the mouth, even without eating or drinking. *This also at times turns into vomiting of water, mucus, or a HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 113 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. 1 Nausea even to vomiting, in the morning im- mediately after rising from bed, decreasing from motion. Nausea always after eating fatty things or milk. Vomiting 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 swal- low 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. gush of acrid acid more frequently after eating flour dumplings, vegetables causing flatulence, baked prunes, etc. 1 Often coming very suddenly. 114 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 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. 1 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).* In the stomach, beating and pulsation, even when fasting. Spasm in the stomach; pain in the pit of the stomach as if drawn together. 3 Griping in the stomach; a painful griping in the stomach;* 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 con- taining vinegar, etc. 5 1 Especially in youth and childhood. 2 In some cases even while fasting, and causing him to wake up out of sleep at night, sometimes oppressing the breathing. 3 Usually a short time after eating. * Not infrequently with vomiting of mucus and water, without which in such a case the griping is not alleviated. 5 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. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 115 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 lassi- tude. After meals, anxiety and cold perspiration, with anxiety. 1 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 ossophagus from below up- ward. After meals, distension of the abdomen. 2 After meals, very tired and sleepy. 3 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, caus- ing many ailments of body and of spirit. 4 1 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. 2 With this, at times, weariness in the arms and legs. 3 Often until the patient lies down and sleeps. 4 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. 116 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. The abdomen is distended by flatus, 1 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 mo- tion, 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 fulness 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. 2 In the abdomen, qualmishness, a sensation of void- ness, disagreeable emptiness;* 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 constric- tion as from a bandage, after she had had no stool for several days. 1 The flatus often ascends; less frequently a great quantity of flatus is discharged, 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. 2 The cutting pain also at times passes down into the rectum and down the thigh. 3 In some cases alternating with a contractive pain in the abdo- men. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 117 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. 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, fre- quently quickly distending the abdomen without flatu- lence. In the lower abdomen, pains pressing down toward the genitals. 3 Inguinal hernias, often painful while speaking and singing. 4 1 Which often rises to the pit of the stomach, digging and caus- ing 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, ex- cepting the few cases, when these parts are injured by great ex- 118 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 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 en- veloped 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. Gray 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. 1 Frequently repeated diarrhoea, with cutting pains in the abdomen, lasting several days. After a stool, especially after a softer, more copious evacuation, great and sudden prostration. 2 ternal violence, or when the hernia arises from superhuman exer- tions of the body through lifting or pushing quickly, while in a great fright. 1 Usually preceded by rumbling or fermentation in the abdomen; chiefly in the morning. 2 Especially, weakness in the pit of the stomach, anxiety, rest- lessness, also at times chills in the abdomen or the small of the back, etc. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 119 Diarrhoea, soon so weakening, that she cannot walk alone. Painless and painful hemorrhoidal varices 1 on the anus, in the rectum (blind piles). Bleeding hemorrhoidal varices on the anus or in the rectum* (running piles), especially during stools, after which the hemorrhoids often pain violently for a long time. With bloody discharges in the anus or in the rec- tum, 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 perinaeum. Polypi in the rectum. During micturition, anxiety, also at times prostra- tion. At times too much urine is discharged, succeeded by great weariness. 5 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. 4 1 Which not infrequently have a slimy fluid oozing from them. 4 Fistulce 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. 9 Diabetes, which with Allopathic remedies is usually so fatal, has probably never any other origin than this malady. *-The urine frequently passes off as thin as a thread, or the 120 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. Pressure on the bladder, as if from an urging to uri- nate, immediate!}' 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 fre- quently at night for that purpose. Urine passes off in sleep involuntarily. 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. 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 blad- der and springs from the same Psoric malady. So also inflamma- tion 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. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 121 Discharge of prostatic fluid after urination, but espe- cially after a difficult stool (also almost constant drip- ping 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 woman, with voluptuous dreams. Nocturnal pollutions, even if not frequent, yet im- mediately attended by evil consequences.* Semen passes off almost involuntarily in daytime, with little excitation, often even without erection. Erections very frequent, long continuing, very pain- ful 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. 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. 'Gloominess, obtuseness, dimness of the thinking powers, di- minished vividness of the imagination, want of memory, de- pression, melancholy; the vision is weakened, as well as the diges- tion and the appetite; stools are retained, a rush of blood to the head ensues, also toward the anus, etc. * The testicles in such a case are never drawn up to the body, but hang down more or less. 9 122 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 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 induration (Sarcoceli). 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 sexual desire in both sexes, either frequent or constant. 1 Uncontrollable insatiable lasciviousness, 2 with a ca- chectic complexion and sickly body. Sterility, impotence, without any original organic defect in the sexual parts. 3 1 Often for years, yea, for many years. The male and the female genital parts cannot then be excited to any agreeable or voluptu- ous 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 an entire bareness of the female genital parts. *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 erec- tion, 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 (leucorrhcea), 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. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 123 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 disturb- ance 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. 1 The menses do not keep their regular periods, they either come several days too early, sometimes every three weeks, or even every fortnight. 2 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). 8 1 Consequent sallow paleness and tumefaction of the face, heavi- ness of the limbs, swelling of the feet, chilliness, weariness, asthma (chlorosis), etc. 2 The menses rarely come several days too late, and flow then in too great abundance, with prostrating weariness and many other ailments. 3 Often followed by swelling of the face, of the hands and feet, 124 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 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, spas- modic, cutting pains in the abdomen and in the small of the back; she is obliged to lie down, vomit, etc. Polypi in the vagina. Leucorrhosa 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 dis- charge 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. 1 painful spasms in the breast and the abdomen, innumerable ail- ments from nervous debility, excessive sensitiveness, as well in general, as of particular sensory organs, etc., and before the ap- pearance 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. 1 L/eucorrhcea, especially the more malignant kind, is accom- panied by an innumerable multitude of ailments. Not to mention the lesser ones (such as the itchiug of the pudenda and the vagina, with excoriation on the outside of the pudenda and the adja- cent 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, epi- lepsy, 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 burn- ing 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 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 125 Premature births. During pregnancies great weariness, nausea, fre- quent 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 con- stantly, 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 can- not speak a loud word. Suppuration of the larynx and the bronchia (laryngo- bronchial phthisis). 1 Hoarseness and catarrh very often, or almost con- stantly; his chest is continually affected. 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 ? 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. 126 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 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 even- ing. Cough, which teiminates 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, worse after awaking in the morning. Cough, worse 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 ab- domen. Dry cough. Cough, with yellow expectoration resembling pus, with or without spitting of blood. 1 Cough, with excessive expectoration of mucus and sinking of the strength (mucous phthisis). Attacks of whooping cough. 2 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. "* 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 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 127 Violent, at times unbearable, stitches in the chest at every breath ; cough impossible for pain ; without in- flammatory 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 de- jection. 1 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 hemoptysis 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 in- tolerable pains, as if he were being torn to pieces. 