The Chronic
Diseases, their Peculiar Nature and their Homœopathic Cure.
by Dr Samuel Hahnemann
Presented By Médi-T
(Page 110 … 119)
The like may be said
concerning the expensive and so-called fine sorts, as well as
concerning the cheap sorts of Chinese tea which so flatteringly
allures the nerves and so secretly and inevitably infests and weakens
them. Even when made very weak and when only a little is drank only
once a day it is never harmless, neither with younger persons nor with
older ones who have used it since their childhood; and they must
instead of it use some harmless warm drink. Patients, according to my
extensive experience, are also willing to follow the advice of their
faithful adviser, the physician in whom they have confidence, when
this advice is fortified with reasons.With respect to the
limitation in wine the practitioner can be far more lenient, since
with chronic patients it will be hardly ever necessary to altogether
forbid it. Patients who from their youth up have been accustomed to a
plentiful use of pure [*]
wine cannot give it up at once or entirely, and this the less the
older they are. To do so would produce a sudden sinking of their
strength and an obstruction to their cure, and might even endanger
their life. But they will be satisfied to drink it during the first
weeks mixed with equal parts of water, and later, gradually wine mixed
with two, three and four and finally with five and six parts of water
and a little sugar. The latter mixtures may be allowed all chronic
patients as, their usual beverage.More absolutely necessary in
the cure of the chronic diseases is the giving up of whisky or brandy.
This will require, however, as much consideration in diminishing the
quantity used, as firmness in executing it. Where the strength
appreciably diminishes at giving it up totally, a small portion of
good, pure wine must be used instead of it for a little while, but
later, wine mixed with several parts of water, according to
circumstances.Since, according to an
inviolable law of nature, our vital force always produces in the human
organism the opposite of the impressions caused by physical and
medicinal potencies in all the cases in which there are such
opposites, it may easily be understood, as accurate observation also
testifies, that spirituous liquors, after having simulated refreshment
and heightened vital warmth immediately after partaking them, must
have just the opposite after-effects, owing to this opposite reaction
of the vital force of the organism. Weakness and a diminution of the
vital warmth are the inevitable consequences of their use – states
which ought to be removed as far as possible from the chronic patient
by every true physician. Only an allopath who has never accustomed
himself to observation and to reflection, and who is unwilling to
acknowledge the injurious effects of his palliatives, can advise his
chronic patients to daily drink strong, pure wine to strengthen
themselves; a genuine Homœopath will never do this (sed
ex ungue leonem !).—–
[*]
Even for men in quite good health it is improper and in many ways
injurious to drink pure wine as a customary beverage, and morality
only permits its use in small quantities at festive occasions. A
youth cannot keep his sexual desires under control up to his
marriage unless he altogether avoids banquets. Gonorrhœa and
chancre are due to such excesses.The permission of beer is
quite questionable! Since the artifices of brewers in modern times
seem to intend, by their addition of vegetable substances to the
extract of malt, not only to prevent it from souring, but also and
especially to tickle the palate and to cause intoxication, without any
regard to the injurious qualities of these malignant additions which
often deeply undermine the health when daily used, and which cannot be
discovered by any inspection, the honest physician cannot allow his
patient to drink whatsoever is called beer;
for even in the white beer (thin beer) and the porter, which on
account of their lack of bitterness seem so harmless, not infrequently
have narcotic ingredients added to give them the much-liked
intoxicating quality in spite of their diminished quantity of malt.Among the articles of diet
which are generally injurious to chronic patients are also all dishes
containing vinegar or citric acid. These are especially apt to cause
disagreeable sensations and troubles in those afflicted with nervous
and abdominal ailments. They also either antagonize or excessively
increase the effects of several medicines. For such patients also very
acid fruit (as sour cherries, unripe gooseberries and currants) are to
be allowed only in very small quantities, and sweet fruits only in
moderate quantity; so also baked prunes as a palliative are not to be
advised to those inclined to constipation. To the latter, as also to
those suffering from weak digestion, veal which is too young is not
serviceable. Those whose sexual powers are low should limit themselves
in eating young chickens and eggs, and should avoid the irritating
spice of vanilla, also truffles and caviare, which as palliatives
hinder a cure. Ladies with scanty menses must avoid the use of saffron
and cinnamon for the same reason; persons with weak stomachs should
avoid cinnamon, cloves, amomum, pepper, ginger and bitter substances,
which, being palliatives, are also injurious while under homœopathic
treatment. Vegetables causing flatulency should be forbidden in all
abdominal troubles and where there is an inclination to constipation
and costiveness. Beef and good wheat-bread or rye-bread, together with
cow’s milk and a moderate use of fresh butter, seem to be the most
natural and harmless food for men, and also for chronic patients; only
little salt should be used. Next to beef in wholesomeness are mutton,
venison, grown chickens and young pigeons. The flesh and fat of geese
and ducks are even less to be permitted to chronic patients than pork.
