Organon §204

If we do not count

2. those countless medicinal wasting sicknesses (see §74) that arise from imprudent, persistent, aggressive and ruinous treatments employed by physicians of the old school (often even for minor diseases), then the greatest part of the remaining chronic sufferings stems from the development of the three chronic miasms: internal syphilis, internal sycosis, but especially (in unequally greater proportion) internal psora. Each of these miasms was already in possession of the whole organism, having pervaded it in all of its parts, before the appearance of the primary, representative local symptom that prevented the outbreak of the internal disease (the itch diathesis eruption in psora, the chancre or inguinal bubo in syphilis, and the figwart in sycosis).

The entire organism is pervaded by the miasm before its primary symptom appears. The primary symptom serves to prevent the outbreak of the internal disease.

If, by external means, these miasms are robbed of their representative local symptoms (which allay the general suffering) sooner or later the characteristic diseases that the Originator of nature has appointed for each of the miasms must inevitably unfold and erupt, thus spreading all the nameless misery and the incredible quantity of chronic diseases which have tormented humankind for centuries and millennia. None of these diseases would have come so frequently into existence had physicians intelligently striven to thoroughly cure these three miasms solely by the internal homeopathic medicines proper for each of them, and to extinguish them in the organism without resorting to topical means for their external symptoms (see fn282).

When its representative local symptom is removed, the miasm expresses itself through the development of characteristic chronic diseases.