2 Obstruction of the breath, with stitching pains in the chest at the slightest amount of walking ; 3 he can- not go a step farther (angina pectoris). Asthma, merely when moving the arms, not while walking. of water will pass; after eight or ten minutes, there follow eructa- tions from the stomach, and the spasm terminates. 1 Usually the attacks last from evening to morning, the whole night. * Such attacks, in some cases, also occur several times in one night, especially when he has not been in the open air during the day. 3 Especially when ascending a height. 128 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 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. Palpitation with anxiety, especially at night. Asthma, loud, difficult, at times also sibilant respira- tion. 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 lancin- ating 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. 1 Is it probable that the different varieties of cancer of the breast have any other origin than this Psora malady ? HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 129 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. 1 Stitching pains in the fingers and toes. 2 Stitches in the heels and soles of the feet while standing. Burning in the soles of the feet. 3 In the joints a sort of tearing, like scraping on the bone, with a red, hot swelling which is painfully sen- sitive to the touch and to the air, with unbearably sensitive, peevish disposition (gout, podagra, chiragra, gout in the knees, etc.). 4 The joints of the fingers, swollen with pressive pains, painful when touching and bending them. 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. 5 Joints, painful on motion. 6 1 These spots then also pain on being touched, as if they were bruised or sore. 1 In worse, chronic cases, this is aggravated into a cutting pain. 3 Especially at night under a feather bed. 4 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 be stands up, etc., they feel intolerably be- numbed and the limb is weakened. *E.g., the tendo Achillis on standing erect, stiffness of the tarsus, of the knees, either transient (after sitting, when rising), or permanent (contraction). 6 E. ^. , the shoulder-joint on raising the arm; the tarsus pains on treading as if it was about to break. 130 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. Joints crack on moving, or they make a snapping noise. The joints are easily sprained or strained. 1 Increasing disposition to strains and to overlift one- self even at a very slight exertion of the muscles, even in slight mechanical work, in reaching out or stretch- ing 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 occasion long confinement to the bed, swoons, all grades of hysterical troubles, 2 fever, hemoptysis, etc., while persons who are not Psoric lift such burdens as their muscles are able to, without the slightest after effects. 3 The joints are easily sprained at any false move- ment. 4 * R. g., the tarsus, the wrist-joint, the joint of the thumb. 2 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 unfre- quently stitches in the side of the breast, or between the shoulder blades, which check the respiration, or painful stiffness of the neck or spine, frequently audible eructations, etc. s Tne common people, especially in the country, seek alleviation through a sort of mesmeric stroking, but without lasting effects; the tendency to overlifting nevertheless remains. It is usually a 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. *. g., the ankle at a false step, so also the shoulder-joint. Ol this kind is also the gradual luxation of the hip-joint (/. e., of the head of the femur from the acetabuluui, when the leg then be- comes too long or too short, causing limping). HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 131 In the joint of the foot there is pain on treading, as if it would break. Softening of the bones, curvature of the spine (de- formity, hunchback), curvature of the long bones of the thighs and legs {morbus angliats, rickets). Fragility of the bones. Painful sensitiveness of the skin, the muscles and of the periosteum on a moderate pressure. 1 Intolerable* pain in the skin (or in the muscles, or in the periosteum) of some part of the body from a slight movement of the same or of a more distant part; e. g., from writing there arises a pain in the shoulder or in the side of the neck, etc., while sawing or performing other hard labor with the same hand causes no pain; a similar pain in the adjacent parts, from speaking and moving the mouth; pain in the lips and in the back at slight touch. Numbness of the skin or the muscles of certain parts and limbs. 8 '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 veiy painful, wherefore he frequently turns over at night; the posterior muscles of the thigh and the bone on which he 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. 2 Of incredible variety. Often burning, jerking, lancinating, but often indescribable, are these pains which communicate a similar intolerable excessive sensitiveness to the mind. These pains thus affect chiefly the upper parts of the body, or the face (tic douloureux}, or the skin of the neck, etc , at even a gentle touch, in speaking and chewing in the shoulder at a slight press- ure, or movement of the finger. 3 The sense of touch is lacking; the parts feel hard and tumid, either periodically or permanently (constant insensibility). 132 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. Dying off of certain fingers or of the hands or feet. 1 Crawling or also prickling formication (as from limbs going to sleep) in the arms, in the legs and in other parts (even in the finger-tips). A crawling, or whirling, or an internally itching restlessness, especially in the lower limbs (in the even- ing in bed or early on awaking) ; they must be brought into another position every moment. Painful sensation of cold in various .parts. Burning pains in various parts (frequently without any change in the usual external bodily temperature). Coldness, repeated or constant of the whole body, or of the one side of the body; so also of single parts, cold hands, cold feet which frequently will not get warm in bed. Chilliness, constant, even without any change in the external bodily temperature. Frequent flushes of heat, especially in the face, more frequently with redness than without; sudden, violent sensation of heat during rest, or in slight motion, sometimes even from speaking, with or without per- spiration breaking out. Warm air in the room or at church is exceedingly repugnant to her, makes her restless, causes her to move about (at times with a pressure in the head, over the eyes, not infrequently alleviated by epistaxis). Rushes of blood, also at times a sensation of throb- bing in all the arteries (while he often looks quite pale, with a feeling of prostration throughout the body). 1 The limb then becomes white, bloodless, without feeling and quite cold, often for hours, especially while it is cool (stroking with a piece of zinc toward the tips of the fingers or the toes usu- ally drives it away quickly, but only as a palliative). HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 133 Rush of blood to the head. Rush of blood to the chest. Varices, varicose veins in the lower limbs (.varices on the pudenda), also on the arms (even with men), often with tearing pains in them (during storms), or with itching in the varices. 1 Erysipelas, partly in the face (with fever), partly on the limbs, on the breast while nursing, especially in a sore place (with a pricking and burning pain). Whitlow, paronychia (sore finger with festering skin). Chilblains (even when it is not winter) on the toes and fingers, itching, burning and lancinating pains. Corns, which even without external pressure cause burning, lancinating pains. Boils (furuncles), returning from time to time, es- pecially on the nates, the thighs, the upper arms and the body. Touching them causes fine stitches in them. Ulcers on the thighs, especially, also upon the ankles and above them and on the lower part of the calves, with itching, gnawing, tickling around the borders, and a gnawing pain as from salt on the base of the ulcer itself; the parts surrounding are of brown and bluish color, with varices near the ulcers, which, during storms and rains, often cause tearing pains, es- pecially at night, often accompanied with erysipelas after vexation or fright, or attended with cramps in the calves. Tumefaction and suppuration of the humerus, the femur, the patella, also of the bones of the fingers and toes {spina ventosa). 1 The swellings of the arteries (aueurismata) seem to have no other origin than the Psora. 134 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. Thickening and stiffening of the joints. Eruptions, either arising from time to time and passing away again; some voluptuously itching pus- tules, especially on the fingers or other parts, which, after scratching, burn and have the greatest similarity to the original itch-eruption; or net tier ash, like stings and water-blisters, mostly with burning pain; or pimples without pain in the face, the chest, the back, the arms and the thighs; or herpes in fine miliary grains closely pressed together into round, larger or smaller spots of mostly reddish color, sometimes dry, sometimes moist, with itching, similar to the eruption of itch and with burning after rubbing them. They con- tinually extend further to the circumfer- ence, with redness, while the middle seems to become free from the eruption and covered with smooth, shining skin {herpes circinatus). The moist herpes on the legs are called salt-rheum; or crusts raised above the surrounding skin, round in form, with deep-red, painless borders, with frequent violent stitches on the parts of the skin not yet affected; or small, round spots on the skin, covered with bran-like, dry scales, which often peel off and are again renewed without sensation; or red spots of the skin, which feel dry, with burning pain; somewhat raised above the rest of the skin. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 135 Freckles, small and round, brown or brownish spots in the face, on the hands and on the chest, without sensation. Liver spots, large brownish spots which often cover whole limbs, the arms, the neck, the chest, etc., with- out sensation or with itching. Yellowness of the skin, yellow spots of a like nature around the eyes, the mouth, on the neck, etc., with- out sensibility. 1 Warts on the face, the lower arm, the hands, etc. 2 Encysted tumors in the skin, the cellular tissue be- neath it, or in the bursce mucosce of the tendons (ex- ostosis), of various forms and sizes, cold without sensi- bility. 3 Glandular swellings around the neck, in the groin, in the bend of the joints, the bend of the elbow, of the knee, in the axillae, 4 also in the breasts. Dryness of the (scarf) skin either on the whole body with inability to perspire through motion and heat, or only in some parts. 5 1 After riding in a carriage, yellowness of the skin conies on most quickly, if it is not yet constant but only occasional. 