Pickled and smoked meats should be rarely used and only in small
quantities.Sprinkling chopped raw herbs
on soups, putting pot-herbs into vegetables, and eating old, rancid
cheese must be avoided.In using the better quality
of fish their preparation should be especially looked to; they had
best be prepared by boiling and used sparingly with sauces not much
spiced; but no fish dried in the air or smoked; salt fish (herrings
and sardines) only rarely and sparingly.Moderation in all things,
even in harmless ones, is the chief duty of chronic patients.In considering diet, the use
of tobacco should also be carefully considered. Smoking in some cases
of chronic diseases may be permitted, when the patient had been
accustomed to an uninterrupted use of it, and if he does not
expectorate; but smoking should always be limited, and more so if the
mental activity, sleep, digestion or the evacuations are defective. If
evacuations regularly only take place after smoking, the use of this
palliative must be all the more circumscribed, and the same result
must be obtained in a lasting manner through the appropriate
antipsoric remedies. More objectionable yet, however, is the using of
snuff, which is wont to be abused as a palliative against rheum and
obstruction of the nose and insidious inflammation of the eyes, and
which being a palliative, is a great hindrance in the cure of chronic
diseases; it can, therefore, not be allowed with such patients, but
must be diminished every day and at last stopped. An especial reason
for this is also that in snuff the medicinal liquors (sauces) with
which almost all snuff is medicated touches with its substance the
nerves of the inner nose and injures just as if a foreign medicine
were taken, which is less the case with the burning smoking tobacco in
which the strength is disintegrated by the heat.I now pass to the other
hindrances to the cure of chronic diseases which must be avoided as
far as possible.All those events in human
life which can bring the psora latent and slumbering within, which has
hitherto manifested itself only by some of the signs mentioned above,
wherein the patient varies from a state of health, so as to break out
into open chronic diseases, these same events if they occur to a
person already a chronic patient may not only augment his disease and
increase the difficulty of curing it, but, if they break in on him
violently, may make his disease incurable, if the untoward
circumstances are not suddenly changed for the better.Such events are, however, of
very various nature, and therefore of different degrees of injurious
influence.Excessive hardships, laboring
in swamps, great bodily injuries and wounds, excess of cold or heat,
and even the unsatisfied hunger of poverty and its unwholesome foods,
etc., are not by any means very powerful in causing the fearful malady
of psora which lies in ambush, lurking in secret to break forth into
serious chronic diseases, nor of great consequence in aggravating a
chronic disease already present; yea, an innocent man can, with less
injury to his life, pass ten years in bodily torments in the bastile
or on the galleys rather than pass some months in all bodily comfort
in an unhappy marriage or with a remorseful conscience. A psora
slumbering within, which still allows the favorite of a prince to live
with the appearance of almost blooming health unfolds quickly into a
chronic ailment of the body, or distracts his mental organs into
insanity, when by a change of fortune he is hurled from his brilliant
pinnacle and is exposed to contempt and poverty. The sudden death of a
son causes the tender mother, already in ill health an incurable
suppuration of the lungs or a cancer of the breast. A young,
affectionate maiden, already hysterical, is thrown into melancholy by
a disappointment in love.How difficult it is, and how
seldom will the best antipsoric treatment do anything to relieve such
unfortunates!By far the most frequent
excitement of the slumbering psora into chronic disease, and the most
frequent aggravation of chronic ailments already existing, are caused
by grief and vexation.Uninterrupted
grief and vexation very soon increase even the smallest
traces of a slumbering psora into more severe symptoms, and they then
develop these into an outbreak of all imaginable chronic sufferings
more certainly and more frequently than all other injurious influences
operating on the human organism in an average human life; while these
two agencies just as surely and frequently, augment ailments already
existing.As the good physician will be
pleased when he can enliven and keep from ennui the mind of a patient,
in order to advance a cure which is not encumbered with such
obstructions, he will in such a case feel more than ever the duty
incumbent upon him to do all within the power of his influence on the
patient and on his relatives and surroundings, in order to relieve him
of grief and vexation. This will and must be a chief end of his care
and neighborly love.But if the relations of the
patient cannot be improved in this respect, and if he has not
sufficient philosophy, religion and power over himself to bear
patiently and with equanimity all the sufferings and afflictions for
which he is not to blame, and which it is not in his power to change;
if grief and vexation continually beat in upon him, and it is out of
the power of the physician to effect a lasting removal of these most
active destroyers of life, he had better give up the treament [*]
and leave the patient to his fate, for even the most masterly
management of the case with the remedies that are the most exquisite
and the best adapted to the bodily ailment will avail nothing, nothing
at all, with a chronic patient thus exposed to continual sorrow and
vexation, and in whom the vital economy is being destroyed by
continuous assaults on the mind. The continuation of the fairest
edifice is foolish, when the foundation is being daily undermined,
even if but gradually, by the play of the waves.Almost as near, and often
nearer yet, to insurability are the chronic diseases, especially with
great and rich men, who for some years, besides the use of mineral
baths, [**] have passed
through the hands of various, often of many,
allopathic physicians, who have tried on them one after another all
the fashionable modes of cure, the remedies which are so boastingly
lauded in England, France and Italy, – all strongly acting mixtures.
