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Chronic Diseases
Definition
§ 72
................... they are diseases of such a character that, with
small, often imperceptible beginnings, dynamically derange the living
organism, each in its own peculiar manner, and cause it gradually to
deviate from the healthy condition, in such a way that the automatic life
energy, called vital force, whose office is to preserve the health, only
opposes to them at the commencement and during their progress imperfect,
unsuitable, useless resistance, but is unable of itself to extinguish
them, but must helplessly suffer (them to spread and) itself to be ever
more and more abnormally deranged, until at length the organism is
destroyed; these are termed chronic diseases. They are caused by infection
with a chronic miasm.
§ 74
Among chronic diseases we must still, alas!, reckon those so commonly met
with, artificially produced in allopathic treatment by the prolonged use
of violent heroic medicines in large and increasing doses, by the abuse of
calomel, corrosive sublimate, mercurial ointment, nitrate of silver,
iodine and its ointments, opium, valerian, cinchona bark and quinine,
foxglove, prussic acid, sulphur and sulphuric acid, perennial purgatives1,
venesections, shedding streams of blood, leeches, issues, setons, etc.,
whereby the vital energy is sometimes weakened to an unmerciful extent,
sometimes, if it do not succumb, gradually abnormally deranged (by each
substance in a peculiar manner) in such a way that, in order to maintain
life against these inimical and destructive attacks, it must produce a
revolution in the organism, and either deprive some part of its
irritability and sensibility, or exalt these to an excessive degree, cause
dilatation or contraction, relaxation or induration or even total
destruction of certain parts, and develop faulty organic alterations here
and there in the interior or the exterior (cripple the body internally or
externally), in order to preserve the organism from complete destruction
of the life by the ever - renewed, hostile assaults of such destructive
forces.
§ 75
These inroads on human health effected by the allopathic non-healing art
(more particularly in recent times) are of all chronic diseases the most
deplorable, the most incurable; and I regret to add that it is apparently
impossible to discover or to hit upon any remedies for their cure when
they have reached any considerable height.
§ 77
Those diseases are inappropriately named chronic, which persons incur who
expose themselves continually to avoidable noxious influences, who are in
the habit of indulging in injurious liquors or aliments, are addicted to
dissipation of many kinds which undermine the health, who undergo
prolonged abstinence from things that are necessary for the support of
life, who reside in unhealthy localities, especially marshy districts, who
are housed in cellars or other confined dwellings, who are deprived of
exercise or of open air, who ruin their health by overexertion of body or
mind, who live in a constant state of worry, etc. These states of
ill-health, which persons bring upon themselves, disappear spontaneously,
provided no chronic miasm lurks in the body, under an improved mode of
living, and they cannot be called chronic diseases.
§ 79
Hitherto syphilis alone has been to some extent known as such a chronic
miasmatic disease, which when uncured ceases only with the termination of
life. Sycosis (the condylomatous disease), equally ineradicable by the
vital force without proper medicinal treatment, was not recognized as a
chronic miasmatic disease of a peculiar character, which it nevertheless
undoubtedly is, and physicians imagined they had cured it when they had
destroyed the growths upon the skin, but the persisting dyscrasia
occasioned by it escaped their observation.
Incalculably greater and more important than the two chronic miasms just
named, however, is the chronic miasm of psora, which, while those two
reveal their specific internal dyscrasia, the one by the venereal chancre,
the other by the cauliflower-like growths, does also, after the completion
of the internal infection of the whole organism, announce by a peculiar
cutaneous eruption, sometimes consisting only of a few vesicles
accompanied by intolerable voluptuous tickling itching (and a peculiar
odor), the monstrous internal chronic miasm - the psora, the only real
fundamental cause and producer of all the other numerous, I may say
innumerable, forms of disease1, which, under the names of nervous
debility, hysteria, hypochondriasis, mania, melancholia, imbecility,
madness, epilepsy and convulsions of all sorts, softening of the bones
(rachitis), scoliosis and cyphosis, caries, cancer, fungus nematodes,
neoplasms, gout, haemorrhoids, jaundice, cyanosis, dropsy, amenorrhoea,
haemorrhage from the stomach, nose, lungs, bladder and womb, of asthma and
ulceration of the lungs, of impotence and barrenness, of megrim, deafness,
cataract, amaurosis, urinary calculus, paralysis, defects of the senses
and pains of thousands of kinds, etc., figure in systematic works on
pathology as peculiar, independent diseases
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