2 Especially in youth. Many remain only a short time and pass away to give place to another symptom of Psora. 3 The fungus hematodes, which has lately become such a dreadful plague, has, according to the conclusions I am compelled to draw from several cases, no other source than Psora. 4 At times they pass over, after lancinating pains, into a sort of chronic suppuration, in which, however, instead of pus, only a colorless mucus is secreted. 5 Especially in the hands, the outer side of the arms and legs, and even in the face; the skin is dry, rough, parched, feels chapped, and often has scales like bran. 136 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. Disagreeable sensation of dryness over the whole body (also in the face, around and in the mouth, in the throat, or in the nose, although the breath passes freely through it). Perspiration comes too easily from slight motion ; even while sitting, he is attacked with perspiration all over, or merely on some parts ; e. g., almost constant perspiration of the hands and feet, 1 so also strong perspiration in the axillae 2 and around the pudenda. Daily morning sweats, often causing the patient to drip, this for many years, often with sour or pungent- sour smell. 3 One-sided perspiration, only on one side of the body, or only on the upper part of the body, or only on the lower part. Increasing susceptibility to colds, either of the whole body (often even from repeatedly wetting the hands, now with warm water, then with cold, as in washing clothes), or only susceptibility of certain parts of the body, of the head, the neck, the chest, the abdomen, ttie feet, etc., often in a moderate or slight draught, or after slightly moistening these parts ; 4 even from 1 The latter is usually very fetid and so abundant that, after even a short walk, the soles of the feet, the heels and toes are soaked and sore. * Not infrequently of red color or of a rank smell like that of he goats or that of garlic. 8 Here belongs the perspiration of Psoric children on their head after going to sleep in the evening. 4 The ailments following from it, immediately afterwards, are then considerable and manifold : Pains in the limbs, headaches, catarrh, sore throat, and inflammation of the throat, coryza, swell- ing of the glands of the neck, hoarseness, cough, dyspnoea, stitches HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 137 being in a cooler room, in a rainy atmosphere, or with a low barometer. So-called weather prophets, i. e., renewed severe pains in parts of the body which were formerly in- jured, wounded, or broken, though they have since been healed and cicatrized ; this renewed pain sets in, when great changes of the weather, great cold, or a storm are imminent, or when a thunder storm is in the air. Water} 7 swelling, either of the feet alone, or in one foot, or in the hands, or the face, or the abdomen, or the scrotum, etc., alone, or again cutaneous swelling over the whole body (dropsies). Attacks of sudden heaviness of the arms and legs. Attacks of paralytic weakness and paralytic lassi- tude of the one arm, the one hand, the one leg, with- out pain, either arising suddenly and passing quickly, or commencing gradually and constantly increasing. Sudden bending of the knee. Children fall easily, without any visible cause. Also similar attacks of weakness, with adults, in the legs, so that in walking one foot glides this way and the other that way, etc. While walking in the open air sudden attacks of faintness, especially in the legs. 1 in the chest, fever, troubles of digestion, colic, vomiting, diar- rhoea, stomachache, rising of water from the stomach, also stitches in the face and other parts, jaundice-like color of the skin, etc. No person who is not Psoric ever suffers the least after-effects from such causes. 1 At times the feeling of faintness seems to rise up even to the serobiculus cordis, where it turns into a ravenous hunger, which suddenly deprives him of all strength ; he is attacked with tremor and has immediately to lie down for a while. 10 138 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. While sitting, the patient feels intolerably weary, but stronger while walking. The predisposition to spraining and straining the joints at a mis-step, or a wrong grasp, increases at times even to dislocation, e. g., in the tarsus, the shoulder-joint, etc. The snapping and cracking of the joints at any motion of the limb increases with a disagreeable sen- sation. The going to sleep of the limbs increases and fol- lows on slight causes, e. g., in supporting the head with the arm, crossing the legs while sitting, etc. The painful cramps in some of the muscles increase and come on without appreciable cause. Slow, spasmodic straining of the flexor muscles of the limbs. Sudden jerks of some muscles and limbs even while waking; e. g., of the tongue, the lips, the muscles of the face, of the pharynx, of the eyes, of the jaws, of the hands and of the feet. Tonic shortening of the flexor muscles (tetanus). Involuntary turning and twisting of the head, or the limbs, with full consciousness (St. Vitus' dance). Sudden fainting spells and sinking of the strength, with loss of consciousness. Attacks of tremor in the limbs, without anxiety. Continuous, constant trembling, also in some cases beating with the hands, the arms, the legs. Attacks of loss of consciousness, lasting a moment or a minute, with an inclination of the head to the one shoulder, with or without jerks of one part or the other. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 139 Epilepsies of various kinds. Almost constant yawning, stretching and straining of the limbs. Sleepiness during the day, often immediately after sitting down, especially after meals. Difficulty in falling asleep, when abed in the even- ing ; he often lies awake for hours. He passes the nights in a mere slumber. Sleeplessness, from anxious heat, every night, an anxiety which sometimes rises so high, that he must get up from his bed and walk about. After three o'clock in the morning, no sleep, or at least no sound sleep. As soon as he closes his eyes, all manner of phantastic appearances and distorted faces appear. In going to sleep, she is disquieted by strange, anxious fancies; she has to get up and walk about. Very vivid dreams, as if awake; or sad, frightful, anxious, vexing, lascivious dreams. Loud talking, screaming, during sleep. Somnambulism; he rises up at night, while sleeping with closed eyes, and attends to various duties; he performs even dangerous feats with ease, without knowing anything about them when awake. Attacks of suffocation while sleeping (nightmare). Various sorts of severe pains at night, or nocturnal thirst, dryness of the throat, of the mouth, or frequent urinating at night. Early on awaking, dizzy, indolent, unrefreshed, as if he had not done sleeping and more tired than in the evening, when he lay down; it takes him several hours (and only after rising) before he can recover from this weariness. 140 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. After a very restless night, he often has more strength in the morning, than after a quiet, sound sleep. Intermittent fever, even when there are no cases about, either sporadic or epidemic, 1 or endemic; the form, duration and type of the fever are very various; quotidian, tertian, quartan, quintan or every seven days. Every evening, chills with blue nails. Every evening, single chills. Every evening, heat, with a rush of blood to the head, with red cheeks, also at times an intervening chill. Intermittent fever of several weeks' duration, fol- lowed by a moist itching eruption lasting several weeks, but which .is healed again during a like period of intermittent fever, and alternating thus for years. Disturbances of the mind and spirit of all kinds? Melancholy by itself, or with insanity, also at times alternating with frenzy and hours of rationality. Anxious oppression, early on awaking. Anxious oppression in the evening after going to bed. 5 1 Epidemic intermittent fevers probably never seize a man who is free from Psora, so that wherever there is a susceptibility to them, it is to be accounted a symptom of Psora. 2 1 have never either in my practice, nor in any insane asylum , seen a patient suffering from melancholy, insanity, or frenzy whose disease did not have Psora as its foundation, complicated at times, however, though rarely, with syphilis. 3 This causes some patients to break out into a strong perspira- tion; others feel from it merely flushes of blood and throbbing in all the arteries; with others, the anxious oppression tends to constrict HAHNEMANN S CHRONIC DISEASES. 141 Anxiety, several times a day (with and without pains), or at certain hours of the day or of the night; usually the patient then finds no rest, but has to run hither and thither, and often falls into perspiration. Melancholy, palpitation and anxiousness causes her at night to wake up from sleep (mostly just before the beginning of the menses). Mania of self-destruction 1 (spleen?). the throat, threatening suffocation, while others have a sensation, as if all the blood in their arteries were standing still, causing an- guish. With others, this oppression is associated with anxious images and thoughts, and seems to rise from them, while with others, there is oppression without anxious ideas and thoughts. 1 This kind of disease of the mind or spirit, which is also merely psoric, seems not to have been taken into consideration. Without feeling any anxiety, or anxious thoughts, therefore, also, without any one's perceiving such anxiety in them, apparently in the full exercise of their reason, they are impelled, urged, yea, compelled by a certain feeling of necessity, to self-destruction. They are only healed by a cure of Psora, if their utterances are noticed in time. I say in time, for in the last stages of this kind of insanity it is peculiarly characteristic of this disease, not to utter anything about such a determination to anyone. This frenzy manifests itself in fits of one-half or of whole hours, usually in the end daily, often at certain times of the day. But besides these fits of destructive mania, euch persons have usually also fits of anxious oppression, which seem, however, to be independent of the former fits, and- come at other hours, accompanied partly with pulsation in the pit of the stomach, but during these they are not tormented with the desire of taking their own life. These attacks of anxiety which seem to be more of a bodily nature, and are not connected with the other train of thoughts, may also be lacking, while the fits of suicidal mania rule in a high degree; they may also return, when that mania is in a great part extinguished through the anti- psoric remedies, so that the two seem to be independent of one another, though they have the same original malady for their foundation. 