By so many unsuitable medicines, which are injurious by their violence
and their frequent repetition in large doses, the psora which always
lies within, even if not combined with syphilis, becomes every year
more incurable, as do also the chronic ailments springing from it; and
after the continuation of such irrational medical assaults on the
organism for several years it becomes almost quite incurable. It
cannot well be decided, since these things take place in the dark,
whether these heroic unhomœopathic doses have added, as may be
suspected, new ailments to the original disease, which ailments
through the largeness of the doses and their frequent repetition have
now become lasting and as it were chronic, or whether through abuse
there has resulted a crippling of the different faculties of the
organism, i.e., those of
irritability, of sensation and of reproduction, and so (probably from
both causes) there has arisen the monster of various ailments, fused
into one another, which can no longer be rationally viewed as a simple
natural ailment. In short, this many-sided disharmony and perversion
of parts and of forces most indispensable to life present a chaos of
ailments which the homœopathic physician should not lightly declare
curable.—–
[*]
Unless the patient should have little or no cause for his grief and
sorrow, or hardly any incitement from without to vexation, and in
consequence would need more particularly to be treated with respect
to his mental disorder, by means of the antipsoric remedies, which
are at the same time suited to the rest of his chronic disease. Such
cases are not only curable, but often even easily curable.[**]
Every time the baths are used, even when the water is not in itself
unsuitable to the ailment, they are to be considered as the use of
large doses often repeated of one and the same violently acting
medicine, the violent operation of which can seldom be salutary, and
must often result in the aggravation of the morbid state, yea, even
to the patient’s utter destruction.By such treatments, which are
incapable of curing the original disease, but are exhausting and
debilitating, the aggravation of the psora is not only hastened from
within, but new artificial and threatening ailments are generated by
such delusive allopathic cures, so that the vital force, thus attacked
from two sides, often is unable to escape.If in such cases the sad
consequences of these indirect assaults of the old methods of cure
were dynamic disturbances only, they would surely either disappear of
themselves when the treatment is discontinued, or they ought at least
to be extinguished again effectively through homœopathic medicines.
But this is not at all the case; they do not yield. Very likely by
these indirect, continuous and repeated assaults on the sensitive,
irritable fiber by such injudicious medicinal disease-potencies, which
are given in large doses frequently repeated, the vital force is
obliged to meet this attack and to endeavor either to dynamically
change these tender internal organs which are assaulted so
mercilessly, or to reconstruct them materially so as to make them
unassailable to such violent attacks, and thus to protect and shield
the organism from general destruction. Thus, e.g., this force, which
instinctively preserves life, beneficially shields the fine sensitive
skin of the hand with a callous covering of hard, horny skin in
persons with whom the skin is exposed to frequent injuries during hard
labor whereby the skin is injured by hard, scratching materials or by
corroding substances. So also in a long continued allopathic
treatment, which has no true healing power with respect to the
disease, no direct pathic (homœopathic) relation to the parts and
processes concerned in the chronic disease, but internally assaults
other delicate parts and organs of the body, in such cases the vital
force, in order to protect the whole from destruction, dynamically and
organically transmutes these fine organs; i.e.,
either makes them inactive or paralyzes them, or dulls their
sensitiveness, or makes them altogether callous. On the one side the
most tender fiber is abnormally thickened or hardened, and the more
vigorous fibers consumed or annihilated -thus there arise
artificially, adventitious organisms, malformations and degenerations,
which at postmortem examinations are cunningly ascribed to the
malignancy of the original disease. Such an internal state is not
infrequent, and is in many cases incurable. Only where there are still
sufficient vital powers in a body not too much bowed down by age (but
where under an allopathic regime do we not find the powers wasted?)