142 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. A weeping mood; they often weep for hours with- out knowing a cause for it. 1 Attacks of fear; e. g., fear of fire, of being alone, of apoplexy, of becoming insane, etc. Attacks of passion, resembling frenzy. Fright caused by the merest trifles; this often causes perspiration and trembling. Disinclination to work, in persons who else are most industrious; no impulse to occupy himself, but rather the most decided repugnance thereto. 2 Excessive sensitiveness. 3 Irritability from weakness. 3 1 This is a symptom, however, which seems to be caused by the diseased state, especially of the female sex, in order to soothe temporarily more and greater nervous disorders. 'Such a person, when she desired to begin one of her domestic occupations, was seized with anxiety and oppression; her limbs' trembled, and she became suddenly so weary, she had to lie down. 3 All physical and psychical impressions, even the weaker and the weakest, cause a morbid excitement, often in a high degree. Occurrences affecting the mind, not only such as are of sad and vexatious kind, but also those of a joyous kind, cause surprising ailments and disorders; touching tales, yea, even thinking of them and recalling them, cause a tumultuous excitement of the nerves, and drive the anxiety into the head, etc. Even a little reading about indifferent things, or looking attentively at an object; e. g., while sewing, attentively listening even to indifferent things, too bright a light, the loud talking of several people at the same time, even single tones on a musical instrument, the ringing of bells, etc., cause harmful impressions: trembling, weariness, headache, chills, etc. Often the senses of smell and taste are immoderately sensitive. In many cases even moderate bodily motion, or speak- ing, also moderate warmth, cold, open air, wetting the skin with water, etc. Not a few suffer even in their room from a sudden change in the weather, while most of these patients complain dur- HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 143 Quick change of moods; often very merry and ex- uberantly so, often again and, indeed, very suddenly, dejection; e. g., on account of his disease, or from other trifling causes. Sudden transition from cheer- fulness to sadness, or vexation without a cause. These are some of the leading symptoms observed by me, which, if they are often repeated, or become constant, show that the internal Psora is coming forth" from its latent state. They are at the same time the elements, from which (under unfavorable external conditions) the itch-malady, as it manifests itself, com- poses the illimitable number of chronic diseases, and with one man assumes the one form, with another an- other, according to the bodily constitution, defects in the education, habits, employment and external cir- cumstances, as also modified by the various psychical and physical impressions. It thus unfolds into mani- fold forms of disease, with so many varieties, that they are by no means exhausted by the disease-symp- toms enumerated in the pathology of the old-school, and erroneously designated there as well-defined, con- stant and peculiar diseases.* ing stormy and wet weather, few of dry weather with a clear sky. The full moon also with some persons, and the new moon with others, has an unfavorable effect. *They bear the following names: Scrofula, rickets, spina ventosa, atrophy, marasmus, consumption, pulmonary consumption , asthma, tabes mucosa, laryngeal phthisis, chronic catarrh, constant coryza, difficult dentition, worms and consequent diseases, dyspepsia, ab- domina, cramps, hypochondria, hysteria, dropsy, dropsy of the ab- domenl dropsy of the ovaries, of the uterus, hydrocele, hydroce- phalus, amenorrhoea, dysmenorrhrea, uterine hemorrhages, hemate- mesis, hemoptysis and hemorrhages, vaginal hemorrhages, dysuria, 144 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. These are the characteristic secondary symptoms* of the long-unacknowledged, thousand-headed mon- ster, pregnant with disease, the Psora, the original miasmatic malady which now makes its manifest ap- pearance, f ischuria, enuresis, diabetes, catarrh of the bladder, hematuria, .nephralgia, gravel of the kidneys, stricture of the urethra, strict- ure of the intestines, blind and running piles, fistula of the rectum, difficult stools, constipation, chronic diarrhoea, indura- tion of the liver, jaundice, cyanosis, heart diseases, palpitation, spasms of the chest, dropsy of the chest, abortion, sterility, metro- mania, impotence, induration of the testicles, dwindling of the testicles, prolapsus uteri, inversion of the womb, inguinal, femoral and umbilical hernias, dislocations of the joints from an internal cause, curvature of the spine, chronic inflammation of the eyes, fistula lachrymalis, short-sightedness and long-sightedness, day blindness and night blindness, obscuration of the cornea, cata- racts, glaucoma, amaurosis, deafness, deficient smell or taste, chronic one-sided headache, megrim, tic douloureux, tinea capitis, scab, crusta lactea, tetters (herpes), pimples, nettlerash, encysted tumors, goitre, varices, aneurism, erysipelas, sarcomas, osteo- sarcoma, scirrhus, cancer of the lips, cheeks, breast, uterus, fungus hematodes, rheumatism, gout in the hips, knotty gout, podagra, apoplectic fits, swoons, vertigo, paralysis, contractions, tetanus, convulsions, epilepsy, St. Vitus' dance, melancholy, insanity, im- becility, nervous debility, etc. *The supreme royal councillor Kopp, an Allopath, who is un- willingly and only half and half approaching Homoeopathy, pre- tends to have seen chronic diseases disappear of themselves he may have seen some particular symptoms disappear, which symp- toms the old school, in its shortsighted fashion, considered with him as so many entire diseases ! fl will grant that the doctrine, that "all chronic non-venereal diseases which are not extinguishable by the vital force, in an or- derly course of life, while external circumstances are favorable, but which even increase with the years, are of psoric origin," is for HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 145 all who have not fully weighed my reasons and for all narrow- minded people, too great, too overwhelming. But it is none the less true. Or should we regard such a chronic disease as not being psoric, because the patient cannot remember that he at some- time, all the way back to his birth, has had several or more (in- tolerable voluptuously) itching pustules of itch on his skin, or (since the itch-disease is considered as something disgraceful) is not willing to acknowledge it? His non-acknowledgment here proves nothing to the contrary. Since at all times, all the innumerable chronic diseases resulting from an acknowledged preceding itch (when this has not been cured) are ineradicable through the vital force, and advance in their equable course as psoric ailments, and continually aggra- vated; so long as the doubters of the psora doctrine cannot show me any other source which is at least as probable for a (non- veneric) ailment, which, despite of favorable external conditions, correct diet, good morality and vigorous bodily constitution, nevertheless increases every year, without any preceding infection from itch so far as memory goes; so long -as I have on my side an overpowering analogous probability, i. e., 100 to i, that also the individual cases of chronic disease, which show a like progression, probably also are, yea, must be of a psoric nature, although the patient cannot or will not remember a preceding infection. It is easy to doubt matters which cannot be laid before our ocu- lar vision, but in itself this doubt proves nothing at all, for accord- ing to the old rule of logic : negantis est pro bare. To prove the Psoric nature of these chronic diseases without acknowledged infection, we do not even need the fact that the anti-psoric remedies prove effectual therein ; this serves only like the proof to a correctly solved mathematical problem. Now since, in addition, the other remedies, although also selected according to the similarity of their symptoms, do not by far yield so durable and thorough a cure in such chronic diseases, as those which are recognized as auti-psoric, and which are selected in as Homoeopathic a manner, because these more than the others are adequate to the whole extent of the endless number of symptoms of the great Psora malady : I do not see why men will deny to the latter the title of the especially anti-psoric remedies, unless this springs from dogmatism . 146 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. And just as little is there any good reason for contradicting me, when I (Organon, \ 73) explain the acute diseases which return from time to time ; e. g. , inflammations of the throat, of the chest, etc., as flaming up from a latent Psora, simply because their in- flammatory state, as they say, is mostly to be combatted by means of the anti-phlogistic remedies, which are not anti-psoric ; i. e. t Aconite, Belladonna, Mercury and the like. These, nevertheless, have their source in a latent Psora, because their customary return cannot be prevented by anything but a final cure with anti-psoric remedies. Cure of the Chronic Diseases. CURE. We now proceed to the medical Homoeopathic treat- ment of the illimitably large number of chronic dis- eases, which, after the above gained knowledge of their threefold nature, has not, indeed, become easy, but what without this knowledge was before impos- sible has at last become possible, since the homce- pathically specific remedies for each one of these three different miasmata have in great part been discovered. The first two miasmata, which cause by far the smaller part of the chronic diseases, the venereal chancre-disease (syphilis) and the figwart-disease (sycosis), with their sequelae, we will treat first, in order that we may have a free path to the therapeu- tics of the immeasurably greater number of the various chronic diseases which spring from Psora. SYCOSIS. First, then, concerning sycosis, as being that miasma which has produced by far the fewest chronic diseases, and has only been dominant from time to time. This fig-wart disease, which in later times, especially dur- ing the French war, in the years 1809-1814, was so widely spread, but which has since showed itself more and more rarely, was treated, almost always, in an inefficient and injurious manner, internally with Mer- cury, because it was considered homogeneous with the venereal chancre-disease; but the excrescences on the genitals were treated by Allopathic physicians always in the most violent external way by cauterizing, burn- ing and cutting, or by ligatures. These excrescences usually first manifest themselves on the genitals, and appear usually, but not always, attended with a sort of gonorrhoea* from the urethra, several days or several weeks, even many weeks after infection through coition; more rarely they appear dry and like warts, more frequently soft, spongy, emitting a specifically fetid fluid (sweetish and almost like herring-brine), * Usually in gonorrhoea of this kind, the discharge is from the be- ginning thickish, like pus; micturition is less difficult, but the body of the penis swollen somewhat hard; the penis is also in some cases covered on the back with glandular tubercles, and very painful to the touch. 150 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES bleeding easily, and in the form of a coxcomb or a cauli- flower (brassica botrytes}. These, with males, sprout forth on the glans and on, or below, the prepuce, but with women, on the parts surrounding the pudenda; and the pudenda themselves, which are then swollen, are covered often by a great number of them. When these are violently removed, the natural, proximate effect is, that they will usually come forth again, usually to be sub- jected again, in vain, to a similar, painful, cruel treat- ment. But even if they could be rooted out in this way, it would merely have the consequence, that the fig-wart disease, after having been deprived of the local symptom which acts vicariously for the internal ailment, would appear* in other and much worse ways, in secondary ailments; for the fig-wart miasm, which rules in the whole organism, has been in no way diminished, either by the external destruction of the above-mentioned excrescences, or by the Mercury which has been used internally, and which is in no way appropriate to sycosis. Besides the undermining of the general health by Mercury, which in this disease can only do *The miasm of the other common gonorrhoea seems not to pene- trate the whole organism, but only to locally stimulate the urinary organs. They yield either to a dose of one drop of fresh parsley- juice, when this is indicated by a frequent urgency to urinate, or a small dose of Cannabis, of Cantharides, or of the Copaiva balm, according to their different constitution and the other ailments at- tending it. These should, however, be always used in the higher and highest dynamizations (potencies), unless a Psora, slumbering in the body of the patient, has been developed by means of a strongly affecting, irritating or weakening treatment by Allopathic physicians. In such a case frequently secondary gonorrhoeas re- main, which can only be cured by an anti-psoric treatment. HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 151 injury, and which is given mostly in very large doses and in the most active preparations, similar excres- cences then break out in other parts of the body, either whitish, spongy, sensitive, flat elevations, in the cavity of the mouth, on the tongue, the palate and the lips, or as large, raised, brown and dry tubercles in the axillae, on the neck, on the scalp, etc., or there arise other ailments of the body, of which I shall only men- tion the contraction of the tendons of the flexor mus- cles, especially of the fingers. The gonorrhoea dependent on the fig-wart miasma, as well as the above-mentioned excrescences (/. e., the whole sycosis), are cured most surely and most thor- oughly through the internal use of Thuja,* which, in this case, is Homoeopathic, in a dose of a few pellets as large as poppy seeds, moistened with the dilution potentized to the decillionthf degree, and when these have exhausted their action after fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty days, alternating with just as small a dose of Nitric acid, diluted to the decillionth degree, which must be allowed to act as long a time, in order to re- move the gonorrhoea and the excrescences; i, e., the whole sycosis. It is not necessary to use any external application, except in the most inveterate and difficult cases, when the larger fig-warts may be moistened every day with the mild, pure juice pressed from the green leaves of Thuja, mixed with an equal quantity of Alcohol. *Materia Medica Pura, Part V. f If further doses of Thuja are required, they are used most efficiently from other poteucies (viii., vi., v., ii.), a change of the modification of the remedy, which facilitates and strengthens its ablity of affecting the vital force. 152 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. But if the patient was at the same time affected with another chronic ailment, as if usual after the vio- lent treatment of fig-warts by Allopathic physicians, then we often find developed Psora* complicated with sycosis, when the Psora, as is often the case, was latent before in the patient. At times, when a badly treated case of venereal chancre disease had preceded, both these miasmata are conjoined in a three-fold com- plication with syphilis. Then it is necessary first to come to the assistance of the most afflicted part, the Psora, with the specific anti-psoric remedies given be- low, and then to make use of the remedies for sycosis, before the proper dose of the best preparation of Mer- cury, as will be described below, is given against the syphilis; the same alternating treatment may be con- tinued, until a complete cure is effected. Only, each one of these three kinds of medicine must be given the proper time to complete its action. In this reliable cure of sycosis from within, no ex- ternal remedy (except the juice of Thuja in inveterate bad cases) must be applied or laid on the fig-warts, only clean, dry lint, if they are of the moist variety. *This Psora is hardly ever found in its developed state (and thus capable of entering into complication with other miasmata) with young people who have just been infected and seized by the fig- wart disease, and who have not had to pass through the usual Mercurial treatment, which never runs its course without the most violent assaults on the constitution; by this pernicious derange- ment of the whole organism, the Psora, even if slumbering ever so soundly, will be awakened, if as is often the case, it was present within. SYPHILIS. The second chronic miasma, which is more widely spread than the figwart-disease, and which for three and a half [now four] centuries has been the source of many other chronic ailments, is the miasm of the venereal disease proper, the chancre-disease (syphilis). This disease only causes difficulties in its cure, if it is entangled (complicated) with a Psora that has been already far developed with sycosis it is complicated but rarely, but then usually at the same time with Psora. In the cure of the venereal disease, three states are to be distinguished : 1. When syphilis is still alone and attended with its associated local symptom, the chancre, or at least if this has been removed by external applications, it is still associated with the other local symptom, which in a similar manner acts vicariously for the internal disorder, the bubo.* 2. When it is alone, indeed, /'. e., without any com- plication with a second or third miasma, but has already been deprived of the vicarious local symptom, the chancre (and the bubo). * Very rarely the impure coition is at once followed by the bubo alone without any preceding chancre; usually the bubo only comes after the destruction of the chancre by local applications, and is a very troublesome substitute for the same. 11 154 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES 3. When it is already complicated with another chronic disease, /'. e. , with a Psora already developed, while the local symptom may either be yet present, or may have been removed by local applications. The chancre appears, after an impure coition, usu- ally between the seventh and fourteenth days, rarely sooner* or later, mostly on the member infected with the miasma, first as a little pustule, which changes into an impure ulcer with raised borders and stinging pains, which if not cured remains standing on the same place during man's lifetime, only increasing with the years, while the secondary symptoms of the venereal disease, syphilis, cannot break out as long as it exists. In order to help in such a case, the Allopathic physi- cian destroys this chancre, by means of corroding, cauterizing and desiccating substances, wrongly con- ceiving it to be a sore arising merely from without through a local infection, thus holding it to be a merely local ulcer, such also it is declared to be in their writings. They falsely suppose, that when it appears, no internal venereal disease is as yet to be thought of, so that when locally exterminating the chancre, they suppose that they remove all the vene- real disease from the patient at once, if only he will not permit this ulcer to remain too long in its place, so that the absorbent vessels do not get time to trans- fer the poison into the internal organism, and so cause by delay a general infection of the system with syphilis. They evidently do not know that the venereal infec- tion of the whole body commenced with the very moment of the impure coition, and was already com- pleted before the appearance of the chancre. The HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 155 Allopathic doctor destroys in his blindness, through local applications, the vicarious external symptom (the chancre ulcer), which kind nature intended for the alleviation of the internal extensive venereal gen- eral disease ; and so he inexorably compels the organ- ism to replace the destroyed first substitute of the in- ternal venereal malady (the chancre) by a far more painful substitute, the bubo, which hastens onward to suppuration ; and when the Allopath, as is usually the case, also drives out this bubo through his injurious treatment, then nature finds itself compelled to de- velop the internal malady through far more trouble- some secondary ailments, through the outbreak of the whole chronic syphilis, and nature accomplishes this, though slowly (frequently not before several months have elapsed), but with unfailing certainty. Instead of assisting, therefore, the Allopath does injury. John Hunter says :* " Not one patient out of fifteen will escape syphilis, if the chancre is destroyed by mere external applications," and in another passage in his bookf he says : "The result of destroying the chancre ever so early, and even on the first day of its appearance, if this is effected by local applications, was always the consequent outbreak of syphilis." Just as emphatically Fabre declares :\ "Syphilis always follows on the destruction of the chancre by local applications. He relates that Petit cut off a part * Abhandl. uber die vener. Krankheit (Treatise on the Venereal Disease), Leipsic, 1787, p. 531. f Abhandl. uber die vener. Krankheit, Leipsic, 1787, pp. 551-553. J Fabre, Lettres, Supplement a son traite des maladies venerien- nes. Paris, 1786. 