under favorable external circumstances, the vital force dynamically
freed from its original disease by the careful homœopathic
(antipsoric) treatment of a practiced physician, may succeed in
gradually reasserting itself, and in gradually absorbing and
transforming those (often numerous) adventitious secondary formations
which it was compelled to form. Such a transformation is, however,
only possible to a still energetic vital force, which has been in
great part set free from its psora. Only however, under favorable
external circumstances, and after the lapse of a considerable time and
usually in only an imperfect manner, does the vital force succeed in
this almost creative endeavor. Experience proves daily that the more
zealously the allopath puts into practice in chronic disease his
perverse destructive art (often with great care, industry and
persistence), the more he ruins his patients in health and life.How can perversions,
introduced into patients in this manner frequently for years, be
transformed in a short time into health even by the best, i.e.,
the true method of cure, which has never assumed to itself the power
of directly influencing organic
defects?The physician has to meet in
such cases no natural, simple psoric disease. He can therefore promise
an improvement only after a long period of time, but never a full
restoration, even if the vital powers are not (as is so frequently the
case) altogether wasted; for where this is the case, he would feel
compelled to desist from treatment even at the first glance. First the
many chronic medicinal diseases which pass over the fluctuating state
of health must gradually be removed (perhaps during a several months’
stay in the country almost without medicine); or they must depart as
of themselves through the activity of the vital force, when the
antipsoric treatment has to some degree begun, with an improved manner
of living and a regulated diet. For who could find remedies for all
these ailments artificially produced by a confused mass of strong
unsuitable medicines? The vital force must first absorb and reform
what it has compulsorily deformed, before the true healer will in time
see again before him a partially cleared malady similar to the
original one, and which he will then be able to combat. [*]—–
[*]
On the other hand, the most dreadful diseases of every kind which
have not been spoiled by any medical fatuity, in the families of
farm laborers and other day laborers, on whom of course no ordinary
physician presses his services, are quite
commonly, almost as if by a miracle, cured by the
antipsoric remedies in a short time, and are transformed into
lasting good health.Woe to the young homœopathic
physician who has to found his fame upon the cure of those diseases,
of rich and prominent persons, which by a mass of allopathic evil arts
have degenerated into such monstrosities! With all his care he will
end in failure!A similar great hindrance to
a cure of far-advanced chronic diseases is often found in the debility
and weakness into which youths fall who are spoiled by rich parents,
being carried away by their superabundance and wantonness, and seduced
by wicked companions through destructive passions and excesses,
through revellings, abuse of the sexual instinct, gambling, etc.
Without the least regard for life and for conscience, bodies
originally robust are debilitated by such vices into mere semblances
of humanity, and are besides ruined by perverse treatment of their
venereal diseases, so that the psora, which frequently lurks within,
grows up into the most pitiable chronic diseases, which, even if the
morality of the patient should have improved, on account of the
depressing remorse, and the little remnant of their wasted vital
powers, accept antipsoric relief only with the greatest difficulty.
Such cases should be undertaken by homœopathic physicians as curable
only with the greatest caution and reserve.But where the above-mentioned
often almost insurmountable obstacles to the cure of these innumerable
chronic diseases are not present, [*]
there is nevertheless found at times, especially with the lower
classes of patients, a peculiar obstruction to the cure, which lies in
the source of the malady itself, where the psora, after repeated
infections and a repeated external repression of the resulting
eruption, had developed gradually from -its internal state into one or
more severe chronic ailments. A cure will, indeed, also be certainly
effected here, if the above-mentioned obstacles do not prevent, by a
judicious use of the antipsoric remedies, but only with much patience
and considerable time, and only with patients who observe the
directions and who are not too aged nor too much debilitated.—–
[*]
One additional obstacle to the homœopathic cure of chronic
diseases, and one which is not very rare but is still usually
disregarded, is: The suppressed sexual
instinct with marriageable persons of either sex, either
from non-marriage owing to various causes not removable by a
physician, or where in married persons sexual intercourse of an
infirm wife with a vigorous husband, or of the infirm husband with a
vigorous wife has been absolutely and forever interdicted by an
injudicious physician, as is not infrequently the case. In such
cases a more intelligent physician, recognizing the circumstances
and the natural impulse implanted by the Creator, will give his
permission and thus not infrequently render curable a multitude of
hysterical and hypochondriac states, yea, often even melancholy and
insanity.But in these difficult cases
also the wise arrangement of nature is manifested in aid of our
efforts, if we only make a good use of the favorable moment offering.