156 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. of the labia of a woman, who had thereon for a few days a venereal chancre ; the wound healed, but syphilis, nevertheless, broke out." How, then, could physicians, despite all these facts and testimonies, close their eyes and ears to the truth : that the whole venereal disease (syphilis) was already developed within, before the chancre could appear, and that it was a most unpardonable mistake to forward the certain outbreak of the syphilis, already present within, into the venereal disease, by driving away and destroying the chancre by external means, and thereby destroying the fair opportunity afforded of curing this disease in the easiest and most convinc- ing manner, through the internal specific remedy, while the chancre was yet fully present! The disease is not cured except when through the effect of the in- ternal remedy alone, the chancre is cured ; but it is fully extinguished, as soon as through the action of the internally operating medicine alone (without the addition of any external remedy) the chancre is com- pletely cured, without leaving any trace of its former presence. I have never, in my practice of more than fifty years, seen any trace of the venereal disease break out, so long as the chancre remained untouched in its place, even if this were a space of several years (for it never passes away of itself), and even when it had largely increased in its place, as is natural in time with the internal augmentation of the venereal dis- order, which increase takes place in time in every chronic miasma. But whenever anyone is so imprudent, as to destroy HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 157 this vicarious local symptom, the organism is ready to cause the internal syphilis to break out into the venereal disease, since the general venereal disease dwells in the body from the first moment of infection. For in the spot, into which at the impure coition the syphilitic miasma had been first rubbed in and had been caught, it is, in the same moment, no more local; the whole living body has already received (perceived) its presence, the miasma has already become the prop- erty of the whole organism. All wiping off and wash- ing off, however speedy, and with whatever fluid this be done (and as we have seen, even with the exsec- tion of the part affected), it is too late is in vain. There is not to be perceived, indeed, any morbid transmutation in that spot during the first days, but the specific venereal transformation takes place in the internal of the body irresistibly, from the first moment of infection until syphilis has developed itself through- out the whole bod} 7 , and only then (not before), nature loaded down by the internal malady, brings forth the local symptom peculiar to this malady, the chancre, usually in the place first infected; and this symptom is intended by nature to soothe the internal completed malady. Therefore, also, the cure of the venereal disease is effected most easily and in the most convincing manner, so long as the chancre (the bubo) has not yet been driven out by local applications, so long as the chancre (the bubo) still remains unchanged, as a vicarious symp- tom of the internal syphilis. In this state, and espe- cially when it is not yet complicated with Psora, it may be asserted from manifold experience and with 158 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. good reason, that there is on earth no chronic miasma, no chronic disease springing from a miasma, which is more curable and more easily curable than this. In this first simple state and simple cure, when the chancre (or the bubo) is still present, and there is no complication with a developed Psora, no prominent chronic ailment from a Psoric origin (usually there is none such with young, lively persons), and with latent Psora syphilis combines as little as sycosis in this first state it needs only one little dose of the best mercurial remedy, in order to cure thoroughly and for- ever the whole syphilis with its chancre, within four- teen days. In a few days after taking such a dose of mercury, the chancre (without any external applica- tion) becomes a clean sore with a little mild pus, and heals of itself as a convincing proof, that the venereal malady is also fully extinguished within; and it does not leave behind the least scar, or the least spot, showing any other color than the other healthy skin. But the chancre, which is not treated with external application, would never heal, if the internal syphilis had not been already annihilated and extinguished by the dose of mercury; for so long as it exists in its place, it is the natural and unmistakable proof of even the least remainder of an existing syphilis. I have, indeed, in the second edition of the first part of Materia Medica Pura (Dresden, 1822), described the preparation of the pure semi-oxide of mercury, and I still consider this to be one of the most excellent anti-syphilitic medicines; but it is difficult to prepare it in sufficient purity. In order, therefore, to reach this wished for goal in a still simpler manner, free HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 159 from all detours, and yet just as perfectly (for in the preparation of medicines we cannot proceed in too simple a manner), it is best to proceed in the way given below, so that one grain of quite pure running quick-silver is triturated three times, with 100 grains of sugar of milk each time, up to the millionth at- tenuation, in three hours, and one grain of this third trituration is dissolved, and then potentized through -twenty-seven diluting phials up to (x) the decillionth degree, as is taught at the end of this volume, with re- spect to the dynamization of the other dry medicines. I formerly used the billionth dynamization (ii) of this preparation in 1, 2 or 3 fine pellets moistened with this dilution, as a dose, and this was done suc- cessfully for such cures; although the preparation of the higher potencies (iv, vi, vii), and finally the decill- ionth potency (x), show some advantages, in their quick, penetrating and yet mild action for this purpose; but in cases where a second or third dose (however seldom needed) should be found necessary, a lower potency may then be taken. Just as the continued presence of the chancre (or the bubo) during the cure shows the continued pres- ence of syphilis, so when the chancre (and the bubo) heal merely from the internally applied Mercury, with- out any addition of a remedy used for the local symp- tom, and yet this disappears without leaving any trace of its former presence; it is incontrovertibly sure, that also every trace of the internal syphilis was extin- guished at the moment of the completion of the cure of the chancre or the bubo. But just as incontrovertibly does it follow that every 160 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. disappearance of the chancre (or the bubo) owing to a mere local destruction, since it was no real cure founded on the extirpation of the internal venereal dis- ease through the internally given appropriate Mercury medicine, leaves to us the certainty that the syphilis remains behind; and every one who supposes himself healed by any such merely local, pretended cure, is to be considered as much venereally diseased as he was before the destruction of the chancre. The second state in which, as mentioned above, syphilis may have to be treated, is the rare case when an otherwise healthy person, affected with no other chronic disease (and thus without any developed Psora), has experienced this injudicious driving away of the chancre through local applications, effected by an ordinary physician in a short time and without at- tacking the organism overmuch with internal and ex- ternal remedies. Even in such a case, as we have not as yet to combat any complication with Psora all outbreaks of the secondary venereal disease may be avoided, and the man may be freed from every trace of the venereal miasma through the before-mentioned simple internal cure effected by a like dose of the above-mentioned Mercurial medicine although the certainty of his cure can no more be so manifestly proved as if the chancre had still been in existence dur- ing this internal cure, and as if it had become a mild ulcer simply through this internal remedy, and had been thus manifestly cured of itself. But here also there may be found a sign of the non- completed as well as of the completed cure of the in- ternal syphilis which has not yet broken out into the HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 161 venereal disease; but this sign will only manifest itself to an exact observer. In case the chancre has been driven out through local application, even if the rem- edies used had not been very acrid, there will always remain in the place where it stood, as a sign of the un- extinguished internal syphilis, a discolored, reddish, red or blue scar; while on the contrary when the cure of the whole venereal disease has been effected by the internal remedy, and if thus the chancre heals of itself without the action of an external application, and when it disappears because it is no more needed as a substitute and alleviator of an internal venereal dis- order which now has ceased, then the spot of the former chancre can no more be recognized, for the skin covering that place will be just as smooth and of the same color as the rest, so that no trace can be dis- cerned of the spot where the chancre had stood. Now if the Homoeopathic physician has carefully taken cognizance of the presence of the discolored scar remaining after the quick, merely local expulsion of the venereal local symptom, as a sign of the unex- tinguished internal syphilis, and if the person to be healed is otherwise in good health, and consequently his venereal disorder is not yet complicated with Psora, he will also, even now, be able to free him from every remainder of the venereal miasma by one dose of the best preparation of Mercury as above described, and he will be convinced that the cure is completed, from the fact that during the time of the activity of the specific remedy the scar will again assume the healthy color of the other skin and all discoloration of that spot will disappear. 