For experience informs us that in a case of itch arising from a new
infection, even when, after several preceding infections and
repressions of the eruption, the psora has made considerable progress
in the production of chronic diseases of many kinds, the itch which
has last arisen, if it has only still kept its full primitive eruption
unhindered on the skin, may be cured almost as easily as if it were
the first and the only one, i.e.,
usually by merely one or a few doses of the appropriate antipsoric
medicine, and that by such a cure the whole psora of all the preceding
infections, together with its outbreaks into chronic ailments, is
cured. [*]Nevertheless it is not
advisable to intentionally cause a new artificial infection with itch,
even if the patient felt no repugnance to it (as is nevertheless,
frequently the case) merely on account of the easier cure in that case
of the old psora which had been several times renewed; because in
severe chronic diseases of a non-venereal and therefore psoric origin,
-as e.g. suppuration of the lungs,
a complete paralyzation of one or another part of the body, etc.,- the
itch miasma rarely retains its hold, and, as far as experience shows,
it clings less when caused by an artificial inoculation than when it
originates from an accidental, unintentional infection.I have little further to say
to the physician already skilled in the homœopathic art as to how he
is to operate in the cure of chronic diseases, except to direct him to
the antipsoric remedies appended to this work; for he will know how to
use these remedies for this noble end successfully. I have only to add
a few cautions.First of all, the great truth
is established that all chronic ailments, all great, and the greatest,
long continuing diseases (excepting the few venereal ones) spring from
psora alone and only find their thorough cure in the cure of the
psora; they are, consequently, to be healed mostly only by antipsoric
remedies, i.e., by those remedies
which in their provings as to their pure action on the healthy human
body manifest most of the symptoms which are most frequently perceived
in latent as well as in developed psora.The homœopathic physician,
therefore, in curing a chronic (non-venereal) disease, and in all and
in every symptom, ailment and disorder arising in this disease, no
matter what seductive name these may have in common life or in
pathology, will usually and especially look to the use of an
antipsoric medicine selected according to strictly homœopathic rules,
in order to surely attain his end.—–
[*]
The same is the case, according to the merciful arrangement of
nature, with syphilis, where, after a local destruction of the
chancre or the bubo and after a consequent breaking out of the
venereal disease, a new infection takes place. The new infection,
while the chancre remains undisturbed, may be cured, together with
the venereal disease sprung from the former infection, just as
easily by a single dose of the best mercurial preparation, as if the
first chancre were still present, -provided that no complication
with either of the other two chronic miasmata, especially the
psoric, has taken place; for in such a case, as has been mentioned
above, the psora must first be removed.Let him not think, while a
well-chosen antipsoric medicine is acting and the patient some day
feels a moderate headache, or else a moderate ailment, that he must
give the patient at once some other medicine, whether an antipsoric or
another remedy; or if perchance a sore throat should arise, that he
must give another remedy, or another on account of diarrhœa, or
another on account of some moderate pain in one part or another, etc.No! the homœopathic
antipsoric medicine having been chosen as well as possible to suit the
morbid symptoms, and given in the appropriate potency and in the
proper dose, the physician should as a rule
allow it to finish its action without disturbing it by an intervening
remedy.For if the symptoms occurring
during the action of the remedy have also occurred, if not in the last
few weeks, at least now and then some weeks before, or some months
before in a similar manner, then such occurrences are merely a
homœopathic excitation, through the medicine, of some symptom not
quite unusual to this disease, of something which had perhaps been
more frequently troublesome before, and they are a sign that this
medicine acts deeply into the very essence of this disease, and that
consequently it will be more effective in the future. The medicine,
therefore, should be allowed to continue and exhaust its action
undisturbed, without giving the least medicinal substance between its
doses.But if the symptoms are
different and had never before occurred, or never in this way, and,
therefore, are peculiar to this medicine and not to be expected in the
process of the disease, but trifling, the action of the medicine ought
not for the present to be interrupted. Such symptoms frequently pass
off without interrupting the helpful activity of the remedy; but if
they are of a burdensome intensity, they are not to be endured; in
such a case they are a sign that the antipsoric medicine was not
selected in the correct homœopathic manner. Its action must then be
checked by an antidote, or when no antidote to it is known, another
antipsoric medicine more accurately answering its symptoms must be
given in its place; in this these false symptoms may continue a few
more days, or they may return, but they will soon come to a final end
and be replaced by a better help.Least of all, need we to be
concerned when the usual customary symptoms are aggravated and show
most prominently on the first days, and again on some of the following
days, but gradually less and less. This so-called homœopathic
aggravation is a sign of an incipient cure (of the symptoms thus
aggravated at present), which may be expected with certainty.
Copyright © Médi-T
2006