162 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. Even when, after the expulsion of the chancre by local applications, the bubo has already broken out but the patient is not yet seized with any other chronic disease, and consequently the internal syphilis is not yet complicated with a developed Psora (which is nevertheless a rare case), the same treatment will also here, while the bubo is only developing, produce a cure; and its completion will be recognized by the same signs. In ooth cases, if they have been rightly treated, the cure is a complete one, and no outbreak of the vene- real disease need any more be apprehended. The most difficult of all these cases, the third, is still to be treated: when the man at the time of the syphilitic infection was already laboring under a chronic disease, so that his syphilis was complicated with Psora, even while the chancre yet existed, or when, even while there was no chronic disease in the body at the outbreak of the chancre, and the indwell- ing Psora could only be recognized by its tokens, an allopathic physician has, nevertheless, destroyed the local symptom, not only slowly and with very painful external applications, but has also subjected him for a long time to an internal treatment, weakening and strongly affecting him, so that the general health has been undermined and the Psora which has as yet been latent within him has been brought to its development and has broken out into chronic ailments, and these irre- pressibly combine with the internal syphilis, the local symptom of which had been at the same time destroyed in such an irrational manner. Psora can only be compli- cated with the venereal disease when it has been de- veloped and when it has ultimated itself in a manifest HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 163 chronic disease; but not when it is as yet latent and slumbering. By the latter the cure of syphilis is not ob- structed, but when complicated with developed Psora, it is impossible to cure the venereal disease alone. Only too often, I should say, do we find the syphilis which has remained uncured after the merely local destruction of the chancre, complicated with awakened Psora, not always because the Psora was already de- veloped before the venereal infection for this is rarely the case with young people but because it is violently awakened and brought to its outbreak by the usual treatment of the venereal disease. By means of friction with Mercury, large doses of Calomel, Corro- sive sublimate and similar acrid Mercurial remedies (which originate fever, dysenteric abdominal ailments, chronic exhausting salivation, pains in the limbs, sleeplessness, etc., without possessing sufficient anti- syphilitic power to cure the chancre-miasma mildly, quickly and perfectly), they assault the venereal pa- tient often for many months, with the intermediate use of many weakening warm baths and purgatives; so that the internal slumbering Psora (whose nature causes it to break forth in all great convulsions and in the weakening of the general health) is awakened be- fore the syphilis can be cured by such an injudicious treatment, and thus becomes associated and compli- cated therewith. There arises in this manner and through this com- bination what is called a masked, spurious syphilis, and in England pseudo syphilis, a monster of a double disease,* which no physician hitherto has been able to * Yea, after such a treatment it is even more than a double dis- ease; the sharp Mercurial medicines, in large and frequent doses, 164 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. cure, because no physician hitherto has been ac- quainted with the Psora in its great extent and its na- ture, neither in its latent nor its developed state; and no one suspected this dreadful combination with syphilis, much less perceived it. No one, therefore, could heal the developed Psora, the only cause of the uncurableness of this bastard syphilis, nor could they in consequence free the syphilis from this horrible combination so as to make it curable, just as the Psora remains incurable if the syphilis has not been extir- pated. In order to reach this so-called masked venereal dis- ease successfully, the following rule must serve the homoeopathic physician: After removing all hurtful in- fluences that affect the patient from without and after settling on a light and yet nourishing and strengthen- ing diet for the patient, let him first give the anti- psoric medicine which is homceopathically the best fit- ting to the then prevailing state of disease, as will be shown below, and when this medicine has completed its action, also probably a second, most suitable to the still prominent Psora symptoms, and these should be allowed to act against the Psora, until they have effected all that can be at present done against it then should be given the dose above described of the best Mercurial preparation to act against the venereal dis- ease for three, five to seven weeks; i, e. , so long as it will continue to produce an improvement in the vene- real symptoms. have also added their medicinal disease, which when we consider in addition the debility caused by such treatment, must place the patient in a most sad state. In such a case Hepar sulphuris is probably to be preferred to the pure Sulphur. HAHNEMANN S CHRONIC DISEASES. 155 In inveterate and difficult cases, however, this first course will hardly accomplish all that is desired. There usually still remain some ailments and disorders, which cannot be definitely classed as purely psoric, and others which cannot be classed as definitely syphilitic, and these require still some additional aid. A repeti- tion of a similar process of cure is here required; /. thus only the exponents as to the third, sixth, ninth, tenth, twen- ty-ninth and thirtieth potency, etc. 256 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. of a large thimble; several drops of the spirituous medicinal fluid should be dropped into it (rather a few drops too many), so that they may penetrate to the bottom and will have moistened all the pellets within a minute. Then the dish is turned over and emptied on a piece of clean double blotting paper, so that the superfluous fluid may be absorbed by it, and when this is done, the pellets are spread on the paper so as to dry quickly. When dry, the pellets are tilled in a vial, marked as to its contents, and well stoppered. All pellets moistened with the spirituous liquid have when dry a dull appearance; the crude, unmoistened pellets look whiter and more shining. To prepare the pellets to give to patients, one or a couple of such little pellets are put into the open end of a paper capsule containing two or three grains of powdered sugar of milk; this is then stroked with a spatula or the nail of the thumb with some degree of pressure until it is felt that the pellet or pellets are crushed and broken then the pellets will easily dis- solve if put into water. Wherever I mention pellets in giving medicine, I always mean the finest, of the size of poppy-seeds, of which about 200 (more or less) weigh a grain. The antipsoric medicines treated of in what follows contain no so-called idiopathic medicines, since their pure effects, even those of the potentized miasma of itch (Psorin} have not been proved enough, by far, that a safe homoeopathic use might be made of it. I say homoeopathic use, for it does not remain idem (the same) ; even if the prepared itch substance should be given to the same patient from whom it was taken, it HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 257 would not remain idem (the same), as it could only be useful to him in a potentized state, since crude itch substance which he has already in his body as an idem is without effect on him. But the dynamization or potentizing changes it and modifies it; just as gold leaf after potentizing is no more crude gold leaf inert in the human body, but in every stage of dynamization it is more and more modified and changed. Thus potentized and modified also, the itch sub- stance (Psorin) when taken is no more an idem (the same) with the crude original itch substance, but only a simillimum (thing most similar). For betiveen IDEM and SIMILLIMUM there is no intermediate for any one that can think ; or in other words between idem and simile only simillimum can be intermediate. Isopathic and (equale are equivocal expressions, which if they should signify anything reliable can only signify simillimum^ because they are not idem SECOND PART. ANTIPSORIC MEDICINES. PREFACE. CONCERNING THE TECHNICAL PART OF HOMOEOPATHY. 1 Since I last* addressed the public concerning our healing art, I have had among other things also the opportunity to gain experience as to the best possible mode of administering the doses of the medicines to the patients, and I herewith communicate what I have found best in this respect. A small pellet of one of the highest dynamizations of a medicine laid dry upon the tongue, or the moderate smelling of an opened vial wherein one or more such pellets are contained, proves itself the smallest and weakest dose with the shortest period of duration in its effects. Still there are numerous patients of so ex- citable a nature, that they are sufficiently affected by such a dose in slight acute ailments to be cured by it if the remedy is homosopathically selected. Nevertheless the incredible variety among patients as to their irritabil- ity, their age, their spiritual and bodily development, their vital power and especially as to the nature of their 1 This preface was prefixed to Vol. III. of the "Chronic Diseases," published in the year 1837. TV. * In the beginning of the year 1834 I wrote the first two parts of this work, and although they together contain only thirty-six sheets, my former publisher, Mr. Arnold, in Dresden, took two years to publish these thirty-six sheets. By whom was he thus delayed ? My acquaintances can guess that. 262 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. disease, necessitates a great variety in their treatment, and also in the administration to them of the doses of medicines. For their diseases may be of various kinds: either a natural and simple one but lately arisen, or it may be a natural and simple one but an old case, or it may be a complicated one (a combination of several miasmata), or again what is the most frequent and worst case, it may have been spoiled by a perverse medical treatment, and loaded down with medicinal diseases. I can here limit myself only to this latter case, as the other cases cannot be arranged in tabular form for the weak and negligent, but must be left to the ac- curacy, the industry and the intelligence of able men, who are masters of their art. Experience has shown me, as it has no doubt also shown to most of my followers, that it is most useful in diseases of any magnitude (not excepting even the most acute, and still more so in the half-acute, in the tedious and most tedious) to give to the patient the powerful homosopathic pellet or pellets only in solu- tion, and this solution in divided doses. In this way we give the medicine, dissolved in seven to twenty tablespoonfuls of water without any addition, in acute and very acute diseases every six, four or two hours; where the danger is urgent, even every hour or every half hour, a tablespoonful at a time; with weak per- sons or children, only a small part of a tablespoonful (one or two teaspoonfuls or coffeespoonfuls) may be given as a dose. In chronic diseases I have found it best to give a dose (e. g., a spoonful) of a solution of the suitable HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 263 medicine at least every two days, more usually every day. But since water (even distilled water) commences after a few days to spoil, whereby the power of the small quantity of medicine contained is destroyed, the addition of a little alcohol is necessary, or where this is not practicable, or if the patient cannot bear it, I add a few small pieces of hard charcoal to the watery solution. This answers the purpose, except that in the latter case the fluid in a few days receives a black- ish tint. This is caused by shaking the liquid, as is necessary every time before giving a dose of medicine, as may be seen below. Before proceeding, it is important to observe, that our vital principle cannot well bear that the same un- changed dose of medicine be given even twice in suc- cession, much less more frequently to a patient. For by this the good effect of the former dose of medicine is either neutralized in part, or new symptoms proper to the medicine, symptoms which have not before been present in the disease, appear, impedingthe cure. Thus even a well selected homoeopathic medicine produces ill effects and attains its purpose imperfectly or not at all. Thence come the many contradictions of homoe- opathic physicians with respect to the repetition of doses. But in taking one and the same medicine repeatedly (which is indispensible to secure the cure of a serious, chronic disease), if the dose is in every case varied and modified only a little in its degree of dynamization, then the vital force of the patient will calmly, and as it were willingly receive the same medicine even at 264 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. brief intervals very many times in succession with the best results, every time increasing the well-being of the patient. This slight change in the degree of dynamization is even effected, if the bottle which contains the solution of one or more pellets is merely well shaken five or six times, every time before taking it. Now when the physician has in this way used up the solution of the medicine that had been prepared, if the medicine continues useful, he will take one or two pel- lets of the same medicine in a lower potency, (e. g., if before he had used the thirtieth dilution, he will now take one or two pellets of the twenty-fourth), and will make a solution in about as many spoonfuls of water, shaking up the bottle, and adding a little alcohol or a few pieces of charcoal. This last solution may then be taken in the same manner, or at longer intervals, perhaps also less of the solution at a time ; but every time the solution must be shaken up five or six times. This will be continued so long as the remedy still pro- duces improvement and until new ailments (such as have never yet occurred with other patients in this disease), appear ; for in such a case a new remedy will have to be used. On any day when the remedy has produced too strong an action, the dose should be omitted for a day. If the symptoms of the disease alone appear, but are considerably aggravated even during the more moderate use of the medicine, then the time has come to break off in the use of the medi- cine for one or two weeks, and to await a considerable improvement.* * In treating acute cases of disease the homoeopathic physician HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 265 When the medicine has been consumed and it is found necessary to continue the same remedy, if the physician should desire to prepare a new portion of medicine from the same degree of potency, it will be necessary to give to the new solution as man)' shakes, as the number of shakes given to the last portion amount to when summed up together, and then a few more, before the patient is given the first dose ; but after that, with the subsequent doses, the solution is to be shaken up only five or six times. In this manner the homoeopathic physician will de- rive all the benefit from a well selected remedy, which can be obtained in any special case of chronic disease by doses given through the mouth. But if the diseased organism is affected by the physi- cian through this same appropriate remedy at the same time in sensitive spots other than the nerves of will proceed in a similar manner. He will dissolve one (two) pel- let of the highly potentized, well selected medicine in seven, ten or fifteen tablespoonfuls of water (without addition) by shaking the bottle. He will then, according as the disease -is more or less acute, and more or less dangerous, give the patient every half hour, or every hour, every two, three, four, six hours (after again well shaking the bottle) a whole or a half tablespoonful of the solution, or, in the case of a child, even less. If the physician sees no new symptoms develop, he will continue at these intervals, un- til the symptoms present at first begin to be aggravated ; then he will give it at longer intervals and less at a time. As is well known, in cholera the suitable medicine has often to be given at far shorter intervals. Children are always given these solutions from their usual drink- ing vessels; a teaspoon for drinking is to them unusual and sus- picious, and thej 7 will refuse the tasteless liquid at once on that account. A little sugar may be added for their sake. 18 266 HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. the mouth and the alimentary canal, /. e., if this same remedy that has been found useful is at the same time in its watery solution rubbed in (even in small quan- tities) into one or more parts of the body which are most free from the morbid ailments (e. g.^ on an arm, or on the thigh or leg, which have neither cutaneous eruptions, nor pains, nor cramps) then the curative effects are much increased. The limbs which are thus rubbed with the solution may also be varied, first one, then another. Thus the physician will receive a greater action from the medicine homoepathically suit- able to the chronic patient, and can cure him more quickly, than by merely internally administering the remedy. This mode of procedure has been frequently proved by myself and found extraordinarily curative ; yea, at- tended by the most startling good effects ; the medi- cine taken internally being at the same time rubbed on the skin externally. This procedure will also ex- plain the wonderful cures, of rare occurrence, indeed, wher3 chronic crippled patients with sound skin re- covered quickly and permanently by a few baths in a mineral water, the medicinal constituents of which were to a great degree homoeopathic to their chronic disease.* * On the other hand such baths have also inflicted a proportion- ally greater injury with patients who suffered from ulcers and cu- taneous eruptions ; for these were driven by them from the skin, as may be done by other external means, when after a short period of health, the vital force of the patient transferred the internal uncured disease to another part of the body, and one much more important to life and health. Thus, e. g, , may be produced the HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 267 The limb, therefore, on which the solution is to be rubbed in, must be free from cutaneous ailments. In order to introduce also here change and variation, when several of the limbs are free from cutaneous ail- ments, one limb after the other should be used, in alternation on different days, (best on days when the medicine is not taken internally). A small quantity of the solution should be rubbed in with the hand, until the limb is dry. Also for this purpose, the bot tie should be shaken five or six times. Convenient as the mode of administering the medi- cine above described may be, and much as it surely advances the cure of chronic diseases, nevertheless, the greater quantity of alcohol or whiskey or the sev- eral lumps of charcoal which have to be added in warmer weather to preserve the watery solution were still objectionable to me with many patients. I have, therefore, lately found the following mode of administration preferable with careful patients: From a mixture of about five tablespoonfuls of pure water and five tablespoonfuls of French brandy, which is kept on hand in a bottle, 200, 300 or 400 drops (according as the solution is to be weaker or stronger) are dropped into a little vial, which may be half-filled with it, and in which the medicinal powder or the pel- obscuration of the crystalline lens, the paralysis of the optic nerve, the destruction of the sense of hearing ; pains also of innumerable kinds in consequence torture the patient, his mental organs suffer, his mind becomes obscured, spasmodic asthma threatens to suffo- cate him, or an apoplectic stroke carries him off, or some other dangerous or unbearable disease takes the place of the former ail- ment. Therefore the homoeopathic remedy given internally must never be rubbed in on parts which suffer from external ailments. 268 tfAHNEMANN's CHRONIC DISEASES. let or pellets of the medicine have been placed. This vial is stoppered and shaken until the medicine is dis- solved. From this solution one, two, three or several drops, according to the irritability and the vital force of the patient, are dropped into a cup, containing a spoonful of water ; this is then well stirred and given to the patient, and where more especial care is neces- sary, only the half of it may be given ; half a spoonful of this mixture may also well be used for the above- mentioned external rubbing. On days, when only the latter is administered, as also when it is taken internally, the little vial contain- ing the drops must every time be briskly shaken five or six times ; so also the drop or drops, of medicine with the tablespoonful of water must be well stirred in the cup. It would be still better if instead of the cup a vial should be used, into which a tablespoonful of water is put, which can then be shaken five or six times and then wholly or half emptied for a dose. Frequently it is useful in treating chronic diseases to take the medicine, or to rub it in in the evening, shortly before going to sleep, because we have then less disturbance to fear from without, than when it is done earlier. When I was still giving the medicines in undivided portions, each with some water at a time, I often found that the potentizing in the attenuating glasses effected by ten shakes was too strong (z. e. , the medicinal action too strongly developed) and I, therefore, ad- vised only two succussions. But during the last years, since I have been giving every dose of medicine in an HAHNEMANN'S CHRONIC DISEASES. 269 incorruptible solution, divided over fifteen, twenty or thirty days and even more, no potentizing in an atten- uating vial is found too strong, and I again use ten strokes with each. So I herewith take back what I wrote on this subject three years ago in the first vol- ume of this book on page 254. In cases where a great irritability of the patient is combined with extreme debility, and the medicine can only be administered by allowing the patient to smell a few small pellets contained in a vial, when the medi- cine is to be used for several days, I allow the patient to smell daily of a different vial, containing the same medicine, indeed, but every time of a lower potency, once or twice with each nostril according as I wish him to be affected more or less. University of California SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1388 Return this material to the library from which it was borrowed. Y 'reTrv - A xsSK^^ > ,. *>^v^/7 .\ a v,,^' > J 9 tfs^la* S^W* J%^.9VfcS - /w *- - asft UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY illinium A 000 421 784 o -cP s^r^^- *' r 8*^ A 000421 ^"T-W, \. ._ . ^/^Sv 3 1970 00873 1082 WB930 KlhQc 190U Hahnemann, Samuel The chronic diseases , . . . MEDICAL SCIENCES LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE IRVINE, CALIFORNIA 92664 Uni